this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants.

Looking at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_flight_simulation_games#Space_combat_games

...there really were far more games in the genre being released in the late 1990s and early 2000s than there have been recently.

A similar sort of phenomenon occurred for World War II first-person shooters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games

Back around the same time period, there was a glut of games in the genre, and they really have fallen off quite a bit.

Whether it's a genre like these two, that hasn't seen many new entrants recently, or a genre that just never grew as much as you'd like, what genre would you like to see more of?

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[–] tal 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A couple that I'd like to see:

  • Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There's not a lot out there. I assume that there's probably limited demand -- flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it's not a genre with many decent entrants.

  • Kenshi-style games. I'm not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you consider Mount& Blade to be a Kenshi-style game? I view the two as quite similar

[–] tal 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it's also got a lot of differences.

The similar:

  • You start out as one person.

  • It's not especially easy, particularly at the start.

  • You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.

  • You can form military groups -- much larger than squads, normally -- that are out and about.

  • There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.

  • There is an economic aspect.

  • The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.

But there are also some pretty substantial differences:

  • While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you're still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you're going to know and equip each character.

  • You're generally working with formations, not individual units.

  • Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what's there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There's a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B -- you're mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.

  • Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you're aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.

  • The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you'd do with your companions, if they aren't in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.

  • M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There's the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you're setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.

  • M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.

  • M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi's modeling the whole shebang; what's being produced matters a lot more.

Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It's just that in Starfield -- at least vanilla; we'll have to see where mods take the thing -- there isn't a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don't want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.

In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it's a first-class part of the game.

Don't get me wrong. I like M&B too. It's just that in practice, I don't think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you've picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don't individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren't killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don't really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There's a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn't really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn't much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world -- that's what the camera follows on the strategic map.

[–] Lemonyoda@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You sir, make a really String Advertisement for kenshi. Is it playable on the steamdeck?

[–] tal 1 points 1 year ago

I don't have a Deck, but I would assume so. It works on desktop Linux, and it's not an especially new game.

It doesn't have gamepad support. I dunno how the Deck does keyboard and mouse.

googles

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kenshi/comments/u4h2p7/psa_its_great_kenshi_on_steam_deck/

Apparently so. Haven't done it myself, though.

[–] Mummelpuffin@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

While it's probably not quite what you're looking for, have you seen Carrier Command 2? Because it's pretty damn cool (and overpriced unfortunately)