redpill me on this game, i see it get shilled a lot on Ganker but everything about it looks like a red flag
>open world survival sandbox
>grindy basebuilding
>reviews say you "make your own fun"
what makes it good?
redpill me on this game, i see it get shilled a lot on?
The fact that it's a open world survival sandbox where you can build your own base and do whatever you want to make your own fun. If you don't like exploring in a sandbox or basebuilding or playing pretend with your little guys, you won't like the game.
say you "make your own fun"
Why not just play Minecraft
I can't control 20+ dudes at once in Minecraft and then create a flesh harvesting windmill mechanism to sell the meat to cannibals.
Will minecraft let me train a squad of elite cyborg bodybuilder ninjas for the express purpose of sprinting halfway across the continent at 50 km/h with 20 kilos of hashish apiece to sell to city slickers?
because it's a totally different game from minecraft
It's all the things you mentioned. If you don't like those things you won't enjoy the game and should not try it.
What makes it good is those things and how much you enjoy them.
All the stuff that applies to these kinds of games (Project Zomboid, Starsector, Stalker Anomaly, Mount & Blade, etc) applies here. The main difference is in the mechanics, since it plays more like a real time tactics/strategy game than an action game.
>The main difference is in the mechanics
And the world building is amazing but sparse
>zomboid
It's more like an RTS/top down RPG than something like RUST or whatever you might be thinking of.
>single player
>existing towns that you can base out of if you so choose
>factions that you can work with or frick with
>not really a story based game but there is lore to the setting and part of the fun is uncovering secrets and things like that, some of the existing characters can be charming for what they are
>can make money the old fashioned way by producing material goods or you can go out and loot stuff
>at a certain point you have to go out and loot stuff anyway since all the endgame tech is buried in old research centers
>soulful visual style
>soulful music
>can play as a solo martial artist hellbent on kicking the world or run a military campaign for your choice of faction
>world is moderately reactive, you can see some of the effects your actions have on the world (although this gets expanded on a lot with mods)
It is pretty slow though. You have to kind of like the grind, and it's pretty easy to bugger up a save and have to start over when you're still learning basics.
There's also mods that buff the leveling process if one feels the game is unjustly too grindy.
>i see it get shilled a lot on Ganker
No you don't. Fricking Black person.
whenever people say something like this what I think they really mean is "I have consistently seen 3 or 4 threads a year about this game, for the last 5 years." Kenshi is a game I don't think will ever not be talked about on Ganker, but it's once in a blue moon, literally months and months in between threads. It's so not-shilled the only way I'm gonna see another thread in a reasonable amount of time is if 10 new players pick it up and love it cuz of this thread and start making threads on it for the next week.
>open world survival sandbox
>grindy basebuilding
>reviews say you "make your own fun"
It's all of that. And it delivers.
You'll love it or hate it, but give yourself the time to make an opinion. It's a masterpiece IMO
Owned this game for four years before I gave it a real chance and actually played it. Now it’s my all time favorite game. It’s great, you just have to have an imagination. You dont have to base build at all. If it’s too grindy you can always just set the play speed to x4.
You can watch your squadmates get eaten alive, how is that not fun?
the game has a setting instead of a story.
you don't do questlines with multiple story beats, you set a goal for yourself like "I will build a little town here," or "I will overthrow this nation" with a lot of steps, and you work you way up to that.
it's really more of a proof of concept at the end of the day, it's blatantly unfinished, but I still loved it dearly. there's no other game that lets me play as a kung fu tinman with a harem of sexy horned ladies, or as a thieve's guild of bugmen intent on taking down an anti-bug theocracy.
>or "I will overthrow this nation
Which you cannot do, because the game has almost no worldstate reactivity to speak of, and even if it did these "nations" are a few tiny as. "cities" that more resemble outposts. The "overthrowing" surmounts to nothing more than taking out some faction leaders and going murderhobo on their perpetually respawning cities.
This is why all of these "make your own fun" games are dogshit. None of anything you do is of any significance and all the world elements are completely superficial so as not to be too consequential when it's fricked with.
numbskull, you totally can.
I regularly overthrow the holy nation just for kicks. it's actually very harmful to the geopolitical balance since cannibals and fogmen move in from the north and west, and without the HN keeping them low and humble the Shek start getting bloodthirsty and you start to run into more trouble in their borders from random Shek berserkers.
Holy Nation were the good guys all along.
No, they're inbred hillbillies making terrible use of the most fertile part of the island, but they're politically useful idiots, which helps them attract chuds. Like unto like and such.
Holy Nation isn't perfect but it's your best bet for survival if you're human. They hate women but even so a female human is safer there than anywhere else. Surely not in the place where being poor is a crime.
>have lots of slaves
>have lots of easily-defensible arable land
>make all the slaves build a pointless statue
>don't cultivate most of the land because it has to go to le based trad farm families
how is it possible to be more moronic than the shek?
displacing family farms in favor of gigantic slave plantations literally destroyed the roman republic so I'd say the holy nation is pretty smart in that respect
that other anon is historylet i think, probably a UC spy. like moll.
yeah, from what I understand they essentially disenfranchised their entire middle and upper-lower classes, which is where a lot of semi-skilled and skilled craftsman came from and where a lot of loyal lower and mid rank soldiers came from. It sounds cool on paper for maybe a generation or two, then it starts causing a lot of problems as you've dramatically increased the amount of lower and poverty class citizens, which will always lead to civil unrest.
Yes, increasingly large plantations growing cash crops with slave labor filled the entire Italian countryside, and all the normal people that used to live there flooded in to Rome proper and became known as the 'urban poor'. Crime skyrocketed - Rome became a city where you simply couldn't go out alone - and politics became driven by competing groups of radicalized mobs vs bought and paid for mobs. In the century before Caesar came along and finally killed the thing, the republic was averaging a civil war every decade.
>use of the most fertile part of the island,
That's not the swamp.
You're kidding me right? You absolutely can. Literally every city has different states based on actions. For example, doing the Anti-Slaver quest line and murdering the UC nobles will lead to their territory turning into a wrecked wasteland where everyone is starving. Kill the hive queen, and suddenly there are fogmen everywhere and the southern hive goes absolutely batshit.
>This is why all of these "make your own fun" games are dogshit.
I've never played Kenshi but Starsector is very much "make your own fun" and I've definitely noticed a big difference in how the galaxy behaves after taking out a big faction like the Church of Ludd or the Hegemony. Namely being in the case of the Church my escapades are a lot less annoying to perform, and with the Hegemony, I'm suddenly being harassed and bombed constantly by factions that were spending most of their resources to defend against the hegs.
Empty, static and boring world. Needs a ton of QoL mods, too.
It's one of those games that are more fun to watch than play. Only reason it's so praised is because of youtubers such as generalsam and sseth making the game seem more fun than it actually is with their edits and stories.
I'm still waiting on the RatDad to fight Cat-Lon.
>Empty, static and boring world
no, no and no
mods do improve on what's there but the fact that there are patrols for basically every faction and a bunch of wild animals, and that settlements and can and do change hands between factions, makes it ten times more interesting than 99% of open world games
M&B has way more interesting faction mechanics tbh. Territory wars happen organically in M&B and factions can get wiped out with zero input from the player - settlements only ever change hands in Kenshi when the player happens to kill a specific NPC
And in M&B settlements changing hands at least means something. Reduced economic output, reduced armies and troop qualities, less lords fighting for the faction, defections, etc.
In Kenshi you go and kill religious chucklefrick of town shithole and what are the overall consequences of it? Now it's the same town but the blue skinned horned guys spawn in it instead. The consequences of this on surrounding settlements or overall factions? What? Dude sandbox lol! make your own fun lmao!
The reactive world/faction system is genuinely very cool and is the main thing separating Kenshi from typical survival sandboxes, but in order to do any of the cool stuff you have to go through a ridiculous amount of grinding
>You want to do combat? Great! The first thing you need to do is get the shit beaten out of you repeatedly because this levels up your skill at staying conscious, so go find some random bandits and watch them knock you out for a hour
>Now you can start getting a couple hits in while they beat the shit out of you, which will slowly level your attack
>After that you can probably kill a single bandit if you're lucky, but bandits all travel in giant packs that'll rape you, so you need to level up your running skill to avoid fights. How do you do that? You guessed it, you run around for an hour!
>You can't automate this so have fun spamming right click
>Oh but that's not all, you see there's actually a SECOND running skill which is levelled separately by running while encumbered, and you need this skill to be able to wear armor or hold a sword
>So now you have to run around for an hour while wearing a backpack full of rocks
And that's just the fricking start - basically every mechanic in the game requires you to spend hours doing moronic shit like this before you can engage with it
The grind would actually be liveable if you only had to do it once, but if you want to fight oppponents tougher than bandits you need a squad and everyone you recruit will have garbage stats, so you have to go through this process at least 3-4 more times before you can even think about participating in the faction wars that make the game interesting. It's so mindnumbingly tedious that "getting good" is basically just figuring out cheap gamey bullshit that makes the grinding slightly less annoying, like "intentionally become a slave because you can repeatedly fail escape attenpts to get the guards to beat the shit out of you and they'll heal you up after"
>0 replies
this guy is 100% right. worst progression system there is.
skill issue
Finding ways to stack xp bonuses and grind with max efficiency is one of the fun parts of the game. The only real limiting factor is money and for that you just need to steal some shit which does not require grinding anything if you're smart about it.
>It's so mindnumbingly tedious that "getting good" is basically just figuring out cheap gamey bullshit that makes the grinding slightly less annoying
>Finding ways to stack xp bonuses and grind with max efficiency is one of the fun parts of the game
damn he really was right
Its my favourite game, and I recommend it to noone. Youll either get it, or you wont.
A problem with everything you mentioned is that 99% of those kinds of games do not take place in an established setting and focus way to much on the survival aspect, where this focuses way more heavily on the "rpg" aspect. You exist in the world that has fleshed out factions, cities and regions to interact with, which is what most games like this are severely lacking and could be improved immensely by having them.
this anon is correct, you'll either get it or you won't, simple as.
it's not really very close to anything else.
If even a single Gankeredditor likes it, it's automatically shit.
The unusual lore that delivers with party members dialogs, notes and observation. When you start the game it doesn't give you anything except for big alien world to explore.
Basebuilding is buggy shit btw. You don't need it to complete the game.
Cat-Lon was not a monster.
No one mentions this but, it's one of those RPG's that you can both take seriously or not at the same time. It's one of its better advantages.
i need to beat the shit out of this game in a 2 weeks i cant have more time. ive invested 20 hours straight already learning mechanics. i dont sleep. Ganker please tell me what i do to break the game. my time running out.i dont care how exploitative it is. i just cant use mods
It can be fun, but it's autistic and unfinished(given the 1.0 version number and abandoned to work on the sequel).
>game in development for like 15 years
>abandoned
homosexual
grindy but very cool when you learn to chease it
you have to be extremely autistic to enjoy Kenshi, if you're a normie you won't get past the jank
its hard fun until you figure out how to game the system then you basically need autism or something for it to not feel like a chore. You need some special personality trait to have it be fun, like be able to immerse yourself in the game and roleplay and self limit yourself.
That just sounds like discipline when you think about. Just don't save scum.
it has nothing to do with discipline unless you consider discipline being able to do the same tedious and brainless task for several real-time hours before you can actually explore the world
Yeah that sounds like discipline.
sounds like tedium to me and I work in accounting
You can cheese most of the tedium in this game with stealth honestly.
>before you can actually explore the world
we got a videogame journalist here
man sucks so much ass he needs to powerlevel to do basic shit
People have mentioned good things ITT. I'd like to add one more point:
Kenshi has a very strong Marxist message. It's one of the few games that truly does not stray away from socialist teachings -- it pulls absolutely no fricking punches -- and it's wonderful. If you felt like even Disco Elysium was a little too "both sides are le bad!!!!" then Kenshi is for you.
is this some sort of falseflag? i don't see how it's communist beyond portraying the HN and UC as bad
OP, don't listen to this moron. He's lying.
Kek I’m going to use this false flag shitpost as template in the future
>but everything about it looks like a red flag
fricking moron lol
If the trailers and gameplay is offputting, you won't like it. It either inspires autistic roleplaying within yourself, or you think "but what do I do thooo????"
It's a clearly unfinished game that changed priorities mid development. It's still worth some fun.
some chinese dude saw potential on it and decided to make his own version, i hope he gets it out in time.
What's the name of the game? If it comes out before Kenshi 2's release in 10 years, then I want to play it.
the matchless kung fu, list it on your gabenshop.
>chinese steal idea
WOW what a shock
>changed priorities mid development
elaborate
If you've played the game, you know what I'm talking about.
Basically Kenshi is this weird mix of open-world, Bethesda like RPG as well as a squad and faction management game. People like it for the freedom it offers but it doesn't really gel well. For example, you'll enter a town and get a scripted conversation that stops the game world as you talk to an NPC. This conversation only plays if you have at least one female character, in which a sleezy guy hits on you in a bar and based on your response you can either start a fight with them, or pay for his drink and smooth things over. However, this will happen if you have a single solo character, OR if you have a massive group of 20+ people where your female character isn't even the leader. The game has a lot of focus on individual character situations and skills, and yet is not designed for single-character runs (ie; lone swordsmen, Kenshiro martial artist, etc.) at all pretty much requiring at least two people for your playthrough, but so much of the writing seems to imply you're traveling through the world by yourself exploring strange sights which become absent after you pass by the invisible triggers that activate these moments. Then, on top of that, the game has randomly generated characters you can purchase to join your party- but there are also scripted characters with unique voice lines and joining conditions that stick out like sore thumbs. It's clear a great amount of effort was put into certain characters, like Beep, where as others basically don't talk as they are radiant-AI tier after they join your party, so you can't really play the game as a "roadtrip" style DND campaign grabbing party members and having wacky adventurers. It feels like the characters and world was designed to be a single player RPG experience, but the game engine and mechanics are solely suited to group combat.
I don't like it and I've given it multiple goes. The first hour is the same as every other hour.
Boring
The lore
The world
The Geography
Frick I need kenshi2 for my boat adventures
I have been sold on Kenshi and will now pirate it, what mods are necessary without drastically changing the experience?
Recruit Anyone
I like running around as a noble hive prince ronin solo. Its quite fun just exploring the world and improving your character with weapons and cybernetics.
Basically, you just get to explore and interact with a living, breathing world. That's where most of the fun comes from: just walking around and getting in trouble.
Don't die on me thread, I need Ganker to talk about games that I'm currently playing.
I made a squad of 4 robot martial arts masters and killed everyone
Worst. Game. Ever.
The atmosphere. If you're not a special kind of sperg, you won't like it.
is this face bogged enough?
Get the mod that unlocks the sliders to embrace your inner Bog.
>https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/534
Sneed it or feed it?
Sneed it.
Feed it.
Okran was An Hero, and Narko was a filthy Skeleton bootlicker that ratted him out.
Tengu? Mogged by GODfist.
Came for the shekfu stayed for the atmosphere.
I'm having fun with it so far OP and I don't feel like I've wasted my money. Threads here say to do save start and I kinda agree.
Feels like I've barely scratched the surface.