Recent reviews by S0ren

First and foremost, this is a heavily Early Access title. The dev team, while dedicated, is very small and working with limited funding, so of course updates are going to be small and slow compared to what a AAA company team can roll out. People who review bomb crying that there isn't much to the game yet... it's Early Access. Real complaints can be made, certainly, but the ones leveled in the Steam reviews are pretty baseless if you take two seconds to think about what you're signing up for when you purchase an Early Access game.

Anyway.

I have watched entire chunks of the map go from placeholder cylinders to full villages. The number of playable species has roughly doubled since when I first downloaded this game. Sound design has been updated multiple times. Talkable NPCs have become a thing. Yes, updates are slow, but it makes sense in context of the size of the dev team and the fact they have full time jobs elsewhere to keep roofs over their heads. For the size of the team and the budget they are working with, they've managed quite a bit and more is constantly in the works. Most of what is happening behind the scenes is on the official Discord and I'm getting pings very regularly there with progress on different aspects of the game. Yes, most of them are still visual for now like other reviewers have pointed out, but other rollouts like expanding the daily quest system are happening, too. A huge wave of updated and expanded crafting assets recently hit. Base crafting recently expanded. The character creator continues to be one of the most in-depth in the indie creature sim genre and is awaiting a planned overhaul that I expect will expand it even further.

Do I wish, now that the main playable species are ingame, that more focus would be spent on the questing system? Absolutely. Do I get that other assets like quest items and enemies still need to get added before that can happen? Sure. Are those also graphic and model updates? Yup. As frustrating as it can be, one step at a time. Where other games would waste time making or downloading placeholder assets that have to be carefully edited out later to facilitate quest systems being implemented earlier, I actually kind of appreciate that Draconia's team seems to be making more of their assets first and then building around them. It's an uncommon approach, and one I watch with interest.

As for whether I would recommend the game or not... the character creator alone is worth the price currently being asked. With how much on the Discord is happening, how responsive the devs are, and what is coming down the pike for implementation, Draconia has real potential to be a diamond in the rough for the creature sim genre. Here's hoping the team keeps it up.

I got this game and put most of the hours I have into Cenozoic before I knew what a hateful dirtbag the developer was. Things were said like that all members of the LGBTQ+ community are groomers if not outright child diddlers. Absolutely heinous stuff that ought to qualify as mass defamation. I quit playing until I heard about it being taken over by more open-minded people and picked it back up. Then the original homophobic, transphobic bigot bought it back and I'm dropping it again along with this warning to everyone else who might come across this.

If you have anyone in your life who is LGBTQ+, the developer of this game has said some horrendous things about people like those you care about. It's obviously still your choice to support this or not, but at least now you've been given the heads up and are a little more informed.

Be smarter than I was and skip the Steam version entirely. Your progress is reset with every update and a painful ass grind to get back to where you were. You can't even use the built-in cheats on the Steam version because the devs throw up a fat bird and a "♥♥♥♥ you" to anyone who doesn't shell out monthly on their Patreon. Save your money and either wait for it to come out for real or go straight to the Patreon.

Very few games these days catch my interest. Even fewer get more than 30-40 hours of play time. This one has over 300 hours at the time I'm writing this with 2 completed playthroughs, several more in progress, and I'm still discovering new stuff every time I turn around--boredom has yet to be spotted even on the distant horizons.

The Pros: The storytelling is immaculate. The customization is fantastic. The fluidity of choices leading to different outcomes feels natural. The controls are fairly intuitive and don't take long to get used to. This game was clearly crafted with love from all directions and captures the imagination in a way I have not experienced in a game in over 15 years. The frequent major updates only keep improving on an already nearly perfect work of true art.

The Cons: Modding is a slight pain in the derrier. That's it. That's the cons list. The whole list. No more notes needed.

Larian knocked it out of the park, leaving every AAA developer in a cloud of dust. Every award won this year is beyond deserved. The AAA industry can learn a lot from these guys.

As for my fellow D&D nerds, leave Larian alone when it comes to the Hasbro layoffs. These guys have nothing to do with that and no power to change anything. The game was in development long before any of the scandals started and was already released well before the latest portions of the scandals. Aim your ire at the people who actually have say over Hasbro's business decisions *cough* like Chris ♥♥♥♥♥ *cough cough*. If anything, Larian should be upheld as how to do D&D spinoff content right, as an example of how to do better by empoyees and customers alike, and how we as a community can reward companies for being better than those around them.

This game has a ton of promise and it's super fun when it's working. Main issue right now is that, on my PC, about 5 minutes into any save a runaway memory leak starts and quickly eats up all 28ish GB of free RAM I have, which then crashes the game. If that issue alone gets fixed I will have zero complaints!

Over 1,000 hours put into this game only to be unable to play for months now due to a RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64 error. MONTHS.

Fix your ♥♥♥♥, Bungie.

Even if you uncheck "Anime" so the anime results are hidden, 99.9% of any search result in the app is still going to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anime. If you want ANYTHING except anime wallpapers, don't bother. Even DeviantArt of all places will give you better results.

I retract everything negative I ever said about this game. I ended up playing it on a different platform, so my actual play time is not reflected here, but I walk back everything. This game is a work of art that made me think harder than most media. It made me think about so many things. The meaning of life after tragedy. The purpose of human connection in a disconnected world. The ever more atomized solitude of humanity under the present systems of end-stage capitalism and the rise of the gig economy.

This was a work of real genius and I look forward to part two.

Definitely very obvious the game is still in Beta, but shows a lot of potential. Controls can be a bit finicky and there is very little information to tell you how to actually play yet, but the communities on some of the servers I've been on are very helpful and friendly. Graphics are stunning for the small size of the dev team and while content is still pretty sparse there are some great starts and groundwork laid.

Controls are unresponsive to the point of unplayable on KB/mouse, can't use a controller due to a nerve issue. I love a challenging game, but not if it's a challenge because it straight doesn't work.