Am I missing something?

[Noodlesocks]

Heard lots of good things about the game and the emergent story your colony will develop for itself. Just shy of two hours playing but so far it feels like a basic town builder. There have been a couple random events but nothing that other games don't offer.

Thinking about refunding and buying something else but before that I want to know I'm not just missing something or if the good parts just haven't happened yet.

[Fawovoir]

have you tried harvesting a prisoners organs yet

[Steelfleece]

You may not have had anything really good happen yet. The real fun happens when you play in more extreme biomes, something terrible happens, and you have to make...decisions.

[marcusaddamsson]

"Interesting" stuff tends to happen later in the game, especially if you're using the stardard start on a non-dlc game. Things like a couple breaking up during the marriage ceremony. Or one of your colonists losing his mind and then digging up his best friend's moldering corpse only to place it on the communal dinner table... all *because* he didn't eat his last meal at said table... Or that orphan you've took in, and trained to be an excellent shooting guy over last quadrums... he gets cornered by a hungry bear, dying nearly instantly. Stuff like that. But those kinda moments need time to 'cook'... I mean, losing a hunter to a bear isn't great, but it does hurt more once you consider all the effort you put into that pawn before he died.

[Veylox]

You're clearly missing something if you think it's "nothing other games don't offer" because I can't find a single one offering the same

2h of doing nothing probably aren't gonna be representative

[XelNigma]

Dont get the wrong idea. the events are all pretty straight forward. Raiders can attack in a few different ways. Drop podding right into your buildings is one of the more interesting.
You will get manhunter packs of random animals. A pack a manhunting rabbits is kinda funny, until you look and see 32 of them.
You might get a drop pod of supplies land nearby which can be any thing. even human meat and leather. Its the implications.

But if your expecting something like a rift to another dimension open up and you have to negotiate with a demon, thats not going to happen.

The interesting stuff people talk about are things like a solar flare hits knocking out your power for a few hours right as a raid happens so you have to fight with out turrets.

Or a mech cluster is chilling on the edge of the map and a trade caravan appears right next to it and they have a big fight.

Or you send some people out to trade and while they are gone a raid hits and you have to fight with half the force or you try to bunker into a building and let the raiders just take what they want and leave.

What im trying to say is the events arent scripted, instead its the interesting combination of things that can cause interest. The timing of good luck or bad luck and how you deal with it.

[Noodlesocks]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

Dont get the wrong idea. the events are all pretty straight forward. Raiders can attack in a few different ways. Drop podding right into your buildings is one of the more interesting.
You will get manhunter packs of random animals. A pack a manhunting rabbits is kinda funny, until you look and see 32 of them.
You might get a drop pod of supplies land nearby which can be any thing. even human meat and leather. Its the implications.

But if your expecting something like a rift to another dimension open up and you have to negotiate with a demon, thats not going to happen.

The interesting stuff people talk about are things like a solar flare hits knocking out your power for a few hours right as a raid happens so you have to fight with out turrets.

Or a mech cluster is chilling on the edge of the map and a trade caravan appears right next to it and they have a big fight.

Or you send some people out to trade and while they are gone a raid hits and you have to fight with half the force or you try to bunker into a building and let the raiders just take what they want and leave.

What im trying to say is the events arent scripted, instead its the interesting combination of things that can cause interest. The timing of good luck or bad luck and how you deal with it.

That's unfortunate. The way the game was described to me made it sound something like "This war of mine" level of emergent story and decision making but with town building.

[Steelfleece]

What settings are you playing on? That may affect it. Especially if you say Randy.

[sdev09]

had same impression. guess rolling till skills are 12+ on intellect, social, construction, plants, social (recruting fast). it will speed things up big time. with values below 8 it gets so slow, you literally see no progress within the first 5 hours.

also skill combos are important, makes no sense to have 14 intellect and high construction. they can't do both jobs at once.

balancing doesnt feel right to me. allowing 14+ on creation but gimping you so hard if you don't min/max ... they even tell you in tooltips to accept lower values for the challenge.

on lower/medium difficulty you can ignore melee and shooting at start, traps will do.

[Lord Freedom]

The thing that sets Rimworld apart from other "colony builders" for me, is that the events propel me through the gameplay. So while it is technically a sandbox, 95% of my decision making is based on necessity due to circumstance.

This is what generates the story. Most colony builders don't get this formula correct, and it becomes a game of, do one thing, wait until it's complete, do another thing, rinse and repeat until you finish the research tree or whatever. Then you beat the game.

With Rimworld (esp on the highest difficulties), I'm never given that ultimate sandbox freedom, sometimes stuff just destroys you completely and you're left with nothing. And I love that.

If that's not you, you might not like Rimworld.

EDIT: Oh and the sheer customization of gameplay with mods. No other game beats Rimworld there. If you ever think, "Huh it's be nice have this" there is definitely a mod for it.

[Das Trojanische Pferd]

getting your ♥♥♥♥ kicked in 4 out of 5 guys are down your last survivor puts a bullet into the last invader and now you stand there bleeding patching up and need to choose who you are saving because solo you can not save everybody.
POV: you find out the last guy has a traumatic backstory and can't patch wounds so you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ but you had a glimmer of hope that the game rips out of your grasp.....

[sbmarauderman03]

The start game can be tedious (unless you crank the difficulty up to the max right away), but this is actually a good thing since you need a bit of time to get off to a good start. As Steelfleece posted, the difficulty settings can easily turn a 'ho-hum' experience to an 'OH SH*T" one very quickly. When I get a bit 'bored' with my current playthrough, I crank the difficulty up a couple notches to see what craziness ensues. I typically have to crank it back down within 5-6 in-game days to avoid having my colony wiped...

[IVOX3L]

Originally posted by Noodlesocks:

Heard lots of good things about the game and the emergent story your colony will develop for itself. Just shy of two hours playing but so far it feels like a basic town builder. There have been a couple random events but nothing that other games don't offer.

Thinking about refunding and buying something else but before that I want to know I'm not just missing something or if the good parts just haven't happened yet.

I don't enjoy spending a lot of time on one game; I like to try different things. Yet here I am with 800 hours on RimWorld. The game doesn't offer many unique, handwritten stories; it's mostly a combination of events and how you choose to respond to them. These events and encounters are kind of similar to each other, and you'll have seen everything in about 200 hours or so. However, the situations are similar, but the conditions are mostly different, and that's the good part of the game. You can adapt to situations or change the way you play.

For example, you can use bionics to strengthen yourself, set traps around your colony, focus on increasing your numbers, or use explosives (or avoid them because they're dangerous). You can change your pawns' DNA so they don't get a heatstroke in the middle of the desert, harvest prisoners, or treat them well. You can adopt children, use them as soldiers, or ignore them altogether if you dislike children. Use magic or become immortal so you don't risk your colonists dying. There are a lot of things you can do and dlcs are gonna make it even more. You can do all of this at the same time, but each choice has a cost.

You often have to decide what's more important for the colonist wellbeing: a cleaner robot or a flatscreen TV or make a ideology where they are brainwashed so they dont even mind a corpse lying around in the base. Whats more important for the next danger? A implant to deploy sword from colonists arm or a cool looking armor. You will constantly try to utilize various things, but you won't always have access to some of them due to material AND research costs. This game is a story where you decide what to do for your colony during both calm and challenging times.

Two hours is nothing, just saying. If you feel like refunding, you should, because this game might not be to everyone's taste. I can safely say this game offers so much that I now think about RimWorld whenever I play a new colony builder. Additionally, it's easily moddable, so you can add or remove things to create unique scenarios for yourself. Having 25,000 active players on Steam for a single-player colony simulator should mean something.

[desrtfox071]

Two hours is way to little. Also, if you made the game too easy, it may seem a bit boring and ho-hum as well. Start a new game. Make it hard. Die in 15 minutes. That will at least give you some, very minor, sense of what can happen.

[Wasted]

lol 2 hours.

[Jaggid Edje]

I agree with all of the people above who mentioned that if you are playing on an easier difficulty, that is probably a large part of the reason it would feel like a 'basic builder', though in your case the fact that you have only played 2 hours is the primary reason.

2 hours is basically nothing. As mentioned above, the greatness of Rimworld is revealed over time as you are forced to deal with the unexpected, and in 2 hours your colony may not have had a single 'unexpected' event yet.

I also would personally recommend that you venture into the workshop once you have the basics of the game down, because a good selection of workshop mods can really enhance that whole "dealing with the unexpected" thing. The most memorable moments in my current game, for example, have all been due to events that are mod-added.

I would recommend just playing vanilla (unmodded) to start, though. Just something to keep in mind when deciding to keep the game or not. Mods add a whole lot to the experience.