| Title | Five reasons you should just go ahead and play the Offworld Trading Company beta |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | February 12, 2015 |
I'm not in the habit of recommending, much less playing, early access games. I'd just as soon wait until a game is finished before playing it..
Read the full articleWell I was inspired to find my copy of Ruthless and holy cow I got it to install and go to the main menu just fine. I didn't start the game I'm not sure if I really want to see if it holds up. But oh boy do I have some great memories of that one. It had a lot of board game sensibilities. Utterly brain dead AI ultimately doomed it but I loved the systems.
Once Soren becomes involved early access is OK?
Just teasing, I look forward to trying this out.
"So why would I play Offworld Trading Company, which enters public beta today and is available for $40 on Steam?"
I thought the answer was going to be because you know Soren Johnson, and lets be honest that is probably the reason.
Wow - you liked the campaign? The only RTS campaign that I can think of that Tom Chick actually liked was Wargame - AirLand battle. Why is the campaign good in OTC? I am picking it up tomorrow, hopefully the discretionary income has some room for a $40 early-access game.
Probably less that it's Soren and more that Soren actually designed a whole game and made sure it worked up front instead of focusing on spectacle engines and adding particle effects first. Which is the big secret to making a good game (especially a game designed to be thought about a little) that almost no one does, because it's work and games are not about work unless you are a sucker because the big market is for spectacle that other people are playing and talking about RIGHT NOW, even if the spectacle engine isn't even done and the particles are still buggy. Buggy as hell.
But what what's really going to bake your noodle is that for well over a thousand years it has been widely known (and then mostly forgotten) that the end of the world will come primarily through empty spectacles, primarily visual in nature. This is how most people lose their souls (usually after becoming convinced that they don't have one).
What is a human being? A drooling animal, perhaps, or is that just an illusion: a byproduct of watching too many empty spectacles? Obviously the standard has been lowered, and will no doubt be lowered further in future.
Well, pretty much anything Soren makes I'm eager to try. But for me, being eager to play a game is usually more of an argument for waiting until it's done.
The campaign is good because it's dynamic rather than a set of canned scenarios. And it forces you to try different kinds of tactics by limiting what you can build. In fact, some of the campaign missions are like crazy chess puzzles. I can imagine this feature will get a lot of extra work over the next year, but even its current form, it makes Offworld Trading Company a completely different kind of game than the skirmishes or multiplayer matches.
Too bad about the AI. But I was actually hoping to set it up on a couple of comptuers here and play it multiplayer with one of my boardgaming buddies. I imagine it might hold up pretty well as a head-to-head game.
Best. Early. Access. Ever.
And a seriously brilliant game.
From the offworld forums:
"To be clear, we are not launching Offworld on Early Access for financial reasons; we have enough money already to fund us through our planned release date early next year. We are going to Early Access because we are serious about making the best strategy game of the year, and the only way to do so is to find out what is wrong with our game right now when there is still time to do something about it."
Amen.
Wow, Tom. I started this article like, "This guy shows up wanting to sell me covered rain gutters. I'll listen just to be nice because he's a good guy." Then I was all "Here is my $1,000 down payment and yes I will set up a payment plan for the remaining $2,500". My radar is full of games and I had successfully stayed away from this due to price coupled with the EA status. Now, with the weekend almost here, I fear an incoming purchase. I wish you had published this on Monday or Tuesday.
Geez, you're kind of dissing Company of Heroes. It's far from my favorite game, but it definitely requires skill to play. I'd go so far as to say it's a very demanding game, but maybe I just suck.
The screenshots make me think of Moonbase Commander.
I've just been reading through some of the Godus meltdown. It's really nice to get some positive stories here too. Good job to Soren and the guys at Mohawk for giving us a reason to be optimistic.
thanks for the response! Chess puzzles as in "Mate in 3?" sounds interesting. I assumed some sort of dynamic campaign would be there if you like it. i don't know why more RTS games do this. i guess the cut-scenes are more important? Remember the old SSG title Warlords (1 & 2)? That was a pretty good RTS with a dynamic campaign and stellar AI (naturally, given it was SSG). Classic game, in my opinion.
...dammit, now I'm back to wishing there was a version of Shadow Watch that ran on modern systems. :/ I loved that game.
Warlords 3 was the best game.
I never said it didn't require skill to play. Did you click the link? My point is that it's far less skill-oriented than Starcraft II.
Just to nitpick, I believe Warlords was a turn-based series. The Warlords: Battlecry games were RTSs.
I'm partial to Battlecry 2, but I've played Battlecry 3 as recently as the last few years. They really hold up. Excellent interfaces in addition to the campaigns and AI you mention.
Ah, good call. That game was a real hoot!
