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[nenjin]

I think there might be a thread for it but eh....

Bought V Rising on sale. People have dubbed it "Valheim but Vampires." I expected a sort of half-baked game due to Early Access and it being a survival game....

But I was pleasantly surprised. It looks great. It plays well (unless you try to turn v-sync on.) It's mostly intuitive. You don't feel like you're fighting the control scheme or some inherent jankiness of the design. Quality voice acting, for what there is. Lots of vampiric options that feel on brand and flavorful. The world is huge, but in the vein of "survival crafting sim" huge. The boss fights are fun too. Twitchy, have to dodge a lot of telegraphed attacks, they keep the pressure on, adds can join in to make things even crazier.

My favorite bit so far:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You have to hunt specific bosses to unlock new techs and spells and such. One such boss is an old lady that you learn tailoring from if you drain her. Up until now, the bosses you've been fighting are bandits, necromancers, huge beasts....so I was expecting this lady to like, throw needles anime style or whatever.

Nope! She's just a sweet old lady with a ton of health. When you engage her in a village she just runs away saying stuff like "Oh Mable, keep it together!" while the entire town aggros you. Pretty hilarious subversion of expectations.

If I have one gripe with the game it's that the map is not procedurally generated. So I'm not sure how good it is for multiple playthroughs. But there is a substantial amount of meat on its bones for an EA game. Would recommend!

[Il Palazzo]

I wanted to like the game, but its unimaginably bad grind mechanics turned me off something fierce. I remember people complaining in the reviews about having to periodically log in or lose progress in your castle (?), but I've never played enough to experience that.

[nenjin]

You can turn all that shit off in settings. It's meant to be a PvP game, that's why the mechanic is there. But for SP? You can tweak all the game settings so you get faster resources, no decay, etc....

That point originally turned me off too but it's not relevant.

[Kagus]

By the time I realized I really should've tweaked it from "Standard PvE" settings, I'd already invested several hours into the character and didn't want to start over from scratch.

It's... Ehh. There are some really awesome elements to it, like the manor building is amazing (once you actually get the obscene amount of resources to DO any of it) and there are some really quite lovely environments... But ultimately it just bogs itself down.

Like, there were a number of things that kinda built up to an overall frustration that lead to me finally putting the game down before knocking out the penultimate boss... Things like finding out that blood prisoners can accrue over 100% misery, meaning that even in the best conditions with the room and floor buffs, you will eventually be forced to go out and sit around fishing just to keep them alive.


I dunno. It's probably a lot more fun actually playing co-op, as with most things, but... Eh. They get huge points for style, absolutely. But it eventually just wore me down.

[Chiefwaffles]

I genuinely enjoyed playing V Rising but it very much feels like you’re not supposed to be playing it single player. Fun, but you have the sense at every turn like they did not design it for this as their main focus.

I’d describe it as something like Conan Exiles (or really any kind of open world multiplayer survival game — Ark, Valheim, etc. — but closest to Conan Exiles in vibes) but with a bit of ARPG (e.g. Diablo) mixed in. Worth playing, but do not be afraid to change the settings to keep the grind at whatever’s fun for you.

[scriver]

I got V raising after Kagus and he advice me to up resource yield generously on world gen, so that's what I did

[nenjin]

I genuinely enjoyed playing V Rising but it very much feels like you’re not supposed to be playing it single player. Fun, but you have the sense at every turn like they did not design it for this as their main focus.

I’d describe it as something like Conan Exiles (or really any kind of open world multiplayer survival game — Ark, Valheim, etc. — but closest to Conan Exiles in vibes) but with a bit of ARPG (e.g. Diablo) mixed in. Worth playing, but do not be afraid to change the settings to keep the grind at whatever’s fun for you.

I'd say the same thing about Conan Exiles. Both of these games pitch PvP as a part of the package. So if you nope out of the PvP, you will immediately find the world rather too large for a single person. Unlike Conan Exiles, I don't feel like V has as many "special" things to go out there, find and do. Just the bosses so far.

Playing it coop is somewhat better at default PvE settings because the farming goes easier and the boss fights are more manageable. One could also just tweak settings though to make the game less grindy for a single person.

[Folly]

I genuinely enjoyed playing V Rising but it very much feels like you’re not supposed to be playing it single player. Fun, but you have the sense at every turn like they did not design it for this as their main focus.

I felt somewhat the opposite...like V Rising was designed around being a single player experience, then had the PvP mechanics tacked on at the last minute to give it a more broad appeal.

[nenjin]

I'm going to agree it's a PvP first game. What tells me that is, if it were a SP focused game, there wouldn't be so much regurgitated content to fill space. In a PvE game uniqueness in content seems to come out. In PvP MP games, you need a breadth of available content, like an MMO, so no one ever feels like there's nothing they can do without tripping on someone else's space. In that regard, V Rising definitely feels like the latter rather than the former. Conan Exiles kind of has a blend of both.....with more unique content. But still vast amounts of space where the same things can be found so there's enough space for a server full of people to play in.

To put it in perspective, I can play almost the entire first half of Conan Exiles without leaving my immediate surroundings because there's an abundance of everything I could want. 90% of the world can be safely ignored because it's just the same thing but further away. Were it not for the boss fights in V, I think the same thing would be true. I could farm the same couple plateaus around my castle for all the wood, stone, ore and herbs I need because there's just no call to go further than that.

[pikachu17]

I'm really enjoying the free Beta version of Your Only Move Is Hustle, thinking I might get the newer non-free version.
YOMI Hustle is a fighting game like Street Fighter, but its turn based. Instead of having to press a complicated series of buttons very quickly, you get up to 30 seconds to choose which move you want to execute from a large list. Once you and you opponent lock in your moves or the 30 seconds are up, your selected moves are executed, and then you get to select moves again, repeat until victory. Then your battle gets replayed in realtime like in Superhot.

[Kagus]

YOMI Hustle

I was wondering why it wasn't showing up on Steam, until I disabled search filtering. It had apparently been filtered out of my results because it's tagged as... Anime?

Okay Steam. Sure.

[Frumple]

I mean, one of the characters is a cowboy with a katana, and another is just flat out a ninja. It getting tagged with anime is fair

E: But yeah, it's pretty great. Haven't got the commercial version and I don't know if I'll ever actually play it vs anyone, but it's a treat to watch occasionally.

[scriver]

Technically, most games are animated

[Robsoie]

Noticed that the excellent lovecraft horror-themed roguelike "Infra Arcana" got a new version a few weeks ago :
https://sites.google.com/site/infraarcana/downloads

changelog : https://gitlab.com/martin-tornqvist/ia/raw/master/installed_files/release_history.txt

[Folly]

The Early Access of Starship Troops Extermination just dropped.
...

I've been enjoying Starship Troopers: Extermination, I think mostly just because it's been way too long since I found a PvE game with more than 4 players and actual need for communication.

I don't want to oversell it. The selection of classes and weapons is pretty limited right now. And I think there's only one map, albeit with multiple deployment areas and day/night variables which mix things up. Only 2 game modes, which are exactly the same except one of them starts you with full resources so that you can skip the gathering phase. And video settings/loadouts don't save between game restarts, which feels very amatuer-hour. But it's a just-launched Early Access title, which promises to improve on all of these areas.

Still, running around a devastated city trying to complete objectives with bugs popping up constantly and needing to be put back down, and calling out priority targets to teammates whenever I get overwhelmed, and figuring out the optimal patterns for building bases that can be easily defended and maintained, it's all very fun right now.