Ooh, neat! RimWorld has had the ability for mods to support different versions of the game for quite a while now and it's pretty handy, so it's good to see that capability expand. (It doesn't have the ability to mark a mod as simple enough that it'll likely keep working with any version, so that'll be a nice feature to have.)

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I've got Slay the Spire 2 and Witchbrook on my wishlist. Most of the other games on there that haven't already released have annoying release dates of "To be announced" or "Coming soon" (I thought that one wasn't allowed anymore?), but in theory the Colonies [External Link] expansion for Terraforming Mars is supposed to be releasing in Q1. Colonies might be my favorite TM expansion (vying for the spot with Prelude) so I'm excited it's finally happening, though the developer has a strong track record at this point of introducing a bunch of bugs of various degrees of game-breaking with each patch, so we'll see how that goes.

It doesn't have a date yet, but I'm also really hoping the digital version of Twilight Imperium [External Link] releases this year. Now in addition to 12-hour sessions with friends twice or thrice a year I can practice on my own! 😆

And it's not software, but I'm looking forward to the Steam Controller release for using my Deck as a living-room multiplayer setup.

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• Island maps can be surrounded by infinite water instead of void.


• Rivers can end in wetlands if unable to reach sea.

Interesting! I love OpenTTD (it's a great game for messing around in multiplayer with friends), and it's nice to see updates to its (rather simplistic) map generation for more complexity. I don't need Dwarf Fortress-level modeling of foundational rock types for simulating tunnel-building costs, but a little more visual interest sounds nice! 🙂

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Excellent, that means I now own a Limited First Edition model! 😆 In thirty years it'll be 'retro' and 'hip' again when we're all use eye-implants that form images directly on our retinas!

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"Stellaris Prime" sounds like a Paradox/Amazon team-up. 😟

But this does remind me of the Savage Planet series of games. I remember vaguely hearing about them on release, feeling mildly interested, but never following up and checking them out thoroughly, so I'll have to go do that. 🙂

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Not quite that long, but I did apparently put 193.7 hours in and didn't actually complete my first campaign…

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71% of my playtime this year was RimWorld (36%), Team Fortress 2 (23%), and Stellaris (12%), all of which are over a decade old*. 7% of my playtime was games released this year, which I think might all be from Ark Nova (the digital version).

*RimWorld only released on Steam in 2018 so Steam apparently counts it as "recent" (1–7 years old) rather than "classic" (8+ years old) in the breakdown, but I had pre-alpha access from the original Kickstarter in 2013 and was playing it years before it officially released.

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It's definitely a grand strategy game (with the attendant effort required to get into it), but if you're used to playing Paradox GSGs I found it wasn't too bad. I got it…maybe two or three years ago, and while I didn't end up actually completing a full campaign because the end game dragged a bit at that stage of development, I enjoyed it and have been meaning to get back into it to see what updates they've released since then. The 1.0 release is as good a time as any, I suppose!

I did really like the whole seven factions idea, and how they all have different goals and win conditions (some of them completely antithetical to each other – you can play as the faction that only wins by killing all the aliens, or the one that wins by helping the aliens take over Earth, to various flavors of "keep Earth safe", to the wildcard "let's figure out how to evacuate Earth's population somewhere else!" faction).

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Quoting: Tethys84It's really sad. I've come across some really great games over the years that seemingly no one noticed or played. Not going to lie, I wish we could go back to something resembling the Steam Greenlight days, where games had to voted on to be able to be on the store. It would just need some tweaking to make sure it wasn't exploitable by shady developers. I feel it would really help cut down on the thousands of legitimately bad, low-effort-made games that flood the store daily.

I get where you're coming from, and to some extent don't disagree, but I'm also not sure how much it'd really help. Let's say that all those games with <10 reviews are the legitimately bad, low-effort games. We cut those out. That still leaves 9,739 games released this year, or over 26 games released a day. We could go further and say only games with >50 reviews are likely to be actually good games…looking at the graph that's still something like 4,500 games, or over 12 games per day.

I think there are just so many people making games now, that even if we apply some arbitrary limit to cut out the really obviously bad ones there would still be so many releasing that no one could keep up with all of them. Would it result in some undiscovered gems getting noticed that haven't been otherwise? Probably, yes. But on the flip side how many games that have blown up and become viral hits in the years since Greenlight ended wouldn't have been voted on for approval with Greenlight?* It's a tricky question, but ultimately I think I'm in favor of erring on the side of more games and letting things like the review system float the good ones to the top (however imperfect a process that may be).

*Or, alternatively, how many games got through Greenlight and then ended up barely played because they weren't as good as the screenshots made them look?

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Well, without looking closely, as someone tangentially familiar with Factorio (having played the demo for maybe an hour), my first thought on seeing that video thumbnail was: "Huh. They're really ripping off closely copying the Factorio look, aren't they?"

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