Octopus Overlords

Came across this at RockPaperShotgun. Looks like a dump truck of awesome. Similar to Mount and Blade, in terms of growing and gaining, but looks to incorporate the next level of detail. Just wanted to put it on radars if it wasn't already. The trailer is worth your time.

Also, it looks like it will follow the M&B development model of having you pay a small price now to help them develop the game and you get it for free. I'm sold so hard on the premise and the setting that I'll probably take the plunge.

I never knew Japan had deserts.

Anyway, it's doesn't look like it's at the point that I want to play it, and I don't believe in the model of having your customers fund development.

But it's worth keeping an eye on.

tgb wrote:I don't believe in the model of having your customers fund development.

Gamers don't like to "invest" in games hoping for a return a year later by way of being allowed to play it. They prefer to "buy" games and play them immediately.

I'm an avid gamer, and I'd never invest in a game I didn't feel like I was getting value for at the point of sale. I appreciate the thought, but it's too easy for a developer to give up or go wrong.

I also had a big WTF at the Final Fantasy style "giant sword" he was flipping around near the end. I'll never understand the attraction of that sort of style.

Yeah, but I remember buying Mount and Blade about 6 years ago for $6. And once a year I'd re-download it and play it, like it, and then download some mods for it, play them, get bored and put it back on the shelf. Then, in another year, I'd break it out again. In terms of bang for buck, that was the single most enjoyable $6 I ever spent. Period.

Now maybe not every game pans out like M&B, I don't know. That's the only model like this I've done, but it worked pretty damn well.

I like the idea of an Asian Mount & Blade, but not with eight foot long, foot thick swords.

I told myself I wouldn't buy this until they a least have sound working. They still don't have sound (although it sounds like they plan on adding it in soon), but I finally gave in and picked it up last night.

Only had time to play for a bit and I still don't have much idea about what I'm doing, but seems pretty cool so far.

Anyone else played this recently? Any good advice for starting out?

[3 years later........]


...and GOG has it at a sale price of 15 magic beans. I see it's version 0.93x so it must be pretty close to done. Is it worth getting now, or should people wait a bit longer? Sepiche?

Last I tried it was a few months ago, and it was still really, really rough around the edges. Apparently they had just done a big map upgrade and a lot of things were broken, but it still didn't seem all that fun.

It also seems really hard to get started, and most of the guides I read said you needed to stick near towns initially and lure bandits into the guards to get established. Having something as basic as the initial progression that broken made me put it down and I haven't tried it again since.

Thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll wait. It is surprising, however, that there are no negative reviews on Steam.

tgb wrote:Thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll wait. It is surprising, however, that there are no negative reviews on Steam.

It seems like most of the reviews mention how really, really open world it is, and the potential. It has both those things in spades, but I just found it really hard to stick with it long enough to get to the fun stuff.

I do need to try it out again now that they've hopefully got it a little closer to release, but lots of perfectly solid games out there to play at the moment.

After bouncing off this a number of times since it went into early access, I went back to give it a shot over the weekend after hearing it's getting close to full release. In the last few years the devs have covered an impressive amount of ground, and they've finally managed to create an interesting, post apocalyptic, open world sandbox with some impressive world design and attention to detail.

Previously I found the initial difficulty crippling, and without any built in tutorials it was hard to get started... not to mention lots of performance issues. Now they have at least some context sensitive help info available when you encounter things for the first time, and, while the initial game is still difficult, there are a few ways to make money without fighting that really help with getting started, not to mention some starting scenarios that bypass some of the initial grind if so desired.

Now after a few days of playing the game, I have my own outpost setup within the territory of a faction of religious zealots, and about 10 party members who are helping me gather resources and defend my base from the occasional bandit and raptor raids. Some of the little details in the game are impressive though.

For instance, since I basically built my base in another factions territory, they weren't terribly happy, and after a few days a large force of paladins showed up with a priest demanding I recite prayers to their god or else they would raze my settlement. They gave me a copy of their holy book and now show up from time to time demanding I repeat the prayers. Apparently it's also a good thing I took on some males to my little group, as these particular zealots are also pretty sexist, and had I not had a male to speak for my group, they would have evicted us for being uppity females.

Another cool thing that didn't happen to me, but happened to one player whose Youtube videos I was watching: his group was attacked by slavers and one of his people taken away into slavery. In Kenshi, this doesn't mean that person is gone however. After a bit of in game time, that character became available to switch to again, but was being held as a slave in another part of the map. That character had some skills enough to pick the lock of their shackles, escape, and return to the main group. Had they not been able to escape the player could have still gone to that part of the map and had their party work to free that character.

It's really hard to encapsulate all the little elements that go into the game, but there are a lot of different paths you can go down now besides building up a faction, and since I played last it really feels like they've breathed a lot of life into to the world. Different human factions at war, a faction of playable robot "skeletons", a faction of playable hive people, a faction of playable warrior-like mutants, some impressive and breathtaking vistas, etc.

All that said, for me the sense of progression against difficult odds and the exploration of a fun world were enough to keep me playing, but people with little time for grindy, difficult starts, or a desire for an overarching story to lead them along need not apply. This game is a sandbox with a capital S, and you start as just another peon and will get regularly slaughtered in fights for quite a while until you've trained and have a worthy combat team.

The full release is supposed to add more area to the map, as well as implement being able to take over other factions settlements.

Definitely worth another look now if you've been turned off by this in the past.

How much of an action game is it? M&B was too much for me.

Lorini wrote: ↑Thu May 24, 2018 5:36 pm How much of an action game is it? M&B was too much for me.

It shares a lot of the sandbox, open world, and party elements with M&B, but the controls and combat are night and day between the two.

The controls in Kenshi are closer to a pausible RTS with a 3rd person camera you can move anywhere within 500m or so of any of your party members (who can be in anywhere in the world). In combat you don't actually control your characters actions directly, but rather just give them a target and they will do the rest. There's even an "Attack All" command where your party will automatically spread their targets around the enemy group.

There is some strategy to the battles... separating enemies from their group and picking them off.. sneaking up on enemies and assassinating them before battle, taunting/blocking with certain characters, etc, but in large part you win battles before they start by having a large, well trained party to fight with you. Truth be told, hours into my game I still run from 80% of battles. Mostly I've been more focused on crafting/building than fighting, but it is best to train up your party well before leading them into battle or a lot of them could be killed.

So it should be hitting 1.0 in what, another 4 or 5 years?

tgb wrote: ↑Thu May 24, 2018 6:27 pm So it should be hitting 1.0 in what, another 4 or 5 years?

Ha. Devs are sticking to "this year", but they have changed that before.

This does feel much, much closer to release now though. It's gone from a mish mash of buggy mechanics into a coherent game in just the last year or so by my count.

I will also throw my hat into the ring for this one. I have the opposite experience, in that I played the shit out of this one for the first few years, but I haven't played more than 5 minutes of checking out some new functions in six months, maybe longer. I've been waiting for the finished project, and I plan on going in fresh. For the person that likes a bit easier game, there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of mods where you can start out semi-powerful; there's a Martial Arts master (100 skill), and you are basically a hand-to-hand god, a celestial-type being (your body is composed of star stuff, as in the skin on your body is a picture of space) and you start with maxed stats, but no skills, mods where you have millions of currency, but no other skills, amazing skills but no weapon, etc.

I'm really looking forward to the full game soon.

I was playing this while catching up on TV last night and I started watching Into the Badlands second season when I noticed it was on Netflix.

Never really made the connection before then, but for anyone wanting a way to visualize the setting, it has a lot of notes from Into the Badlands with maybe a little Trigun mixed in.

The end times are almost upon us.

Lo-Fi Games is pleased to announce, after a long total of 12 years in development from the moment Chris first created it… Kenshi will reach full release 1.0 on December 6th 2018!

We want to thanks all of our fans from all around the world for their help in supporting us over the years, being patient with us, helping to refine Kenshi with feedback, bug reports, suggestions, and simply enjoying playing Kenshi and boosting us to create something huge.

The finish line is close, now is the last chance to make your voice heard to really help us make Kenshi the best we possibly can. We aren’t taking feature requests anymore and we won’t be adding in any more gameplay features but we’ll be focusing on fixing the last of the bugs and irregularities. Reporting any odd gameplay issues, bugs or imbalances will be massively valuable to us in these next few weeks. No matter how small you think an issue is, or whether you think it’s already been reported, send it in to us anyway!

And don’t worry, even after the 1.0 release we will continue to support the game and work on any fixes we might have missed.

You can share your feedback with us via the Steam forums or our official forums.

*Please note that the price will be increasing from £12.99 to £22.99 at version 1.0.

I've had this game on my wishlist for donkeys' years and it's been there so long I forgot to check and see that it has actually left Early Access. So, has anyone gotten it? Is it as good as the Steam reviews have said? They are Very Positive with people posting who have put in on the high side of one hundred hours. I'm just not sure I'd like the gameplay.

I'm currently downloading the demo myself but I thought someone might have some opinions.

I tried the demo and... wow, this is a really rough looking game. Also way more complex than I want to get into right now . But I'm glad they had a demo so I could see for myself.

Yeah it's too rough for me. I've been favoring pretty lately or at least not ugly.

I enjoy it. I like the concept of "you are not special, you are not the chosen one, and you are alone."
Although some of the available mods can make you a god. Literally. One of my favorites is the monk mod (forgot the name...drunken master, maybe?) That is basically a one-punch guy but you have ZERO other skills.

I downloaded the demo with uTorrent (My first ever use of a "Torrent" whatever the hell that is) but now I can't figure out how to actually start the demo. All the web help I've found just tells you how to download something with uTorrent, not how to make use of it once downloaded! Any help would be appreciated.

Apollo wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 2:24 pm I downloaded the demo with uTorrent (My first ever use of a "Torrent" whatever the hell that is) but now I can't figure out how to actually start the demo. All the web help I've found just tells you how to download something with uTorrent, not how to make use of it once downloaded! Any help would be appreciated.

Ah, you young kids who never used Torrent downloads!

If you downloaded the demo, IIRC (gosh, two days past and I'm a bit vague ) you ought to have a file called Kenshi_1.0.7.zip which weighs in at about 6.57 GB or so. You'll need to extract the contents of the zip file into a folder, keeping the existing folder structure of the zip. I extracted mine to the C:/ drive top level. It looks like this:

click to enlarge

To start the demo you'll need to click or double click the file kenshi_x64.exe and if you get an Open File - Security Warning, select Run. Then select Try Demo and you should be good to go from there.

After playing with the Demo a bit, I think I'll pass on this one. While it has a lot of things I love (Huge open world, no story, you start with nothing, can recruit NPC's, etc.) between the crude graphics and the lack of a first person view, it's not quite what I am looking for. Still, I'm very pleased that there are folks out there developing these kind of games. The major studios very rarely produce anything that I am even remotely interested in these days, so it's nice to see small companies cranking out stuff like Kerbal Space Program, Empyrion, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, Kenshi, etc.

Apollo wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:14 pm After playing with the Demo a bit, I think I'll pass on this one. While it has a lot of things I love (Huge open world, no story, you start with nothing, can recruit NPC's, etc.) between the crude graphics and the lack of a first person view, it's not quite what I am looking for. Still, I'm very pleased that there are folks out there developing these kind of games. The major studios very rarely produce anything that I am even remotely interested in these days, so it's nice to see small companies cranking out stuff like Kerbal Space Program, Empyrion, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, Kenshi, etc.

The cool thing about these games is that they don't require beefy expensive computers. I'm on my third year with this computer, something I never thought would happen when I was playing AAA titles. I have upgraded my GPU but that's it.

My son paid like 30 bucks for this monstrosity. Wtf is it?

A failed attempt at a playable UI.

It has its fans.

I've been getting back into this a bit lately and enjoying it, rough around the edges it might be at times. It's a fantastic open world RPG though with a lot of solid mods.

I did some research and built up a list of mods I'm currently using for my new game and figured I'd list them here as a reference for anyone thinking about playing this. All mods here are available on Steam, maintain balance (i.e. aren't completely OP), and work together as far as I've been able to tell.

Patrol Waypoints Plus - Lets you use torches as waypoints to help in automating some tasks
Reprogrammable Skeletons - Lets you convert captured skeletons by jumping through some hoops
Less Clutter x0.50 - Reduces clutter objects (rocks, trees, etc)
Animal Backpacks - Backpacks for animals added by Animal Traders
Animal Traders - Traders with lots of various animals for sale
Profitable Slavery - Ups payment for delivering slaves to make it more worthwhile
Interesting Recruits! - Adds costly unique recruits around the map
Skeleton NPC Hires - Adds more skeletons for hiring
Hard labor uses strength - Changes the default that laboring (mining, etc) doesn't raise strength
Advanced training dummies - Various training dummies that help get stats started
Cannibal hunting is now a job - Adds lootable heads and bounties for them for cannibals
Crossbow Training Station - Allows basic crossbow training
Reduced Raid Duration - Reduces how long raiders will hang out in your base if they defeat you (was 24 hours)
Taxman/Tribute/Prayer Relations+ - Adds events that raise your relations with various factions if you are nice to them
More Names! - More random names for recruits (~4x more)
Wear Goggles with hats - Lets you equip a handful of small items (like goggles) on your belt
Race Blood - Unique blood colors for the various races
Attack Slots x2 - By default only one person can actively attack another at a time, this ups it to 2
Take Over the World - Allows conquest of faction cities
Realistic Katana Class Weapons - Buffs katana type weapons a bit
Adventurers Guild - Lore Friendly Recruitment - Adds recruiter NPC that can randomly generate new recruits for a fee
Reduced Weather Effects - Reduces some of the weather effects to help with visibility
Outland Coin Purses - Adds small coin purses to NPCs
Weaklings Give XP - Gives a little more experience for fighting weaker opponents
Sparring Mats - Basic Training for Melee Defense & Martial Arts - Buildable mats to allow training by sparring
Enhanced Shopping Economy - Improves NPCs ability to shop at player stores
Wooden Dexterity Training Dummy (Animated) - Dex training dummy
Weight Bench - Strength Training - Str training dummy
Bandit Disharmony - Makes bandit factions attack each other on sight
Compressed Textures Project - Compresses a number of textures in the game. Little visual difference, and much better performance
Dark UI - Dark colored sharper UI
256 Recruitment Limit - Ups player faction size limit from 30 to 256
Nice Map [Zones + Zone names + Roads] - Map replacement that shows roads and zone names (doesn't show settlements until you find them though)