I tried this on launch and refunded it shortly after release, but i've seen they've had some updates. It was pretty clear they have some great artists, but content past cute models and art is shallow so far.

This game started development around a decade ago, and was based on a paid mod minecraft server that was cancelled overnight from mojang changing their TOS to not allow for private servers to sell mtx. They started building their own game in response, got acquired by riot soon after. The head guy made big bucks over the years from investments (maybe thanks to the private server revenue and the sale?) Riot games shuttered them after many, many years of development due to lack of progress. The head guy bought it back from riot and immediately launched in to EA.

I don't think there's a single boss in the game yet? They're all marked with "WIP" placeholders. There's an entire fantastical story area you portal to that is beautiful and really well crafted with art and has "WIP" signs everywhere, empty npcs and a couple of vendors.

You can also go explore and find these beautiful POIs all over the place in a handful of different biomes, and then you try and enter them and "WIP" is staring back at you. They haven't implemented so much basic sandbox exploration stuff.

Combat has a few weapon types and a finisher move that charges up until you unleash it. I really wanted more nuance, but it's way better than minecraft's combat (not saying much.)

The art is some of the best, but when it comes to coding in the rest of the game it's to be seen if it's development progress will greatly increase.

They do have a focus on modders to be able to mod out the world. That seems to be the core of everything (including their monetization plans. They want to be another Roblox where creators get paid and they get a cut, which they've promised not to start taking for 2 years in a blog post shortly before EA launch. The world gen can be customized to create new biomes, mobs can be programmed to act a certain way, all kinds of modder things are everywhere.

For now there's about 10 hours of poking around in the sandbox until you've seen all you're gonna see imo. If you want to build the palette is clearly getting lots of love with loads of textures, so there should be no shortage for that well beyond 10 hours.

In terms of other recently launched EA minecraft clones, Everwind seems more interesting to me. It may not be as pretty (still gorgeous though) but the gameplay loop of building a magical steampunk airship that is your base and then exploring different sky islands is phenomenal. Still another EA title, so much EA hell! Doesn't anybody aside from AAA release mostly finished games nowadays? Do modern games really need to take over 10 years to finish?

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Fortnite can't last forever. The kiddies are growing up and moving on.

Sucks that this is the state of the global economy in most industries though. Layoffs everywhere the past couple of years. The pandemic response really fucked the economy and we're still paying for it directly and indirectly (like politics.)

If their game store didn't go balls deep on exclusivity and kept it simple like Stardock's Impulse did before they sold it off, odds are they would be swimming in money. The masses hate gatekeeping.

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My only wish is what you used an em dash somewhere in this post to mess with us.

Love what you're doing man!

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Quoting: VerglasSo is that the reason they completely pulled the other BSG game from Steam a few months ago?

Either way, as a huge BSG nerd I will definitely check this one out. So say we all.

Pretty sure the other one had a 10 year license expire and that's what got it pulled from the store. I may have the amount of years wrong, but it didn't seem to be anything due to any kind of upcoming game.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPThat flow of +Chinese -Linux is fairly normal by now.
I wonder what is it that makes Chinese rise and ebb so sporadically - you'd think it would be a more or less constant chunk.

Also a pretty hefty growth of Russian and Korean too. Linux is heavily english userbase. Filtering by linux shows very little change of language.

When you drill down to the system spec growth, Linux is getting higher end systems added. 3.7ghz and faster is the biggest growth segment. Windows has the most growth with intel 2.4ghzish processors, so laptops. The language growth in russian/chinese/korean is all there under windows.

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I seriously thought about backing this. I went as far as going through the pledge process on kickstarter. I ended up cancelling though before the end of the day.

It costs just about $400 to have this shipped to the US if you get 8GB of memory, 128GB eMMC, the MX95 and all three of the IO devices added on.This is basically maxed out.

For $450 you can get a maxed out AYN Thor that has two screens, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB NVME SSD. Don't get me wrong, this is not a 1:1 comparison at all. The Thor has pretty limited linux support, but there is some out there. It's definitely going to be better for a handheld gaming device though especially for emulation. It normally runs android though, not linux.

But when you compare it spec for spec, it's really hard to want to drop so much on a device that will probably feel dated the day you get it. 8GB of ram just isn't much anymore. A super tiny screen isn't great. It's going to be a meh blackberry, an ok gameboy emulator, or an oddball tinkering device. I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy it but the price doesn't feel right to me.

A version 2 in a few years once memory prices calm down and another generation of better processors is available might make more sense, and i'll get to see how they do with the kickstarter launch. I've never had a kickstarter ship on time before so I don't expect them to.

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