Kenshi Impressions/Help Thread

TheRealFluent

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Alright, so on a whim I picked this up recently and decided to give it a go. Boy am I glad I did, this is now my favorite game since Kingmaker and I feel it may go down as one of my favorites ever. So here's why I like it so much.

You're in an enormous, and I mean enormous, hand-crafted open-world. There are many biomes and the map is just gigantic, reminiscent of something like Asheron's Call. You're thrown into this world and expected to survive any way you can. It's harsh, you have to find a way to make money, by trading, robbing, farming, mining; whatever you can manage to start. You build up your cats (money) and then can hire on other people to help you along the way. You start getting attached to them the more they travel with you and survive tough encounters, and they even have some banter here and there.

The game is open-ended and lets you do whatever you want. The game doesn't revolve around you, you'll see skirmishes between factions in the wilds, you'll see factions killing monsters (which you can then loot, this was a great way to make money for me early on), and the game world evolves and goes on without your input. Every little upgrade you can manage helps a lot and there's a ton to sink your teeth into. I built a little outpost and started training on training dummies to get my melee attacks a bit better, as well as training on a locked box for lockpicking. I had 2 workers mining copper and hauling it to my storage box so I can take it all and make a nice profit in the town I'm near.

Then Dust Bandits show up. They demand 2000 cats every other day, a ridiculous sum at this point, so I am probably going to have to abandon my outpost and move. Which is cool, because the game is playing in a way that you write your own story, so my little band of adventurers are going to have to find a new home, probably buy a house in town where it's safe and go from there. Exploration is great, there's stuff all over the place to find, monsters to slay (or run desperately from), factions to deal with, jobs to do, bounties to hunt and more. Tons of crafting and some base building which feels organic since you're playing an RPG and it's adding to your overall experience. It's just been a great time with this game for me and it's surprised me a lot.

If you guys have any questions feel free to ask. I'm only several hours in and barely cracking the surface, but I have a few neat things figured out I can probably help with. I highly recommend this game for something totally unique and different, just give it some time to really grab you.
 
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Well worth checking out, just give it some hours because it starts slow. You have to earn your way at the start but when you start doing that it becomes very rewarding.
 
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it's been on my wishlist for ages but I've never jumped in.
 
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It's release timing is a bit unfortunate. It will have to be on this year's poll for the Watch's GotY but nobody has had a chance to see it yet.
 
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it's been on my wishlist for ages but I've never jumped in.

Should give it a shot, I'm really glad I did. So many memorable moments so far, thankfully captured in my Let's Plays (if anyone watches them though, is another story). The game really managed to suck you in and is very, very addictive. I just had an encounter last night that really messed my team up, hungry bandits attacked and stole our food, I had to carry the Dust Boss Bandit to a prison across the desert and we were all weakened and beat up pretty good. It was really intense stuff. And the cool thing is that when you're KO'd in combat, as long as you're patched up you gain the Toughness stat, which makes you more rugged for next time. Hell of a game, really.
 
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I love it too, what a great great experience it is.

Awesome to hear, bro. The game is such an underrated gem right now that I feel it's going to be a classic, a cult type of classic in a few years. Such a cool game.
 
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Other cool features include an *enormous* handcrafted world map, where you can click on it directly and your party will walk there the best route available. And even though it's humongous you can turn the speed up to triple speed and the walking back and forth is not too bad. You won't want triple speed if you don't know the area, but for certain things it's a great speed to get you back to town quickly.

I bought a house in town, crafted a copper storage bin and have 2 permanent workers mining copper outside of town. When the bin gets full, Bark, one of my laborers empties it by selling it to local merchants. You can make a ton of catans that way. I'm still working on getting a strong enough team (now featuring my trained pack bull, Charlie) to where if the dust bandits come demanding money I can tell them to stuff it and defend my outpost. For now I have to abandon it though and explore more, get better gear and more trained companions.

I've also joined the Shinobi Thieves, aka the Thieves Guild and they have special training equipment to increase your stealing abilities. I've already pilfered a bunch of good stuff at nighttime from certain houses, but got caught and had to serve a few days in prison, where I subsequently escaped from one night while the guards were sleeping. I had a bounty of 1000c but it was only temporary and now I'm off scot-free. Can't wait to pick some locks now with my special ninja backpack that allows me to haul a ton of stuff each time I steal from a place. Look out world, Samsonar the Thief is coming to a town near you. ;)
 
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Can you play solo or is a squad mandatory?
 
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Can you play solo or is a squad mandatory?

Squad is pretty mandatory, unless you somehow build your solo dude into a real killing machine. The game sort of favors 1 amazing fighter over 10 average ones, such as samurais were back in the old days, one great samurai may be worth 100 average men on the battlefield. So technically you could do that but it would be difficult. Having a squad just means more firepower, more carrying space, more mouths to feed which is not a big problem and just more help. You don't have to micromanage them much and just send the whole squad together as one unit. But if you played solo I'd love to see how you build your character into a super samurai that can wipe out squads alone. It is definitely possible within the gameplay realm of Kenshi, I feel.
 
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I tried the demo and found it pretty rough. The setting is neat, but I found myself constantly fighting with the camera the entire time.

They really need to implement some kind of system for the camera where it auto-adjusts for you when you enter buildings, etc, so your view isn't constantly being obscured.
 
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I tried the demo and found it pretty rough. The setting is neat, but I found myself constantly fighting with the camera the entire time.

They really need to implement some kind of system for the camera where it auto-adjusts for you when you enter buildings, etc, so your view isn't constantly being obscured.

True, but if you double click your character's portrait you get an "auto-follow" camera. That helps when traveling for me.
 
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Still crickets here? I'm shocked. I wrote a review/love letter for it on the Codex, I'll quote it here.

Kenshi Review by Fluent

Kenshi. What can you say about a game like Kenshi? Once in a blue moon, no, a lifetime, a game may come out that completely changes your world. It changes the way you think of gaming, the way you think of innovation and what could be done within the gaming medium and think of all the possibilities that could happen because of it. To me, that game is Kenshi.

This is a once in a lifetime game. I've never played anything like it in my life before, and I've been playing RPGs both on console and PC for roughly 30 years. Let me start by saying this is not a feature-complete review; according to Steam I have played 57 hours in the past *several days* and that is barely enough to even scratch the surface of this behemoth of a game. So please keep in mind that I haven't really gotten that far, but I've gotten far enough to know that this game is a huge breath of fresh air for the gaming industry.

First, you get to choose your background and starting options. You get several choices, each deeply impacting how you start off the game and the situation you are in. The name of the game is survival, this is not your typical or traditional CRPG nor is it a typical survival or strategy game. It blends elements from several genres; survival, real-time strategy, RPGs, and even borrows from games like Total War. The idea is that *you* create the story. You won't find many prewritten quests here. You won't find NPCs who tell you long, drawn out stories about what enemy to slay or what item to go gather for them from a local cave. Instead, you make the story. The game is so rich with "toys" and gameplay mechanics that yourself coupled with your imagination leads to a more intriguing story than any author can pen. You not only write the story, you ARE the story.

In Kenshi, you'll want to try and survive by any means necessary. This could mean mining iron or copper ore to start, selling it at the local town and affording enough to feed yourself and maybe hire a companion or two on board. Or, you could go the less savory route of thievery, complete with lockpicking, sneaking ability and even the option to KO a victim so you can move about freely while they are laying on the ground unconscious. You could also decide to become a trader; take some goods from one town, hire some mercenaries and make a trip to a faraway land to sell and make a profit. There are so many options to choose from that you can literally do anything you want in the game - if you can get away with it. The world is your playground and Kenshi gives you every imaginable tool at your disposal to play with.

Recruiting companions is an important part of Kenshi, as you'll want to create a squad of warriors, tech specialists, armor smiths, field medics and more that can not only withstand the punishment of bandit ambushes, bonedog attacks or blood spiders trying to eat you alive, but that can also hold up an outpost if you choose to build one. Yes, you can build bases in Kenshi, and not only that - whole cities. You can create your own faction in a world that is already littered with a few dozen factions as it stands. These factions also have reactivity within them. The Holy Nation, for example, will attack Starving Bandits on sight, and also give trouble to any non-human character as they are extremely xenophobic religious zealots. If you build an outpost expect bandits to test you, demanding sums of money in return for not razing the place, or the occasional raid by hungry Garrus who want to eat your hard-worked on crops. The game is very dynamic and there is always something surprising around every corner.

It should be noted that the map is the largest handcrafted map since Daggerfall, sizing up at an incredibly impressive 870km squared. And yes, you heard it right, it is handcrafted. There is no procedural generation in terms of the landmass, it is all there for you to explore as you wish - if you can survive. The game features dozens of unique areas and many biomes to go along with the plethora of factions and monsters to slay. You could be traveling for days, which in most cases is always a tricky situation as you must feed your group but also stay alive if you get into a scuffle, or worst, lose a scuffle. A great feature of Kenshi is that if you lose a fight and your characters don't outright die, you can regain your health with first aid skills and you actually gain points in the Toughness stat for taking such a beating. Now *that* is innovation, when even losing a fight results in a huge gain.

Beyond all of that, you can smuggle illegal narcotics, grow crops, craft armor, weapons and more, from leather to steel and all in between. You can create your own power generators to power your workshops and even create biofuel generators that run off plants. You can research a ton of new tech, find many blueprints of items to craft, and best of all is that all of your skills increase by usage, so nothing is wasted. Even if you start off as a terrible weaponsmith, keep forging blades and eventually you could become the best in the land. There are ruins to plunder, some guarded by dangerous beasts and others free to take what you like. You can buy pack animals to carry a lot of your accumulated goods, as well as help fight for you. You can find rare items, monsters of lore that are extremely dangerous and obscure, gain reputation with factions by collecting bounties and delivering them to the local prisons and so much more. This is really just the beginning of what Kenshi offers as a game.

I'm not sure what else I can say. I can talk about how blood on the ground will attract predators, so it would be wise not to build a camp near a recent battlefield. Or how you can clear out nests of enemies so they don't respawn, lose a limb fighting and get a robotic replacement, or even how you'll be traveling at night and get ambushed, only to wipe out the enemy and become stronger with a real sense of satisfaction in the meantime, but words are not really going to do this game justice. At 57 hours I feel I am just beginning my journey into the world of Kenshi, a journey that I am extremely grateful I discovered. I would go as far to say that this game will definitely be a cult classic in the near future, and heralded as one of the best games of all-time once the dust settles on the recent release. It truly is a unique and creative masterpiece, and although not perfect (the game engine runs on one CPU core), it was extremely ambitious and they delivered more than most games of this type combined. I highly recommend this game with my highest recommendation possible. This game is very close to dethroning Pathfinder: Kingmaker as my GOTY 2018 and I still see I have hundreds of kilometers to go.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please pick this game up at full price and support these wonderfully creative developers. Who knows, they may change their mind if the game sells well enough and implement even more features, possibly as a free DLC (even if I would throw oodles of cash at them regardless if it was free or not!) Right now they say it's feature complete, but if enough people continue to buy it, well, who knows. Stop what you're doing and buy this game, but give it quite a few hours before you start to learn the ropes. This is not an easy pick-up-and-play, it requires some determination, some learning, trial and error and some luck. But once it starts rolling, boy does it roll hard.

Thank you for reading. - Fluent aka J Dumont
 
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Thanks Pladio! I got lucky and bought this on a whim, so glad I did. :)
 
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So no one's playing this gem? I'm 170 hours in and have barely scratched the surface, for real. It's a massive, difficult game. I'm enjoying every minute of it though. Just got through the Fog Islands where Fogmen swarm you like rodents and try to get your team spread out so they can pick them off one by one. That was an adventure for the ages, lemme tell ya. Half my team had to be carried out as I booked out of there as fast as I could!
 
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It's on my wish list! It hasn't even been out for two months yet, though. Gotta finish up Valkyria 4, Tower of Time, and maybe Kingdom Come first. Then Yakuza 0. That should put me near the end of Tomb Raider's DLC content so I can start playing through that. Then I can play this. Or maybe PoE2. Or Kingmaker. Or Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Or Legrand Legacy. Or replay some BattleTech…. OH! I still haven't played Metro 2033!

Jeez, I really need to retire.
 
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Yikes, that's a lot of games, @Zloth; ! I'd play Kenshi before anything else on that list, though. ;)

I'm just surprised it's still flying low a bit on the radar. It's had solid sales and very positive reviews on Steam but it seems here and even on the Codex no one is talking about it much. It's a really unique and creative gem and I hope more people get in there and check it out! :)
 
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