Balrum: Why RPGWatch isn't playing?

Curious as to why this game didn't get much attention here, outside of myself of course. Is it market saturation? Balrum is basically D:OS without a party or weird humor. It is graphically weak, but game play strong. Isn't this site supposed to be about PLAYING games?

I wonder if some folks saw the farming aspect and just ignored the game because of that. To me, this was a mistake by Balcony Team. Farming=Casual in almost everyone's mind. In fact, I almost didn't buy this when I read about farming and house building. This isn't a casual game. It is better than or equal to most of the indies I've played in the last two years. Lots of puzzles, several skills, tons of crafting, loot everywhere, base building, etc.

I don't farm, but the base building is kinda cool in this game. Your grandpa gives you a device that takes you to a small land area that is only reachable by the device. Since I'm not a builder, I just set up a tent, tons of storage containers, a well and crafting stations. Once you've played for a while, you will learn how to create teleporters that will take you to the middle of the various maps. You can return to your home any time that you are not in combat, so it is perfect for loot hoarding until you're ready to head back to town. There is an 80-turn cooldown/visit, so that you don't run home in between each battle

Just curious.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/424250

Other thoughts I've had about the game:

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32831

Why not me?
Because I'm on Stardew Valley. And because of SV I've also put Dragon's Dogma on hold. Not to mention a backlog filled with already old titles I didn't even touch yet (Blackguards 2 for example).

Simply not enough time for everything. Doesn't matter I won't play Balrum, but when, impossible to plan ahead.

I backed it on KS and kicked the tires for a couple hours when it released, but it never pulled me in. I'm really not big on crafting/gathering systems, and there's not a lot of interesting story early on. I also really despise the food/drink bars. They are just an incredible annoyance, and being buried on the character screen was poorly thought out imo. It doesn't add difficulty, just pointless clicking and inventory management.

I also rolled a mage, and wish I had gone fighter after a couple of encounters due to mana issues.

I've yet to play witcher 3, some divinity games, one with co-op, and, yes, Stardew Valley…

There were a few things (including the graphics, TBH) that put me off, like the farming aspect, the hunger countdown, etc. But, more than that, there's just so many games out there that I'm only going to play the ones I expect to be really good.

I find quite a lot of indie RPGs pretty mediocre - not terrible, but 6's or 7's, let's say. They just aren't going to make it through my backlog. A small indie RPG needs to get a very enthusiastic reception to persuade me, like Underrail, and I'm not really getting that sense from Balrum.

greywolf00 said:

I backed it on KS and kicked the tires for a couple hours when it released, but it never pulled me in. I'm really not big on crafting/gathering systems, and there's not a lot of interesting story early on. I also really despise the food/drink bars. They are just an incredible annoyance, and being buried on the character screen was poorly thought out imo. It doesn't add difficulty, just pointless clicking and inventory management.

I also rolled a mage, and wish I had gone fighter after a couple of encounters due to mana issues.

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I too went with mage, and like most games, mages don't come into their own until later. This game requires some strategy to play a mage. As far as food and drink go, the devs added a toggle at the beginning of the game to make it much less of a hassle. If you play on novice mode, you eat and drink at the beginning of the day and forget about it. On normal, you'll eat twice. What I did was put bread and a water bag in my quick slots. There are hydrated/fed icons on the main screen. If those go away, I eat or drink.

I strongly suggest taking armor crafting and alchemy if you play a mage. I don't play the game straight. I use an exploit so that I can take all of the non-combat skills. I still have to pay for them, but I give myself enough life points, so that I can do so. That is just me though. Lots of people like having to make choices so that they can enjoy replays. Nowadays, I rarely replay anything. There is too much new stuff all the time.

Ripper said:

There were a few things (including the graphics, TBH) that put me off, like the farming aspect, the hunger countdown, etc. But, more than that, there's just so many games out there that I'm only going to play the ones I expect to be really good.

I find quite a lot of indie RPGs pretty mediocre - not terrible, but 6's or 7's, let's say. They just aren't going to make it through my backlog. A small indie RPG needs to get a very enthusiastic reception to persuade me, like Underrail, and I'm not really getting that sense from Balrum.

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Fair enough. I'd rate Balrum about an 8.5, but I didn't start out feeling that way. The devs have been patching about 1-2 times a week, balancing the game and ironing bugs. Those have helped my rating climb.

One thing that should be pointed out; I don't really care about story. I need a loose framework to give my character a reason to exist, but that's about it. Balrum's story is very slow to develop. You're basically a young adult being given "graduation/tutorial" tasks in the beginning. Your goal is to figure out why the townspeople fled to this area and why that may have been a mistake. The adults are hiding this and you want to know. This slowly unfolds as you leave the starting area.

Yeah, I hardly ever replay anything either.

Glad they went back and tweaked the food/drink thing.

I'll inevitably go back to it eventually and try to hit the $1/hr of playtime mark, but the early game just failed to do anything interesting for me. Little story, incredibly generic turn based combat (which is a real shame) and character development felt very bland.

They clearly invested a lot of time into their crafting systems and world building, those just aren't areas that strike a cord with me.

I do hope the game does well commercially for them though. I'm always a fan of small teams with an obvious passion.

crpgnut said:

Fair enough. I'd rate Balrum about an 8.5, but I didn't start out feeling that way. The devs have been patching about 1-2 times a week, balancing the game and ironing bugs. Those have helped my rating climb.

One thing that should be pointed out; I don't really care about story. I need a loose framework to give my character a reason to exist, but that's about it. Balrum's story is very slow to develop. You're basically a young adult being given "graduation/tutorial" tasks in the beginning. Your goal is to figure out why the townspeople fled to this area and why that may have been a mistake. The adults are hiding this and you want to know. This slowly unfolds as you leave the starting area.

Click to expand...

Well, if you had to cheat to enjoy the game, probably that is the reason right there.

It must be some kind of fail in design if you need to cheat before enjoying the game, unless of course you also have to cheat in other games to enjoy them!

I'm a KS backer and it's in my queue . Going by the rate they patch things up I decided to wait before playing it, so it's at the end of the queue.

I'm currently playing Shadowrun HK bonus content (after finishing Pillars of Eternity with the expac) and started playthroughs in Valkyria Chronicles, Satellite Reign and ME2 as well.

GG, I'm the type to mod/cheat games to match my preferences, so that isn't a fail on their part I'll also use walkthroughs, forums, and the internets seeking an edge. That is part of the fun for me. I rarely play a game straight.

That said, I have 2 pure games going along with my main cheat game. Now that I've experienced all the game has to offer, I know the best things to spend my life points on to ensure success. Farming, cooking, carpentry, and weapon crafting are totally unnecessary, unless you like those things. Armor crafting and alchemy are vital; especially as a mage.

In my opinion archery/daggers is the most powerful play type, but I like playing mages.

I was a KS backer too for Balrum, but my house is sold, we're moving and I have a huge backlog of games, and no place to play them. It's on the list, but I don't foresee me playing it for at least another 3 months.

I'm just distracted with a million other RPGs at the moment. Balrum will get some attention from me...someday.

I'm glad to hear you like it, crpgnut. I didn't back it and was on the fence about buying it. I might get it now when it goes on sale. But, yeah, saturation is a reason. I have tons of games which appealed to me more at first glance either on kickstarter or on release and now I have a huge number of unplayed games.

I m still trying to finish Fallout 4, and ESO is a big time sink. My backlog was huge before this was released. And as others have said, the initial comments were off-putting, namely that playing a mage is not really viable, and the game play includes a lot of repetitive farming and crafting.

Good question, I backed the game during their KS. I was quite active early on, talking about ideas with the devs and what not on their forums(since it was a really small group of people on there at first).

Many things happened and I have yet to actually play the game now that its out. Though I expect to have time to do that in a month or so.

I have a key too, but no time to play it. We did have a lot of coverage of Balrum on RPGWatch though, starting in July 2013 and ending (up to now) last week.
Apparently it is not the game that is high on everyone's list.

crafting and stuff seems to be well done, but other gameplay mechanics seem to be rather weak. I'll probably wait for a sale.

I haven't been playing it yet because it still keeps getting updates, some pretty big ones. I really don't feel like playing it through again - this one looks like one to dive into, say, six months from now when the developers decide they're done tinkering and responding to user feedback.

Your review actually supports that feeling it seems, since you mention it's quite time consuming, LPs are hard to come by, and the game only really supports one play through.

I definitely plan on buying it. It's sitting in my wishlist on Steam, ready to go...

For whatever reason I've been enamored with Diablo 2 clones so I've been playing a lot of Grim Dawn and I picked up Din's Curse to fool around with that.

I completed this a couple of weeks ago and I would highly recommend it. I often hold off playing a game to allow for patches etc. but with Balrum most of the updates are very minor and this is an absolutely playable game right now. If you want to wait fine but it's not a good reason to put it off imo.

It's a bit stingy on the learning points as crpgnut has said and I can understand why it would be tempting to change that to fully explore all of the skills available. There are a few skill books you can find in the world but they are specific (Sword level 2 for example) and in most cases I found them after already having spent my lp on them. It probably would have been better if those books simply gave you a 1 point increase in that skill to avoid frustration. Thirst and Hunger became trivial issues very quickly (and I started without the patched on options to reduce them). Don't forget Eschalon Book II and later had the same mechanic and I believe thats a highly regarded game here. The story is solid enough for this type of game and like crpgnut I don't need much to keep going. I like my exploration but not purely sandbox and the story held my attention well enough.

Overall I think this is an excellent debut from a small team and I hope it does really well because I want to see a bigger and better Balrum 2 in the future and I'll back it in a heartbeat.