Sword of the Stars: The Pit

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a sci-fi themed roguelike developed and published by the indie studio Kerberos Productions currently available for the Windows OS.

"A deadly plague ravages your world. Your last hope: a legendary alien facility dug deep into the Feldspar Mountains...a massive Pit, built by the ancient Suul'ka."

I've always been a big fan of roguelike, dungeon crawling games. The genre takes progression elements from RPGs and adds a strategic layer to the game.

Picking up The Pit during the Steam winter sale, I figured it would be a fun way to burn some hours and then move on to the next indie title. The game's style and setting reminded me of System Shock and its sequels so I thought I'd give the game a go.

The Pit is pretty standard for a roguelike: you get to pick a class, you get out there and kick-ass (or have your own get kicked), go down to the next level once you're ready (or die a horrible death because of complications). You only get three classes to start off with in the base game: Marine, Engineer, and Scout. The Marine is all about beating things up and shooting things. The Engineer is all about the tech aspect, but can still hold in a fight. The Scout is all about mobility, popping in and out of fights and scavenging. It's the traditional firepower-mobility trade off.

organization is key to having a good time

As I ventured into The Pit, I quickly learned one aspect: You're going to die, but that isn't a bad thing in a roguelike, really. The game features a little SOTSDEX device that logs the different enemies you encounter, the items you find, and different messages you decrypt from computers that reveals more about the game's universe and of course, The Pit itself. Your little SOTSDEX is your encyclopedia and you write it as you play the game. It's available to you at any time in any play-through. With every expedition into The Pit, you are armed with more knowledge that will hopefully carry you farther and hopefully lead to another discovery before you get your face melted off.

these messages give crucial hints

Like many games in the roguelike genre, The Pit is very brutal. You have to be resourceful with the little bits of food, ammo, and tools you find. Knowing that you're by yourself in The Pit adds a degree of tension while you're playing, but there are some scenarios that you're going to run into that you will have little to no control over. There will be times when you just run into a seemingly harmless room only to find multiple killer robots. There will be times when you have bucket loads of rifle ammo lying around when all you have is a pistol. Sometimes, that's just how the dice are cast. 

beep boop

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a test of your resourcefulness, knowledge of the game, and perseverance to push forward. 

The game is very comfortable, but feels very standard and lackluster. There isn't very much to distinguish the game from any other roguelike. This is definitely a game where you talk to your friends about the various monsters and items and what they do, gleaming little bits of knowledge off each other.

I feel that this game would be a lot if it included a way to share discoveries with your friends. That way, the entire knowledge of the game isn't spoiled by the Wiki and you can still have a meta-database of your own with some friends.

Finding crafting recipes to build items is overly tedious mainly because components are destroyed if you don't have the right combination so it removes a lot of the player intuition part from it. You can't really come up with creative combinations of items in your head. Instead, you're either going to have to scrap together hints from hacked terminals, go to the Wiki, or just try every combination imaginable.

hang onto your points until you need them

I've only gotten to about 1/4th through the 30 floors, but nothing so far has impressed me. I wish the game allowed you to command and extra trooper or two. That would open up so many more tactical and strategic options! Instead of having to choose one of 3 classes, why not be able to bring them all in and specialize them even further? It could allow for much more elaborate and in-depth combat options as you breach a room or try desperately to escape. 

Do I recommend this game? To be honest, I can't give my wholehearted recommendation.

I really like how much exploration and in-game knowledge you can build up. Different enemies will detect you through different ways: sight, sound, smell, if you're bleeding or not, etc. but their isn't any form of indication to tell the player what the monsters are reacting to. The audio-visuals don't really complement the theme of data collection and exploration. Sure, it's lighthearted and cartoon-like, but the tiles get repetitive and sodden. The walls and floors change colors every so often, but that alone isn't enough.

The game is fun, it's comfortable, there's a lot to learn, but it doesn't go that extra mile to make it special. The presentation is mediocre, but it all wraps up to be a worthy roguelike. Sword of the Stars: The Pit seems small, but there's a lot to the game than meets the eye. Here's a demo from Steam if you want to give it a go.

The game does have two DLCs, but I'm not really tempted to try them at the moment.

Thoughts on Minecraft and servers

So Mark, Ben, and I decided to play Minecraft again. Mark started up a remote server and off we went to explore and build our cities. It had been maybe half a year since we played Minecraft and I wondered why the game wasn't appealing to me to the point where I wanted to actually play single player and actually "beat" the game like I would in Terraria.

It's really fun to build things in Minecraft, but it feels wasteful to just let it sit there without anyone else seeing it. Multiplayer it was. 

It's hard to find a good server.

on our old server i decided to recreate the 'bastion' from a game of the same title

The first thing the three of us did before starting our own server was finding a decent sized server (~10 - 20 regulars) so that building towns and interactions between towns would be feasible. We found a bunch of medieval themed RPG servers which suited our different criteria. Our top-picks soured almost instantly.

First off, the application process for servers: I guess a basic literacy/comprehension test is a good thing to have, especially with Minecraft's community, but some of them are ridiculously tedious. Make up a name to role-play as, what's your job status in-game, what's your lore, make up a country from which your character came from and explain its lore, etc. etc.

We would find entire essays people wrote just so they could get a glance at the server.

Another thing we found consistently was server admins coming up with a "no meta game allowed" rule. I had no idea Minecraft had a meta game, let alone how would one figure out if someone was meta gaming in Minecraft. 

According to one server we looked at, an example of "meta gaming" would be: 

"For instance a massive bandit raid is being planned for your town (OOC [Out-of-Character]) and you dislike that idea to prevent the raid you and your friends build a massive wall (IC [In-Character]) to balk this. Simply you take something you learn either on the forums, or the wiki (Cultures of races can be a good example, along with languages) and use it to give your character an advantage, or strength to a situation."

So in short, a lot of the servers we looked at looked down upon being knowledgeable, even if it is for the sake of role-playing. And because we're all illiterate we didn't want to write an essay either. 

Creative servers didn't exactly do because we still wanted a theme to build around so that our structures would look nice and have rhyme and reason to them without being giant square boxes, so that made pretty much crossed off every other server from the list.

and i think it turned out pretty well

Long story short, we didn't find a good server that just let us go online to gather resources and build things that looked nice and fitting.

Then we just thought, "Hey, let's just make our own server and build stuff." 

And then we did. And then we had a lot of fun. 

I still wish we could share our creations with other people in-game, but then I realized that I stopped caring about all that. I still do wish I had taken screenshots of some of our other buildings and structures. They were pretty neat.

texture pack is jolicraft

And I guess the problem extends beyond Minecraft to any game. Take Team Fortress 2, for example: It's difficult to find a server where you just hop in and play without being bothered by ads, server offers, and pleas of donations to the server.

People complain about not having good servers to play on, but I say to them: Just make your own. Take the time to learn how, it pays off in the future. You have to take action to change things you don't like. And eventually, you find like-minded people and you form a community.

These days, server owners are trying to compete really hard for attention with ridiculous ASCII server title banners and flashy signs when really, all people want to do is to hop in and play.

Path of Exile- Ground beef

quite the chili mix, too

In Path of Exile I'm playing as a Witch with a summoner build. This means I can spawn zombie and skeleton friendos to tank enemies for me.

There's this one mini-boss named General Gravicius and I soon learned that I did not have the best fire resistances to stand around him for too long. Old Grav mostly has fire based AoE spells and they hurt.

I ended up just spawning minion friendos on top of him over and over again. Grav would just smite them into a paste immediately but not before taking a bit of chip damage. After a while, this was the result: a dead mini-boss and some kind of ground beef thing on the floor made up of who-knows-how-many minion friendos.

My old gaming laptop has finally fried itself after some 3 and a half years of service. This screenshot was taken on my work laptop. I'm researching new gaming laptops now and I hope to get my new gaming laptop by early to mid January. 

Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a free-to-play Action-RPG MMO available for the Windows OS on Steam, developed by Grinding Gear Games, and man is it a lot of fun. 

The first ARPG I ever played was Torchlight after my friend Mark introduced it to me. From there I played Torchlight II and Diablo II and those games only cemented my appreciation for the ARPG genre. Path of Exile is a good throwback to the olden days featuring tried-and-true game mechanics that have been polished and reinvigorated, all very gorgeously presented through its breathtaking visuals and soundtracks.

One of the most interesting things about Path of Exile is the way it handles character progress and leveling: through active skill gems and a MASSIVE, universal skill tree. You can play as six different classes, each focusing on one or two of the major attributes: Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity. 

Active skills are granted through "skill gems" that level up just as you do whereas passive skills are allocated on a sprawling web of all kinds of skills ranging from +3% more health all the way to keystone skills that change the play-style of a character all together. The player starts off at different areas of the massive skill tree depending on the type of class the character is; Strength classes will tend to have melee and life nodes close by whereas casters may have mana and energy shield bonuses nearby.

A level of mastery arises from being able to carefully plan out routes along the passive skill tree into a specific character build that suits your play style. Don't worry if you allocated a skill point into somewhere and decided to change your mind later; Path of Exile boasts a forgiving respec option, allowing you to save up "Refund" points as you progress.

Skill gems allow you to virtually create your own spells. You have a fireball spell but want it do something more? How about adding a support gem that makes it shoot 3 fireballs? Make it bounce off the walls? Make it bounce off the walls and EXPLODE? Make it bounce of the walls, explode, and have it shower more fireballs around? The possibilities are endless! Melee skills are no different. How about adding a chain lightning effect to everyone you smite? How about making the chain lightning longer? Make the chain lightning blow up things around you? Really, you can do anything.

Another interesting point to note is that Path of Exile doesn't have a baseline currency "gold". Path of Exile is all about the loot: the armor and weapons. There are currency items that allows players to re-roll stats, improve armor, or change it's rarities. Those items that allow you to change your existing gear is what's sought after. The end result is a robust player-driven barter economy.

Path of Exile also has great attention to detail. I was overjoyed the first time I played a Ranger and shot an arrow into a zombie, only to see that the arrows actually stuck in various parts of the zombie. The particles and lighting, combined with a fresh, unforgiving universe and great sound effects give Path of Exile a whole, complete feeling. Everything Grinding Gear Games did is carefully done and a lot of work and effort went into it.

The game also features an extremely competitive race mode that I have yet to try, but that only tells me that Path of Exile caters to a wide variety of gamers, from casual to hardcore.

However, I do wish that I had more graphical options to play around with, mostly the number of particles and decals. I do play the game on an older laptop and usually run at a smooth 40 - 50 frames per second, but can dip during times of intense combat where spells and swords just get flung around all over the screen. I run things at a very nice medium settings and am still impressed with the game.

Do I recommend this game? Absolutely. The game is free and the developers themselves stated: 

"There is no catch at all, once you download the client you are free to play for as long as you like, with no charge. The purchasable perks do not convey any gameplay benefit, but help you create a unique look for your character and its fighting style."

Even if you were never a fan of ARPG's, Path of Exile is a great way to start. The game offers a wide range of difficulties and challenges that will please newcomers and casual gamers as well as long-time ARPG aficionados and veterans of the genre. 

From a development team in New Zealand with great passion for gaming, Path of Exile offers a great refresher in the ARGP genre.