Maybe it is my Ukrainian heritage, more likely the current political situation, but I am leary of loading anything that comes from Russia onto my computer.
Am I being irrational?
I try to be open minded but I’m erring on the side of caution and passing on this.
Well, if you’ve played the Eador games or Grimlins, Inc. it’s too late. All of them are by the same guy, Alexey Bokulev.
… and Aleksey was born and still lives in Kiev. So, orald, you have to buy 2 copies.
Well in that case Ukes unite!
Well, if any of you get into the beta I’m interested in hearing your impressions.
Having watched one of the recent developer’s let’s play episodes, I now have some serious reservations about just how fun this game is going to be. A lot of it seems to be watching little dots representing your parties moving around on a world map and stuff happening to them. The impression that I was left with is that game play is rather passive. It seems like watching a sim with no input. I could be wrong, we’ll see. My enthusiasm has been tempered though.
The 15 minutes of video I watched were mostly about art, which looks like a very busy boardgame. I like the premise of the game, but whether or not the execution will be interesting is another matter.
@Coldsteel As best as I have been able to follow, the player is this mighty mage who can never leave the spire. You do a lot of things there – interview prospective recruits, teach, study, build rooms, cast spells, tell your people what to work on. But as to the wild lands around you, it’s all a matter of setting up parties to go out and explore, gather materials and info, etc. So yeah, the map shows dots representing their progress.
Hopefully, this will not feel overly passive. But I think of a game like Majesty, which never felt passive to me. However, it strikes me more as a management sim with almost no elements of a conquest sim, so from that perspective it will be passive.
Yeah, I’ve been following it pretty closely and understand how the game works and I knew it was going to be more of a sim. None of what they showed was surprising to me. What surprised me was just how ‘meh’ it felt watching it. It’s still very early on so I’m sure they’ll tweak stuff. It may also be the type of game that’s more fun to play than to watch someone else play.
This has been released into “limited” EA, because it is still has a lot of cooking, let alone baking to do. I’m probably going to pick it up this evening if I have time. They are hoping to hit Q1 2020 for a normal EA release.
Yes, I bought it this afternoon.
It is not available through the regular Steam website, you have to get the special Steam link from the Spire discord, because the devs do not feel the game is ready for the general public and are actively discouraging anyone from buying it for entertainment at this point. But they are looking for feedback. Basically, it is beta testing, and not close-to-release beta testing either. I ran into quite a few issues during my initial session, although the game does look very interesting.
So how much are they charging for the “privilege” of testing their game?
20 bucks
In their defense, a substantial number of their followers were begging them to take their money and let them try it out, knowing that it is far from finished.
They have actually asked people not to give them any publicity yet.
This will get a demo in the June Steam festival and they are planning to do normal EA in autumn.
such a long way still!
They basically scrapped what they had created just before EA a few years back because they realized real time wasn’t working so they basically reworked the game to be turn based instead. I’m glad they did because I was getting some bad vibes from what they had previously. I have no idea how it plays now but I’m still pretty skeptical that it’s going to all turn out well at this point.
As far as the aesthetics of the game, I have to admit that I just absolutely hate the character art. I think it’s god awful ugly. It sears my eyeballs with its ugliness in screenshots.
Yeah I’m cautiously optimistic at best as well. It sounds too awesome and intriguing. The big question is whether they manage to turn into into an entertaining experience in the end.
As for the character art I have to strongly disagree. I’m not in love with the style or quality but it does the one thing really well; it notably distinguishes the procedurally generated apprentices and makes them identifiable at a glance. If the developers manage to make them mechanically as individual and distinct that might be enough to carry the game.
Sounds like they scrapped all their early art as well. Hadn’t checked in years, but uh, that’s different!
That looks awful.