Survival

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19 entries. 18,124 words.

February, 2015

  • How To Survive (A Game, Not A Guide). 2015-02-09 4:00 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    • Survival

    In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. Perhaps I was inspired by the news that H1Z1 rushed itself out the door too soon came to Steam Early Access. I already had TUG and Don’t Starve, but they never really grabbed me. (I keep hoping TUG will improve.) I have a bunch of these kinds of games on my Steam wishlist, but as I’m sure you know, 99% of them are still Early Access (including TUG), so I tried to find something else. 671 words.
  • State of Decay Is A-OK. 2015-02-17 4:00 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    • Survival

    In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. The first game I pulled out was State of Decay, which I already had on Steam. I’m probably the last person to discover this, but State of Decay is pretty cool. I had played it before, somewhere back when it first came to the PC I think, but it didn’t really “click” with me the first time. This time, I got into it and spent some 40+ hours playing it. I kept thinking it would make a great MMORPG (minus the permadeath). If H1Z1 turns out to be anything like a multiplayer State of Decay, then that would be very cool. (From what I’ve seen, though, it doesn’t look like it’s going that way.) 282 words.

October, 2015

  • ARK – I “Finally” Bought It. 2015-10-31 1:08 PM.
    • Status
    • Steam
    • Survival

    Okay, I just caved and bought ARK in the Steam Halloween sale for $20. Normally I try not to buy Early Access games unless they’re $10 or $15 but I keep hearing everyone talk about this game and I didn’t want to be the last person in the world to buy it … on launch day. :) 57 words.

November, 2015

  • ARK – Um It’s Got Issues. 2015-11-02 10:46 PM.
    • Pre-Release
    • Reviews
    • Survival

    Here’s my advice: Do not buy ARK right now. At least, don’t buy it with any expectation of actually playing it. Because on my 12GB system it runs out of memory and crashes. If you run the “low memory” 4GB version it doesn’t crash, but it runs horribly slow. There is a good two minutes of loading screen to wait through before geting into the game (literally-I timed it). Then in order to get it to run at an acceptable frame rate (which to me is a rock-solid 60 fps, but I suppose in a pinch 30-40 fps will do) you have to disable almost every graphical setting, and then the game is painful to look at. 529 words.

January, 2016

  • ARK – Another Chance In The New Year. 2016-01-04 12:00 AM.
    • Gaming
    • Reviews
    • Survival

    With the start of the new year, I decided to give ARK: Survival Evolved another chance. So many people rave about this game, in streams, podcasts, and blogs. I had a lot of bad feelings to overcome, but I figured it was possible that I was the one who was wrong about it. So on January 1st, I fired up a single player game, determined to play until I “got it.” I ended up playing about 18 hours over the holiday weekend. What I call my Beach Base on the northern edge of The Island. 807 words.
  • ARK – So Good Yet So Bad. 2016-01-25 6:00 PM.
    • Musings
    • Survival

    If anyone looks at my YouTube channel*, you can tell I’m still playing a fair amount of ARK. I’m in a very “I want to be by myself” gaming mood right now and toodling around by myself on a giant island of dinosaurs is a good fix. Thanks to a suggestion from Aywren I’ve customized my server settings to make the game a little more palatable. I haven’t altered it much, just a few tweaks to GameUserSettings.ini to minimize the annoyances: 1,537 words.

February, 2017

  • Snap Judgment – Conan Exiles. 2017-02-01 6:43 PM.
    • Steam
    • Survival

    I wasn’t going to buy Conan Exiles right away, because I could tell from the streams and the early gameplay videos that it wasn’t ready yet, but I bought it anyway because I just didn’t feel like playing FFXIV. $30 isn’t too much to waste on a game, right? Eventually they’ll fix it up into a finished game, surely? To nobody’s surprise, I should have waited for a sale. Let’s start with the bad stuff. 785 words.
  • Conan Exiles, Part Two. 2017-02-05 11:14 PM.
    • Status
    • Survival

    For some weird reason I’m still playing Conan Exiles. Probably some misguided need to get my money’s worth out of it. Also it’s a fairly relaxing game world to be inside right now. I can safely ignore everything in the real world while I’m breaking rocks. (And that is a big chunk of what you do-everything requires tons of stone.) However, I will continue to list everything that’s wrong with the game, hopefully to shame Funcom into feeling bad about releasing their game too early. Let this be a lesson to you game developers: I will say bad things about you if you release too early! 1,367 words.
  • What Makes A Good Survival Game?. 2017-02-10 12:24 AM.
    • Survival

    My recent test drive of Conan Exiles and a comment from Jeromai reminded me of a topic I once started writing about but never finished, which I will now take up again: What makes a good survival game? What defines a survival game? The Forest (way back in 2015) What prompted me to visit this topic was a comment from Jeromai: That he became more interested in Conan Exiles after hearing you could play it solo. I think it highlighted one of the current problems with the survival genre: There’s a perception that survival games are defined as PvP last-man-standing games like H1Z1 King-of-the-Kill, ARK Survival-of-the-Fittest, Rust, etc., where your only goal is to log in and try to murder everyone in sight, basically like Quake Deathmatch in 1997, only using stone knives and bear skins instead of rocket launchers. 1,275 words.
  • Conan Exiles, Part Three. 2017-02-14 8:25 PM.
    • Single-Player
    • Survival

    You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :) Some random shrine of some random priest. It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources. And every time you craft something new, it helps speed up the leveling and searching for more resources. And there’s always something cool to craft just out of reach. So it’s kind of a vicious cycle that will continue until I either run out of things to craft and/or can safely walk anywhere on the map. (I quit playing ARK after I could craft winter-weather protection and a rifle which could kill any dinosaur I encountered.) 851 words.
  • 7DTD – A Forge Makes All The Difference. 2017-02-21 9:06 PM.
    • Survival

    I played a large amount of 7 Days To Die this weekend. I finally discovered some things to make the game more enjoyable beyond the 7th day. A trip to the market. I bought 7DTD way back in February 2015 for $25. That must have been before my $10 rule or a random exception, because I don’t think I’d heard about the game beforehand. I didn’t play it very much in 2015 because it was still early, but it was fun, and I liked what they were doing with it. It’s been on my desktop pretty much all the time since then. 3,025 words.

March, 2017

  • 7DTD – New Game, Treasure Hunt. 2017-03-02 4:00 PM.
    • Survival

    So I’m going to write some more about 7 Days To Die since it’s all I’ve been playing lately, and there’s this weird expectation that bloggers are supposed to post things occasionally. I gave up on Conan Exiles because I already feel like I’ve done everything in the game, or I should say I’ve seen all the game mechanics that are in the game. Those mechanics are: Gather stuff, build stuff, and kill stuff. Everything you gather is gathered the same way: Either pick it up by hand, or hit it with a tool. Everything you build is built the same way: Put the component in your hot bar and place it where you want it. (This includes thralls.) Everything you kill is killed the same way: Shoot it with a bow or crossbow, or hit it with a melee weapon. (Or hit it with a club if you want to drag it back to base and make a thrall out of it.) 1,387 words.
  • 7DTD – The Great Minibike Catastrophe. 2017-03-10 4:00 PM.
    • Survival

    I’m now 56 days into my Navezgane 7 Days To Die game. I’ve built a forge and a workbench and a cement mixer and my base is getting upgraded to concrete and reinforced steel. Just in time for the bigger zombies like policemen, soldiers, and weird alien “feral” zombies. I also found some iron veins to mine. I had a hard time finding them because I kept hearing that you’re supposed to dig where you find gravel but it’s not actually “gravel” that comes out of the ground, it’s sand and stone (which combine to make gravel). 1,208 words.

May, 2017

  • FrostKeep’s Rend Announced. 2017-05-09 3:00 PM.
    • Survival

    This post sat in my Drafts folder for nearly two months waiting for me to add that picture… I’m hearing reports (from my super secret source known as “the Internet”) of a game called Rend revealed at PAX East 2017. Rend is a self-described “hybrid survival game” from FrostKeep Studios, a studio I’ve never heard of, but which supposedly has a good pedigree. It’s largely being reported as a “survival sandbox” game like ARK or Conan Exiles, but MassivelyOP also compared it to Crowfall and Camelot Unchained. I submit that a better name for this kind of game would be something like “tribal warfare simulator” or “multiplayer online persistent team PvP” (MOPTP pronounced, obviously, “moptop”). 332 words.

August, 2017

  • Snap Judgment – Dark and Light. 2017-08-04 3:30 PM.
    • Survival

    I didn’t know much about Dark and Light except that I had a vague sense that it was a PvP-style MMORPG that had been cancelled and then salvaged. Yesterday I saw a screenshot of the game float through my Twitter feed that looked amazing, so I totally broke my own rules and impulsively went to Steam to buy the Early Access version for $25 (on sale). Dark and Light - Today's Minor Patch Paves Way for Larger One Coming Soon https://t.co/BS0kW8ZRuu #Gaming #News pic.twitter.com/FJ0d7CM6N0 598 words.
  • Subnautica. 2017-08-29 2:30 PM.
    • Pre-Release
    • Steam
    • Survival

    Last night I tried out an early access survival game called Subnautica. I bought it for $9.99 in the last Steam sale. The premise of this game is unlike other survival games in that you play a big part of it underwater. The game begins with you scrambling into a “rescue pod” while your ship blows up around you. (I assume it’s some kind of spaceship.) The rescue pod lands in a big alien ocean and then it’s your job to survive, while your ship looms in the distance, burning and giving off radiation. 812 words.

January, 2018

  • ARK Revisited Two Years Later. 2018-01-15 3:30 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Survival

    There is a wide variety of interesting sky effects, too. I haven’t played ARK much since early 2016, so I decided to re-download it and give it another look. The game finally “launched” last year, after all. Presumably all of the problems I had with the game are now fixed. Well, not exactly. Although to be fair I really enjoyed it before, too. I just ran out of challenge. I got to a point where I could go to any biome and survive, and kill any dinosaur in my path, and that is pretty much “winning” the game. 1,026 words.

August, 2019

  • NEO Scavenger – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 7]. 2019-08-07 2:20 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Steam
    • Streaming
    • Survival
    • Videos

    Yesterday I played NEO Scavenger for the 10th day of the Steam Backlog Death March I mean Bonanza. It was released in 2014, and I bought it in 2016 for $5. (Coincidentally it’s actually on sale today for less than that.) Waking up from cryosleep. I goofed with this one. I have, in fact, played it before. But for some reason, Steam didn’t think I had. I know I played it because I found a video I recorded of it in 2016. Of course I didn’t remember a single second of it, but the game looked vaguely familiar when I played it, and that explains why. 750 words.

April, 2020

  • No Man’s Sky. 2020-04-10 7:11 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Survival

    I’ve been wrestling with whether I should get No Man’s Sky for almost four years now. To their credit, Hello Games has put a lot of work into upgrading it over the years, but I worried it was one of those games that looked great visually and conceptually, but didn’t have much substance or gameplay underneath it. Recently I heard they did another big update, and I was looking for a mouse-and-keyboard game to play on my PC on my “controller-rest days” in between playing Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 (which I restarted a little while ago). So I finally pulled the trigger and bought No Man’s Sky on Steam yesterday. It’s on sale right now. 825 words.