My Initial Impression

[RedMint]

I just picked Kenshi up yesterday, after a long process of looking into the game, reading reviews, and so forth. I'd never bought an early-access game, honestly I am not a fan of the idea. But this one looked so intriguing, I thought, "what the hell" and I bought it.

I'm actually blown away by it.

After cranking all the video settings up, I found the world I appeared in quite beautiful. I enjoyed customizing my avatar and made a wanderer as my first go. The interface is both complex and intuitive, with a lot of help from info boxes for every button and statistic. Now, without reading forums or guides, one would be left wondering just what exactly they're supposed to be doing in this world. Right off the bat you notice that some of the NPCs are friendly, some are selling items, and others instantly attack you upon sight. I was set upon by a few nasties and the village I was nearby came to my rescue, cutting down my attacker (I would have stood no chance). I noticed I could loot the corpse, so I did, and now I had some armor improvements and items I could sell. Suddenly the game already had a direction. Stay alive. Loot and sell.

After a little forum-hopping, I found that building a very simple structure, a basic shack, is a good first order of business, presumably to have a shelter and a base of operations. Thumbing through the Tech (research) options, I notice that I can research things like beds and storage chests. Okay, this game is now becoming deep.

To cut through what could be a long story, I absolutely love Kenshi, in this state, as it is right now. They could stop developing now and I am still certain I just spent money wisely and will get a lot of enjoyment out of the game. The fact that this is still in the wee hours of development is astounding. I can see now why so many people have said that there probably is no other game in development with as much potential as this one. It is absolutely, completely unique, but it will set trends. If I had to, I would compare this game to a crazy blend of The Guild series (grow a business - good games, by the way, cheap on Steam), the Total War series (tons of moving, battling parts), Minecraft (explore and build your own world from scratch), an aRPG like Diablo (kill, loot, grow in experience), The Civ series (expand building and tech trees, diplomacy, factions), and maybe the Sims (customize your character, make him look the way you want, do tasks). There are so many different games going on at once here, and they all work, upon first impression, nicely. What a package.

There's no sound, but now I can't imagine playing this game without Boards of Canada playing in the background.

I give this game 5 out of 5, on sheer scope and potential alone. It's 4 out of 5 fun right now, as is. It won't appeal to twitch gamers, everything takes time, and a lot of it. Just going back and forth from your shack to the nearest town can take 2 or 3 minutes real time. Researching things take literal hours. But there's something about this pace that I love. It's both relaxing, yet you have to be on your guard for death around every corner.

If you are on the fence, get this game.

[RedMint]

Sadly I have to report a game-breaking bug. I've gotten into a 'fatal loop' where only moments after logging into the game, it freezes and crashes to the desktop, rendering it unplayable. I posted a bug report (along with the requested crash log the game generated), so we'll see what happens. Two realities here:

1) I know the game is in development and things are going to be buggy and messed up, including fatal bugs that end all progress.

2) It's really, really hard to wrap my mind around losing 40 hours of progress.

So I'll keep reporting the good and the bad here. I also know the dev is likely overwhelmed with bug reports.

Would love to start a new game but as there's only one save spot, I will be clutching onto that 40 hours of work until there is no other option.

Primarily though I'm just bummed not to be playing the game.

[RedMint]

I posted on the official site. Got some quick feedback from the community to use the 'New Import Game Squad' option (which I thought was a 'save-the-characters-lose-the-world option, which I was certainly trying to avoid). Turns out inside that option there is the option to merely MOVE your squad to other places, in the hopes of pulling them out of buggy loops. It worked. What a great option to have. I'm back to being constantly impressed at a) the community engagement, friendliness, and helpfulness - and b) all the bases the dev covered in releasing this.

[Kirazo]

well done...did you trek you squad back to your base or did you have to start another base?

[RedMint]

When I logged back in after the Move Squad option, most (not all) of my characters appeared in a distant city (oddly not the nearest one), and instantly began running back to my base - they still had jobs qued up. But my base was still right there with everything where it should be, including a few of my other characters. Dunno how that works or why but I don't care, the game is working.

Four or five hours later, I can say that this did the trick and I am a happy gamer again.

Progress report: My characters are really starting to hit their stride. Several of them are formidable warriors and can handle almost anything short of being very outnumbered. I've got a medic who is so good it takes like 2 seconds to fully heal a totally downed comrade. My laborers are ridiculously fast, too. Getting better at things changes how you need to assign tasks because suddenly you find that you are out-producing your resources. So you buy more wells, you look very forward to tech upgrades like Wells III or Stone Mining IV. (Semi Spoiler?) I see that in the tech tree there is an upcoming (though still rather distant in terms of time to get to it) Automated Stone Mining. That will be a game changer. About a week into this and I'm still being surprised by things. I say again - for a shell of a game, this isn't a shell of a game at all. It's a fully-formed, extremely deep experience already. Unless some upcoming PC game just blows my mind, this is already my Game of the Year. Yes. In this state. In early access. Game of the Year. I probably sound like I'm an employee, I'm even kind of embarrassing myself with all this fanboy praise, I don't usually do it. But this game is special. Looking around the forums, I see I'm nowhere near alone in this thought.

What else is new? I'm developing weapons now that verge on sick. I like the way there are different levels of the same weapon. Makes for a tidy progression for the characters. This is somewhat reflected in the graphics, too. Low level weapons are rusty pieces of crap and higher level weapons are shiny. You can almost tell just from the look of a weapon whether it's worth keeping or not. A week in and I'm still discovering weapons I'd never seen before, on fallen enemies. Things like giant axes. Very cool. Same goes for armor, and at this stage, the lack of armor craftsmanship is about the only thing that absolutely feels missing. I see in Dev posts that this is on the upcoming agenda, though, and I like this guy's track record.

There's that little tickle in the back of my brain that says this could obviously be the penultimate multiplayer experience. But I will leave that tickle right there because I've seen far too many posts RAGING that there is no multiplayer. There are whiny people who claim they're not even going to play it until it HAS multiplayer. Heh. Their loss. This is a rewarding single-player experience and the Dev has said no multiplayer, so there you have it. But man. Let's just use our imaginations and jump forward a long while from now when Kenshi 2 is being developed. I can certainly see this game being the first in a very successful series, should that be a direction the Dev and his now-fledgling company decide to head. They could totally go a Total War route and simply change the flavor with each iteration (a modern, military setting; a fantasy setting; a naval setting?) heh. With this as the skeleton, dude is seriously sitting on a ridiculously fat cash cow. When this is completed and hits, mark my words, it should certainly be held in at least as high regard as games like Age of Empires or Civilization. It's really the next-gen natural step up from those games, mostly because it combines them and so many elements from other games so well into this one huge experience. I really haven't read much on the game, I'm trying to go into this somewhat blind for the novel experience of it all, so I don't know if there are intentions to build a story around what's going on, with interactive characters chatting about things other than sales, or not.

Anyway, onward and upward. I haven't even left my original hub except on those rare occasions to grab some extra labor/sword hands. 99% of the world right now is just... out there. But I can see damage being done wayyyy in the distance, little green and red numbers trickle up into the air. And when I visit the nearby town, I see visitors from elsewhere, some wounded and limping. I decided to follow one such band out, see what direction they went, and they were really headed far away, so I retreated back to my hub. But these kinds of things make the world, which might otherwise feel vast but unnecessary, actually feel alive.

[RedMint]

Probably time to mention some of the more noticeable bugs. The more I play and really start understanding the mechanics and how things ought to work, it's easier to see when things don't.

One of the most major bugs, and I've seen many comments on it, is what I'll just call a transfer-of-items bug. If I want to move items from one inventory location (such as a chest) to another (such as my character) there are times the item simply disappears in the process of movement. It basically just feels like it has been dropped. Of course in a game that doesn't yet have such items literally appear in the world as individual items, they really -have- disappeared, forever lost. This is not a big deal when you're talking about some wheat flour. But it's a very big deal indeed when you're talking about a valuable weapon you just spent an age and tons of resources crafting.

AI pathing is largely great in this game. But occasionally it's not. And this can be annoying. In my current game, I have a whole crowd of traders (and their hired guns) all smooshed together, out in the open, because they seem to refuse to want to go around one of my power generators. Eventually they just give up. But that's a lot of money I just lost.

One of the most annoying bugs in the game causes micromanagement to become micro-micromanagement. For some reason there's a stacking problem with the artificial intelligence of your characters dealing (I believe primarily) with water. Your character, let's say a rum brewer, needs more water to brew more rum, so he runs to the well and grabs a stack of water. I'm not entirely sure what happens here, but it seems he gets back to the rum machine, puts in some of the water but not all of it, and runs back out to get yet another full stack of water. Stacks are important in this game. So far, certain items can only be stacked so deep (with the inventory container also playing a role in how deep they can stack). With water in a rum machine, that's 5. So the guy gets back to a rum machine that already has water in it, and he's left holding a full stack that cannot be applied. Instead of correcting for this miscalculation, the character just stands there in an endless loop of indecision. I wish I had a dollar for every time I had to manually move water out of their inventory just to get them working again. It certainly currently defeats the whole idea of automation.

There seems to be a door bug in which occasionally a location's door appears to be closed but is actually open. Characters pass right through it as though they were ghosts. The problem is that when you need to do door options such as 'Lock' or 'Open' or 'Close' - they don't work when the door is in this bugged state. I have also occasionally seen characters inside not be able to get out, nor be able to open the door manually. This hasn't happened much, but the odd closed (no, open, really!) door thing happens a lot.

There are a few odd programming choices, too. Your hub's power output is indicated by a divided number like 5/10. One would logically think that this means you are using 5 out of the available 10 power resources, but in actuality, that is flipped. That number would actually mean that you are trying to use 10 resources with only 5 available. Just an odd choice for number placement and I'd love to see that corrected.

Also, at the start of the game, my mouse cursor hovers over the 'Load' button, so I instantly click to load, but instead of hitting the button, the mouse cursor repositions itself center screen, so I haven't clicked on anything. This is totally just a little annoyance, but it's noticeable every time I go to start the game.

Figured I should present the good and the bad here. These are all obviously completely forgiveable things given the game's early stages of development, but they're worthy of mention if anyone's actually been reading this thread for one new player's overall gaming experience. None of them should cause anyone to consider foregoing buying the game in this state. The game in actuality runs remarkably well for such early access.