Rakqoi
My profile and commission info:
https://rak.crd.co
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I’m glad you get that kind of enjoyment out of the game! I totally understand that feeling.
I think personally the thing that turns me off the most from the game is the linearity to progression. I love cozy survival games, and I’d love this one too, if only it didn’t copy the progression from other similar games. I’d rather it be truly open, with recipes being researched or found through the normal gameplay, instead of forcing me into a linear dungeon that feels so disconnected from the rest of the game. It’s the same problem I personally had with Raft and similar.
It’s why I love Astroneer, No Man’s Sky, and Starbound (if you ignore the story, which is entirely possible). Progression feels like such a natural part of the game, without any forced linear progression locks that funnel you into a single specific thing.
I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay overall in Forever Skies. Me calling the survival aspects “chores” may come across as harsh but I absolutely love that stuff. I mean, I play old school runescape and countless survival and farm sim games, hehe. I agree that the interactivity of the game, the stockpiling of resources, the slow process of upgrading your ship, it all feels great and I love that part of the game the most. It really is just my (very personal) disdain for this sort of overarching progression that kinda gives the game a mediocre ranking in my book, combined with how unoriginal the game as a whole is aside from aesthetics and setting.
I got and played this game a few months ago. It’s… fine, I guess? It’s about the same as every other survival crafting game with linear progression. A reskin of Raft / Subnautica / The Forest / Valheim etc. but without the charm or new mechanics which made those games worthwhile. It doesn’t do anything really unique or novel besides the aesthetic which gets pretty bland after a bit, but I haven’t played to the end of the game, so maybe the areas get more interesting than rusted metal and concrete which makes up 90% of what you see at all times.
On the plus side though, it’s fairly polished except for a few gamebreaking bugs (not being able to place anything being the worst one, but it was fixed after a restart and may be fixed with this update). It does the whole linear survival crafting game well enough so if you like games with the loop of exploring hand crafted dungeons to unlock recipes to be able to go to the next dungeon and repeat, doing chores to keep hunger and thirst up in between dungeons, then you’ll probably like this one.
Personally I wouldn’t recommend it though since it feels like the extent of the developers’ idea for the game was “what if we just made Raft, but the apocalypse was dust instead of water”
It has a pause option, at least in a solo session. From what I understand it also can be played offline after the initial denuvo activation (but haven’t confirmed it myself). I’m not extremely far into the game yet but so far, the pacing of the game has been really quick and I’ve never once had to grind anything, but that may be in part due to my experience with monster hunter making it relatively easy to get by with lower tier equipment.
I definitely wouldn’t say it’s anything like an mmo or live service game besides the fact that it will get free content updates for a little while, and has the option of playing with friends.
Although I agree with the author of this article that the terms are somewhat muddied, even in their more generally accepted definitions, by the fact that it’s hard to draw the line for when unlockables can be considered “permanent progression”.
Although I have many gripes with the terms in general and how they’re used, I’m of the opinion that it is clear enough for there to be a distinction; if all of the unlockables in a roguelike game are sidegrades, or merely more options without inherent strength over other options that are unlocked from the start, then it still counts as a roguelike.
Though admittedly, this can be a bit blurry too… it would be pretty easy to argue that some unlockables in games like these are more powerful than other options, especially because it’s very hard to put an objective “power level” on an item in a roguelike. Also, one could argue that merely having more options makes the game easier, thus it counts as permanent upward progression.
Yet regardless, the article’s attempt to coin the term “rogues” as the all-encompassing sub-genre/game mechanic name absolutely won’t catch on, and the differentiation between the terms does have a lot of value for people trying to determine whether or not they will enjoy a particular game, even if the line can be a little blurry.
Here’s a relevant video that I enjoyed by Game Maker’s Toolkit that focuses on the main mechanical differences between the two designs, from a very broad and practical overview, definitely recommend watching it if you’re interested in this sort of thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9FB5R4wVno
Here’s another tangentially related video by Chariot Rider about roguelike progression in particular, which I also found interesting, although less relevant to this discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOfgUFx9RkU
Even more tangentially, here’s a fun video by Lextorias about confusing or controversial game genres (well… game genres in general) and it has a big section about the distinction between roguelikes and roguelites
As I understand it this is not true private servers and the article is somewhat misleading. This is a game mode that lets you play in a solo or friends-only lobby without other players, still hosted on the official servers though. Unfortunately the “private” game mode will be severely limited and will slow down your progression and lock you out of many activities in the game, in their effort to force people into the open PvP mode.
120 GB, saved you a click