ROSS’S GAME DUNGEON: HINTERLAND

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I thought I would take a break from Game Dungeon, but ended up having some inspiration for an episode coming after this one and decided I wanted this one first. I honestly thought this would be about 10 minutes, so naturally, it's almost 23. It's definitely a game that can get its claws into you and I honestly wanted something semi-normal as a break from Armed & Delirious.

In other news, I've discovered a lot of my videos have been demonetized as what I assume is an algorithm has determined they are unsuitable for advertisers. I'll have more news on that later, possibly even a video. Youtube is certainly trying to keep things interesting.

COMMENTS

I remember playing this game a lot, back when Stardock had it's own online game store. (Yes, it's been a while.) Funny enough, I've been thinking about playing it again, but the key I got from the Impulse store doesn't work anymore.

Quite interesting game. Like you said, this had potential to be a unique game if it had more "meat" into it.

I would say that this quite reminds me of Majesty a little, except that in Majesty you only had the building part and you heroes would run away even if they had the advantage.

Sounds like a game worth "rebooting". Great review Ross.

I've got to say a game of this genre has some great potential, Only a few minutes into the videos I could see that this game was gleaming with it, definitely a game style worthy of more games. I could seriously see some crazy good atmosphere with each town and playstlye being different. I could see myself seriously sinking a lot of hours into a game like this, Someone please make another game like this

You've made me realize how much I want Minecraft to have pumpkin bombs in it. Might have to suggest that.

In other news, I've discovered a lot of my videos have been demonetized as what I assume is an algorithm has determined they are unsuitable for advertisers. I'll have more news on that later, possibly even a video. Youtube is certainly trying to keep things interesting.

That sucks man, seems like everyone's getting screwed on this nowadays.

Here's hoping you'll manage to stay alive and won't have to develop a device that can make beans out of thin air.

Great video as usual,by the way, haven't heard of the game before, I'll have to try it out now

I can't speak for anyone else, but those who enjoy city sims aren't all accountants, Ross. I'm a comic artist(cough) and aspiring writer, although I will admit that I have taken some stabs at game programming for fun.

I will agree that disasters are probably not great in these types of games, at least for me. I prefer to play it as a zen garden where I have to earn each stroke of my sand-rake.

As for games which are like Hinterland, I think Factorio is pretty similar, and it's high-rated on Steam. Granted the combat takes a backseat to the building in that you don't gain many resources by hunting down the baddies, but they do like to gang up on your base now and then and you can go out and perform some pest control to keep things stable.

I did have an idea for a game in this vein but was more on an adventurous side of things. The idea was to head out into the wild and into dungeons to collect materials for a factory you'd build yourself which would in turn produce the weapons and such that would make you more capable to go out on these excursions. Heck, there might not even be a leveling system, everything you need would be produced by your machines. Anyone who's played the Tekkit mod for Minecraft would probably know roughly what I have in mind.

It seems almost every youtuber has been effected by this ad friendly content thing.

I suppose this is what happens when people like pewdiepie, whom I see impulsive, irresponsible and childish, are

given a great status and just can't figure out how to handle it properly.

You would think that racism and holocaust are things you shouldn't be casually joking about, but here we are.

Naturally Ross and other people who try to make a living through this system gets the sharp end of the stick while

pewdiepie probably won't get effected much by this change since he probably has made enough money to sustain a decent, if not better,

life style for the rest of their lives.

Oh well maybe we really should learn useful skills like cooking, carpentry or hunting just so we can

survive when all other means fail us.

edit: Jim Sterling has made a really nice video about this issue ->

Google should probably realize that you can't have the rigurous checking for offensive content that television has with just some neural network that scans the metadata and whatever it can get from the audiovisual content of the video.

They have a lot of knowledge on this topic (like Deepdream, and the algorithm they're using for recommendations), so I don't get why they're making it so trigger-happy with demonetizing videos.

But hey, at least the advertisers are happy and Youtube isn't making that much money, so why try and fix all the obvious false positives?

A sufficiently complex neural network is capable of making the same judgment calls a human can; I think at best what can be said is if they ARE using a neural network for this(probably so) that it might be a young and insufficiently trained one. I'm no expert but I'm willing to bet that when deployed on such a massive database as Youtube a lot of things are going to get thrown to the wayside as the neural network learns how to do its job, even if it was extensively trained beforehand.

Yeah, you're pretty right on that, but Google should have given it a lot more training data and time to work with, since (for example) confabulating offensive content with the unedited Q&A session that is the videochat is very worrying.

Subject: ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: HINTERLAND

It seems almost every youtuber has been effected by this ad friendly content thing.

I suppose this is what happens when people like pewdiepie, whom I see impulsive, irresponsible and childish, are

given a great status and just can't figure out how to handle it properly.

 

You would think that racism and holocaust are things you shouldn't be casually joking about, but here we are.

Naturally Ross and other people who try to make a living through this system gets the sharp end of the stick while

pewdiepie probably won't get effected much by this change since he probably has made enough money to sustain a decent, if not better,

life style for the rest of their lives.

 

Oh well maybe we really should learn useful skills like cooking, carpentry or hunting just so we can

survive when all other means fail us.

 

edit: Jim Sterling has made a really nice video about this issue ->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odoe1qVkcJ4

if advertisers want to pull out of a platform that has an almost exclusive monopoly on people between the ages of 0 to 30 because pewdiepie said a bad word then that's totally within their rights to destroy their company. besides, idubbbztv has said way worse and I don't see you or the news complaining about this. why are we complaining about this? this is stupid

now for something actually related to the video

I would totally buy a 240 hz monitor, I have a 144hz one and it's so nice

edit: once I have a 21:9 4k 240hz dual monitors, then i'd truly be in nirvana

I played Depths of Peril nearly a year ago, but I got bored before I even got to the strategy part, if there's any. I've been looking for a game with a similar concept for a while but I didn't have any luck with it.

Dark Cloud got me into these kind of games, or at least the idea of it, but it's not really close at all, it's all instanced and the game is more focused on dungeon crawling. The building feels optional if anything. I was hoping Depths of Peril could fill that void seeing as it was realtime and all but I just couldn't stand it, I also tried Distant Worlds but it's a pretty empty game when it actually comes down to it, it's like a real time 4X empire game, but it didn't do it for me.

I also tried Kingdom but I wasn't too fond of it, it looks great but I'm not a fan of the gameplay. I also hate fighting those little monsters, wish I had some humanoids instead, and an actual Kingdom to conquer, that game didn't feel very kingdomy at all, I just found it really disappointing and I can't really explain why now. Great graphics and an amazing atmosphere, it would almost be perfect if it wasn't for... everything else. It just felt very constrainted, I feel like a true kingdom game should give you a fuckton of freedom on how you approach whatever challenges you stumble across.

At this point I'm just making my own game, I've had a similar idea since 2005 and I've been dying to finally get the hardware to actually make it, before I even had access to a PC, I don't want to reveal anything yet though, if I can actually pull it off I'll just reveal it when it's at an okay level, if it ever happens. I would honestly die if I didn't make it though, I really need to make this game. It's supposed to be based (roughly, very loosely) on Greek and Egyptian mythology but saying more would be too much.

There's also Dungeons and Dragons Dragonshard I think? I don't remember anything at all about it.

https://www.gog.com/game/dungeons_dragons_dragonshard

I don't think it had any base building at all. It's not really close to this RPG+RTS genre at all but after thinking of SpellForce it just came to my mind again.

I'm trying to remember which games were close to this style of gameplay but nothing really comes up other than some shovelware-ish titles which never got too far, this doesn't seem the kind of genre a triple AAA developer would make at all. I would never expect a game of this kind unless it's some random indie or a budget game. I feel like since Command & Conquer died mainstream FPS games have since dominated the market which is a bit of a shame, I'm not too crazy about FPS games, if anything I always considered the PC platform the RTS platform, there's just something about these kind of games which makes them much more stimulating than just shooting someone in the face for 3000 hours, unless I'm playing PayDay 2, that game has one of the most godly shotguns I have ever seen in a game (locomotive).

Just crouch and run into an enemy and aim up at their head and they'll ragdoll into space, it's so satisfying.

There'e also WARSHIFT but I just couldn't get into it. It's not what I would like at all and it's 100% safe to assume that Ross knows about it anyway, if anything I'm just posting it for everyone else.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/392580/WARSHIFT/

Also are there any games like Satellite Reign which don't run like complete garbage?

I can't speak for anyone else, but those who enjoy city sims aren't all accountants, Ross. I'm a comic artist(cough) and aspiring writer, although I will admit that I have taken some stabs at game programming for fun.

I will agree that disasters are probably not great in these types of games, at least for me. I prefer to play it as a zen garden where I have to earn each stroke of my sand-rake.

 

As for games which are like Hinterland, I think Factorio is pretty similar, and it's high-rated on Steam. Granted the combat takes a backseat to the building in that you don't gain many resources by hunting down the baddies, but they do like to gang up on your base now and then and you can go out and perform some pest control to keep things stable.

 

I did have an idea for a game in this vein but was more on an adventurous side of things. The idea was to head out into the wild and into dungeons to collect materials for a factory you'd build yourself which would in turn produce the weapons and such that would make you more capable to go out on these excursions. Heck, there might not even be a leveling system, everything you need would be produced by your machines. Anyone who's played the Tekkit mod for Minecraft would probably know roughly what I have in mind.

I don't think Factorio is close at all, if anything that game is more related to RimWorld than Hinterland. I feel like the more kingdomy it is, the closer it is. Factorio is future post apocalyptic if anything. Meanwhile the kind of the game I'm thinking of is more ancient or ideally set in a medieval-ish era.

Sorry for the double post but I forgot to mention this game I wanted to check out for a looong while, I even had it wishlisted on GOG. It looks promising enough.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4800/Heroes_of_Annihilated_Empires/

https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_annihilated_empires

nice job, youtube

One thing that could be a good idea for a game inspired in Hinterland would be a persistent hero, much like in Warlords Battlecry 3.

WB3 is a RTS (and I think maybe Ross should cover the Warlords franchise at some point on Game Dungeon), but it's main feature is that you can create a hero that you can carry over to any map, and you even choose a class for him/her. Faction and class also defines the skills you can level up, and these can range from spells, passive combat bonuses, and even resouce generation bonuses.

It's "Gold Ore" just like Hinterland, it's a unique concept for a RTS, but it still very rough.

In other news, I've discovered a lot of my videos have been demonetized as what I assume is an algorithm has determined they are unsuitable for advertisers. I'll have more news on that later, possibly even a video. Youtube is certainly trying to keep things interesting.

Recently Guru Larry had problems with Youtube's algorithm, and you wouldn't believe why:

Recently Guru Larry had problems with Youtube's algorithm, and you wouldn't believe why:

It's not an Algorithm, it's a Blacklist

Razorfist explains it well in this video:

I have an idea for how to expand upon Hinterland. In ActRaiser, you had six regions: Fillmore, Bloodpool, Kasandora, Aitos, Northwall and Marahna. In Hinterland, it seems you only have one region: town and environs.

Expand Hinterland to make six regions (or whatever number). You start off in one region, clear the area and discover a new region. Perhaps a rival town which you can either partner with or conquer, depending on your playstyle. If you conquer, you will have a tough battle, but then you get all their resources if you win. If you partner, you will have no battle, but you will have to share resources (you take some of theirs, they take some of yours). Something like that.

Your task is to rid the lands of monsters and RULE THE WORLD! Or the island, whatever.

Just an idea. Also, subs will be up shortly.

Subs are delayed. My desktop computer (where the subtitles are stored) powered off. When I tried to power it back on, it boots up for about 5 seconds then powers off.

Troubleshooting, but work and sleep are getting in the way of that...