You guys are crazy for hating on House of the Dying Sun. It’s clean, sleek, and wonderfully precise. The missions have just enough of a puzzle/strategy component to elevate it above being an arcade sim. And there’s just so much character in the look and feel of the ships. The mission structure gets you directly into the combat, filler-free, instilled with a sense of urgency thanks to the traitor flagship, and with a variety of set-ups at varying difficulty levels with varying solutions based on which loadouts you bring and how you order your ships. Personally, I think this is a breath of clean fresh air in a genre bogged down by the mediocrity of its sheer quantity. I’m eager to see how the survival mode turns out.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your complaints, but not every space game has to be a wide-open procedurally generated universe with trading and diplomacy and factions. That’s like complaining that the new Doom sucks because it’s not an open-world game.
-Tom
Enemy Starfighter, the previous iteration of this game, WAS open world of a sort. You could jump around the map and choose your battles. This new version, while retaining the amazing combat of Enemy Starfighter, feels just…smaller…so much smaller. It’s just something of an emotional letdown from what we once had.
This is what it used to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wENzfmTHCG8
I’m not hating on House of the Dying Sun, since I haven’t played it (yet). I’m just loving on Steamworld Heist, that’s all. :D
Razgon
3524
Love this game - It is also one of the few games I know of, that changes its UI based on your allegiance. So much awesome! The voiceovers as well…Is it purchasable somewhere?
Right, and the developer has explained why it’s no longer that. It’s a rare skill to pare down your design when you realize your original intent isn’t going to work out. I admire anyone who can do that. The difficult part of the process is knowing what to leave out. And that’s one reasons early access can be anathema to the design process. It freezes into place expectations before you a designer should commit to them.
But more to the point, it seems to me you’re better off judging a game by what it is rather than what it could have been. By that metric, there’s no game in the world that holds up. House of the Dying Sun is a compact package of distilled space combat awesomeness, stripped of what probably would have been filler. I see that as a good thing.
-Tom
Yes, I realize now I’m in actual, emotional mourning for the game that was and could have been, and I guess I just need to work through that.
It is NOT. Unless you wanna pay exorbitant amounts of moolah on eBay. I was very, very lucky to finally get a copy for around $15. They usually go from $70 on up.
Sure, but I don’t think that’s quite the sentiment Brian is expressing. (Certainly, it isn’t the one I feel, which I’m more qualified to speak on.) Leaving aside which design, House of the Dying Sun or Enemy Starfighter, makes for a better game, I was excited by the premise of Enemy Starfighter, and I’m not really excited by the premise of House of the Dying Sun at all. A tight, focused experience is less important to me than infinite replayability.
This is where I’m at too.
Also, I spent a couple years being excited by the premise of Enemy Starfighter, so where we ended up is doubly disappointing. I understand why the dev made the changes and there’s nothing wrong with HotDS, (name aside), it’s just I don’t find it to be very good and it’s not the game I was waiting for.
Sigh, yeah, basically. It’s like, for years, we were anticipating one thing (which I got to play and fall in love with, mind you) and now we’ve gotten this nearly complete other thing. This new, other thing isn’t BAD, mind you, it just took a lot of what we loved about the other thing and threw it out. It’s just saddening, and I feel honestly grief stricken by it, which I feel I’m allowed.
I’ll pointedly ignore this game simply because it harshed Brian’s buzz.
Oh don’t ignore it, please. On its own merits, so far, it’s a solid gameplay experience, as Tom’s opinion clearly shows, but for me, who’s been waiting for one game for years and then to get another is tough. It’s not rational, but it’s mine and I own it.
It’s gorgeous and its combat just flows wonderfully. Just so, so fluid.
But when I first saw that linear, mission-based map, I just felt gutted, I admit it.
I guess I just have a whole different approach to games (and other entertainment, by the way). I’d rather react to what a game is rather than what I want it to be, based on expectations or otherwise. Which I understand is mostly what you’re doing when you say House of the Dying Sun “[isn’t] very good”. I understand that. But whether it’s good or not – I think it’s very good for the reasons I’ve explained – is a different question entirely from whether it needs to be an open-world game with randomly generated missions and the ability to fly around between star systems instead of picking missions from a branching tree structure. We have plenty of open-world games and a lot of them are poorly made, without personality, and crammed with filler. Mike Tipul made the right call by scaling House of the Dying Sun to his capabilities and as such, there’s one less ambitious game fallen short asking for your money. There is instead one more shrewdly focused design with personality, unique gameplay, and an unforgettable aesthetic, to boot. Tipul is a better designer and House of the Dying Sun is a better game for focusing on what it can do rather than fixating on something that didn’t work early in the design process.
That’s one of the dangers of the “design in a fishbowl” approach that I don’t like: people don’t understand that one of the hardest parts of game design is knowing what to leave out. They feel like they’re being deprived of something when a feature goes by the wayside, regardless of whether that feature would have made for a better game.
At any rate, House of the Dying Sun still has some development to go. It’s getting a survival mode and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of replayability added to the missions, like scores or random parameters. That might bring around some people who can’t accept hand-crated missions as a viable way to make a game.
-Tom
I understand what you’re getting at, but I just don’t understand that mindset. Infinite replayability is only as good as the actual playability. That’s like saying “I don’t care how good the food is so long as it’s all-you-can-eat.”
-Tom
CraigM
3537
Well, sure, but I totally get it. I fall somewhere in the middle. Infinite replayability is fine if core systems are good. I love Kerbal Space Program, Minecraft, Europa Universalis, and Civilization. All have (near) infinite replayability. I also adore games like Unity of Command, Bastion, Brothers, and TIE Fighter. The dichotomy between EU IV and Unity of Command doesn’t matter, as both are exemplars of their design focus, and are among the (IMO) 5 best games in the last decade.
But if I’m honest I’d gladly take another game to go in the first group over the second. Doesn’t mean anything other than that if given the choice of two games of equal quality, one being hand crafted discreet missions, the other a more freeform sandbox, I’ll take the latter*.
*does not apply to RPGs and action games. 0 interest in Bethesda games, or your GTA type games.
Tom, a part of the issue (I think) is that fans of space sims like Brian and myself have dreamed with good space sims with dynamic campaigns for a long while, and those are exceedingly rare (I can only think of Starshatter, to be honest). Enemy Starfighter was the first game in ages to propose anything similar to that, so you can imagine how excited space fans got…
…only to get a game with handcrafted, static missions, like the dozens we already played in the past, including classics like Freespace 2 (which is hard to beat). So while it’s not a problem for you (since you’re not a rabid fan of a particular genre which has been underrepresented for decades), it is a problem for fans of the genre who have dreamed of a Falcon 4.0 style space sim for ages.
Wow --I just looked at that game from a fresh eye – it looks marvelous! Do I need a joystick? I’m gonna get it as soon as I’m finished with Fallout Survival mode – expectations do tend to diminish our fun levels – btw can I get a digital copy of freelancer anywhere? Its been ages since I played that.
This is not the way to eat food?! ;)
