Still browsing through old screenshots and realized I only seem to have one from the game Bioshock Infinite. I enjoyed pretty much every game in this series and the premise behind Infinite was bonkers. So much going on in that game. My guess for this screenshot is I hit the button by accident, but that's OK because it makes for an easy post all these years later.
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| Bioshock what now |
Just digging through some old screenshots and unearthed these Planetside 2 screenshots back from 2012. The game actually doesn't look too bad for it's age. How time flies!
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| Assemble my fellow combatants! |
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| UI |
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| Follow orders! |
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| Ouch who shot me |
By the time this post goes live I am likely many, many miles in the middle of nowhere on a off grid canoe trip. So here is a picture of me relaxing in my Ebonscale Reach home in New World (as well organized as my real life one).
I miss my monster truck from Just Cause 2. Such a fun game! Here are some screenshots to remember it by.
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| Crrruuuunnnnchhhh |
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| Vroooooom |
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| What goes up must come down |
Do you remember Global Agenda? I don't particularly myself, but I had a few posts on the game back in 2011 so spent some time with it. Browsing through screenshots to share recently I came across this one from the game.
Months later and I still don't know why this guy is in the bed on my ship in Starfield.
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| Who are you!? |
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| Northern Tier |
I am off to Northern Tier with my son's Boy Scout Troop. We'll be spending a week on the water canoeing the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. I've scheduled some simple posts to go out on the blog while I am away so enjoy!
As I dabble around games and completely avoid my Steam backlog I decided to give Russian Fishing 4 a try. What I found was a deep and complex fishing game.
First, I will admit the fish species and baits are foreign to me as an angler who fishes in the USA. That does not, however, change the feeling of seeing a fishing pole bend over when a fish is hooked or the relief when the fish lands in your hands.
My other most recent fishing game experience was with Call of the Wild: the Angler which is much more on the arcade end of the fishing simulation. In comparison Russian Fishing 4 is much more on the realistic simulation side.
This more realistic approach is evident from the moment I stepped into the tutorial. I started with a "cane pole" (fishing line attached to a pole; no reel) and did some float fishing. The game offers no strike or other indication of a fish. I was required to watch the float and set the hook when the fish ran off with the bait pulling the float with it.
The tutorial also goes through fishing with a spinning reel which works without indicator aside from poles pending and fishing line moving. This is about as realistic as a video game could get aside from having a rumble feature of some sort to give haptic feedback to me as a player.
I liked this approach more than I do the arcade model of CotW:Angler. There is also many other "real fishing" features that I liked about my first couple of hours in Russian Fishing 4. I can place my fishing rods on the ground so I can have one out with bait and use the other for active casting with lures. Its quite fun to juggle putting down one reel to scramble and get the other one. Funny as well when you wander a bit far and forget about the rod you set down entirely.
Underneath the fishing is also a deep and complex progression system. There are skills for everything from creating your own baits to all the aspects of fishing (cast distance, cast accuracy, retrieval, etc). I barely scratched the surface so far but it hits that part of your brain where you are always saying "one more cast... one more fish" before realizing its 2 AM and you need to go to sleep.
The game is free to play but has some form of pass you can buy which looks to expedite progression, but I've not felt compelled so far to buy in. The free experience scratches that realistic fishing sim itch pretty good. I'd love a version of this that is more USA focused and it's possible later maps I can get onto have USA waters and fish species, but at the end of the day a fish is a fish is a fish and they are fun to catch anywhere in the world.
Screenshots:
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| Decent enough looking water and maps |
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| Fish on! |
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| One rod float fishing (left) and active fishing right next to it. A cool mechanic many other fishing games don't offer! |
First, a summary of what a season is in Once Human
In Once Human, seasons will introduce fresh gameplay experiences within a fixed timeframe, featuring new stories, events, and mechanics. Each season is divided into stages with unique challenges and objectives. Players start anew at the beginning of every season, but can carry over certain progress and items to the next season.
The best comparison I can make is to Crowfall where campaigns came and went and players extracted materials from the campaign to use with their "crow" (character) in the next campaign. Crowfall also had Eternal Kingdoms that were persistent hubs for players to build up as a more permanent hold. Once Human is planning a similar feature with Eternaland.
Eternaland serves as a personal "bubble world" for each player that persists between seasons, allowing them to build and keep structures across resetsThis model looks to keep things fresh for players and help avoid power creep in the long run as players are brought back to level playing field regularly. However it is at the cost of persistence so Eternaland makes sense. To note; as far as I could tell Eternaland was not available in the demo and its not clear we have any players that can share hands on experience with it.
Personally what I enjoyed most about the Once Human demo was the core loop of clearing enemy camps, gathering stuff, and coming back to build up the base. The story helps as it drove me to explore more of the world and thus find more camps to clear/loot.
That sort of gameplay loop would eventually run out of steam if the base and my character and base persisted forever. The season resetting and having me start fresh will keep me in that loop longer. Now it is yet to be seen if that will be enjoyable to start over as the fine details of what carries over or does not carry over is to be seen, but I like the idea.
I can also liken the experience to my experiences in New World; specifically server merge days. While it wasn't cool to think less players over all were playing the game (hence server merges) it was actually a neat experience those first few days after server merge. The somewhat stale cycle of your server was turned over and new faces/enemies/friends/etc came available. Everything felt good for a couple weeks before thing settled in again.
I don't think it's wrong to think Once Human's resets will create that same sort of "server merge day" feeling. Six weeks also feels long enough to be useful for progression but not long enough to feel like you've lost everything because of a reset. It will likely feel weird for players that start playing right around a season ending but there is always a feeling of "I need to catch up" when you join a game past its launch.
I will hold my final verdict until I get to move through a reset, but I think its a neat way to keep the game fresh. I am also interested in Eternaland and what it will offer for players to have a sense of persistent progression outside of the seasons.
Pax Dei launched into early access with a whimper. Reviews are mixed and the Steam charts are mediocre compared to other meteoric early access releases this year. Content creator reactions are tepid. Jay Oddity summed it up best in his first impressions video when he commented that the game is like a sandbox without any toys.
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| Not bad. Not good. Pax Dei hitting 11,531 peak concurrent players in a year where we've seen multiple games in the survival/crafting genre hit 100,000+. |
This wasn't too unexpected. My own feedback after the last alpha test was that there wasn't much to the game other than long crafting grinds and combat so bad you may as well not call it a combat system. In more recent comments on Blue Sky I mentioned the game had at most a week of content (maybe more since they stuck with the time gated crafting progression from the last alpha).
I don't want the game to fail. I want an MMO at some point that does the things that Pax Dei says it will do. I am also a supporter of games coming to early access as I'd rather play a game and see it evolve than to not be playing. However, you have to have more than an barren sandbox as Pax Dei does currently.
For what it's worth; I have no intent to play Pax Dei at this point.
