Space Station 13

Lerxst

Yeah... anyone know about or play this game now or in the past? I've tried it out but am looking for a similar game that may be a bit more accessible to play. If there's one thing SS13 is, "easy" isn't it!



It's clunky. It has horrific lag due to the BYOND engine. It has equally poor controls. It has a painful UI. It has severely dated graphics.

But the game is some of the most fun I've experienced in an MMO in almost 20 years now!

I've been reading up on it on and off for about a year. I tried it out now and then, only to be painfully confused. I finally tried it out more seriously a couple weeks ago and am now hooked... after blowing my hand off in a freak accident with a blow torch and O2 tank, cutting my bare feet on broken glass from self-inflicted explosion and then seeking shelter by sucking myself out of an airlock, mistaken for the sick bay in my blind panic.... and that was just on a single person server. Add 90 people to situations like that one and you have the gist of the game. Oh... and add a sadistic, player-controlled, malfunctioning AI to the mix, just to keep things interesting

I'm just wondering if there is any other game that comes even remotely close to this one in terms of game play and experience. One that might be a bit more playable, easier to get in to and "polished" at least, in terms of the game engine.

Limnic

There are some station sims that have been made in the same vein, but none that have quite the variety of features Station 13 has.

Ion is trying to be a game following the same concept.

Rimworld riffed on things pretty heavily too, though it's single player.

Ones like Space Engineers and Interstellar Rift kinda play off the same sim-style elements of it with a bit more focus on building and exploration with life-sim elements marginalized.

I know there's some others as well that have chased the same design, but offhand I can't remember their names and I don't think any of them have yet to encapsulate the full suite of features.

EDIT: I always preferred to play a nice AI though, 'cept the one time I named myself Shodan.

MadFrenchie

Project Zomboid has that level of world interactivity if you're looking for a zombie-themed version.  Leaving ovens on can caused fires, the electricity eventually goes out just as it would if society were to break down and nobody were there to maintain it in real life, etc.  Pretty cool little game, and it has multiplayer servers.

Lerxst

Holy crap, does Ion sound good! Too bad nothing new has been released about it and people are saying it's dead

Ah yes, PZ! Played that to death a couple years back, before multiplayer. Got pretty good at it; enough to cheat death for months on end. In fact, it actually got rather boring after getting to a certain point and being able to hold my own during a zombie hoard, collecting water and growing food. I felt the multiplayer would be nice, but not really in the atmosphere of what I liked about being the one and only sole survivor in the world.

Rimworld is currently my "go to" game for colony building/management and I love the evil sadistic streak it brings out in people... and the fact that you actually can do those things to begin with!

I just kind of like the natural flow of a SS13 game though; how things can go to Hell on their own due to dereliction of duties, minor problems snowballing into major ones, paranoid crew members offing one another for fear of a doppelganger or traitor, etc. I'd say it's a very "organic" feeling game while the others are a bit more contrived.

Guess I'll be sticking with it a bit longer!