I'm not sure how much value there is to be found from GB playing complex multiplayer sandbox-survival games if you're going to go in completely blind, turn off the voice chat, and proceed to spend your time goading each other to attack every player you encounter. If you're given a sandbox to play in and all you do is throw sand at the other kids, then you're probably not going to have much fun. Reminds me of watching Dan try to play DnD.
Complex isn't how I'd describe this game at all.
Then you're simply wrong.
The whistles they were screwing around with are actually for giving orders to groups of tamed dinosaurs. There are follow and halt commands, different aggression levels and behaviors, modes of attack, etc., all of which can result in some amazing RTS-level strategy if you know what you're doing.
Taming itself is complex. Different dinosaurs have different taming methods and mechanics, along with their own food preferences. Doing torpor (knockout) damage with narcotic-tipped arrows is one of the more effective methods, but balancing torpor damage and physical damage is a tightrope, because you can accidentally kill something you're trying to tame.
Dinosaurs can be bred, and stats and color variations can be maximized through selectively breeding. On one map, I set up a pen full of penguins and set them to mate on their own. A while later, I realized I hadn't provided a source of food (a trough), and when I was offline for a while, they'd run out of food, but strangely my penguin population was still growing. I discovered that the penguins had started evolving a higher food stat to compensate for the lack of food. Only those with the increased food stat survived long enough to reproduce. It was evolution in microcosm.
Even something as seemingly simple as the poop is complex. Different animal poops provide different levels of nutrition for fertilizing crops. Dung beetles need it for food. Crops also must be irrigated using a system of water pipes and taps. Certain crops don't appear naturally in the world and must be grown to be obtained.
The clothes you wear also matter. Most of the higher level armors are hot to wear, and also heavy, reducing your available carry weight and causing you to consume water at an increased rate. Some armors are specialized, such as the ghillie suit for stealthily approaching wild creatures, and the fur suit for surviving cold climates without freezing to death.
I get that this isn't the game for everyone, and I'm not trying to pass it off as some monumental achievement that you'd be crazy if you didn't like. The UI is one of the game's most glaring issues, and learning to navigate it successfully is a huge part of the learning curve. The community is, for the most part, garbage. Cheaters clip under the maps on official servers and use explosives to demolish bases from under the ground mesh, where retaliation isn't possible. There's some open-world jank, for sure, and occasionally the physics go wonky in hilarious, depressing, and horrifying ways that are impossible to predict. Some people will be immediately turned off and never get into it enough to see any of the more intricate stuff. And that's fine. It's got issues for sure. But to say it isn't complex is demonstrably false.
@brad: Bought this game after watching this QL, and there are TOTALLY secret rooms! If you see a place that looks fishy, try shooting the wall to see if a door opens up (well, not a door, but those anchor-chain-pneumatic tube-thingies).
Here's one I found if you go left instead of right in the room before the first boss:
This is a great idea. There haven't been too many opportunities for Dan to be the heel/antagonist lately, and he's soooo good at that. Excellent choice of game, and great setup and victory conditions.
Having played a ton of the Genesis version of Eternal Champions, this Sega CD version seemed real bad. The original was slow and floaty and had some almost Dark-Souls-ass animation priority goin on, weird special moves, and ridiculous AI cheese. It wasn't a great game. But that CD version looks real slapdash and buggy, the sound was comparatively awful, and it seemed like the only plus it had going for it was a few new characters (the cowboy, the pirate lady, and the pharaoh were new ones that I saw, may have been one more).
But yeah, when this inevitably has science applied to it, i *strongly* recommend the Genesis version.
Wow. I was kinda with the people saying you shouldn't pick on this game until I saw that. Guy clearly has an inflated sense of what he's accomplished. Don't get me wrong, kudos to him for making it alone and learning everything from scratch, but selling his time for $100/hr.? Nah man. Put that time into learning something about design and storytelling. Fix the bugs and finish the game. Because this smells a lot like abandoning the game to make a quick buck.
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