Planet Nomads, the sci-fi single-player survival game has another update out and it seems it's been a tough year for the developer.
Before diving into what's new, I wanted to point out a blog post the developer put up here. In it, they describe how it's been tough going for them, to the point of them even considering cancelling the game. They pulled people from it to work on new "mobile projects" and so on. Eventually, it seems they were able to put some more resources back into Planet Nomads after community support. The post starts a little negative but thankfully ends on a positive note about it.
Frankly, I think their decision to axe multiplayer was part of the reason people decided to ignore it. Unless you have a really good hook for a single-player survival game, competition is seriously hot. It has a lot of good features for building (including vehicles) that would be so much more fun with others. I've yet to see anything in the single-player survival that has really made me think it's worth my time compared to many other similar games, a lot of which do have multiplayer.
As for the recent update, for Linux gamers they've made a tweak to "support not so recent distributions" so it's nice to see some attention there. Additionally, there's new types of weather along with improvements to existing weather; a new "Free Roam" game mode, which allows you to explore without worrying about thirst, hunger, radiation etc; a directional indicator for damage sources; a take-all button for containers; performance optimisations and so on. Sounds like a reasonably good update overall.
Find it on Humble Store, GOG and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
That said, I've had a lot of fun out of it. It just lacks variety and any real sense of purpose once you've got food and water production going. There's a sort of difficulty gap: exploration is fun until you've seen all the biomes, and then, presumably, a search for the alien artifacts is supposed to take over. But that's a much more daunting prospect, since you basically have to cover the entire surface of the planet to find them. As I say, more variety - different biomes (some kind of parametric variations on the existing ones, maybe), more animal and plant types - might make that a more interesting experience.
But I wouldn't be too tough on Craneballs. What they set out to do is really hard - probably harder than they realised - and, multiplayer excepted, it's about 80-90% there. It just needs more interest to really hook you in.
Last edited by Dunc on 20 December 2018 at 2:47 pm UTC
That's probably the biggest advancement so far to be able to load another persons design.
The game in itself is very difficult due to very advanced physics and "microbuilding" of vehicles. In that respect it's more advanced than planet explorers.
I did not care for multiplayer that much, but after seeing what NMS now has in place (small cooperating teams) it doesn't seem that bad.
But I have a hard time on planet nomads to see a goal, except for my standard goal: to build the biggest (moving!) base ever. With trains and stuff like that.
I wish that the developers of NMS, PN, FcE and PE got together and develop the most complete game.
I've never cared about the multiplayer but I hope for more content and purpose.
There's a lot of really impressive builds to check out on YT.
Was nice that they added some story mission before you crash into the planet. Sad that they still haven't changed their mind about multiplayer though.
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Last edited by Xpander on 20 December 2018 at 10:36 pm UTC
TheRiddick Dec 21, 2018
Quoting: TheRiddickI bought it on the premise that multiplayer would be a thing. While some may dislike multiplayer, you must remember that there are FAR better survival games out WITH multiplayer in them! Just keep that nugget of information in mind when rejoicing over Planet Nomads.
Well, if you're not into multiplayer, the "WITH multiplayer" part obviously means nothing to you.
Question would be rather if there's better stuff when ignoring multiplayer.
TheRiddick Dec 21, 2018
The only thing unique with this game is some of its building and linking mechanics, their quite nifty and can allow for some elaborate vehicle designs, assuming it ever developers to that stage and doesn't become vaporware or release as a early unfinished alpha.
Last edited by TheRiddick on 21 December 2018 at 8:22 am UTC
A game like this either has to be vaguely story-driven (like Subnautica) or multiplayer (like 7D2D). I'm not sure I'll ever get this to be honest. Still holding out for a native build of Astroneer personally.
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