NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.
There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.
In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.
It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.
Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.
This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…
Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.
I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(
Wow, I heard about that when it entered early access, and it’s my sort of game. I was waiting for release though. I guess I just didn’t hear about it. They probably chose a bad time to release too, so close to the Factorio DLC. It sounds like they messed up though. I’ll have to think again about if I’ll pick it up considering the changes you mentioned. I hope they can recover because it was a good concept at least.
NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.
There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.
In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.
It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.
Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.
This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…
Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.
I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(
Wow, I heard about that when it entered early access, and it’s my sort of game. I was waiting for release though. I guess I just didn’t hear about it. They probably chose a bad time to release too, so close to the Factorio DLC. It sounds like they messed up though. I’ll have to think again about if I’ll pick it up considering the changes you mentioned. I hope they can recover because it was a good concept at least.
It’s available on game pass, if you have it.
I played it there so much that I figured I owed it to the devs to actually buy it on Steam, and I don’t regret it, had a ton of fun