Don't Starve

[Multi-headed Cow]

Strange, I could've sworn we already had a thread for this but I didn't find one when I searched. Oh well.

Anyway, Don't Starve is officially done for "Retail". Actual final release is on the 23rd but they just pushed out the final patch to get it to what they consider release state.
http://forums.kleientertainment.com/showthread.php?16180-We-re-Live!

They're still planning to do six months of updates (Unspecified on if they're free or not) after release so I guess we'll see what happens with that. Haven't played since I dicked with the LP some months ago so I have no idea what the state of the game is now, but there's apparently an actual goal and win state so that's something. Just figured I'd give you bros a heads up.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

There have been regular updates, you should definitely start playing it again. They added some stuff that makes it easier but then again there are several difficulty options to choose from.

 

[Konjad]

I like their update videos, now old and you already know what they mean, but eh, I enjoyed watching them






http://www.youtube.com/user/kleient?feature=watch

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Been messing with this a little since they said it's done. Definitely gotta say the new world generation is better, and the way they handle research now is way less grindy. Had stockpiled a good 15 gold before I realized I didn't need to chuck it into the science machine.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Picked it back up for the first time in months. I like the change to research, but the game is still griny as hell. The fact that food spoils now is aggravating, and in order to get the next tech level I need incredibly rare items I can't even make unless I'm a librarian (and even then the materials are incredibly rare.) It seems like the intention is for you to stockpile a bunch of food, gather up an army of pigs, find ONE spot to gather nightmare fuel from (and you'll get like 2-3 of the 10 you need), then go and regather food/fuel/etc. for another 3-5 days to do it again. Actually fighting anything on your own is fucking impossible, and almost none of the tech I've gotten so far is actually helpful for combat at all.

 

[Metro]

Looking forward to picking this up again but I'll probably wrap up my first playthrough of Borderplands 2 first.

 

[Trash]

So, any codexians playing this? Picked it up today after trying an 'extended demo' for a bit. I like how utterly hard the game can fuck you over and how much fun it is to slowly learn to play the ropes. Lots of little fun thing to find and exploration is key to survival. I can however see it get incredibly grindy after awhile. Art style, animation and music is awesome btw. I love the attention to detail as my little gentleman slowly turns into a wild savage.

Kudos to the devs for updating this constantly btw. Some real dedication.

 

[Metro]

I think a lot of those who had been -- including myself -- have probably put it aside for now. While it's a good concept the overall implementation needs a lot more polish. When you figure a few things out the game stops presenting a challenge. Specifically...

Spoiler

...just find yourself a herd or two of beefalo, set up your camp by them, build a few drying racks, and kill two every week for the meat. They also make great defense when hounds come. Simply run into them and they'll eventually kill them.

Additionally you can kill all of the monsters you need to with the easily crafted log armor and spear. A good 60-75% of the items are pointless/not worth the hassle to craft. Adventure mode presents more of a challenge with it's randomness and early onset of winter but even then you can figure things out after a while. And, yes, it can get a bit grindy. Overall while I love the premise I really wish they spent more time tying things together. The multiple character don't really add anything to replayability as the differences between them are trivial.

 

[Trash]

Yeah, I put it down. It's fun but somehow feels very unpolished. There was also something else really nagging me.

http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/06/the-tiresome-dietary-politics-of-dont-starve/

“But here we have a game about survival, a game called Don’t Starve, that cares about more than whether or not you are able to keep yourself from starving. It cares about whether or not you can keep yourself from starving in a way it finds morally acceptable. And if you try to take another path to survival than the one the developers want you to, it will throw huge roadblocks in your way to stop you. And we’re not even talking about extreme things like cannibalism here — we’re talking about killing a rabbit for its meat.”

 

[Metro]

I can probably count on one hand the number of times the 'naughtiness' factor has mattered. This blog piece grossly exaggerates one minor mechanic and does so in fairly self-serving and overly verbose manner. More about making the author sound witty and intelligent versus legitimate criticism. You'd have to kill dozens of rabbits in a very small window to spawn the guy (naughtiness decays). I can't imagine anyone sticking to rabbits as it's horribly inefficient and tedious. At a certain point you need to 'graduate' from rabbits to the beefalo or fish or using monster meat with the crock pot to make suitable food, etc. Pretty much zero way you can trigger Krampus sticking to the next tier of food source. There's also no point in mass killing the beefalo as some of the food would simply rot before you needed to consume it (they drop four big pieces of meat each).

 

[tuluse]

So Don't Starve has a DLC out. Cool I guess. Except the DLC is Early Access. Yes, they are selling addon content in an unfinished manner. This is really too much.

Infinitron might be interested to hear this.

And uh, I guess I get to use this fun gif.

 

[Metro]

Meh. Might buy it for 75% off. As I've said before: cool concept but as a 'game' it falls fairly flat. The base Don't Starve is still in what I'd consider beta.

 

[dextermorgan]

I'd rather grind in LOTRO. Or eat broken glass.

 

[Farage]

Meh. Might buy it for 75% off. As I've said before: cool concept but as a 'game' it falls fairly flat. The base Don't Starve is still in what I'd consider beta.

I played 50 hours~ and never came back.
The early game is really boring after you play for the fifth time or so.
They failed at making experience something that would speed-up the gameplay. Instead, its wigs and hay collecting for 4 days straight.

 

[Metro]

Yeah it's like a somewhat more boring/darker version of Sims. I believe it's changed a few iterations ago but when I was playing I was able to sustain myself indefinitely by living near a herd of buffalo things.

 

[cvv]

Hm, Codex not giving much damn about this baby.

Anyone tried the expansion yet? Because imo it bumped up a 6/10 game by two notches easily. There's a lot more content and it's quite a bit more difficult. It just gobbled up my weekend like a hungry pig . I suspect it doesn't have a huge staying power but right now I absolutely love it.

 

[Metro]

Meh. Might buy it for 75% off. As I've said before: cool concept but as a 'game' it falls fairly flat. The base Don't Starve is still in what I'd consider beta.

 

[cvv]

Meh. Might buy it for 75% off. As I've said before: cool concept but as a 'game' it falls fairly flat. The base Don't Starve is still in what I'd consider beta.

Yeah, I've read the thread and I wasn't too hot about the base game either when I bought it a while back but the expansion is a gamechanger, at least for me.

 

[Blaine]

I played this game for a handful of hours shortly before release and found it to be extremely tedious, just basically clicking constantly to pick icons up off a flat plane with occasional breaks to craft something or click on food to eat.

Certainly, there are a lot of games where you click-click-click, but this shit's like weeding a garden for hours at a stretch and there's really not a lot more going on than that.

 

[cvv]

In summer 2014 this game is nothing like the pre-release version. They've been constantly adding new content and features and now with the big expansion there are so many things you have to watch because everything can kill you in a jiffy.

Besides hunger you have to pay attention to day cycles because if you're caught at night without light, you're dead within a few seconds. Also your sanity is constantly dropping, at dusk, at night, while fighting monsters, while eating bad food and below a certain point you'll see weird distortions and shadow monsters that can swarm you and rip you open. There are ways to raise sanity but all of them present a trade-off, either they're risky and require you to fight monsters and get resources or they make you very hungry etc. Monsters can be deadly too, you have to constantly watch your gear because if your armor wears out and breaks a few swings can kill you. There are also both small and big bosses, some of the big ones are extremelly difficult to beat head-on and require long preparation and careful strategies. Plus there are seasons too, in winter you can freeze to death very quickly if you hadn't prepared beforehand plus the days are extremelly short and there is always either dusk or night during which you go insane, in spring it rains constantly, everything is soggy, food is spoiling fast and your sanity's dropping even faster, you need to hunt for materials and craft all sorts of waterproof clothing, in summer you overheat and die very fast if you hadn't prepared way back in winter collecting and storing ice plus you grass-and-wood base can catch fire at any time and most of your precious supplies will burn in a few seconds. Autumn is friendly and mild so you have time to explore a bit and prepare for the incoming madness. Except the autumn boss is pretty nasty and if he finds your base he'll smash it to splinters. On top of all that there are about dozen of playable characters, each with their own quirks and traits. And of course the world has three layers now, there are the underground caves and beyond them the ancient ruins full of monsters, traps and other deadliness. But I haven't been able to explore those yet because I rarely last a full year and death is of course permanent.

And all of this is barely scratching the surface there are so many items to craft, so many monsters with their own behaviour and strategies, so many recipes to cook and so many mods adding about a million new things that I can't be bothered with this post any longer, I'd rather go and kill dat annoying summer boss which is a huge fire-spitting dragonfly that burned half my base to crisp together with my entire herd of beefalos I keep for meat, fur and manure so I had to escape with my life but now I'm ready for her, c'mon bitch!

 

[Renegen]

I like Don't Starve, in fact I made a thread about it a while back and got made fun of for liking a casual roguelike. I'm glad to hear the expansion adds a lot, I might resume and play this. The biggest problem like always is that it takes hours to go anywhere and you lose everything in an instant if you make a mistake.

 

[cvv]

I can see myself sinking another hundred hours into this.

I've already started and it's great again...except one small problem - the oceans are way too vast and way too empty. In normal Don't Starve you can walk some distances too but the landscape is full of shit to fight, pick or explore. Here you're sailing for minutes without encountering land or anything else for that matter. The "avoid the waves" minigame isn't gonna cut it.

Plus a minor thing I kindda hated when I started playing Don't Starve was discovering Crock Pot recipes. Ain't nobody got time for that. After a while I started relying exclusively on wiki. In Shipwrecked recipes are not available yet so at one point I actually almost starved, after a few disastrous experiments when I blew all my crab meat and other ingrediences on wet goops :D

Apart from that game seems to be incomparably more complete and fun to play than Early Acces DS vanilla. Plus I'm absolutely loving the Carribean theme.

 

[Metro]

Might check this DLC out on sale but I never bothered with Reign of Giants. I've mentioned it multiple times in the thread but as creative as the game is it boils down to mindless tedium after awhile. And there's no real 'end-game' short of crafting funny items and such.

Fake/real edit: Never mind. Watched the video. Looks too similar. Klei makes good games and this is certainly a good game... just one that gets old after forty or so hours.

 

[Farage]

I came back when Reign of Giants was released, they fixed a lot of shit and added a lot of cool things to the game, got a good another 50+ hours on it.
Im still thinking if this new expansion is worth it thought, it seems more like an off thing than something that actually adds to the game, anyone bought it yet?

 

[cvv]

Im still thinking if this new expansion is worth it thought, it seems more like an off thing than something that actually adds to the game, anyone bought it yet?

As I said, I got it and played it for about 20 hours. It definitely adds a lot of shit into the game, I'm amazed it costs only 5 bucks. But it's decidedly an early alpha. A lot of stuff is rough, imbalanced and unfinished. I'd definitely wait for the full release but it's already shaping up as even a richer and better expansion than RoG.

 

[Mozg]

Might check this DLC out on sale but I never bothered with Reign of Giants. I've mentioned it multiple times in the thread but as creative as the game is it boils down to mindless tedium after awhile. And there's no real 'end-game' short of crafting funny items and such.

Fake/real edit: Never mind. Watched the video. Looks too similar. Klei makes good games and this is certainly a good game... just one that gets old after forty or so hours.

I got RoG; still boring. Plus so much stuff is just custom-built to be annoying (smoldering, tons of short-durability crap, bad interface with no dedicated axe/shovel/whatever hotkeys or chain crafting that would automatically do stuff like queue up a subjob like turning grass into rope so you can make a spear without juggling more clicks and inventory) that I can't even really enjoy it like a zen Finnish vacation simulator like mid-lategame Unreal World.

It's a pretty well-made attempt at a cute Unreal Worldish survival game for console gamepad controls.