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Rimworld beta release requires pile of mods to manage annoying features by Saltlord 12/03/2017, 12:11pm PST
tl;dr: Indie dev's game finally hits beta after half a decade of development, endless annoying design features modded out, dev turns nose up at most improvements exposing same stupidity that got him in trouble before for dumb nerd take on gender politics (someone fixed that too). Pretty fun to play if you tinker with it forever to add in cool shit. If not, it's like having to stare at units move across the screen in Warlock: Master of the Arcane because the devs decided you should have to see that every turn.

Pros:
-helps scratch the building game itch
-mods add cool and complicated dependency chains to add scope and depth to gameplay
-can build a cyborg homo-dystopia complete with robotic labor, cyber attack dogs, nuclear power plant
-can brainwash tribals, space pirates and randos into joining you after brutally using them as organ banks and giving them peglegs and hooks for hands
-tinkers' ideal game, mod structure allows most mods to be integrated smoothly

Cons:
-base game has lots of stupid limitations, can feel bare compared to what's offered by alternatives
-weak UI necessitates adjustment if you don't want to babysit the game and get all the typical hand strain of a serial masturbator
-new update means most of the community-provided content is still being patched
-timesuck to find out what content is available, then to build it into your game; timesuck to play afterward.

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This game has been in development for five years and finally hit a beta release about two weeks ago. In that time, the lead dev has demonstrated the social aptitude of a hopeless nerd, which drove him to make a stupid decision about gender in his game that served only for skewering by RPS. He has not demonstrated a whole lot of aptitude in integrating features the mod community created to make his game less irritating to play. Somewhere in all that, people released mods that fix the dev's integration of his shitty gender politics into game features just so he could avoid stupid controversy about a stupid problem and focus on creating a better experience. He made no move to package anything like it into his subsequent builds.

I gave the beta a try. Its design has shifted. It started out very sparse. Now it feels sparse aside from frequent, repetitive events that throw wrenches into what you're doing as a player. You can do little about the problems in question, which include everything from solar flares and power outages to eyestrain and headache inducing UI flaws to a set of design decisions that inevitably force most players to build a killbox. The ability to grow your faction of hardscrabble survivors is capped artificially well before the game starts to pose a problem for even an old CPU. The gameplay on any given setting tends to favor manic rushes for survival marred by constant disaster - half the advanced economic content requires functionally impossible things, like your colony having a stable power system provided to maintain an environment in which to grow a cash crop that's liable to crash long before harvest, killing all your seedlings. Advanced features are a crapshoot - the RNG will screw up your plans and you'll have little you can do about it, turning potential challenges for the player into disappointments at being handed a problem you can do nothing about.

Rimworld has some hundreds of mods - probably several thousand if you count old versions and depreciated content that is no longer updated (out of a total of 6K+ in its workshop and more on the forums, the bulk of which is starting scenario throwaway shit). Of these, about 175 have been designed just to curb irritating decisions made by the developer. There's plenty of additional content and features available - one features all the components of a nuclear power plant that requires careful management of its fuel rods, temperatures, and so on to generate energy - but the essential mods all do things like enable players to eliminate features like the following:

-Power conduits unavoidably failing and starting fires when your power system is of any appreciable size, creating fires no-one can catch before they destroy essential structures and end the game
-Crop blights that make food sources disappear instantly when the player has had no opportunity to create stores, likely ending the game
-Solar flares that deactivate systems essential for life support and food production, creating a failure cascade for the colony and ending the game
-UI feedback noises that annoy the fuck out of people because they fire every time an event occurs, which becomes frequent
-Bullshit percentage chances up above 75% that anyone you'll try to bring into the faction you're building will just die to keep the player from countering the numerical superiority of the AI with their own numbers
-Hostile encounters with base-destroying infestations spawned under the only areas safe from hard-to-counter bombardment to prevent the player from digging in to protect their inferior numbers
-Refusal by colonists to execute critical tasks like fighting fires to prevent a game-ending setback because the RNG assigned an inability to a player
-Ridiculous requirements for things like personal quarters the size of an entire mansion in a hardscrabble frontier town lest colonists fall into tantrum spirals at the first sight of a raider corpse or dead animal, often resulting in the death of critical individuals and the end of a game

You get the idea. In almost every case, the mod community has created an interesting workaround that adds to game features by creating a new means of dealing with a problem that requires player consideration and attention to execute and maintain rather than simply eliminating the issue. A few have been adopted by the developer into the base game, creating a better experience. Most have not.

There are plenty of independently developed games like Rimworld with an active modder community willing to fix the eyesores and design shortcomings of the developers. To be a modern developer with a long design runway and a fanbase full of such contributors is both a lucky break and an opportunity for collaboration. To be a dev that turns his nose up at integrating features because you don't think they're good is a matter of taste, fine. Devs can have really poor taste. But to do it when the fixes are offered to you on a silver platter for no good reason is asking for a reputation as a small-minded control freak, especially when someone hammers out a fix to cover your shitty politics.
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Rimworld beta release requires pile of mods to manage annoying features by Saltlord 12/03/2017, 12:11pm PST NEW
    Indie development is terrible. A bunch of half-assed features that all fuck you NT by and then you have to fix it yoursel 12/03/2017, 4:18pm PST NEW
        Same for AAA games. Half the mods for Tropico 5 are for annoying, broken shit. NT by Saltlord 12/03/2017, 6:28pm PST NEW
 
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