love that this genre of game is finally getting the lime light it deserves

This is great, I just picked up Kenshi because of the steam Winter sale but haven't tried it too much. Would love to see a video about it!

Be aware, Kenshi is like classic Dwarf Fortress, it's arcane as fuck but once you figure out what you're doing it's an intense game.

your video quality is stellar, man! i was shocked to see you didn't have even 1k subs... here's hoping you get the recognition you deserve, because the effort you put in *really* does show. keep it up homie!

Mate pretty much everything you listed in this video is a sandbox game, 'Sandbox' is the name of the gerne and what you described most of them as is literally it's definition. (If you don't believe me, look it up and put some time into researching it before trying to dispute.) Some people mistake stuff like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS) as a "sandbox" but these types of games are actually more apart of the worldbox gerne instead, which I guess is a similar name and this term isn't used very often overall. My favourite sandbox games is the Mount & Blade series and Paradox games in particular, some people even consider games like GTA and Skyrim as somewhat sandbox but I don't really see it because they do have a fully fleshed out story.

Which is itself a Dwarf Fortress reference. It's all a circle.

@@BirdieRumia and alot of space station 13s server rules like to say losing is fun

Back in my Rimworld, it was called Merciless. God I love Rimworld so much.

Rim world is just worse dwarf fortress imo

@@gex6692 They're too different to be compared imo. I liked dwarf fortress aswell and had a few hundreds of hours fun but it never came close to me as Rimworld

I originally got into back in 2014-ish when Quill18 introduced me to the Lazy Newb Pack in one of his streams. I put the game down for a long time but when I saw it was getting a steam release I decided to wait and join in throwing money at the Tarn and Zach.

@@buffatwo I've bought two copies so far. I throw it at friends whenever I can.

@@CQIsMethe day of release I bought two copies for my little brothers

I’ve been listening to people playing dwarf fortress for a few years now, but I never actually started playing it myself... anyways, it is indeed nice to see players old and new experiencing Zach and Tarn Adam’s Magnum Opus, brings me new hope for Humanity.

Who is saying it inspired Minecraft!!?? who is the source?? IMO they are WRONG very wrong... Minecraft was born from its creators parent game the Granddaddy and still truest open world crafting game there is Wurm Online also released on Steam as Wurm Unlimited that Notch worked on with friend Rolf Johansson before parting ways and making Minecraft which is a pixelated voxel version of Wurm which needs the recognition it so highly deserves!!

Guy made a game just to sell his book. Game ends up more popular than book.

Bio infinite aint much a credit. Game was pretty stinky

@@JerichoJulius0 Still I deem the DLC's overpriced.

@@orangesoda4535 I think this is why games like storygenerators exist because I thought Bioshock Infinite was pretty awesome... sure; it was awefully messy at times too but the underlying narrative of the game was a great experience for myself who's also heavily into stuff like Quantum Physics, Time travel and meta-realities. Having said that; my journey with elizabeth was absolutely as much fun as that time my heavy in rimworld threw a tantrum and decided to fire his doomsday rocket launcher... whose projectile, by stroke of luck or misfortune (your pick), ended up travelling straight down a 20 cell hallway and ended up deadcenter in my dininghall where everyone else was celebrating the marriage of my village elder with the local doctor....

It’s honestly soooo much more of an accomplishment having rimworld in your résumé than having bioshock infinite

I got Kenshi about a week ago for the winter sale, and it's become a drug for me. Already have 100 hours in it, and several almost max level characters.

Dayz does this too with even less direction

you could try Project Zomboid.

Rimworld and Kenshi both changed how I saw game design. I didn't get into Dwarf Fortress, still haven't, but I read lot about it, and admired it from a far for a long time. Rimworld is like Dwarf Fortress Lite. Its much more approachable, but does many of the things (to a less intense degree of simulation.) And Kenshi is so fascinating because its much more...intimate, than Rimworld. I loved my colony, sure, but that game makes you feel you need it to be colony to play. Kenshi makes it more like you could play with just one person, but you don't need to be alone. I can't say how deep simulation in Kenshi goes, but if makes you feel connected with the characters. My Kenshi story is, I started off in Sho-battai, alone, unaware how to play the game, running around mining some copper for cheap money, only to realize I needed help to get it done. I talked to few drifters, they demanded money for my help, eff that. I bought a slave instead, a guy with a goat head. He was skittish and didn't trust me, and just cried a lot. So...I basically babied him until he actually decided to join me for real and we mined a lot...to no avail. It picked up more drifters and headed off into the desert, not even very far, when...I happened upon a gold mine. I was like "jackpot" and made small town with a wall around the gold mine, not far from Sho-battai. Production was slave driven. (Sort of), I ended up adopting a crap tone of Starving Vagrants into my command under a group I called "slaves" and just made them work in the mine. (Through them in cages for a few days, starved them, then gave them food to make them join me.)( I would then take the gold ingots to the Sho-battai bar, and sell 50 gold bars at a time. Then, literally sneak up stairs in that bar, and steal back the gold I just sold, then sell ll 50 bars again to a fence. It was epic. I fed my people on stolen food until we made farms, but it wasn't until something happened I didn't expect. that my whole way of playing changed. I had a Starving Vagrant I'd put in a cage and nearly starved, he didn't want to join me, and I didn't need a legless man... So I kicked him out of town and he was just...laying there in front of my town like he'd given up. I...felt bad for him. So I gave him a leg and sent him on his way. For no reason, he starts following my character around on my mission to sell gold bars. Suddenly...he starts talking, saying "I've never felt this free before, is this what its like to be like you?" And...suddenly, he asks if he can join me. He's the only person that ever just...asked to join, no being put in a cage and bribed with food, no abusive dystopian behavior. He...freely joined me, cause I helped him and made him feel alive. I named that guy Free Will, and decided to "rename" my subgroup of characters from "Slaves" to "Workers". And I started treating those characters less like they were disposable and more like, these are my people. I fight for them, not with them. It was amazing. I want and need to make a game like these games. I've literally played for over 200 hours, and still haven't left that Great Desert. There is still so much to do. I'm just having to much fun running my little town.

@@honaleri I loved this story! I tried getting into Kenshi about a year ago but it just didn't click for me. Now you've made me want to try again! :)

It’s great, but boy after this video I need a break.

same

Rel

Getting back to DF but I recently played shadow empire and Stellaris is my morphine because those games hurt

This was even without the best part. Crises. Nothing finishes a game of Stellaris better than saving the galaxy with its uncountable people from an unknowable extragalactic threat.

CDDA is great

Both DDA and Bright Nights are some of my favorite sims/rpgs. Especially with mods! My first character was a massively in debt dance instructor who managed to barely survive the first month by throwing rocks at lone zombies and scrounging stale food from houses and drinking out of toilets. With great persistence and luck, he became a cyborg kung-fu master who could punch holes through tanks. He eventually managed to rescue some fellow cyborgs from some secret labs and start a quiet farm, occasionally venturing out to delve into other secret labs to try and save any other cyborgs that might be trapped there. My current character is a genetically engineered bodyguard whose master got zombified while touring a remote prison island. I managed to clear the island through scavenging firearms from the police zombies, and constructed a crude raft by chopping trees and doors to make it past all the zombified sea life to the mainland. Currently chilling in a cultist safe house and digesting various tomes about forbidden arcana and getting insane morale boosts from it. I’m eager to see how her story will play out.

Stellaris is personally one of my favorite games. And I have modded it. Quite a bit. Rimworld has also been an occasional rabbit hole. Of mine that I go into every once in a while.

I just bought Rimworld a month ago. I already have 200 hours. It’s amazingly addictive and I’ve only played Vanilla with Biotech so far

As a digital masochist myself i play neo scavenger

I've played a lot of Rimworld, but it's just so soulless.

Two of the best games of our modern era, I think! I love them too!

I've noticed that videos about games like these tend to use Rimworld music. For good reason.

Same here. I love the music of Rimworld, it always makes me wanna play again

Duude, tell me about it. EVERY TIME I hear Rimworld music, a tiny part of me goes haywire.

Moving On is just the best soundtrack ever. Can't explain the wild mix of feelings I get every time it plays in the perfect moment.

Warcrime simulator

Just wish I could actually really see that story being told with good visual representation and not just reading it. The first developer to actually make one of these games in 3D with the same amount of depth as the others will have a goldmine on their hands. The fact that nearly everything interesting is just in reading text in most of the games in this genre is the number one thing by far preventing it from growing. All of them that exist so far have clumsy and mediocre UI and presentation.

​@@derpderpin1568 I mean. I saw it. I can see it still. The bones of Zuglar Fencedpunches are still stuck in the river. The visual restriction allows for a much more personal interpretation. DF is a game of storytelling; like playing DnD. Theater of the mind and all that jazz. Same as reading books, I guess. You either like to read or you don't and there is nothing wrong with that, but some games just aren't everyone's cup of tea.

@@derpderpin1568 I think limited graphics actually lend it a lot of fun room for interpretation.

@@derpderpin1568 thats is sort of impossible though. They would have to makes a statue for every single emergent gameplay thing that could happen, and thats just the stoneworker example. The game would end up with a massive file size from all of the extraneous items it would have inserted into it when descriptions would have worked fine, take months or years longer to develop and still be more broken than its 2d counterparts. Story generator games belong in theatre of the mind.

Me with 40 Dwarven skeletons lying unburied in the chasm beneath my tavern because the waterwheels that were supposed to operate the pumps stopped spinning for no apparent reason and my artificial waterfall flooded half the fortress: 0_0

I’m pretty sure the mod is called civil wars

@@Someone-vq6jk yes, correct. I'll edit that.

Especially since its code name in development was “Dollhouse”, and what is a dollhouse if not a story generator lol.

Or Crusader Kings!

Would you call The sims a tactical game?

​​@@danieladamczyk4024epending how you play, yes, it can be a lot more tactical than what you see at face value Edit: typo

@@Duncanois Thank you for your answer. Doing the best with time we got counts as tactics for me.

Im glad you enjoyed it! I’ve only heard these kind of games discussed as individual examples, rather than a category altogether. I’ve also had friends be confused at this choice of games, and I always found it hard to explain succinctly. Hopefully this opens people up to the category more!

bro the amount of times i heard someone say "i dont like this game/this game looks trash/looks boring" just because the game "looked weird" made me cry out in pain

I'm lucky I have friends that play these games

​@@buffatwoI've sort of connected these games in my head but never really had a good encompassing title for what they all were. Space station 13 is great, Kenshi also has to be one of my favorite games ever. I think someone needs to start a website dedicated to finding and hosting information about these sorts of games.

Sounds like Star Sector but without the fleet mechanics.

@@chazdomingo475 thanks bro, i will check it out

@@chazdomingo475 starsector with nexerelin installed but without the fleet and direct controlled combat

@@simex909 starsector is amazing but install the nexerelin mod

Lame ass tribe tbh

@@peenyyt4921 They indeed have some round asses. :]

Wich DLC you consider not history focused?

@@AramatiPaz Royalty, it has some storymaking elements but it is mostly fun with psycasts and mech clusters.

Honestly, after attempting (and failing) to get into Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm: DDA and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Space Station 13 was really easy to get into in comparison. I hopped onto Beestation and spent my first round being taught the basics by a friendly assistant, and from there anything more specific I needed to find out could be solved with a quick look at the wiki. And because the rounds are ~2 hours instead of the 7+ that the rest require, it is realistic to have at least a few stories by the time you'd finish one of the other games - this is only helped by the fact that all 15-25 players in the server are also working towards that goal.

@@NedInYaHead is beestation goonstation?

@@pagodeiromaster3347 no its TG code

UnReal World also.

I did play neo scav before and cdda too

Had to make sure that somebody at least mentioned Kenshi here.

One day! Thanks for the sub!

I'd say GURPS instead of e5 but that's fine too

​@Scott's Precious Little Account Depends how it's designed. I'd even say it cares for a particular individual who's not even within the game : The player. Meanwhile IRL nature and the universe really don't give a shit about you or me, and the only rules we can impact are social ones. We can't change how physics work.

a very high praise