Alzir

@GR3AVESY wrote:

Hello lads, I’ve heard alot about this game is it anygood? what type is it?

It’s a sandbox game Greavesy, and if you’re geeky enough to know what that means, then it might be something you’d enjoy 🙂 If you don’t know what that is, then think of it as game where the objectives are basically set by the player, in a randomly generated world, with few limits on what you can actually do.

As an example, in survival mode (the only mode worth playing atm) your goal is to simply stay alive while exploring the various options available to you in the game. Generally speaking you’ve got between dawn and dusk to do what you can outside, and to ensure that when night comes you’ve got a secure hideout to fall back to, which is well lit enough to prevent monsters spawning within it’s permiter, and which should be sealed off from the outside world where nasty things want to kill you. As in the video in the OP, a typical game starts out with the need to find some wood and fuel with which to kit out a simple cave that you can dig out of a wall, or seal off, and spend your first night in safety. During the night you can then craft the materials you’ve picked up during the day into Tools which will help you during the next day when you’ll be exploring your immediate area and deciding on a spot where you’ll start work on your main base. As time progresses your base tends to become quite spectacularly large – for example, I’ve carved my entire base out of the side of a mountain and extending to great depths, with various secret passages also carved out to different places around the surrounding area where there is either a natural or artifical (eg a farm) supply of resources. If I get bored mining or building, I can set off on an expedition, which can simply be for the sake of exploration, or could have a goal you’ve set yourself, such as to find a source of a particular resource which is scarce around your main base.

When you set off on a trip like this, it’s sensible to pack for the trip, taking with you a selection of tool and weapons which will help you survive along the way. The challenges you face on a journey are the same as those you faced on your first night, in that each night you’ll need to setup a camp of sorts where you can spend the night in safety, but you’ll face other obstacles as well, such as the very real possibility of getting lost. This might not seem like much, but if you consider that atm the game has a fixed spawn position on each world it generates, then the further you get away from that position, then the harder it is to find your way back to pick up what you may have accumulated on your trip (the scarcity of some resources makes this particularly painful sometimes). When you’re actually travelling you can bring with you a compass which always points in the direction of your spawn point, and you have the sun and moon which cross the sky from east to west as in the real world, but it’s incredibly hard to navigate on these alone. On a recent trip I took in my game, I was searching for a source of Cactus (which can be used as a component of monster traps, and which can be farmed from your base if you have a source block), and I set off basically North following the coast line, but soon discovered it diverging all of the place, so I had to build myself markers along the route to identify the direction back to base. On one occasion I completely lost my sense of direction in a forrest, and had to risk finding high ground at night from which I hoped I could spot the lights around the camp I’d made the previous night. Getting to high ground in the pitch black, and fighting off the hoards, while at risk of losing everything I’d collected on a 5 day trip was nerve wracking to say the least.

The other great thing about the game is that despite the ancient looking graphics, it somehow creates an incredibly scarey atmosphere, and I’ve lost count of the times a monster’s growl, or simply the game’s music cutting in at a tense moment, has made me actually jump in my chair. The combat, is simple, but certain monsters are tricky to handle under certain circumstances, and if you find yourself in a tight space facing mutliple targets or tricky obstacles around you, such as lava, it can be challenging enough.

On the building side of things, and depending on how gay..or sorry “Artistic” you are, you can spend hours in the game designing some pretty spectacular buildings. I think a lot of people tend to start off with castles and towers, but some progress to incredibly smart looking houses, complete with kitchen, living rooms etc, and others build complexes resembling buildings you might recognise from films (the treehouse from Avatar being an amazing example I’ve seen). Stalker is one such artist. You also then have a side of the game which can get quite technical, in that you can build what are essentially electronics systems, which can be as simple as a switch to open a door, or complex enough to control the routes minecarts take on a rail system. The electronics side of the game includes the ability to create logic gates, and from what I’ve seen on youtube, the sky is almost the limit in what people can create from this. One example Stalker showed me during the week was of someone who had built a working binary calculator within the game, which worked essentially as a punch card computer! Obviously you don’t need to get so deeply involved in design to have fun with the options the game allows, but I mention them as an example of the challenges you can set yourself, and the genius of the game itself.

The game is currently in the alpha stage of development, and it might seem strange to pay for an alpha, but firstly it’s completely playable at the moment, and secondly it’s being developed by one person on his own who’s raising funds for a full dev team. From what I’ve been told, he’s currently raised 600k, and expects to have other developers involved very soon. There are updates all the time which add things to the game, and one coming out soon will include an extra dimension called hell, where you can portal to and find, we presume, greater rewards at greater risk etc. There are also plans to create daytime dangers, such as woodland beasts for example, and to increase the variety of monsters, perhaps incorporating huge beasts of the underworld, or dinosaur types on land or sea. I’ve also read of an interesting idea where a “Zombie night” can happen randomly, during which you may have to defend your base from attack by monsters which for the duration of the night have the ability to break through structures which would normally keep them out of your base. If you have a castle for example, this might lead to the practical need of building a keep.

Anyway, that’s quite a wall of text, but if that doesn’t give you an idea of what to expect from the game, I recommend watching a few more X’s videos (the guy who made the video in the OP), as they do give an accurate impression of how your first game pans out. The next in the series can be found via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bh4EexJO4I&feature=related

and follow ups of these should be easy to find from the related items. You can also use his youtube channel to find these: http://www.youtube.com/user/davidr64yt

@=xdc= magicker wrote:

you can almost certainly embed it in the front of the site

That’s a good point, you can most likely do it on wordpress, though I’d need to test it to be sure, and if you wanted we could create a page off the frontpage dedicated as a gallery of Fifa highlights? It wouldn’t be hard to setup, but I’d be leaving it up to you guys to maintain it (which is simple as fuck before you let that put you off).

– logged into steam a few times but nobody about

Lies! I’ve been sitting around on TS and steam all weekend.

Oh and that video’s awesome Silver, thanks 🙂