After not seeing anything about this game for over a year, a video popped up on Kotaku and actually looked kinda cool.

Regardless of what you duders opinions are, I'm still probably going to get it for this weekend since I have a couple days off in a row (which is rare for me). But have you played it? Do you like it? Do you have any interest in playing it?

It seems like they have NPCs in the game to make it so the game isn't dependent on an active user base but that an active user base will make the game much better. But if you have played it, is there any way to ensure that you get to the same town as your friends? Like is there some sort of matchmaking/private server?

Sorry for all the questions but so much of this game still feels like an unknown.

I really like the style. It crashed on the first loading to a new town tho, and then I had to go to bed. Will pick it up again tomorrow tho. Very intrigued.

@noboners: I played in all the betas of it but I haven't played the full thing yet. From what I remember it was interesting but there are some things that worried me about its long term life.

The NPCs don't actually do much. They sort of just grow the population which lets the players build more things. They don't defend the city, they don't go out and work. Some of them act like vendors but those ones are sort of built into the vendor shops that you make.

If a town doesn't have an active player base, not a lot gets done. You can filter towns by where you're friends are playing, but if its full you're going to have to wait for a slot. If you get to a certain level and build a home in a town, you secure a spot there.

One problem I've had with it and that I hope they sorted is that it's really a very single player game. Think of it like Dark Souls or something. Other players will pop in and out of your game. And that can be terrible for you. Your character will die in the darkness, one time me and another guy where helping each other tunnel through a structure. He brought a light with him, but whenever he picked it up, both he and the light would vanish and I'd start to die until he put it down again. There was no way for us to party up so that we'd always be together.

Played it a little bit the other day. Only have three key questions/things right now:

1. What is up with the visual filter it has on? The whole screen has a sort of.. greasy vaseline blurryness to it which is make it very hard to look at. I feel like I've played or watched this game before and it didn't have that? It's really messing with my eyes. Maybe its th depth-of-field effect gone berserk but I feel like it is on near view stuff as well.

2. This one isn't quite legit (since I didn't look hard myself) but how can I start a new town or whatever? Every town I drop into looks like it's already "done". So I can't define an easy starting goal for myself. I at least want to mess with a clean slate at first so I can understand what the process is for building and what each building does etc.

3. Not sure about the online/multiplayer aspect of it. As @jesus_phish said, people are pretty much fading in and out of existence. Enough so that it's sort of pointless for them to be there. I'm sure some amount of it was server load. For example I was shooting at a giant monster as it attacked the town, and as I was, the game would suddenly load in like 10 other shots from other people and it looked all laggy etc.

I still want to try it more but, as usual, way too many other games and way too little time.

@seikenfreak: Go to the metro station and you can travel to new towns. You can filter them by a lot of things, like friends, population, new, old etc. Then you can travel to them.

@jesus_phish: Yea I knew that but even when I went to the "new towns" with low population, they looked all built up already.

Okay now that I've put some more time into the game... I'm still not 100% sure of what I'm doing. We need a Quicklook EX

I have a vague idea of what its supposed to be, but it lagged way too much for me to do anything. Aside from that, I had a hard time figuring out what I was supposed to be doing. I'm definitely interested in this weird minecrafty thing but, its just not really giving me anything to go on. I think I saw some tutorial videos online that I'll check out. Its got style at least. Without direction it seems kind of a mess.

While playing this game it reminded me somewhat of No Man's Sky, but without the actual cool parts (you know, travelling through space and landing on planets).

My first town I entered and saw all the residents gathered on the same spot and they kept upvoting each other so they all leveled up or something? Players will find ways to exploit the system I guess, but seeing that in my first seconds of the game was kind of a bummer.

I decided to leave them and take the bus to the island to do some mining. The island was flooded with flying pigs that tried to hurt me and I had nothing to defend myself with. After coming back to the town they also invaded that very town and I was kind of running for my life the whole time. I decided to log off and play some more the next day.

Logging in to the game the next day I simply got a message that the town I was in was no more and I should go to a new one. OK, I guess.. I was mining some minerals for my new town as well and plenty of people chipped in. But soon we got one of the big godzilla types stepping on all of our buildings, we had little to defend ourselves with (2 canons) and our town just went to shit basically. Also did not help that somehow after I entered one of the canons I got bugged; I couldn't do anything anymore but running around (not even jumping). The only thing left was restarting the game.

I have no idea what the point of all of this is. Am I upgrading my character through all of it? Why are we building these towns if they're probably gone the next day you log in?

I would like this game more if you could build a town by yourself, find matrouska dolls and order those NPC's around to do mining or defending your town. Then find other towns in the void (other players) and try to destroy their town or make peace with them. Like a little RTS/Minecraft/Settlers/Tower Defense game.

@seikenfreak: When they fully launch later this month there will be a way to 'Reset" the population so you can rebuild them. Most of what you are seeing is from the Beta.

@dussck: You may be close, with your statement about NMS. The "point" as I see it anyway, are for you to progress simply for the sake of it. With enough help you can get your town in shape to withstand the odd attack. The main problem is that you need folks who rotate in/out of your town through the day. So try and invite folks (once you can do that) from other timezones.