Medieval Engineers from Keen Software House, Dev that brought us Space Engineers. http://www.medievalengineers.com/ Ok, so they are adding another creative survival crafting game, to a market now flooded with them and Space Engineers isn't even finished yet but admit it, who doesn't think it would be very cool to build your own castle! Check out the Alpha footage on the link above. This should be hitting early access 'soon', anyone else excited like a small child?
I'm somewhat interested in their new game, though I hope this doesn't have too much impact on the rate of updates for Space Engineers. They're one of the few developers that have had an excellent track record of releasing updates on a regular basis, so I'd hate for that to change due maintaining a new project. Not so sure about the art style, it looks a bit too bright and colourful at the moment... however, that can easily be fixed. I'm already fairly invested in Life is Feudal: Your Own, which this seems to be a competitor for so it would be interesting to see how the two develop next to each other and what paths they take. I'll most likely pick it up regardless of content & gameplay as I tend to grab most Early Access/Beta games to support the devs behind them, though I'm not sure how much I'd play it with my medieval life being rather content with Feudal. How much time I put into the game would probably depend on how deep the resources gathering, crafting & construction systems are and if they can push out content at the same pace as they do for Space Engineers. Would possibly be entertaining to see how the physics would respond to a castle balanced on a thin pillar, along with what would happen when a catapult takes out that pillar.
Apparently this will not impact SE development as according to the KSH CEO Marek Rosa, they have expanded the team specifically for ME. Also, there has been some interesting cross deveopelemnt, as in idea's they pick up in one of their games making it to the other for the better, like: Compound blocks – multiple blocks being positioned into one grid cell; this will allow better ship designs http://blog.marekrosa.org/2015/01/medieval-engineers_22.html Like you, I wondered if I would really have enough time for another game like this but also want to support the cool smaller devs, who ultimately make better games than the EA's, Acti-blizzards and Ubisofts...! Even if I never played another minutes of space engineers again, I have already got my money worth 100 times over. In one of the interviews with Marek and the you tuber 'last stand gamers' they said there would be a physics model but didn't wan't to commit to specifics at that time given how early there are in the project. How are you finding Life is Feudal: Your Own? It's on my radar but I don't know anyone on my steam list who is playing it :/
I don't know of anyone else here who plays Feudal either, it would be good to get more community games going as I've not had much chance to play along with many people since our old BF3 server went down. I think the only thing I play at the moment with other people from Bit is Minecraft. Overall I quite like Life is Feudal, but it is rather buggy and clunky to run with masses of room for improvement. It also takes a bit of getting used to as the UI and controls aren't particularly intuitive, hopefully that'll be worked on some more as the development progresses. Performance wise, it takes a fair time to load into a server and the combat mechanics are a bit hit and miss (no pun intended), especially with ranged weapons. They've gone some massive improvements over the initial launch and seem to have a rough target of patching at least every 2-3 weeks. Most of December was about rendering and performance optimisation patches, so everything is gradually getting smoother to load with less lag to deal with. I find that the skill system is working very well, you can do everything yourself by picking skills to deteriorate while you build up new ones for a type of work, but it lends itself more to having a group of people with set functions in a community. They've put up a bit a vague progress meter system onto their website so you can see the things on their list that the team are working on, but without details what they're actually working on is often anyone's guess. At the moment the 64 player limit for the map seems to be just about right for the size of the map, it gives everyone enough space to claim their own portions of the island, build a large fortification together and avoid any human contact if they wish but still keeping people close enough for their to be risk of conflicts. At the moment it is one of those games that is a lot more fun when you first start off, as you begin with nothing and no means to defend yourself so any noise can make you a bit paranoid that something is stalking you (the wildlife can sometimes be a bit nasty, like when you find yourself surrounded by wolves and have no energy to run). Once you've done the general bits of gearing up, building a sturdy fortified castle or house and planting a basic farm there isn't a great amount more to do at the moment so I'm not sure how well it might keep most people entertained, I'm however one of those sad souls who can stay entertained for hours with something as simple as fishing. On a side note, they've stated that anyone who purchases Life is Feudal: Your Own will be able to get a free character slot on the MMO version when that one launches. However it's still a bit pricey at £25 for an Early Access title, so it might be worth waiting for it to pop up on sale again on either Steam or Humble.
