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Wot I Think - RimWorld: RoyaltySycophants and Sick-o-‘phants
Sycophants and Sick-o-‘phants
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:SteamPrice:£15.50/€16.80/$20 (requires base game to play)
It’s been 28 years since 1992’s Dune II, and like many people out there, I’d long ago stopped seriously hoping for another videogame to do justice to Frank Herbert’s legendary science fiction series. So it’s with surprise and delight, then, that I can tell you the best Dune game in three decades is here… and it’s a procedurally generated sitcom, played through a colony management game. Because whileRimWorld: Royalty, the first DLC for Ludeon Studios’ space settlement hit, isn’t jaw-dropping in terms of the raw bulk of features it adds to the game, what it does for the game’s atmosphere - for me at least - is properly magic.
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RimWorldgot popular, I think, because it’s a well-tuned machine forgenerating storiesabout people thrown together in a survival situation, built on top of a small-scale, compulsively satisfying, city builder game. It had a fairly exemplary ascent through early access, with regular, substantive content updates. And even when it seemed those were at an end with the 1.0 release at the end of 2018, its modder-friendly design kept the party going until last week’s surprise release, not just of Royalty, but of a free 1.1 update too, with its own substantial feature list.
Here’s someone with a lightsaber, about to beat the shit out of a giant sloth.
It’s one of my favourite games, for all of these reasons. It is, I’ll say with whatever authority you’ll allow me, the only successful attempt at making a more user-friendly iteration of theDwarf Fortressformula. But with that said, if it had attempted to directly replicate DF’s theme and atmosphere, I think it would have pissed me right off. Instead, RimWorld anchored itself on a science fiction setting that started off extremely vague, but ended up surprisingly coherent.
You can find even more ruins now! Here’s a settlement I made in a broken down tomb, where the settlers ended up eating their dinner next to an ancient, broken-open sarcophagus. Very relaxing.
Here’s the guest house I made for “the lads”.
In one genuinely laugh out loud bit of procedural generation, on mysecond dayafter crash landing on a planet, a local aristocrat asked if i wouldn’t mind looking after their pets for a couple of weeks while they attended to business offworld. The pets were nine elephants. Nine elephants,with bubonic plague. “No problem milord, I’ll get right on it” - gives a whole new meaning to sick-o-‘phantsy, eh?
For the king!
I’ve seen people moaning that quests are rarely worth it for the rewards they give, and I guess they might be right? But if you’re playing RimWorld to win, you’re not really playing RimWorld. Min-maxing and optimisation seems completely pointless in a game about generating dramatic interactions between little bobble headed space fools, and if it (rightly) doesn’t interest you, you’ll find the new Royalty quests greatly amplify the RPG elements of running your settlement.
And that brings me to the other real masterstroke of this DLC’s theme. When your colonists begin gaining imperial ranks, you see, they get demanding. It starts with demands for slightly better bedrooms, which seems fair enough. But before long they’re decreeing their fellow settlers make them a human leather corset, or start throwing wobblies because they haven’t got a uranium harp. In the end, they’ll insist on having throne rooms, and gargantuan thrones from which they will make speeches to the people who were once their fellow, dirt-dwelling raccoon-stranglers. It’s at once a great driver for more emergent interpersonal weirdness, and a new set of challenges for otherwise too-stable mid- and late-game settlements.
Some things never change.
There’s more, of course, and it’s definitely worth pointing out that Royalty brings back RimWorld’s music composer, Alistair Lindsay, to double the game’s gorgeous, space-western ambient soundtrack. But feature-wise, you’re pretty much looking at what I’ve described above. For fifteen quid, I think that’s fine? I’ve had about 16 hours on it so far, and not started to feel I’ve begun tapping out the new content yet. I’ve seen people protest that you can get equivalent amounts of features for free with mods. And, erm, yes. You… can? I just don’t see how that’s an argument against buying Royalty.
Here is a completely unhyped, completely straightforward expansion - in the old-school sense of the term - that adds a few strong new systems to the game, as well as a whole bunch of new variables to feed into its various narrative generation mechanics. And thanks to the endlessly repeatable, emergence-focused creature that RimWorld is, it’s enough to completely refresh your sense of compulsion, even if you felt you’d done it all to death with RimWorld 1.0. Hurry up and buy it, peasant, or those fucking elephants are going to die.
