Why Did We Forget Void Bastards

The worst sin you can commit as a roguelike is ending after killing mom. Void Bastatds forgot to put a mom in the first place.

if this doesn't pop off please don't get discouraged, this is great!

Void bastards is amazing at first when you don't know what you're doing and keep discovering neat ways to survive, but immediately becomes boring when you realize that going in guns blazing is the dominant strategy every time due to how the spawning mechanics works together with the resource economy

I think this "sloppy" style is actually very elegant, and if it's quicker to produce, you should use it.

Love this game but you're 100% correct, when it ends there's nothing to bring you back or make you consider different playstyles. That's fine for one-shot experiences that aren't meant to be replayed (Deadly Tower of Monsters comes to mind) but for a roguelite there NEEDS to be a final challenge to work towards, FTL certainly understood that but the similar game Convoy didn't, which is why it's in the same boat as Void Bastards. Excellent essay, the editing is top notch and the script flows very well, not having an annoying voice is a huge bonus as well. Looking forward to whatever comes next.

Void bastards reminds me a lot of the older game Heat Signature in that it's a heist game in space, but I felt like Heat Signature had a lot more replayability, though it was a top down game instead of a first person game- it had a lot of interesting things in it. You could need to extract a citizen off a ship, dock with the ship, use overwhelming firepower and time travel abilities to blast your way through the guards, throw down 5 packs of explosives into the room with the citizen you needed to extract, slow down time to throw a forcefield onto the citizen before he got blown up, and then read the future for 3 seconds to see where he'd get launched to when the explosives go off. Then as his shielded body was hurtled through the wall and glass of the ship into the void of space, directly to where you had predicted he'd be you teleport to him, grab him and then radio your ship to remotely pick you up before the ship you just stole him from has enough time to even call the guards.

1:59 man, the moment I heard that I just immediately went “HEY I KNOW THAT VOICE!” and yep I was right, that’s Kevin Brighting, voice of the narrator in the Stanley parable! It’s not really my type of game, but the fact they had him on (not just because he’s That Voice but I think he’s actually great for that computer/ai assistant type of character, it works really well) not to mention the great art direction gives me a lot of respect for this game. Great video :D

I loved Void Bastards, and I think you pretty much nailed it. I bought it on Day 1, the style and vibe of the whole thing was immaculate, and I really enjoyed the time I spent with it. But many hours in, I just lost the drive to keep going. I didn't hit a major roadblock or come up against any kind of miserable grind like other games I've stopped playing, but I also wasn't getting tantalisingly close to the next big progression goal, I wasn't honing my knowledge to theorise new killer builds that I could try next run. I was just... kinda doing the same things, reaching the same milestones in the same ways, predictably. And predictability is a death knell for this kind of game.

I didn't forget void bastards, it's a great game, I still recommend it to people sometimes.

I don't "forget it" it's just once it's done, it's done, it doesn't have a good game loop and that's okay! It's a brilliant game, and I'm excited for the sequel that, as far as I'm aware, leans more to the rogulike aspect which I genuinely feel is what this game was missing

You sound like a young version of the Toonami guy- Dead ass love it.

A good salesman does not sell good goods, rather they sell goods well.

Why Did We Forget Void Bastards: A Subversive Masterpiece

Because it was super shallow, got a super sneaky release, didnt get any post-release support...

Another issue i've had with Void Bastards is it's slow progression towards complex mechanics which lead to interesting gameplay interactions with eachother, and since such things are a staple of the genre, the game feels horribly rigid. While they are in-game, and you can use gadgets and weapons in smart ways to get situation in your favour, you are almost never forced to experiment and improvise on the spot, as your supply stockpile is pretty generous and more often than not it's more effective to slowly crawl around corners. I'll compare it to another breaking-into-spaceships-in-a-weirdly-dytopian-galaxy game - Heat Signature. The main difference in design philosophy of which is that it's mechanics are way more basic, but there are way, way more ways they interlock with eachother. Say, firing your weapons in Void Bastards is usually limited to 3 uses at most - you can fire to damage enemies, to trigger enviromental hazards or to distract enemies with gunfire. I haven't been in a situation where i used guns to do more than any of these three things. In Heat Signature, however, firing your main gun can lead to a cascading chain of events triggered by eachother. You can easily miss your shot because your character has alzheimers, and hit a shielded enemy instead, which would make your bullet ricochet into a room full of fuel. That room would then explode, sucking out the only guard with a keycard in this area of the ship, making traversal by foot impossible because your target is behind a locked room. However, since there's a giant hole in the spaceship now, you may as well try to dock your pod into it and maybe you can find another way to get past the roadblock. For this reason, i have clocked nearly 50 hours in Heat Signature and dropped Void Bastards after 6 hours. It's slowness is not compensated by complexity.

I prematurely abandoned it too.. and now I know why. It doesn’t need a sequel, just a really good mod to add all the skill curve and tension that the gameplay lacks

neat stuff, deserves more then 30 likes

It's so weird that I was just thinking about the game two days ago and then this vid popped up By the by, I think the bit about objectives in games stands out in a really good way - the contrast between the energy and passion in those 30 seconds and the almost monotone of the rest of the video is very charming.

I didn't forget! Need more. Excited for Wild Bastards but Void should have been longer and I hope it gets a more expansive sequel in the same setting with more cat and mouse mechanics. If they're going more combat oriented in Wild that's cool but my favorite parts of Void were the hair raising moments where the gigachad citizen was right around the corner and you have zero ammo and almost no health and a daring dangerous dash to the airlock. The feeling of helplessness in that game is peak when you exhaust your resources

Your laugh at the end, is such a nice touch. Glad you left it in.