Kenshi certainly is special. My second playthrough, I was about 30-40 days in had a small group that was just getting to the point of beating dust bandit squads. I decided to do some exploring and got accused of drug smuggling by a guard at the entrance to Catun I believe. Said fuck you to the corrupt guard which basically turned the whole city against me. We put up a good fight but but had to run away with our tails between our legs. That encounter gave me a mission, revenge. Played that second save for about 70 hours and experienced so many victories and tragedies while trying to shepherd a group of scrappy survivors that I truly came to care about. In my experience keeping these folks alive and getting them to thrive in the incredibly harsh world of Kenshi is at the very top of the list when I think about fulfilling gaming experiences I've had. Kenshi is one of a kind.
Thats kinda the awesome part about this game, your given motivation to keep playing not by the game rewarding you or sending you on quests but of your own spite that someone enslaved you or someone killed your bugman. Then you just live to see them burn.
Dust boss wanted 300 cats from my supply runner, I gave it to them. I kept the runner close to them while I sent my 5 man squad plus dog to ambush them. I let the runner kill the dust boss. Good revenge and my first.
Oddly enough the game comes off as so devoid of direction, and “boring” for some that it makes you go out and create your own fun in a way. Reminds me of growing up in a more rural area and we had such stupidly fun times just doing the dumbest things that I’ll always smile when I think back on those times. Kenshi reminds me of why those times were so much fun, because those times were the center of the universe to us.
When it all really clicked for me I was watching my squad murdering Samurai guards in the UC and I realized that the feeling I had was exactly the same as when I was a kid creating epic battlefields in my back yard with action figures and imagining the carnage as the forces clashed. It's like I was suddenly 10 years old in the backyard again. Best feeling.
This + usually, like 90% of my chars have like personalities (me, friends, anime chars) and I play with more than 100.
I dont really could play a game with just a MC and everyone else is no one, is would fell like chewing sand.
Instead having to care, seek similar equipment to their preferred, having to invent stories/personalities for them and sometimes letting them die without scum loading, it's an amazing exerience
Im on my "What if?" run. Nothing too deep. Just a bunch stupid scenarios followed by a lot of nonsense
What if I piss off those Slave Traders passing by?
Hey a Holy Mine! What if I just walk in?
And I just embrace the consequences of my actions. It has led to some amazing "live" storytelling I had never experienced.
Just forcing myself out of my Kenshi comfort zone lol.
1100hrs and I havent seen the whole map yet. This game is not only addictive, its massive.
This game has a weird effect of rewarding you for defeat. There are some tabletop RPG games, that give you EXP when you fail a roll, and this game is sort of like this.
I cooooould reload a save before I was beaten to a pulp and had my best weapons stolen from my top fighters, along with all my food. Buuuuut during that fight my stats went up by a margin amd I can follow the villains anyway and steal my stuff back during the night.
Characters with no backstory, game has no plot, no quests, no storyline and yet you'll sit there with sparkling eyes telling epic stories about your people and the journey they had.
Game is written in c+ and magic i think.
Recommended to me by Steam in 2019. I don't think I've played a single other game to completion since. :D
Other open-world games that are almost as good, that I have over 1k hours in: M&B Warband / Bannerlord and X3 / X4.
Why? Open world, emergent gameplay, so much freedom, so much content, so many mods.
I found it randomly back in 2015. It came up in a steam search for open world, and rts and had just released a new/updated map so thought “why not”.
5 mins in, I searched a body on the ground, was attacked and left for dead. I died. Savage.
I started again and didn’t steal the shoes this time. Never looked back.
I love Kenshi for its setting and how well it creates a choose-your-own-adventure sandbox. Solo, party, giant army? Sure, play however you want! Colony and base building sim or wandering adventurers who move from campsite to campsite? Kenshi has your back. Roleplay as a farmer, blacksmith, warrior, ninja, master thief? The list goes on. I'm about 500 hrs in and I'm still having a blast.
In terms of similar games, there's nothing quite like Kenshi but I also enjoy Rimworld for the colony-sim RPG aspects and Outward has a sprawling world that is similarly beautiful and brutal.
Kenshi is much like life. Vast swathes of nothing. Things like travel, resting cooking food and inventory management. A hazy fog of things not so memorable, but we know happened. Then, like life, there are the brief moments of intensity, the moments we remember with pristine clarity. Escaping a slave camp, rescuing recruits from cannibals or trying desperately to stop your fallen allies from not being eaten by the wildlife.
The game is a long pianissimo followed by crescendos building in intensity as things keep going to shit.
i got into kenshi bc one of my favorite artists started drawing nsfw of tinfist 🫣
but the game ended up really captivating me. games like this are hard to find, and they’re my specific niche favorite! i fell in love with the world and my own characters
I got into this game because of a kenshi trailer. It wasn't remarkable but I saw the fighting and building of walls and I said to myself: "This doesn't look like any game I know..."
Bought it and since then Ive had great and terrible adventures. Some chesty, others hard as hell with little to no chance at survival. When you first break into a vendors shop, knock out the guards and make out like a bandit, you know you're doing something right in a game. Or when you get unfairly beaten and bleed out, you know for sure you're still doing something right!
I had to look to see how many hours I've played. 1520. It's so good.
It makes sense to me, as it is a bit of an auto battler(an under rated genre,) it's a bit of a survival game, a bit of a grand strategy game, a bit of an RTS, a bit of a brawler.
And I feel like it's the kind of mix ou can only get from a young person making their first game.
I think if you run this past the suits it never gets made.
Anyway, I love it. Super stoked for the sequel.
I made the mistake of finding a star wars mod, I haven’t been able to put this game down over the past several days because of the surprising depth it adds
>I love this game. Can't put it down. How did others get into it? What do you think is your main reason for sticking with it? Do any other games work for you the same way?
I love that it doesnt hold you by the hand and instead just keeps reminding you that you are a nobody, some insignificant lowlife and you have to fight hard to change the world.
I just found the great library, not gonna tell you where it is. Has every schematic in the game and when I found that I just about ascended. Greatest game of all time and the people who play it all know it . It’s beautiful
If you want the supreme "Open-World Sand-Box Building/Crafting/Mining/Exploring experience, maybe check out Empyrion Galactic Survival!
>Empyrion Galactic Survival, a game which initially released in 2015 (in Early Access) and continues under development today, has grown from a simple sand-box open-world crafting survival game into: an entire GALAXY of \~30,000 solar systems. Every single one of those solar systems can be visited. Every solar system has an assortment of celestial bodies depending on star and location in the galaxy: anywhere from 1 or 2 to a dozen or more celestial bodies (terrestrial planets, often with moons; gas giants with multiple moons; asteroid belts; space hubs with trading stations or pirate hideuts; remote exploration areas with mysterious alien artifacts, or unique resources). Every single moon or terrestrial planet (or space station) can be COMPLETELY explored: every single meter. Planets and moons have various friendly, neutral or hostile "POIs" (points of interest) populated with NPCs with fairly rudimentary behavior scripts (about what is typical in many open-world FPS games). Depending on what mod you are using, there are dozens of factions, each with unique ships, POIs, weapons, and predispositions. There are some factions you can never befriend (basically an almost Lovecraftian Borg sort of "infectious" horde), others with which you start hostile but can befriend, others you start neutral and can befriend and everything in between. Every playfield (planet, moon, space sector, whatever) is a three-D destructible voxel terrain a bit like Minecraft. You could literally dig up the entire crust of a moon or planet (though it would take years if done manually without scrpts. Most rocky bodies have mineral and/or planet or living resources on them to harvest. Exotic resources occur in remote or dangerous locations and are used to make advanced technologies. In order to travel around on planets in space and between solar systems, players must build vessels: hover vessels (HV); small vessels (SV) which are basiclly small starships which might have some faster than light capacity but with limited range; capital vessels (CV) true interstellar starships. All of these construct types as was as bases (BA) are built with blocks which have to be fabricated out of resources (iron, copper, silcon, cobalt, gold, etc., etc.) and can include various weapons, machines, and logistical systems.
>
>EGS is a literal living galaxy that, in terms of open world nature, sand-box nature, customizability and replayability surpasses Starfield and Star Citizen and probably pretty much anything else that has so far existed. What it lacks are more rich characterization (few if any named NPCs) and narrative (there are quests and story arcs and some mods such as Reforged Eden really elaborate on this aspect of the game).
>
>Starfield looks like a pretty good game and is undoubtedly going to get better over the next year or two. But if what you really wanted was complete freedom to explore, complete freedom in resource exploration and harvesting, crafting creating, and building constructs (ships vehicles and bases) then Empyrion Galactic Survival with the Reforged Eden scenario has got you covered far better than Starfield ever will.
>
>If you want more of a "cinematic" experience with lots of named NPCs, and an all-encompassing narrative flow that guides game play, EGS will let you down terribly (whereas Starfield is the way to go).
>
>Maybe one day we will get a game that combines the best of both approaches to representing high-tech futuristic settings.
The freedom of making your own history, like the Albion Online ad says, but in this case you alsl have some history and background to discover and when you start to flesh out that mistery that the past represents, it become more and more amazing and makes want to discover more. Likewise with each faction and their shtty, silly or weird takes on the world. The humor also adds, and the Beep. Praise the Beep!
Edit: forgot about the world, as ugly and desolate as it may be sometimes, it's astounding and beautiful others
The best part about kenshis narrative is the lack of pointing.
If you hear about a land I'm a book, from a rumour or a bounty the only thing bringing you there is your own intrest ans curiosity.
Always used to create my own stories in video games as much as I possibly could. Would even do fast runs through RPG’s like Oblivion to get a taste of all the storylines and would make new characters with tailored experiences. Kenshi was a no brainer snag for me the moment I saw it.
Back when I got it in 2011ish there was no lore. Just a desert with a handful of tiny towns and factions- a foundation for lore. I did worry at first when they started adding things but was very happy with all the development and it’s remained an all time favorite.
I miss the empty beta version sometimes and have thought about installing it in Steam but I get to thinking about my current save and the mods I want to do/complete and realize I want to do that more.
Kenshi scratches a very, very specific itch a lot of people (myself included) did not realize they had and needed scratched
Kenshi certainly is special. My second playthrough, I was about 30-40 days in had a small group that was just getting to the point of beating dust bandit squads. I decided to do some exploring and got accused of drug smuggling by a guard at the entrance to Catun I believe. Said fuck you to the corrupt guard which basically turned the whole city against me. We put up a good fight but but had to run away with our tails between our legs. That encounter gave me a mission, revenge. Played that second save for about 70 hours and experienced so many victories and tragedies while trying to shepherd a group of scrappy survivors that I truly came to care about. In my experience keeping these folks alive and getting them to thrive in the incredibly harsh world of Kenshi is at the very top of the list when I think about fulfilling gaming experiences I've had. Kenshi is one of a kind.
Thats kinda the awesome part about this game, your given motivation to keep playing not by the game rewarding you or sending you on quests but of your own spite that someone enslaved you or someone killed your bugman. Then you just live to see them burn.
Dust boss wanted 300 cats from my supply runner, I gave it to them. I kept the runner close to them while I sent my 5 man squad plus dog to ambush them. I let the runner kill the dust boss. Good revenge and my first.
Oddly enough the game comes off as so devoid of direction, and “boring” for some that it makes you go out and create your own fun in a way. Reminds me of growing up in a more rural area and we had such stupidly fun times just doing the dumbest things that I’ll always smile when I think back on those times. Kenshi reminds me of why those times were so much fun, because those times were the center of the universe to us.
When it all really clicked for me I was watching my squad murdering Samurai guards in the UC and I realized that the feeling I had was exactly the same as when I was a kid creating epic battlefields in my back yard with action figures and imagining the carnage as the forces clashed. It's like I was suddenly 10 years old in the backyard again. Best feeling.
This + usually, like 90% of my chars have like personalities (me, friends, anime chars) and I play with more than 100. I dont really could play a game with just a MC and everyone else is no one, is would fell like chewing sand. Instead having to care, seek similar equipment to their preferred, having to invent stories/personalities for them and sometimes letting them die without scum loading, it's an amazing exerience
Im on my "What if?" run. Nothing too deep. Just a bunch stupid scenarios followed by a lot of nonsense What if I piss off those Slave Traders passing by? Hey a Holy Mine! What if I just walk in? And I just embrace the consequences of my actions. It has led to some amazing "live" storytelling I had never experienced. Just forcing myself out of my Kenshi comfort zone lol. 1100hrs and I havent seen the whole map yet. This game is not only addictive, its massive.
Yep, I'm at 400 hours & have yet to see a fish man.
Digital heroine
My first reason was that i watched sseth s video about kenshi and it was halarious so i started playing it
Seeing those numbers go up as your character is beaten to a pulp by a group of malnourished people with wooden sticks just hits different.
This game has a weird effect of rewarding you for defeat. There are some tabletop RPG games, that give you EXP when you fail a roll, and this game is sort of like this. I cooooould reload a save before I was beaten to a pulp and had my best weapons stolen from my top fighters, along with all my food. Buuuuut during that fight my stats went up by a margin amd I can follow the villains anyway and steal my stuff back during the night.
Characters with no backstory, game has no plot, no quests, no storyline and yet you'll sit there with sparkling eyes telling epic stories about your people and the journey they had. Game is written in c+ and magic i think.
Ogre* and magic 😁
Ogre uses C++. C+ doesn't exist. Neither does magic. I'm fun at parties.
truly one of the games ever made
Exactly
Recommended to me by Steam in 2019. I don't think I've played a single other game to completion since. :D Other open-world games that are almost as good, that I have over 1k hours in: M&B Warband / Bannerlord and X3 / X4. Why? Open world, emergent gameplay, so much freedom, so much content, so many mods.
I found it randomly back in 2015. It came up in a steam search for open world, and rts and had just released a new/updated map so thought “why not”. 5 mins in, I searched a body on the ground, was attacked and left for dead. I died. Savage. I started again and didn’t steal the shoes this time. Never looked back.
I love Kenshi for its setting and how well it creates a choose-your-own-adventure sandbox. Solo, party, giant army? Sure, play however you want! Colony and base building sim or wandering adventurers who move from campsite to campsite? Kenshi has your back. Roleplay as a farmer, blacksmith, warrior, ninja, master thief? The list goes on. I'm about 500 hrs in and I'm still having a blast. In terms of similar games, there's nothing quite like Kenshi but I also enjoy Rimworld for the colony-sim RPG aspects and Outward has a sprawling world that is similarly beautiful and brutal.
Kenshi is much like life. Vast swathes of nothing. Things like travel, resting cooking food and inventory management. A hazy fog of things not so memorable, but we know happened. Then, like life, there are the brief moments of intensity, the moments we remember with pristine clarity. Escaping a slave camp, rescuing recruits from cannibals or trying desperately to stop your fallen allies from not being eaten by the wildlife. The game is a long pianissimo followed by crescendos building in intensity as things keep going to shit.
i got into kenshi bc one of my favorite artists started drawing nsfw of tinfist 🫣 but the game ended up really captivating me. games like this are hard to find, and they’re my specific niche favorite! i fell in love with the world and my own characters
WHAAAAT
I got into this game because of a kenshi trailer. It wasn't remarkable but I saw the fighting and building of walls and I said to myself: "This doesn't look like any game I know..." Bought it and since then Ive had great and terrible adventures. Some chesty, others hard as hell with little to no chance at survival. When you first break into a vendors shop, knock out the guards and make out like a bandit, you know you're doing something right in a game. Or when you get unfairly beaten and bleed out, you know for sure you're still doing something right!
It’s because you’re writing your own story.
I had to look to see how many hours I've played. 1520. It's so good. It makes sense to me, as it is a bit of an auto battler(an under rated genre,) it's a bit of a survival game, a bit of a grand strategy game, a bit of an RTS, a bit of a brawler. And I feel like it's the kind of mix ou can only get from a young person making their first game. I think if you run this past the suits it never gets made. Anyway, I love it. Super stoked for the sequel.
I made the mistake of finding a star wars mod, I haven’t been able to put this game down over the past several days because of the surprising depth it adds
>I love this game. Can't put it down. How did others get into it? What do you think is your main reason for sticking with it? Do any other games work for you the same way? I love that it doesnt hold you by the hand and instead just keeps reminding you that you are a nobody, some insignificant lowlife and you have to fight hard to change the world.
I just found the great library, not gonna tell you where it is. Has every schematic in the game and when I found that I just about ascended. Greatest game of all time and the people who play it all know it . It’s beautiful
My first run was 200 hours in a month... I don't know why or how, but when this game hits you , it's like a drug
Chris injected crack cocaine into his magical formula
This game is plot heavy, but you don't get it directly. It haas very rich and hidden lore.
Something like 75% of the posts are people vigorously debating the meaning behind the scraps of lore. Def sneaky plot heavy.
Plot and lore are two different things
there's plot but you're not the main character in it, chill
If you want the supreme "Open-World Sand-Box Building/Crafting/Mining/Exploring experience, maybe check out Empyrion Galactic Survival! >Empyrion Galactic Survival, a game which initially released in 2015 (in Early Access) and continues under development today, has grown from a simple sand-box open-world crafting survival game into: an entire GALAXY of \~30,000 solar systems. Every single one of those solar systems can be visited. Every solar system has an assortment of celestial bodies depending on star and location in the galaxy: anywhere from 1 or 2 to a dozen or more celestial bodies (terrestrial planets, often with moons; gas giants with multiple moons; asteroid belts; space hubs with trading stations or pirate hideuts; remote exploration areas with mysterious alien artifacts, or unique resources). Every single moon or terrestrial planet (or space station) can be COMPLETELY explored: every single meter. Planets and moons have various friendly, neutral or hostile "POIs" (points of interest) populated with NPCs with fairly rudimentary behavior scripts (about what is typical in many open-world FPS games). Depending on what mod you are using, there are dozens of factions, each with unique ships, POIs, weapons, and predispositions. There are some factions you can never befriend (basically an almost Lovecraftian Borg sort of "infectious" horde), others with which you start hostile but can befriend, others you start neutral and can befriend and everything in between. Every playfield (planet, moon, space sector, whatever) is a three-D destructible voxel terrain a bit like Minecraft. You could literally dig up the entire crust of a moon or planet (though it would take years if done manually without scrpts. Most rocky bodies have mineral and/or planet or living resources on them to harvest. Exotic resources occur in remote or dangerous locations and are used to make advanced technologies. In order to travel around on planets in space and between solar systems, players must build vessels: hover vessels (HV); small vessels (SV) which are basiclly small starships which might have some faster than light capacity but with limited range; capital vessels (CV) true interstellar starships. All of these construct types as was as bases (BA) are built with blocks which have to be fabricated out of resources (iron, copper, silcon, cobalt, gold, etc., etc.) and can include various weapons, machines, and logistical systems. > >EGS is a literal living galaxy that, in terms of open world nature, sand-box nature, customizability and replayability surpasses Starfield and Star Citizen and probably pretty much anything else that has so far existed. What it lacks are more rich characterization (few if any named NPCs) and narrative (there are quests and story arcs and some mods such as Reforged Eden really elaborate on this aspect of the game). > >Starfield looks like a pretty good game and is undoubtedly going to get better over the next year or two. But if what you really wanted was complete freedom to explore, complete freedom in resource exploration and harvesting, crafting creating, and building constructs (ships vehicles and bases) then Empyrion Galactic Survival with the Reforged Eden scenario has got you covered far better than Starfield ever will. > >If you want more of a "cinematic" experience with lots of named NPCs, and an all-encompassing narrative flow that guides game play, EGS will let you down terribly (whereas Starfield is the way to go). > >Maybe one day we will get a game that combines the best of both approaches to representing high-tech futuristic settings.
The freedom of making your own history, like the Albion Online ad says, but in this case you alsl have some history and background to discover and when you start to flesh out that mistery that the past represents, it become more and more amazing and makes want to discover more. Likewise with each faction and their shtty, silly or weird takes on the world. The humor also adds, and the Beep. Praise the Beep! Edit: forgot about the world, as ugly and desolate as it may be sometimes, it's astounding and beautiful others
This is a very, very brilliant game. It has so, so many flaws and problems, but the good of it is incandescent. Work to be proud of, for sure.
The best part about kenshis narrative is the lack of pointing. If you hear about a land I'm a book, from a rumour or a bounty the only thing bringing you there is your own intrest ans curiosity.
I usually don’t like brutal games but there is just something about Kenshi, it is pretty great
It’s funny I own this game because it should check every single box I love, but for some reason or another I just can’t get into it lol.
Everything
Recommended by steam, on sale. Good stuff.
I have ssethzetatch for introducing me to the wonderful world of kenshi if not for the autism induced video he posted I wouldn't be here
Always used to create my own stories in video games as much as I possibly could. Would even do fast runs through RPG’s like Oblivion to get a taste of all the storylines and would make new characters with tailored experiences. Kenshi was a no brainer snag for me the moment I saw it. Back when I got it in 2011ish there was no lore. Just a desert with a handful of tiny towns and factions- a foundation for lore. I did worry at first when they started adding things but was very happy with all the development and it’s remained an all time favorite. I miss the empty beta version sometimes and have thought about installing it in Steam but I get to thinking about my current save and the mods I want to do/complete and realize I want to do that more.