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Rob Zacny

Episode 365: Rimworld

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Three Moves Ahead 365:

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Rimworld

Rowan Kaiser, Gita Jackson, and Jonathan Bolding join Troy "Why do I always have to clean the airlock" Goodfellow to talk about Rimworld. Rimworld joins a prestigious line of games in the relatively new genre of "It's like Dwarf Fortress, BUT - " by adding its own sci-fi survival twist. While still in Early Access, Rimworld has recently made its way to Steam to bring its procedurally-generated madness to the masses.

Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress

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Stellar episode. Great to hear Gita - have I missed other episodes with her appearing, or is this the first?

In any case, great discussion.

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Another "Early Access" game. I'll pass.

I get it. You all play video games as part of your profession. You most likely get free codes. You like the 'new' and 'fresh'. Something unfinished is so much more interesting to you, since it has the "potential" (= I hate that word in game reviewers vocabulary), to become what you want it to, in your heads. And a Dwarf Fortress clone "with a twist" most certainly is exciting ... to you.

 

I myself, prefer a *finished* game (whatever that means today - interesting discussion in itself), not something in flux.

 

I don't buy half-baked bread. I don't watch a writer over the shoulder, while he is still writing. I don't buy a car with three wheels. No offense.

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Really interesting discussion!

 

I have been intrigued by Dwarf Fortress for a long time, but there is no way I'm ever going to dive into that. Rimworld seemed like a perfect "compromise" for me, and it is indeed pretty amazing.

 

I love the heavy focus on social stuff in this game. I played my only game (so far) on Phoebe Chillax Basebuilder and the first colonist to die was killed because she insulted one of my other colonists, who then beat her to death. The lover of the dead colonist was miserable throughout the rest of the game, and absolutely detested the other colonist, Jeff Goldblum. On top of that, Goldblum's wife started an affair with a colonist called Slick (Slick, by the way, was an absolute dick. He was constantly jealous about other colonists, and I had to make sure he had one more colored lamp in his bedroom than any other character). On top of that still, Mrs Goldblum's ex-husband joined my colony. So, I found myself in the situation where I had to pray that a guy with serious anger management problems doesn't do anything to further piss off the man whose lover he killed, doesn't become jealous about the ex-husband of his wife, and doesn't realize he is being cuckolded. It felt like my colony had a ticking time bomb with three timers I could do nothing about*.

 

I also learned the hard way to pay attention to individual colonists state of mind before giving them order. I had one very handy colonist that was good at smithing, tailoring, and crafting. I was constructing my ship and desperately needed both components and steel, and so I manually prioritized him to craft components and smelt steel. After a couple of days he went crazy. Luckily he didn't go berserk, and just stripped down and started running around the base until he collapsed. I checked his needs, and of course this was the colonist whose lover had been killed. Manual prioritization also seems to override eating. So basically I had forced a grieving colonist to smelt steel for several days in a row without letting him eat.

 

Miraculously, I managed to escape the planet with only one casualty in total.

 

Oh and yes, the artwork system is absolutely amazing! You should definitely read the descriptions of the sculptures and sarcophagi once they are completed.

 

 

* In hindsight, I guess I could have sent the time bomb to a hunting expedition with the shittiest weapon I could find, and then harvest his organs when he inevitably failed to kill all the boomrats.

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Another "Early Access" game. I'll pass.

I get it. You all play video games as part of your profession. You most likely get free codes. You like the 'new' and 'fresh'. Something unfinished is so much more interesting to you, since it has the "potential" (= I hate that word in game reviewers vocabulary), to become what you want it to, in your heads. And a Dwarf Fortress clone "with a twist" most certainly is exciting ... to you.

 

I myself, prefer a *finished* game (whatever that means today - interesting discussion in itself), not something in flux.

 

I don't buy half-baked bread. I don't watch a writer over the shoulder, while he is still writing. I don't buy a car with three wheels. No offense.

 

That's very unfair. RimWorld is not really an Early Access game anymore. The devs are leaving it in Early Access to show that they're developing free content still.  Go read the description on their store page, they openly say the game is fully complete, balanced and relatively bug free.

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Another "Early Access" game. I'll pass.

I get it. You all play video games as part of your profession. You most likely get free codes. You like the 'new' and 'fresh'. Something unfinished is so much more interesting to you, since it has the "potential" (= I hate that word in game reviewers vocabulary), to become what you want it to, in your heads. And a Dwarf Fortress clone "with a twist" most certainly is exciting ... to you.

 

I myself, prefer a *finished* game (whatever that means today - interesting discussion in itself), not something in flux.

 

I don't buy half-baked bread. I don't watch a writer over the shoulder, while he is still writing. I don't buy a car with three wheels. No offense.

I agree with Cold, especially in regards to this game.  I bought the early access version maybe two years ago.  It was never an "early access" game.  It was always complete enough to provide a very fun experience for the price.  It's been fun to see the iterations come along and add new things.  With Rimworld, the early access process has actually been quite fun.  And I say this as a guy who cannot devote a lot of time to gaming. 

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Agreed this isn't Early Access in the bad sense, though I do think Rimworld's lowest-tier price is a bit high for the game's value.

 

It would be interesting to have a panel of well-regarded static content designers and procedural generation designers discussing games like DF and Rimworld, and the advantages and disadvantages of their approaches to strategy game design in general.

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I've played a bunch of hours in Rimworld and think the best comment from the podcast was roughly that the game feels like it happens to you, not that your mistakes pile up and break the game.  I feel like every time I get a good set-up for food production I get the "blight" event.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the mental break system and how unreasonable your colonists are about bad situations.  On one hand they react pretty well to losing arms, getting shot, and being in horrible mental places.  On the other hand they seem to have breakdowns because the walls are ugly and they have bad clothing.  I'm open to the idea that I should be playing a different way but I'm also tired of going through the same opening motions.  I don't have 100+ hours to grind at an MMO and I feel like this game requires a ton of time to see all of the end states.

I'm pretty happen with the state of the game.  Overall it's was a good buy after returning No Man's Sky but I"m not sure how many more games I'm going to play on the standard difficulty (Cassandra Classic on Rough).  I see myself putting down the game in a few more hours and not picking it up again.

 

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This may sound frivolous, but I want a fictional justification for the player in a game like this. There are so many games where the closest analog would be a disembodied god figure, but I want something more explicit (and interesting)!

 

Like, maybe the AI core of the ship could have survived the crash, and everyone is following the computer's suggestions.

 

It could even work for the neolithic scenario: a group of primitive humans finds a mysterious obelisk that teaches them a new way of life. They could worship it as a god, like the Feeders of Vaal in Star Trek

 

It would also have the knock-on effect of providing a justification for why the group never strays from that one spot on the map; maybe the computer is too heavy to move until the end-game technologies are researched.

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