Sons of the Forest … And maybe other stuff…
Hello, everybody. This is Shane R. Monroe and you’re in the passenger seat with me? It’s passenger seat radio. It is Friday, Friday, Friday, February 24th, And as you can hear by the sound of ariated water, I am indeed in the hot tub on my lunch break. Welcome to the show. I have not been. Oh, Wow. Hey, will be, is in 22 seconds in nice work. That’s the fastest since Travis came in last. I think that, uh, you have the record maybe anyway. Um, yeah, I wasn’t, I’m not feeling super great. You know, I tell you, since I’ve had COVID life has never quite been the same. I get sick more. You know, that a fib things showed up. I mean, it seems like a lot of things coincidentally happened right around that period of time. You know what I’m saying? So, I don’t know, it just, it definitely seems that way. So instead of being on the art trainer for 30 minutes, like a good boy, I decided to crawl in the hot tub and see if it would make me feel better. So why not throw the mic on and have a little show action besides, I’m eager to talk about Sons of the Forest, which was released yesterday At 11 AM Arizona time. Of course. So, um, obviously, you know, the first thing I wanted to do was see how it ran on the steam deck, which is not good. Um And I don’t think it really has anything to do with the steam deck. Sorry, I’ve got drainage going on if I cough. I apologize. I think the game itself being early access and probably a little bit rushed out the door. Uh There’s definitely some optimization issues with the game that I’m sure we’ll see patches for in the future. But from a technical standpoint, even on my well endowed gaming PC, the game eventually grinds to a halt and, you know, if you’re not near a safe spot, you could technically lose something. So I warn you with peace and love, peace and love. We’ll talk more about the game itself here in just a minute. But if you’re considering it, it’s $30 early access. Um but it is definitely not optimized. And even on a decent system, you’re probably going to feel some, some anguish if you’re an early adopter. But let’s talk about the game, shall we? So, I’ve talked about the forest like ad nauseam here on this podcast. In fact, when I registered the domain name, Sons of the forest dot com, which they still haven’t asked for it back. Nor have they answered any of my emails to them, telling them I would be happy to turn the domain name over to them for free. You know, I’m not looking for money. I just, I grabbed it before some asshole did knowing that I could turn it over whenever they wanted it. And, uh, I get crickets so either they’re really, really busy or they’re just ignoring their emails. I don’t know, so hard to say. But even now Sons of the Forest dot com will take you to my, one of my earlier um passenger seat radio episodes where I sort of review the game. So I thought that was kind of a nice thing just to kind of keep people interested. I may actually move it to this uh podcast episode. Um Instead, since this is actually going to be dealing with Sons of the forest, so let us continue, shall we? So I’m gonna assume that you kind of already know about the forest if you’re interested in Sons of the forest. So I’m gonna try not to cover a ton of old ground. Um Instead I’ll talk about some differentials between the two games. It’s very, very obvious that the developers were looking to strike a balance between introducing new and improved game concepts while keeping people comfortable with the old ways. And I think that could be a remarkable challenge. And I think for the most part, they have accomplished this which is huge kudos to end night development for, um, being able to keep people comfortable while still expanding and doing new things. And we’ll talk a little bit more about what that means in a minute. So much like the first game you are in a helicopter flying over what appears to be an island, maybe, maybe not, maybe it’s a peninsula, don’t know, but something happens and your helicopter goes down and you are stranded once again, just like the original game with pretty much no knowledge of what the hell you’re supposed to be doing. Survival. Of course is a key note and you do get some help along the way to help nudge you in the right direction. This time though, it appears you do not crash land on a random location but rather a fixed location up at the top of a snowy peak mountain. Um, what you get available to you right away, however, does appear to be random. So just like on the forest, you start surveilling your area that you crash land in and there will be numerous like suitcases, tote bags or not tote bags, but tote crates and numerous other things for you to harvest stuff from. You might get lucky and find a flashlight, you might not get lucky and just find a whole bunch of medication, right? I mean, it’s all randomized. I’ve been, I’ve been through the opening like four times now and every single time you get a little something different, which is kinda cool. I guess that’s how they throw the randomization in there while still trying to keep some more objective based gaming alive. So, as usual, you know, first rule of orders to get some food, find some water, maybe build a shelter, right and start the start the, you know, exodus that is figuring out what you’re supposed to do. So this time around, instead of waiting for you to get a map and discover things on your own, you’re immediately given a GPS unit, which you can bring up right from the beginning of the game and it will sort of guide you to weigh points of what you need to be doing. There are some pre configured waypoints on the GPS, but a lot of things are not yet available. You have to discover them on your own. Oh, that was quick. My jets timed out, get these back on. Um So when you first open your GPS, it’ll say go to site B or go to the, go to the site b locations of which there are three shown as little purple indicators on your GPS. So they’re all far away right from where you start. So you start looking around, right? So the first thing I always do is sort of do like a, a circular outward spiraling reconnaissance of my area, make sure I’m safe, see if there’s any mutants around, right? And maybe start doing some building. Now, I don’t want to build in the snow. Right. But in my immediate exploration, there is something up to the north of you or towards the top of the mountain that you immediately want to go in and start picking up resources. So the next thing you want to do is get the hell out of the snow. Now, in the forest, when you were in the snow and you didn’t have proper equipment on, uh You would start to freeze, you know, and eventually you’d be screwed in this game though. You sort of come prepared. It’s not like you were on a plane with Timmy and you crash and you have no knowledge that you’re going to be in a survival situation this time. You’re just a little bit better prepared. So you’re not in immediate danger landing in the, the, the winter forest land, but you do want to get somewhere where you can actually start uh putting down roots if you will and you don’t want to do it in the snow. At least I don’t think so. So you’ll start heading down the mountainside, getting out of the snow, the snow line and into something a little more comfortable and you will not wait to encounter mutants. They are a little smarter. They operate a little differently, but it’s still there. Still mutants, they still want to kill you. Um And you still have to combat them in order to survive a lot of the key elements of the game are still here. Uh You know, killing, killing mutants and throwing their bodies on the fire will burn them down to bone and bone can be used to make armor, right. That is a crucial element of the original forest is making bone armor. That is the some of the best armor that you can have. Um, unfortunately, some of the recipes have changed a little bit. So bone armor requires um, something that so far I’ve seen in Short Supply, which is tape and tape, you can find in quantity, but you use tape for almost everything. And as such, it seems to be sort of an endangered item. At least so far, I’ve only put a couple hours into the game, but I can assure you that that that appears to be the the item that tends to be not available when you need it the most. Um So let’s talk about some of the changes. Well, obviously, quality of life meant a lot to the developers. Things that probably piste you off about the original game um are are starting to get fixed, right? Things that you notice right off the bat as you have a quick access menu for your inventory, you could assign those to hot keys before. But this actually is a little more visual, little more ui and orientation and actually sort of follows more protocol with the existing nomenclature of gaming in terms of, of how items are accessed, how they’re stored, your inventory, which used to be a blanket, you would lay down on the floor when you open up your inventory and your items were scattered amongst it is now a little more militant. It’s obvious that you’re here for a reason and you’ve got good stuff with you. And so your inventory um pack is like this futuristic sort of uh multi flat pack that opens up and actually lets you scroll around. There’s so much crap in this game. You actually have to scroll around your inventory area to see and get to everything, double edged sword. Of course, because when you’re in a hurry, the last thing you want to do is scroll around your inventory stream. But again, you can use a quick access to put a handful of items on your backpack and access the outside of your backpack quickly without having to unroll the entire thing. So that’s pretty cool. Um Again, recipes are provided to you. So if you find an item, you’ll get a notice at the bottom of the screen saying, hey, there’s new items you can build now or potentially build. And let’s say you lay an item down on the uh you know, the combination table right where you’re doing your work and it will show you a gear and you highlight the gear and it shows you what you know, you can make based on the items that you found. Now, I suspect that more, uh, blueprints will open up as you find more items. So, for example, if all you have is a stick and you don’t have any tape or, or whatever else you might need, it’s not gonna show you items that you can make that haven’t passed through your inventory already. Hope that makes sense. So, yeah. Anyway, um, now there are tools that are used to create things that’s a little bit different. So to make a spear in the old days, it was what? Uh 22 sticks and a cloth, I think it was for the forest. Now you need two sticks, the tape and you need to use a knife to actually sharpen the point of the stick into a spear. So you don’t consume the knife. It’s just a utility for use. That’s different. Alright, so you start running around the forest, you’re gathering sticks, you’re gathering rocks, you’re gathering leaves, you’re looking for, you know, caches of supplies that others have left behind. You’re looking for built in safe locations like the little tents, those things all exist and it all feels very familiar and comfortable. Weird things start changing up a little bit is um when you start dealing with uh the enemy, right? Um The enemies are harder to fight. Um, things where you can pretty much get away with the basic spear. You’re gonna probably, you’re probably gonna have to be a little more clever than that. Um you don’t tend to get one C to Z enemies. They tend to travel more in groups so that, of course, makes them more dangerous. Um There are different types of enemies. I’m not gonna get into details, but you have your standard uh natives to, you know, the mutants, the cannibals who will pretty much attack you on sight. But there are other creatures that are malevolent but not so aggressive. They may take a swat at you, but they’re not going to engage you in hand to hand combat. They’re gonna take advantage of you with your back. Turn, they’re going to, uh, you know, use the environment against you. So you climb down the mountain, you get to like some sort of an opening, you find some freshwater, you’ve got a handful of things, you’ve got your Molotovs, they’re back and they’re still effective. Um So you start building up your standard survival packs, right? Um, berries and items that you can find to eat show up as unknown. So you look at them and it shows a big question mark, but you can eat them when you eat them, you’ll find out whether they’re okay. You don’t gag and choke and lose health or you eat them. And bad things happen to you. If you eat something and bad things happen to you, the game will change the little yellow Pac man into like a red Pac man when you hover over the item and it will basically show you dude don’t eat these. I mean, you already tried them once. Dumbass. Are you gonna eat them again? Probably not. But if you want to, you can do it and surely there’s a point where you can grab maybe some of these poisonous plants and turn them into weapons, hard to say. Um, but those, but that’s another little again. It’s a quality of life thing. Whereas if you eat a bad blueberry or snobs berry or whatever and you find the same snobs berries and you’re dumb enough to eat them again. I mean, it’s not going to stop you, but in this case, it at least warns you that dude, you’ve already tried these, probably not a good idea. Um, the day and night cycle, it’s still there. Um, nighttime seems to be a little more prohibitive. You still have a lighter but it’s one of those like electronic lighters. It’s not one that runs on butane, which may be kind of makes more sense since you always wondered how a big lighter last forever. But this is like an electronic lighter. It doesn’t light up as much either, but it does do quick and dirty jobs of lighting things on fire, which is, you know, that’s kind of what we need and providing a bit of purplish light when it’s dark outside. Um Let’s talk about crafting. That’s probably the biggest change so far along with the GPS, which is sort of guiding you through a narrative early on. Um crafting is different, not bad but different. It’s a little more involved. So there’s two different ways of crafting. Now, one of which is just do it. I’ll explain this in just a minute, just do it or produce a blueprint which puts an outline of the item in your play area. And then you can start contributing the items you need on it. For example, you don’t, you don’t put a fire blueprint down. Now instead you literally hold a stick, break it into, drop it on the ground, break another stick into, drop it on the ground, then you can put torch to it. So you’re not, you’re not building the fire from scratch, you’re actually doing the motions to make it, which is a little different. Now, you can flip your little survivalist guide into another mode which gives you the items that can be done with a blueprint. And the other ones that you just sort of have to do on your own. When you build your first shelter. For example, you hold a tarp, lay it down, you hold a stick and you got to prop the stick underneath one end of the tarp and then probably stick under the other end of the tarp. And that turns it into a lean to, but it’s not just, you know, get the items lay down a blueprint. Click, click, click, click, boom. It’s built not quite the same way. So for people who are interested in a more detailed building experience, it seems like they’ve heard your pleas for people who would like to look at building as a secondary thing. This might disappoint you a little bit. I’m in the current business of building a an alpine tree house. Always my favorite, my recommended um uh places up in a tree where they can’t get to you. You have some respite, you have a safe spot, you can sleep there. Um But building that now is considerably more engaging than it was before, before you needed like 36 logs and a rope and you are good to go. Now, not only do you need the logs but you need um, planks which you make from splitting logs into two. So every log splits into two planks and you need X number of planks to make the floor also because one log size doesn’t fit all. You’re going to need half logs, which you can make from logs, cutting them in half and quarter logs by chopping them in quarters. You may also need smaller platforms. So you get the idea. It’s not just gather 20 items, throw it at a blueprint and you call it done, you actually have to work a little bit and it takes a little bit longer and there’s a little more effort involved. Again, if you’re looking for a slightly richer survival or building experience rather than this is going to appeal to you. I’m on the fence still because building is fun, but it’s always been kind of secondary to me to exploration and figuring out the story, but I’m not opposed to it at this point in time. Not yet. Now, the other thing that’s brand new to this is N P C s. So these are non player characters. I call them minions. I’m just gonna call them minions from now on. Apparently you can have multiple minions and they actually grant you with a minion from the beginning by the name of Kelvin. And Kelvin apparently was on the helicopter with you and essentially he got lobotomized when you landed. So you look at him, he’s got, you know, it looks like there’s holes in his ears, like earwigs from Star Trek to the wrath of Khan got in there, maybe nuzzling around, maybe a little starship trooper brain bug action he’s there, but he’s not all the way there, the lights are on but nobody’s home. The good news is Kelvin is incredibly useful for one particular reason he will do stuff for you. Now, here’s something that’s brand new, different and really, really cool. There’s sort of a almost a macro language that you use to guide your NPC around. So, right. So like in other games, you get an NPC and you could tell him to do things like wait here, follow me attack with me, right? Like, you know, like simple one word or two word verbs. This on the other hand, gives you something a little more detailed. For example, the things that might piss you off about early survival is gathering a shipload of sticks, gathering a shipload of rocks, gathering a shipload of logs, right? You can tell him to do those things for you. So when you bring open your little notebook, it has the first column has like the verb go, stay, get rest, whatever, right? And then if you have a second tier, so let’s say you say get, then another tab appears or another column appears that says rocks, sticks, logs. And then when you select that column, it goes to a third column that says, what do you want done with them? Drop them off here, give them to me, that sort of thing. Um So you can get, you can get your little minion doing some of the dirty work for you. Like, you know, like you would normally do in multiplayer, right? Somebody’s out hunting for food, somebody’s out gathering resources. You left the guy back at the camp to keep an eye on things and make sure the chicken rotisserie was running on time for chow time. Um But yeah, your minion will do some of these things for you and he’ll follow you around and he’ll, he’ll eventually work his way back to you. Should you leave him in the balance? Now? He doesn’t seem to want to fight for you, but he will do menial tasks. Which is cool. That’s really neat. I like giving him an assignment and sending him off to do the stuff that I don’t want to do. Um, his intelligence isn’t all the way there though. I did notice that I put up a blueprint for the alpine tree house. I told him to go get logs. He’ll start chopping down trees, but he’s not smart enough not to chop down the damn tree that you have a blueprint in. Fortunately, we got interrupted by some natives and he stopped what he was doing. Um, which was chopping down my tree that had my tree house in it as it turned out, my partial tree house was destroyed by one of the indigenous creatures which really pissed me off and it wasn’t a good spot anyway, there was no water nearby. It was just one of those things that had a nice open plain and I wanted to build somewhere where I could see what was coming. Um So I don’t want to spoil any storyline stuff, but I’ll tell you about the very first task that you’re set to doing, which is to find these three locations on your GPS. The three locations are the, like the other chopper. Where did the other chopper go down where the survivors? If any, where the supplies from that chopper, right. All of these things are in these three areas that you’re supposed to go find. Uh, and again, I don’t want to give anything away because part of the fun is figuring out what the hell are these three points. Um, but you’ll find things like supplies, you’ll find new, sort of new bios. If you will, you’ll also find, um, task that you can’t quite perform yet based on the inventory that you have or what you can build. So, um, I find it interesting that the first three things that they give you and by the way, these aren’t random, they don’t change. Um, but they are, they’re almost part of the tutorial. Right. Getting you navigating around, getting you finding a location. And then, um, uh I don’t wanna say circumventing a challenge but understanding what you need to do, I guess. And again, I don’t want to spoil it. I will tell you a secret though. I will tell you one thing that I found and this isn’t new, but it’s less usual in the forest. In the original forest out in the middle of the water was a boat like a luxury yacht and you went out there and there was rope and there was some, some magazines and a bunch of food and drink and a safe spot. Well, there’s something like that here too. Um, and one time, once, one time in the 300 hours I played the forest, I encountered a shark while I was going to and from the boat, there are sharks here now too. But they seem to be a little more regular and a little more deadly. So keep that in mind if you’re planning on doing some long term paddling out in the ocean. So right now that’s kind of what I got. I do have the three legged three arm chick that has approached me a couple of times. I know what to do with her, but she, we keep getting interrupted by natives. So I’m not gonna tell you what I’m supposed to do with her because that will be part of the fun. Um But suffice to say that it’s creepy. The whole game is creepy. Listen, it’s, it’s, it’s the forest on steroids. If you love the first one, you’re gonna love this one. What you may not love is how poorly optimized the game is. What do I mean by that? After you play for, At least on my machine, your mileage may vary on my machine playing for about 45 minutes. Things you’ll see a slow degradation of the play like suddenly, like when you start moving to the left, it’s almost like your controller sticks for half a second and you keep moving left for like a half a second, even though you’re taking your hand off of it. So it’s almost like the inputs are getting cached and you don’t mean to this makes it impossible for combat by the way. So as soon as you start seeing this head for a safe spot save, dump your machine, come back and play again, uh and pick up from your last save spot. I warn you with peace and love. It only gets worse from there. Eventually the machine, your machine will start to slow down and slow down pretty soon doing anything of use, including gathering basic stuff will become impossible. And at some point, you’ll really have no choice but to exit out of the game. Hard, hard exit and probably reboot your machine. That’s, That’s what we’re talking about here. And on the steam deck, it happens even faster. After about 15 minutes of play, the steam deck will take a dump. Um cryo utilities to with the recommended one button, click settings appears to keep it from crashing at least for a while. But my money says about 45 minutes in on the deck just like on the PC. It’s gonna crash. Whether uh whether you’re using uh using that or not. Can you stream link from your steam deck? Pick up a retro three. I’m going to try and set up Steam Link. I find Steam Link horrible. I don’t find it well optimized. It’s stuttering. It’s jittery. Last thing I want to do is have stutters, jitters, compression artifact in and all that nonsense when I’m in combat with cannibals. If I was going to use anything I would use moonlight, um which has much lower latency, much better performance. Um Steam Link just bothers the ship out of me. I’ve never gotten good performance out of it. I don’t like it. I don’t care for it. Especially not in the game. I really like, uh, if I was doing it for maybe a review or something, maybe I would do it. And I have played Modern Warfare Two over Moonlight. But even then listen, uh, any sort of latency get you dead quick. And so it’s, I don’t know if I were playing a turn based strategy game. Great. If I’m playing a fast action first person shooter or survival game, probably not recommended, but your mileage may vary. Um So that’s pretty much all I have to talk about with sons so far again, only got a couple hours in, you know, I see my jets are telling me it’s time to go in anyway, got to get the shower in the movie. Uh Actually I knew in the shower and I do need to get back to work. Um, So recommendations do I recommend sons of the forest? Yes and no, if you are a rabid fan of the forest, you shouldn’t even be asking. You’re gonna buy it anyway. It’s 30 bucks, which is a little pricey for early access. But I got so much time out of the forest. I still feel like I’m, I’m in the black with um, the price I paid I paid, I think 1499 for the forest. I got 300 hours out of it. The least I could do is throw a bit more money their way. Uh Even if it was just to thank you for how much love I got out of the first one. Um It’s not unplayable. It’s obviously playable up to a certain point when your machine starts puking on it. Um But that’s gonna piss people off and if you’re nowhere near a save point, you’re kind of dict. Um So maybe when you start seeing your controller lag or whatever your movements start lagging, it’s time to head back to the shelter and get that saving. Too sweet. Um Cloud saves work. Um, so those people were going from deck to PC. One of the things that was bad about the forest was, um, cloud saves were only per device. They weren’t, um, they didn’t go across the board. They do here now, but you’re not really playing it on deck. Not yet anyway. Um, what else can I tell you? It looks great. Looks beautiful. I’ve got mindset for 10 80 P at ultra high settings. Um, and I got everything turned on, everything’s turned up and it looks great, plays great until it doesn’t. Um, of course, I’ll be doing some experimentations, right. I’m gonna turn off a few things, lower my settings a little bit and see if I can buy more time. Um, I typically don’t play more than a couple hours at a time anyway, but I can tell you on deck having everything on ultra low with all the features turned off, using F S are still crashes. So I don’t think it’s a settings thing. I think there’s a memory link. I think there’s a resource leak and after a period of time it just tanks the machine that it’s on, at least on the PC you can like get out of it maybe. But my whole machine was dragged down. So you gotta be able to kill it if you can’t quit normally, right? So, yeah, I’m on the fence with the recommendation rabid fans of the forest. You’re gonna have to have it. You probably already own it. Me telling you all these bad things about it isn’t stopping you from playing it. Um I’m saying that it is a technical problem, not a problem with the gameplay itself so far. The gameplay has been, uh, familiar but fresh. Um, I’m still getting the hang of, of my, uh, attacking, right? I will tell you that getting a bow with some stone arrows up front is a good thing. You can retrieve your arrows. So even don’t, don’t feel bad that you can only build like 48 arrows with your limited inventory. You can pick them up when you’re done. I will warn you though that if you throw a spear or you shoot an arrow into something like a deer or a mutant and they haul us off, they’re taking your stuff with you. So I was trying to hunt deer and I threw my spear which didn’t kill him right away. I figured it was a one shot, one kill, but it was not, um, the spear stuck in him and he ran off and I couldn’t catch him. So I lost my spear and spears required tape. And as I said, at the beginning of the show tape is seemingly hard to get right now. So keep that in mind, make sure, make sure if you’re gonna use something like a ranged weapon that you don’t mind losing it if your quarry runs off on you. But the bow and arrow seems relatively effective in the early parts of the game for Mutant Dispatch Mint. Um, I haven’t hunted with it, only protected myself against Mutants. So, but it does definitely seem to be, um, definitely seems to be the item of choice. Of course, Molotovs work. Um, very, very well. If you’re lucky enough when you started the game, you got a couple of grenades, right? C four. Um, these items can of course, help you with a mass swarm. And again, remember these things don’t tend to run around one at a time or even two at a time. They come in a pack. So, um, you want to be ready for that anyway, I’m gonna wrap this guy up. I hope you enjoyed. I know this show is all about Sons of the Forest. I didn’t talk about anything else. Um, like I said maybe in the description we talk about other stuff is just not gonna happen I guess today but listen more shows. Most people don’t care as long as I’m putting out shows. So here’s another show. Alright, everybody this is Shane, are Monroe passenger seat radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care.
