Category Archives: Survival Crafter

Palworld: Casual fun collecting monsters

Whaddaya know, there I was feeling the gaming blues all summer until I ended up getting Palworld and Once Human this September and finding myself enjoying both for different reasons. The last two weekends were mostly dedicated to monster catching however which is why Once Human has to wait its turn for a personal review.

First of all, I did not intend to ever try out Palworld. I am not a Pokémon fan (which is how the game was advertized in some corners) and I had marginal knowledge beyond this before it was gifted to me by my longterm gaming buddy. I knew it’s open world survival crafting which I generally enjoy…until I don’t, which is the inevitable fate of this genre. Once your base is functional and expanded and chest inventory management becomes unbearable, I tend to lose interest unless there’s a reason to keep exploring and/or doing quests. Valheim does this pretty well but many titles really don’t.

About 25 hours and 20 levels into Palworld there’s an undeniable charm and gameplay variety that’s very engaging. Maybe it helps that I never played Pokémon so there’s not the constant ingame comparisons to Nintendo’s giant IP, over which they’re now currently suing Pocket Pair Inc. because apparently only Nintendo are allowed to use monster catching mechanics that involve throwing round balls. As far as I’m concerned the corporate bullies can suck the aforementioned but that’s neither here nor there.

An early Palworld review

Palworld starts the player off without much bravado; as you leave the familiar MMO cave, a wide open world awaits that is ripe for the exploring. It’s up to you where to head to first and where to set up camp, although venturing off into higher level areas early is not recommended. The map is vast and biomed in all the familiar ways. All across the world monsters of different levels, magical schools and random skills await to be conquered, some friendlier than others. Add outdoor bosses as well as dungeons and special instanced challenges to the mix, plus a linear quest progression to offer a sense of direction.

The crafting and leveling process are solid. New recipes and skills are unlocked through tech tiers that require different levels and resources. Some upgrades revolve around base building features while others improve your character’s gear or add special skills to pals. The workstations look fine – overall building and decorating are functional and simple without offering nearly the depth of Valheim or similar titles. If you’re looking for landscaping and detailed custom architecture, Palworld ain’t for you.

A large chunk of the game revolves around micromanaging the different pals you collect around the world and how they are put to optimal use in your homebase and combat. Creatures come with different schools of magic, innate skills as well as synergies and thus your quest for optimal outcomes beginneth. Gathering and crafting are mostly automated by way of putting suitable pals to work and overseeing their well-being. And yes, there’s a ton of cuteness involved as you watch your pals’ distinct animations and goofy behavior as they go about their daily tasks. Palworld is a cute game in a good way, it has a sense of humor about it. Naturally there’s also pal breeding and a process called ‘pal distillation’ which create longterm incentives for players to gather multiple pals of the same kind and hunt for special “lucky pals”. As I’ve only just started playing, I’ve no idea how important all of this will be further down the road.

Then there’s the exploration and combat part of the game which keep things varied. A degree of preparation is required before bigger excursions as you have to take food and other materials for yourself and up to 5 pals you’re allowed to bring along. The pals will aid you in combat and add other perks like riding, flying or scanning for dungeons to your journey. Besides hunger mechanics, there’s also gear decay and special gear for certain weather conditions – all your usual survival game fare. Catching new pals involves timing and throwing corresponding spheres of a certain level of which 3 different varieties exist so far. I’ve a feeling the dev team will keep adding more content in this regard. Traversal is made easier by things like different rideable pals as well as grappling hooks and a glider which you receive early on. There’s also fast travel by way of unlocking new areas.

The game is very vertical in places and it’s fun to climb up towers and mountains of which there are many. As you explore the map, you keep running into new pals, special collectibles and the odd dungeon or special encounter. If there’s one criticism I have right now, it’s that soundtrack is non-existent but that’s a personal thing. It’s weird to me how silent the game is when you’re out there looking for treasure. Otherwise I’m quite happy with the casual gameplay it offers and the flexibility of customizing your own world client side. Few things need improvement but nothing major enough to get on my nerves just yet. There’s multiplayer too of course which is slightly less ideal in terms of how progress is managed (for example tech unlocks aren’t shared) but it still feels very early days so I’m happy to go solo or join my friend on his server when we manage to coordinate. Let’s see if the game can keep our interest the next 20 levels.

Returning to Valheim

When Valheim launched in February 2021 it was possibly one of the greatest adventures me and my friends have shared online since MMORPGs stopped being good. It was a nearly perfect game and I remember being completely immersed and absorbed by the beautiful world, the great building features and well-balanced mechanics and progression. It was probably also the last time I’ve experienced the famed “running and screaming in terror” that gamers like to refer to with some nostalgia when talking about the good old days of gaming. There’s no doubt that Valheim ranks as one of my top favorite games of all time (overall, not just within the open world survival genre). Games such as this are very rare.

And yet after arriving in the Plains after the initial launch frenzy, things came to an almost screeching halt. Valheim’s indie dev team, Iron Gate Studio, were clearly taken aback by their success. It took them 1.5 years to release the next biome Mistlands and almost the same amount of time to drop the Ashlands expansion this May 2024. Not discounting smaller additions to the game like the Hearth & Home features or Cult of the Wolf optimizations, that is an awfully long time to release new content.

The inevitable happened for me and my group of five – everyone lost interest after the Plains were bested in spring 2021 and most of the gearing and crafting had been optimized to the max. The dedicated server save on which our build had been running was lost by someone’s mistake or other, much to my chagrin. Half a year later, nobody mentioned Valheim anymore. It was as if all memory of it had indeed passed on to the afterlife of Valhalla and only Huginn and Muninn remained to tell the tale.

Home base

It’s hard to come back from such a long break, yet whenever I’m reading Valheim posts by other bloggers I feel it pulling at me something fierce. Now Wilhelm reported that the Mistlands biome was a very mixed bag and often more odious chore than epic adventure. And apparently the developer’s plan for Ashlands is to be as unforgiving and tedious as possible…to slow player progress? Not the greatest prospects. To echo Bhagpuss, I’m not interested in playing Elden Ring Valheim. I’ve no idea what the developers real intentions are but I certainly never thought of Valheim as a particularly difficult game. It was tuned just right to keep your attention, sometimes frustrating but never joyless. I cringe at the idea that they’ve gone and overtuned things in Mistlands or the more recent biome which according to many forum discussions is an endlessly respawning mob rush.

Will I still find Valheim enjoyable when I reach the new biomes? It’s hard to say. Difficulty is often relative, as I have found when playing games that other players consider too easy or too hard. I’m no sucker for punishment for the sake of it, yet I can certainly sink my teeth into a more hardcore title. The question is always: is it hard but motivating? Is it well paced and rewarding? Does the difficulty make sense? And if not, do the devs listen to player feedback?

I guess I’ll just have to find out for myself. A brand new server is running anyway, this time our own. Me and the better half have just downed the second boss and the sunrise over our little hut is as poetic as ever. I miss our old base but this is another afterlife we must explore. Here we go again, Valheim.

Running & Screaming in Terror: 7 Days to Die and individual Survival Instincts

I’ve been playing 7 Days to Die again this past week and everytime I return to the game, I find myself thoroughly hooked in that “ooops it’s already past midnight??”-kind of frenzy for a time. Really, survival games are the worst for time management, one minute you’re planting potatoes on your farm – the next, four hours have passed and you still didn’t take that shower before bedtime.

7 Days to Die is one fine title for anyone into survival and building sims, in fact the zombie apocalypse part is only about one third of that experience. Zombie encounters get more intense after a while but the balance between different activities is what makes this such a fun title. Survival is rough but not too rough, especially not in coop, and the dev team keeps putting great effort into making the game ever more interesting (and smooth looking!), adding more and more features and sites (air drops are fun! army camps are not!) as well as complexity to the already very accomplished crafting system. Whatever you decide to do, progress feels very rewarding.

Improved graphics, weather effects and much more

Similar to DayZ which I have been duly impressed with in the past, 7 Days to Die is primarily also a game about atmosphere – maybe even more so. The sounds of the wilderness have been improved tenfold since the earliest builds and I get goosebumps regularly sneaking about towns or running from bears in the forest (I need a rifle!). The dynamics of the game change considerably once you got a team of three together for exploratory ventures and like with DayZ too, there’s some intriguing group psychology unfolding once several people start playing a fresh build together. Where DayZ was all about unspoken rules of conduct, 7 Days to Die coop mode is an entertaining experiment in terms of which measures of survival individual players will prioritize. In my own steady group’s case, the same scenario keeps repeating itself (Bee and Tee being my mates here):

Tee instantly starts base building: fortification is important, so a forge must be established immediately for things like iron doors and better defensive mechanisms. Also, we need firearms as soon as possible.
Bee is all about the farm and mining: we need crops for independent food resources and as many tunnels as possible down to the bottom of the world.
Syl starts hunting game and cooking: we need food and drink supplies. Also our entire storage unit needs to be organized and labeled, omg chaos!

I feel like such a cliché whenever I fall back to cooking for everyone but on my personal list of survival prios, food/drink are the most immediate. No potential death could be dumber or more embarrassing than dropping dead somewhere out in the wild, pockets bursting with loot, because you ran out of food or water. At least when you keep your character fed, you can run off to wherever and start building a new base there. Dunno, maybe that’s just me. I definitely enjoy how the game inspires everyone to play to their strengths (mine seems to be foresight and organization in this case) and take on different roles for the team.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

7 Days to Die is officially still in alpha which gotta be the most consistently playable alpha development I’ve ever encountered. Build 13 is about to drop soonish and looking incredibly good, so if you ever thought about checking this title out, now is the time! Immersive survival sims don’t get much better than this.

DayZ – In the Land of Intense Colors and Unspoken Rules of Conduct

I currently live in a house where much of my weekend mornings and all of my evenings are accompanied by the loud and unbridled DayZ enthusiasm next door. I wake up to hectic commands shouted over voice-comm almost every Sunday (because like all sane people I sleep in on weekends) and go to sleep to “It’s me! Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” and “Identify yourself now!”. The better half is having a blast in DayZ and the very playable standalone early access has done much to rekindle that passion. Being a pretty obsessive gamer myself, I observe all of this with equal amounts of understanding and amusement. Far be it from me to begrudge anyone their gaming sessions. Until he forgets to wash and get dressed, anyway.

Naturally, I was gifted my own copy of DayZ recently and having always been fascinated with the harshness and unmoderated authenticity of this title, I’ve given it a couple of nights over the past few weeks running with an international clan. There is a lot of mixed information out there currently about DayZ which, in my humble opinion, fails to paint a fair or complete picture of this complex beast of a game, of the depth and psychological intrigue of this persistent world hiking and murder simulator with rogue-like elements. And that’s the shortest way for me to describe it.

DayZ always has been and in its current state certainly is legitimately a PvPer’s game just like some games are made for PvE or RP. While it’s entirely possible there will be other server modes again where killing other players isn’t possible, DayZ right now is about handling an outrageous mix of feelings – between stark loneliness and desolation, to the desperate search for food while a quick, inconspicuous death is haunting your every step. Like in the real world that DayZ takes such pains to simulate, you cannot tell friend from foe at a first glance. Like in the real world, due caution and clear communication may decide your fate. Like in the real world, there are stakes to what you do and decisions have tangible consequences.

dayzq

DayZ is the game where absolutely nothing happens for hours and you find yourself desperately lost in the wild world without maps and indicators. Where you can hike forever and a day and never meet a soul. And then you die. And death has so many faces. It’s the game of paranoid retreat and uncanny social contact, of foul betrayal and uncompromising bonds. It’s the game of fear of loss, of terror and so much hope. In summary, it’s a fascinating social environment that teaches us much about the way we will behave under social / peer pressure once all written law and agreed-on convention is lost.

If everything goes and everyone is equally hungry, what means and tactics will you resort to in order to survive?

In 2003 Postal 2 launched with a particular tagline: it’s only as violent as you are! Only DayZ adds the online multiplayer component. The question of how violent you are gets replaced by how the violence of your peers will affect you. And there are many ways in which individual players respond and adapt. Despite inviting more notorious gankers along with everyone else, DayZ isn’t all kill on sight but more frequently about caution and basic unspoken rules of conduct. One of my very first encounters with strangers in the game went like this:

Still fairly fresh, hungry and ill equipped, two zombies attacked me and I started bleeding. Bleeding in DayZ gives you a limited amount of time to patch up before losing consciousness (which equals death pretty much), as the game’s color saturation gradually and unnervingly decreases. The zombies right now in standalone are a shadow of their former self, dumb and slow, yet dangerous in packs when unarmed (and a nub like me).

Frantically getting away, I crossed a small township and as these things always go, another player and his rifle materialized right in front of me. Oh shit! I froze on the spot because approaching strangers is pretty much the most stupid thing anyone will do while intentions are unclear – and intentions are always unclear in DayZ. Like most creatures that inhabit this planet would never dream of just running into each other, you just don’t do that here either. Should you ever form bonds with other players they have been tested beyond all doubt. In DayZ, trust needs to be earned and cooperation justified.

Friendly! Friendly!!

I managed to raise my arms waiting while the stranger started using proximity chat, the single greatest feature ever added to DayZ:

“Hello. Are you there? Are you okay?”

(At this point I haven’t figured out proxi chat just yet. I keep standing still looking dumb and expecting death by rifle.)

“Are you bleeding? I think you’re losing blood. Can you hear me?”

(I finally figured it out.) “I can hear ya! Hi! Yeah the zombies just got me down that road.”

“I assume you’re fresh, ye? Unarmed? I think I have some spare bandages if you like.”

(Overeager) “Yes I am friendly! I have virtually nothing! And I would really appreciate a bandage!!”

“Okay…..umm Bob, you can come out of the bushes now.”

(That’s when Bob, a second perfectly British gentleman who had been hiding in the bushes behind me, in case I turned out to be not so friendly, emerged.)

This was possibly the most hilarious conversation I’ve ever been involved in with random strangers online. It is also DayZ in a nutshell. That day, I lived and was saved by strangers. That day, I met the good people.

Lessons from DayZ

There is an emotional roller-coaster to DayZ, a ‘rawness’ of the simulation and in extension, basic human interaction both good and bad, that makes for some of the most exciting encounters and meaningful decisions in the world of online gaming today. I will never be a shooter fan but I am full of envy for the tension, terror and exhilaration this seemingly simple game is capable of producing. It’s what MMORPG players like myself dream of: the risky tactical play, the screaming and cheering on vent, the epic wins, the real scares and strong sense for friend or foe. The meaningful rewards and choices that can only come from risk and real chance of loss.

None of this would be possible if DayZ changed its present core mechanics or started imposing too many restrictions. I’m all for different server modes, after all that’s what self-hosting is for, but I love PvP DayZ and hope it will always remain this harsh and thrilling setting of basic social mechanisms. Traveling Chernarus, like Minecraft before it, has made me keenly aware of the things I miss in other MMO sessions –

1) Sharing with your next wo/man
There is an overwhelming sense of community in DayZ’s group play, encouraged by both the scarcity of resources and bag space, as well as omnipresent fear of death (which means starting over naked at a random location). Players can’t hoard and won’t hoard because two armed players are better than one and four are better than two. Even as a completely new player, I had people watch my stuff in DayZ, meet me halfway to re-equip me and make sure I was good on food and drink. It’s been a most humbling experience to have others look out for me in such manner.

2) Constant risk, decisions and consequences
Centered around survival with and against other players, DayZ is a game of endless decisions that often need to happen quickly. Dilemmas abound: Do I cross that public square in broad daylight for a chance of food or do I risk my hunger longer? Do I take a chance at the exposed well or try the popular food store? Do I have my weapon at the ready or do I prefer the faster run speed? Do I talk to that person and risk getting shot? Do I shoot first and risk to be heard? If I get heard, what’s my fastest way out? It never ends and paths lead in all directions.

3) Communication, caution and (self-)awareness
We take so many things for granted in other games – zone chats, grouping tools, location indicators, nametags and colors of allegiance that we have stopped communicating our intentions and wishes precisely. There is no need to act considerately or with caution because our actions don’t tend to affect or harm others, so there is very little in terms of self-awareness, of watching our movement and general behavior in MMOs. DayZ brings back the sign language, the reading cues and the very clear communication: Who are you? What do you want and why are you here? What are you up to? Without nametags indicated, identifying yourself to your buddies becomes a test of its own. In my partner’s clan, allies will ‘wiggle’ when approaching the group and state on voice-comm what they are wearing.

4) Running and screaming in terror
What it says. How much I have missed this!

5) A sense of gratitude
Due to high risk and strong sense for friend or foe, DayZ creates moments of gratitude with ease. In contrast, gratitude is something that is mostly gone from the games I am playing; when resources are plentiful, loot is individual and nothing and no one can really harm or save you, there is less need to rely on others and therefore also less opportunity for gratitude. You could say that’s the nature of all PvE-centric games that don’t tend to pressure-test social mechanics outside of maybe high-end raid content but I’m not sure it needs to be. In any case, I’ve really missed gratitude in my social games and DayZ made me realize it. How ironic that an emotion depending so strongly on community and acts of kindness should exist in a PvP rogue-like a lot more than in PvE enviornments.

And a beautiful world it is too.

Final Words

While this has become quite a love letter for a game I probably won’t make a main, I believe DayZ deserves our attention and curiosity as far as its less popularly promoted aspects go right now. It would be wrong to dismiss this title over its potential for griefing and asshattery or judge it based only on the most visible forum crowd. Paradoxical as it may sound, DayZ offers a wide spectrum of positive social experiences and chances for cooperation (not to forget creativity and hilarious pranks). Such is the nature of freedom – that it can be applied in any which way. And in my limited experience, it’s group play where DayZ really shines.

Like for other games I’ve played in the past and that fall outside my usual high-fantasy MMORPG bracket, I’ve tried to look for inspiring features and opportunities here (while hiking an awful lot). As far as I’m concerned, DayZ is a rich canvas other social games could borrow some intense colors from while still being in this modest stage of early access. The sun hasn’t even begun to rise over Chernarus yet.