Anyone try Season 9 yet? Apparently two new maps in Canada. I’m wondering whether i need to buy this and add it to the pile of things i haven’t made it to in snowrunner.
Can’t offer an opinion, sorry. I have 300 hours or so in the game and the farthest I’ve made it has been the first Yukon map in Season 1 :)
However, I actually bought a steam key the other day (all gaming on Epic before that) and decided to just buy the base game as it doesn’t seem likely I’ll need more than that for what will essentially be comfort gaming sessions.
I did get to the Yukon in Hard Mode, which was fun/excruciating, so hopefully I will continue that play through at some point.
Tried this out again recently and it has me thinking about gaming overall. On the one hand, I like it and feel it’s a top game of recent years for me. On the other hand, I find myself frustrated with the grind that it, and so many other videogames, puts in front of the player. Against the grind, there is a dedicated fanbase of completionists and a community of fans that have hundreds to thousands of hours in it. Those players and the positive word spread out likely contributed to the games success and profit, which are a good thing for the fledgling genre of slower, more mature driving games.
What is success in this game?
I feel all of the Mudrunner games have been unrealized, and pushed out in semi-complete form. At first I thought Snowrunner was the first that didn’t have that issue. But on trying it again it’s absurdly unfinished:
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The mechanic of completing missions for profit and to beat a map almost completely ignores having those success reflected back in the world. The one exception being bridges that are completed and then used for the rest of the map. But the bridges are more often than not just adjacent to a mud bog that requires several minutes to traverse, on long routes that short-cuts could be devised. How realistic is it to restart a productive oil industry without fixing two-foot deep mud on the roads to the wells and refineries?
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The story is non-existent, and I don’t need cut scenes and dialogue and filler, but again - Michigan in 1979 is completely flooeded with roads washed out. Help us rebuiled the economy! Deliver steel, wood, food, fix buildings, bridges, power lines. This is fun! But at the end of it all, a month of game-time later, and the roads and map looks like the storm went through hours before.
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The grind. Later maps are utterly disgusting in terms of grind. Like, do this annoying 30-minute slog at 2mph through a mud-bog on a long circuitous route. Now do it 4 more times. Now do a slight variation of the route.
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Lack of mission variety that makes smaller vehicles or roadworthy trucks useful. Small trucks are for revealing towers, that’s it. Because of the above mechanic, a lot of road-worthy trucks, and the mechanics of going from mud-based economy back to a civilized road-based economy with improved productivity, are non-existant. The road trucks are an unrealized portion of this game.
Anyway, it’s really weird for me to restart a favorite game from past years and find it awful. If I restarted XCom or any other favorite games from the past decades, I’m sure I might not finish it, but would find it super fun.
Any thoughts?
Yeah, I can understand why they don’t do it, but I would definitely appreciate if the next one had you meaningfully improve the traversability of a map over time.
Yeah, I suppose that’s a shorter summary of my wall of text above, lol.
It’s not just you. And while I think it’s not just Snowrunner, it does share some of the blame. Last time I tried to get back into it, it just felt too slow and expansive and pointless. I can imagine maybe sinking back into it as a “podcast game” (i.e. a busywork activity that frees up brainspace for me to pay attention to something I’m listening to or even watching), but I wonder if the novelty of mud and traction has played out by now. I think Snowrunner, like Mudrunner and Spintires before it, got a lot of mileage out of its novelty, and that might have eroded away.
And, oh look, season 10 just started, whatever that means. I saw the announcement for it on Steam, but it just looked like more of the same to me.
Oddly enough, the recent driving game that really grabbed me is published by the same folks who publish Snowrunner. It’s called Dakar Desert Rally, and once you get to the advanced mode, you have to cross huge open maps using the co-driver’s roadbook to find beacons, much like you’d use a treasure map to find treasure. I’ve never played anything quite like it. If Snowrunner is slow and expansive and pointless, Dakar Desert Rally is fast and expansive and pointless. :)
I like it as a podcast game. I find that the addition of component progression to Snowrunner makes me want to play it much more than Mudrunner. That little dopamine rush of unlocking something helps me to ignore the ultimate pointlessness of the game.
I do wish they added more visible changes to the maps as missions are completed in the most recent seasons. The descriptions sound like they should have changes, e.g.:
Fix & Connect
A storm has shaken western Canada, wreaking havoc all over and cutting off power. Reconnect British Columbia’s grid and its crucial infrastructures with 2 new trucks across 2 new summer maps.
I’m at the other end of the adventure curve, just messing with Smithville Dam and Black River on hard mode, and I’m only seeing the roses at this point. I mean, yeah, it would be nice if the areas improved over time, after you clear them. But I’m in love with the problem-solving the game throws at you. Just having a blast.
I can certainly see how at some point it’ll all start to feel the same, but I’m locked in at the moment. :)
I’m also still playing it, and while I can’t really argue against the grind that shows up later, this did make me laugh:
The game launched with a bug where if you left the tutorial early, some of the missions didn’t appear in the world. So that mountain bridge above the gas station on the first map didn’t show as repairable for me - I spent hours trying to drag the fuel trailer up to the factory by every other route possible. It was probably the most gruelling thing I’ve done in a game, so try that out if you feel like the bridges are irrelevant ;)
In general, yes, you have no impact on the world and it would be nice for that to show. Getting your truck damaged by those little pebbles on the roads is a personal bugbear and if I had some piece of machinery to clear those I’d do it at the start of every session. Really.
Have you tried Hard Mode? It really adds a lot, and you will actually use the smaller trucks and road trucks, even if it is sometimes just to transport fuel between maps. But definitely viewing the game as a whole, road trucks are wasted.
There is an awful lot of content too, too much for me, though I can’t speak to that because the farthest I’ve gone is the Yukon, which was a pretty early season and was included in the deluxe version at launch. I did that in hard mode and had a great time. I recently bought the game on Steam (just the basic version because I’ll probably never see the content) and am currently motoring through that on hard mode as well (though pretty intermittently as it’s nearing the end of its life for me).
But I had a great time with it, probably a top 25 game for me, and its appeal has endured.
Snowrunner was the perfect Covid game for me. All the townsfolk are staying home during lockdown while I’m the hero making all these difficult but super important deliveries. The game lacks story so I made one up. :)
I do feel like some of the DLC maps have too much busywork. Lumber requires three trips. Definitely a grind if you’re playing solo. I assume the devs were catering to those who play with friends, who can team up and make quick work of it.
Completing a map is such a satisfying feeling. I need to get back to this game at some point.
It’s the pointlessness that ultimately has me shelving the game for long periods of time. I would love an evolving map.
But in short windows of my real life time (2-3 weeks every 6-12 months), I enjoy the game as a podcast game. It’s the problem solving I love. The big grinds (lumber missions needlessly repetitive for example), that keep me from completing maps before moving to the next.