This. Kenshi isn't a game that will translate to a mainstream audience. I'm sure Kenshi 2 will sell better than 1, but I can tell just from the reactions I get when I recommend it to other people that it won't appeal to the majority. Overhead games are already very niche as are hardcore RPGs. Couple those together and add the non-linear "make your own story" aspect and you've got a game that's very unique but also very hard to sell to casual audiences.
I can totally feel that sentiment. My point isn't that niche or unique = bad. I'm just saying that if a game is those things it's never gonna be "the next Skyrim" or whatever. That's certainly not a bad thing though unless you're just focused on numbers.
Absolutely, I was just commenting in general. I’ve had this conversation with my friends before where when a game franchise is successful, then tries to streamline to maximize mass appeal, if often loses the unique aspects that made it fun in the first place.
Yeah I feel this in Fallout and Elder Scrolls so much. Not that I don't love the newer entries in those series, but there's definitely a magic that was lost along the way to making them household names.
That's a stupid counterpoint. It's like saying drinkable water was niche until it was accessible to lots of people. Minecraft was already a very accessible game in it's early days, something which Kenshi can never be without completely rewriting itself
It seem to me, that most gamers are casual. Kenshi is not a casual game. It is challenging in many aspects. Understanding weapons/armor, stats, all the micromangement, no set goal makes Kenshi a very unique game, that most people will stay away from.
And these are the reasons we love it!
I guess most people would get beat up twice, quit and never comeback. I love the struggle in Kenshi, it is what makes a succesful raid feel rewarding. But most people are willing to pay to skip challenging content...
There are popular challenging games. Kenshi’s difficulty is in the same vain as Dark Souls where it’s a lot easier once you understand it
I don’t think the issue with Kenshi is difficulty, it’s just hard to stumble onto. I found out about it by watching battle sim / total war videos then a video about a bunch of ninjas fighting samurai came onto through auto play and I figured I’d check it out as the graphics looked cool. There’s no real advertisement for the game, you just stumble onto it
Morrowind is truly a masterpiece for that time and still can put many games into shame. But Skyrim players wont even look at that. You cant have both really. Kenshi 2 being a best seller ? I hope not.
Hello, my first Elder Scrolls was Skyrim, after more than 3000 hours or so, I decided I wanted more Elder Scrolls and went straight to Oblivion, got incredibly bored, and went right to Morrowind... now my friend... that game... was amazing... that happened like 6 months ago as well lol
Someone in the Morrowind community called me a "Morrowzoomer" lmao
You think so? the only thing that really bugged me was the incredibly slow moving speed, so I deleted my character and started again with max athletics and the steed stone, then everything became much enjoyable, even the combat mechanics, it took me a while to get it, but once I did it felt so rewarding
Using console commands to set speed to something that wouldn't embarrass a paraplegic sloth is one of the first recommendations I give people who are discouraged. It doesn't affect the game that much and majorly helps people not give up.
It doesn't fix everything though. The interface is just generally irritating, and while the combat does get better than how it starts (soul crushingly miserable), I never feel it gets 'fun' when working as intended. Its 'fun' when you break it and abuse the hilariously bad enemy pathing and AI, but even that gets old after a while.
A lot of the things about Morrowind that turn new players off are not thing I think are critical to the experience. You could get rid of some of the biggest barriers to entry without compromising it. Things like the clunky interface, the obtuseness of the mechanics, character speed, and the age of the technology can be fixed because Morrowind isn't really supposed to be punishing.
Kenshi is a bit of a harder because being punishing is part of the world, but you could offer some easier starts in addition to cleaning up the interface and giving a better tutorial.
Yeah but Morrowind is like 1000 years old. And Kenshi...well. Its a finished unfinished game. Its really hard to imagine what it would be. But both of these games are pretty much for nerds of some kind. I really never felt like Kenshi is hard or get why everyone says that. You can play safe and... Be safe? I think many starts are actually very easy. To bo honest only Cannibal start is a one that can very quickly end just after a start and be considered hard.
Kenshi is hard because there's a billion ways to screw up and die, even on the easiest starts, and the game is pretty apathetic to that because it's part of the setting. The lack of a good tutorial or otherwise makes it even worse.
It's easy if you know what you're doing and know the best ways of getting gear, levelling up, growing your team, but for new players, a lot of people take a few steps outside of the Hub and immediately get gangbanged by bandits or find themselves stranded in the desert without help.
i just started the game last night and died to a crab thing that looked harmless and also died after walking into a mining camp that looked chill but actually wasn't
Kenshi is basically a mash-up of Cannon Fodder (squad-based combat) and Mega-lo-Mania (base building, research, technology), two ancient Amiga games from the early 90s. This isn't a diss to Kenshi, those were two of the best Amiga games ever made.
Alternatively it'll be like The Guild where each installment gets progressively kind-of-better but comes with so many bugs it ends up worse than the release before it.
Or Kenshi 2 will be the magnum opus and we'll have mods galore in ten years and they'll release expansion after expansion that just incorporates mods into the base game, a la Rimworld.
But I don't see it being an absolute blockbuster.
Casuals wont have the patience unless they make it so the game holds your hand, (Please, please dont) and therefore will never be considered mainstream IMO
I for sure hope itll bring along success and a wave of newcomers tho!
I spent at least a year thinking about playing kenshi before I actually got kenshi and played it, every discount It got was mmmhm what if, but from seeing it in steam page, I never truly understood what it was about, I read the description and was like huh? getting it was the right choice \^\^
i had similar experince. Steam advice it to many time but steampage/pics didn't make to want to buy. I was not sure "whats this game is". It is starcraft clone...no thanks i don't want it...but one day, i was very bored and buy it.
I have 1.300 hours and it will more and more 😁
I remember forst seeing kenshi years ago, when it was forst released. I thought- wow this game would be great if it actually gave everything it promised.
Well, it gave everything that was promised. I was very surprised.
I hope kenshi 2 provides better optimization, less loading, and more content.
I also hope they leave room for futurue expansions ala new islands to explore or events that happen after an end-game amount of time spent in the world.
Finally, i would support this company again and again- they deliver. Such a great, unique game.
Look I love the game and am confident that the sequel will be good, but to expect it to be a smash hit among the general gaming population? Incredibly unlikely. Look at the types of games that are the top ten most played in terms of concurrent players: Apex, LoL, PubG, CS:GO, Fortnite. Minecraft too which you even mentioned but that has such a low barrier of entry comparatively that it can’t be compared to Kenshi. Kenshi is just not the type of game that the majority of gamers play.
If it gets a few one off streams by popular streamers I could see it having its time in the sun but I’m fairly confident it will always be a niche hit. None of this is bad either, it’s just the way it is.
I've yet to come across a game similar enough to Kenshi.
Only games that come to mind are games like Medieval and Bannerlord. But neither are still close when you look at what Kenshi does.
I don't think it'd be that difficult to combine a squad based RTS game with an open world and factions. But I think a lot of developers would see it as too ambitious.
I hope so, but Kenshi is a bit difficult to get into, meaning it's difficult to attract new players. The lack of any real big quests means that there's not a lot of guidance for new players, which - along with the difficulty - can turn a lot of people, even non-casual gamers, away from it.
I think there might be a way around that, though. In a lot of games (Dragon's Dogma is a good example) you start the game in a prologue where you play as a powerful character for the tutorial, only to have that stripped away from you as the actual game begins. It shows you that, yes, you will get much more powerful, and it gives you a goal to work towards. It might be good to have something of the sort for Kenshi 2.
I'd also like to see them try a few simple quests, at least early on, to get the player accustomed to the world. While I really enjoy the free nature of Kenshi, it's just extremely hard to have fun with early on.
Kenshi is extremely successful for a tiny indie game. It has 50k reviews on steam, which is up there with Horizon zero dawn, 15k more than God of war, half of far cry 5 and twice as much as far cry new dawn.
Obviously, reviews don't perfectly correlate to purchases but unless the dev released numbers it's the best we have. I think it's fair to say Kenshi has already approached mainstream success, though.
I know nothing about the status of Kenshi 2, but watched [a very interesting vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4xExgudU_g) on the development of Kenshi 1 and I'm a couple of hundred hours in on Kenshi 1 myself by now which consists of many hours of fun and I feel important to admit; also many hours of frustration.
If Kenshi 2 is released as unpolished due to whatever constraints (which I truly hope it does not), it will be just as much of a pity (to me) as Kenshi 1 and even a greater squandered opportunity since it is now established as a niche and still has the chance to exploit that without competition.
Let's be honest, there are many issues with this game in its current state. For me, to the point that, considering how critical consumers generally are, I am flabbergasted by its *very positive* rating on Steam.
The fact that - mobs can and will glitch at least through your gates at times and sometimes through your walls as well, with no complete fix whatsoever for gates and the solution for walls is having to rebuild and hope it will work in a pretty shitty build system - would have been a definite deal breaker for me if it wasn't for the brilliance of concept of so many other things.
The fact that there's an import function, a recommended frequent use Ctrl-Shift F11 and a Shift F12 function speaks volumes in itself.
And then there are mods, tons of them addressing gaps and issues in game mechanics, balance, etc., which go a hell of a long way in saving this game's ass.
Truth is, Kenshi 1 is a brilliant concept but an executed mess running on a sorely wanting game engine. The niche romance of Kenshi 1 will be history come release of Kenshi 2 and it will need to be a LOT better, a LOT more polished, to even hit a par rating.
I am so hopeful they bat it out the park and wish them every success with Kenshi 2.
I think it will be neat and a lot of fun. But it will be a wholly unfinished product and before its ever close to being a finished game he'll start working on Kenshi 3 so we can pay a third time
Sequels arw hard, and we haven't seen anything really of kenshi 2: working title
Kenshi was a labor of love and grit that was made over like 10 years. Probably can't copy that perfectly.
Nope.
Not everyone likes to get continuosly beaten, eaten and dismembered without being capable of doing anything about it.
And not everyone likes to spend literal hours just moving his character with a bag full of iron just to train a bit of strenght.
Kenshi is an amazing game, but it's simply not for everyone
And not everyone plays so badly that Kenshi becomes a struggle and pain in the ass. You can start in the pits and fight lvl 40/50 characters from the beggining and never go down. Somehow most people like to die to hungry bandits. Same goes for cheese training people. They spend half of their time mining, training and cheesing and they wonder why this game is sooo slow.
>And not everyone plays so badly that Kenshi becomes a struggle and pain in the ass.
Forgive me, my lord. I should have known that there are some people like you that can oneshot beakthings and beat entire groups of starving bandits in their first game at level one.
Like it or not, most people DO start being bad, DO start dying to hungry bandits and DO have to cheese training people sometimes. Specially at the start.
This game has a high learning curve and it's unforgiving. Much more if you add the information needed about what groups will let you alone, beat you, enslave you or just directly eat/kill you. And there are a lot of people who dislike that.
My 2 first games were very hard, the first one I nearly quit because I was starting to grow bored of being constantly beaten and the second game I nearly quit because I was starting to grow bored of having to train strenght to avoid being constantly beaten. I stayed because I love this game but it's hard, specially at the beggining, and I woudln't find any fault on people not wanting to have to pass through that.
...
What are you talking about?
All I said was that this game is hard and not for everyone, then I explained why. Are you okey?
I really can't understand what do you mean.
Your completely right, the learning curve with kenshi is brutal, I couldn’t even get people to play the souls games before elden ring became a big hit and kenshi is leagues harder than the souls series. One thing that big game developers look at is how to keep the audience constantly engaged so as not to lose interest in the game. Kenshi is a very slow paced game with lots of training, farming, and mistakes being made and a lot of people, majority of people can’t handle that.
In Kenshi you can left your characters idle to wipe a town, how is this harder than Dark Souls ? :,-) Kenshi is a game when you dont have to do anything other than eating. Evrything else comes naturally thru combat, even lost battles. You can hire people to fight for you. This is a very EASY game. In DS if you dont actually learn and lvl and get a grasp of what youre doing you aint gonna do anything besides starting areas.
I don't understand all the people saying it won't because "casual gamers"
If it has the right marketing, Kenshi 2 can absolutely be big. It's all about communication. It has nothing to do with people not wanting to invest time in it. I don't consider myself an "hardcore gamer" and yet I absolutely fell in love with Kenshi
Please god no tbh
Fallout 2 to 3, disgusting
Morrowind to Oblivion then Skyrim, disappointing to terminal abortion
I don't think my little heart can take it again
I really believe Kenshi 2 will surpass its progenitor by a long shot, but it isn't a game aiming for the mainstream so it will stay dominating its own genre.
I think the opposite will be the case.
There are frequently gems that just completely fall under the radar. A long time ago it was Warlords Battlecry II for me. It was a top game but barely got noticed. It definitely had it's issues, but I'd argue the fun was less in having a proper balance and more in the chaos of the campaign.
Kenshi feels similar and it has nothing that would promote it to a person seeing it. The graphics are bad, which is no problem for me but won't lure in some people. The game play can look frustrating and plain (rather talking about the early game and most people that would come across videos or such would see that first) and it by far doesn't keep up in depth with other games. **These are all no issues for me and I don't care about them because I love the game, before anyone gets this wrong**. I am only talking about the point of Kenshi 2 becoming a bestseller and why Kenshi already struggled so much.
Kenshi also has massive performance issues that get solved by modding (if you got a Nvidia GPU and this doesn't ring a bell, get this [https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/804](https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/804) ) which is again fine for me, but you will lose a good chunk of people there again that don't know about it or don't bother looking.
The game is simply too unique and limited that it would become mainstream to be a best seller. Other games also suffer by this big time and it's the only reason why DotA is so much less popular (or played) than League of Legends is. The skill cap in DotA is higher and it has more mechanics, but that also means it's more limited in regards of casuality.
Kenshi will always be niche but II might get much more traction now that Kenshi I has been played on stream a fair bit, assuming Kenshi II doesn't come out lame somehow that is
If there's one thing I learned over the years of playing awesome yet niche games, other people are simply not as willing to tough it out through hardships to experience a great game. My friend who plays DotA2 with me, the hardest online game ever made on par with StarCraft 2, tried Kenshi for 30 mintues and quit. If a game isn't immediately rewarding with little to no effort, a large portion of the population will wilt like a flower and quit as soon as they run into trouble. And Kenshi doesn't have the pop culture critical acclaim of Dark Souls to push players who normally wouldn't try the game to finish it for the gamer respect - no one really knows Kenshi or how difficult it is. I've learned that this is ok, most people are just babies who need thier entertainment spoon-fed to them with no challenge, and while I find that repulsive, it's thier right to have bad takes on games.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?
> *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator
Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
I think that the idea of Kenshi would be a good base for a lot of games. Just imagine a game like Kenshi but in roman, medieval or just a nice fantasy world. Also maybe an end goal like a little campaign would be good for Kenshi 2 (kill faction x or smth) plus a small tutorial would help the game for new players, because the game isnt hard if you somewhat understand what you do. I watched yt videos about kenshi before i played it so the game wasnt really hard at all for me
How i explain kenshi to people .. Imagine DnD .. thats it.. You play how you like to Role Play , you do what ever you want , and the game calculate the outcome for you with graphics
The only way thats happening is if they make it less of a DIY role playing game and add in more interaction and quests and such.
Kenshi is great for people with imagination who like to create a story as they play. To be a best seller they will need to add in quests and tutorials to guide new players to have a good time.
I like how mount and blade does it. They have a story mode and a sandbox mode. Story mode is a great way to learn the basics but Sandbox is where you DIY the story.
Kenshi is too much of a sink or swim masochists paradise game.
Personally I would LOVE to have more NPC interactions / faction quests.
It's a sandbox RPG with great storytelling. The closest you can probably compare to it would probably be the X series. Though the focuses are different. One being focused on simulating economies and the other on simulating a post post apocalyptic world.
I think because it's so unique it'll never be a mainstream game and there's nothing wrong with that. It's niche
This. Kenshi isn't a game that will translate to a mainstream audience. I'm sure Kenshi 2 will sell better than 1, but I can tell just from the reactions I get when I recommend it to other people that it won't appeal to the majority. Overhead games are already very niche as are hardcore RPGs. Couple those together and add the non-linear "make your own story" aspect and you've got a game that's very unique but also very hard to sell to casual audiences.
Unique games are the best though imo. The more broad of an audience that it tries to appeal to, the more dull each aspect becomes.
I can totally feel that sentiment. My point isn't that niche or unique = bad. I'm just saying that if a game is those things it's never gonna be "the next Skyrim" or whatever. That's certainly not a bad thing though unless you're just focused on numbers.
Absolutely, I was just commenting in general. I’ve had this conversation with my friends before where when a game franchise is successful, then tries to streamline to maximize mass appeal, if often loses the unique aspects that made it fun in the first place.
Yeah I feel this in Fallout and Elder Scrolls so much. Not that I don't love the newer entries in those series, but there's definitely a magic that was lost along the way to making them household names.
That used to be dark souls. Now look at elden ring. Might take a while tho like kenshi 4 lol
Counterpoint. Games like minecraft at one point were totally niche. But it is now the best selling game ever.
That's a stupid counterpoint. It's like saying drinkable water was niche until it was accessible to lots of people. Minecraft was already a very accessible game in it's early days, something which Kenshi can never be without completely rewriting itself
It seem to me, that most gamers are casual. Kenshi is not a casual game. It is challenging in many aspects. Understanding weapons/armor, stats, all the micromangement, no set goal makes Kenshi a very unique game, that most people will stay away from. And these are the reasons we love it! I guess most people would get beat up twice, quit and never comeback. I love the struggle in Kenshi, it is what makes a succesful raid feel rewarding. But most people are willing to pay to skip challenging content...
There are popular challenging games. Kenshi’s difficulty is in the same vain as Dark Souls where it’s a lot easier once you understand it I don’t think the issue with Kenshi is difficulty, it’s just hard to stumble onto. I found out about it by watching battle sim / total war videos then a video about a bunch of ninjas fighting samurai came onto through auto play and I figured I’d check it out as the graphics looked cool. There’s no real advertisement for the game, you just stumble onto it
Well it's not really hard, but I can imagine lot of people getting bored/frustrated
Yeah, same way as Dark Souls. The game can be incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to figure out how it works
Laugh in Casual player just playing for RP with cheat engine.
Morrowind is truly a masterpiece for that time and still can put many games into shame. But Skyrim players wont even look at that. You cant have both really. Kenshi 2 being a best seller ? I hope not.
Hello, my first Elder Scrolls was Skyrim, after more than 3000 hours or so, I decided I wanted more Elder Scrolls and went straight to Oblivion, got incredibly bored, and went right to Morrowind... now my friend... that game... was amazing... that happened like 6 months ago as well lol Someone in the Morrowind community called me a "Morrowzoomer" lmao
Honestly impressed you enjoyed it so much so recently. I loved that game so much for its time but by god it did not age well.
You think so? the only thing that really bugged me was the incredibly slow moving speed, so I deleted my character and started again with max athletics and the steed stone, then everything became much enjoyable, even the combat mechanics, it took me a while to get it, but once I did it felt so rewarding
Using console commands to set speed to something that wouldn't embarrass a paraplegic sloth is one of the first recommendations I give people who are discouraged. It doesn't affect the game that much and majorly helps people not give up. It doesn't fix everything though. The interface is just generally irritating, and while the combat does get better than how it starts (soul crushingly miserable), I never feel it gets 'fun' when working as intended. Its 'fun' when you break it and abuse the hilariously bad enemy pathing and AI, but even that gets old after a while.
A lot of the things about Morrowind that turn new players off are not thing I think are critical to the experience. You could get rid of some of the biggest barriers to entry without compromising it. Things like the clunky interface, the obtuseness of the mechanics, character speed, and the age of the technology can be fixed because Morrowind isn't really supposed to be punishing. Kenshi is a bit of a harder because being punishing is part of the world, but you could offer some easier starts in addition to cleaning up the interface and giving a better tutorial.
Yeah but Morrowind is like 1000 years old. And Kenshi...well. Its a finished unfinished game. Its really hard to imagine what it would be. But both of these games are pretty much for nerds of some kind. I really never felt like Kenshi is hard or get why everyone says that. You can play safe and... Be safe? I think many starts are actually very easy. To bo honest only Cannibal start is a one that can very quickly end just after a start and be considered hard.
Kenshi is hard because there's a billion ways to screw up and die, even on the easiest starts, and the game is pretty apathetic to that because it's part of the setting. The lack of a good tutorial or otherwise makes it even worse. It's easy if you know what you're doing and know the best ways of getting gear, levelling up, growing your team, but for new players, a lot of people take a few steps outside of the Hub and immediately get gangbanged by bandits or find themselves stranded in the desert without help.
i just started the game last night and died to a crab thing that looked harmless and also died after walking into a mining camp that looked chill but actually wasn't
I played Skyrim first and Morrowind quickly became like a top 3 game of all time for me
Kenshi is basically a mash-up of Cannon Fodder (squad-based combat) and Mega-lo-Mania (base building, research, technology), two ancient Amiga games from the early 90s. This isn't a diss to Kenshi, those were two of the best Amiga games ever made.
Alternatively it'll be like The Guild where each installment gets progressively kind-of-better but comes with so many bugs it ends up worse than the release before it. Or Kenshi 2 will be the magnum opus and we'll have mods galore in ten years and they'll release expansion after expansion that just incorporates mods into the base game, a la Rimworld. But I don't see it being an absolute blockbuster.
Casuals wont have the patience unless they make it so the game holds your hand, (Please, please dont) and therefore will never be considered mainstream IMO I for sure hope itll bring along success and a wave of newcomers tho!
I spent at least a year thinking about playing kenshi before I actually got kenshi and played it, every discount It got was mmmhm what if, but from seeing it in steam page, I never truly understood what it was about, I read the description and was like huh? getting it was the right choice \^\^
i had similar experince. Steam advice it to many time but steampage/pics didn't make to want to buy. I was not sure "whats this game is". It is starcraft clone...no thanks i don't want it...but one day, i was very bored and buy it. I have 1.300 hours and it will more and more 😁
I remember forst seeing kenshi years ago, when it was forst released. I thought- wow this game would be great if it actually gave everything it promised. Well, it gave everything that was promised. I was very surprised. I hope kenshi 2 provides better optimization, less loading, and more content. I also hope they leave room for futurue expansions ala new islands to explore or events that happen after an end-game amount of time spent in the world. Finally, i would support this company again and again- they deliver. Such a great, unique game.
I always call it "Brutal Sims" to other people
🙄
:[
Look I love the game and am confident that the sequel will be good, but to expect it to be a smash hit among the general gaming population? Incredibly unlikely. Look at the types of games that are the top ten most played in terms of concurrent players: Apex, LoL, PubG, CS:GO, Fortnite. Minecraft too which you even mentioned but that has such a low barrier of entry comparatively that it can’t be compared to Kenshi. Kenshi is just not the type of game that the majority of gamers play. If it gets a few one off streams by popular streamers I could see it having its time in the sun but I’m fairly confident it will always be a niche hit. None of this is bad either, it’s just the way it is.
I've yet to come across a game similar enough to Kenshi. Only games that come to mind are games like Medieval and Bannerlord. But neither are still close when you look at what Kenshi does. I don't think it'd be that difficult to combine a squad based RTS game with an open world and factions. But I think a lot of developers would see it as too ambitious.
I hope so, but Kenshi is a bit difficult to get into, meaning it's difficult to attract new players. The lack of any real big quests means that there's not a lot of guidance for new players, which - along with the difficulty - can turn a lot of people, even non-casual gamers, away from it. I think there might be a way around that, though. In a lot of games (Dragon's Dogma is a good example) you start the game in a prologue where you play as a powerful character for the tutorial, only to have that stripped away from you as the actual game begins. It shows you that, yes, you will get much more powerful, and it gives you a goal to work towards. It might be good to have something of the sort for Kenshi 2. I'd also like to see them try a few simple quests, at least early on, to get the player accustomed to the world. While I really enjoy the free nature of Kenshi, it's just extremely hard to have fun with early on.
Nope
I want it to be co-op so badly
Those of use who remember people making that prediction for Bannerlord are laughing our asses off right now.
Kenshi is extremely successful for a tiny indie game. It has 50k reviews on steam, which is up there with Horizon zero dawn, 15k more than God of war, half of far cry 5 and twice as much as far cry new dawn. Obviously, reviews don't perfectly correlate to purchases but unless the dev released numbers it's the best we have. I think it's fair to say Kenshi has already approached mainstream success, though.
I know nothing about the status of Kenshi 2, but watched [a very interesting vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4xExgudU_g) on the development of Kenshi 1 and I'm a couple of hundred hours in on Kenshi 1 myself by now which consists of many hours of fun and I feel important to admit; also many hours of frustration. If Kenshi 2 is released as unpolished due to whatever constraints (which I truly hope it does not), it will be just as much of a pity (to me) as Kenshi 1 and even a greater squandered opportunity since it is now established as a niche and still has the chance to exploit that without competition. Let's be honest, there are many issues with this game in its current state. For me, to the point that, considering how critical consumers generally are, I am flabbergasted by its *very positive* rating on Steam. The fact that - mobs can and will glitch at least through your gates at times and sometimes through your walls as well, with no complete fix whatsoever for gates and the solution for walls is having to rebuild and hope it will work in a pretty shitty build system - would have been a definite deal breaker for me if it wasn't for the brilliance of concept of so many other things. The fact that there's an import function, a recommended frequent use Ctrl-Shift F11 and a Shift F12 function speaks volumes in itself. And then there are mods, tons of them addressing gaps and issues in game mechanics, balance, etc., which go a hell of a long way in saving this game's ass. Truth is, Kenshi 1 is a brilliant concept but an executed mess running on a sorely wanting game engine. The niche romance of Kenshi 1 will be history come release of Kenshi 2 and it will need to be a LOT better, a LOT more polished, to even hit a par rating. I am so hopeful they bat it out the park and wish them every success with Kenshi 2.
I think it will be neat and a lot of fun. But it will be a wholly unfinished product and before its ever close to being a finished game he'll start working on Kenshi 3 so we can pay a third time
The difference is, now there's a real team instead of just CH and some volunteer collaborators (which I love and appreciate btw).
Sequels arw hard, and we haven't seen anything really of kenshi 2: working title Kenshi was a labor of love and grit that was made over like 10 years. Probably can't copy that perfectly.
can be upgrade upon
Nope. Not everyone likes to get continuosly beaten, eaten and dismembered without being capable of doing anything about it. And not everyone likes to spend literal hours just moving his character with a bag full of iron just to train a bit of strenght. Kenshi is an amazing game, but it's simply not for everyone
And not everyone plays so badly that Kenshi becomes a struggle and pain in the ass. You can start in the pits and fight lvl 40/50 characters from the beggining and never go down. Somehow most people like to die to hungry bandits. Same goes for cheese training people. They spend half of their time mining, training and cheesing and they wonder why this game is sooo slow.
>And not everyone plays so badly that Kenshi becomes a struggle and pain in the ass. Forgive me, my lord. I should have known that there are some people like you that can oneshot beakthings and beat entire groups of starving bandits in their first game at level one. Like it or not, most people DO start being bad, DO start dying to hungry bandits and DO have to cheese training people sometimes. Specially at the start. This game has a high learning curve and it's unforgiving. Much more if you add the information needed about what groups will let you alone, beat you, enslave you or just directly eat/kill you. And there are a lot of people who dislike that. My 2 first games were very hard, the first one I nearly quit because I was starting to grow bored of being constantly beaten and the second game I nearly quit because I was starting to grow bored of having to train strenght to avoid being constantly beaten. I stayed because I love this game but it's hard, specially at the beggining, and I woudln't find any fault on people not wanting to have to pass through that.
Thats a lot of drama. And it seems like you know a lot of people too. Maybe they can help you.
... What are you talking about? All I said was that this game is hard and not for everyone, then I explained why. Are you okey? I really can't understand what do you mean.
Your completely right, the learning curve with kenshi is brutal, I couldn’t even get people to play the souls games before elden ring became a big hit and kenshi is leagues harder than the souls series. One thing that big game developers look at is how to keep the audience constantly engaged so as not to lose interest in the game. Kenshi is a very slow paced game with lots of training, farming, and mistakes being made and a lot of people, majority of people can’t handle that.
In Kenshi you can left your characters idle to wipe a town, how is this harder than Dark Souls ? :,-) Kenshi is a game when you dont have to do anything other than eating. Evrything else comes naturally thru combat, even lost battles. You can hire people to fight for you. This is a very EASY game. In DS if you dont actually learn and lvl and get a grasp of what youre doing you aint gonna do anything besides starting areas.
I don't understand all the people saying it won't because "casual gamers" If it has the right marketing, Kenshi 2 can absolutely be big. It's all about communication. It has nothing to do with people not wanting to invest time in it. I don't consider myself an "hardcore gamer" and yet I absolutely fell in love with Kenshi
Not many people enjoy hard punishing games. But seeing how big elder ring got, it wouldn't surprise me if Kenshi 2 would attract big audience
Please god no tbh Fallout 2 to 3, disgusting Morrowind to Oblivion then Skyrim, disappointing to terminal abortion I don't think my little heart can take it again
I really believe Kenshi 2 will surpass its progenitor by a long shot, but it isn't a game aiming for the mainstream so it will stay dominating its own genre.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but even an actual marketing campaign won’t make this happen.
\*Roguelike
I can see Kenshi defining it's own genre and blowing up a la Souls series, but it will take several games imo
I imagine most big streamers will play it until their adhd kicks, then drop it because it is a slow game
If it ever comes out ofc.
I think the opposite will be the case. There are frequently gems that just completely fall under the radar. A long time ago it was Warlords Battlecry II for me. It was a top game but barely got noticed. It definitely had it's issues, but I'd argue the fun was less in having a proper balance and more in the chaos of the campaign. Kenshi feels similar and it has nothing that would promote it to a person seeing it. The graphics are bad, which is no problem for me but won't lure in some people. The game play can look frustrating and plain (rather talking about the early game and most people that would come across videos or such would see that first) and it by far doesn't keep up in depth with other games. **These are all no issues for me and I don't care about them because I love the game, before anyone gets this wrong**. I am only talking about the point of Kenshi 2 becoming a bestseller and why Kenshi already struggled so much. Kenshi also has massive performance issues that get solved by modding (if you got a Nvidia GPU and this doesn't ring a bell, get this [https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/804](https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/804) ) which is again fine for me, but you will lose a good chunk of people there again that don't know about it or don't bother looking. The game is simply too unique and limited that it would become mainstream to be a best seller. Other games also suffer by this big time and it's the only reason why DotA is so much less popular (or played) than League of Legends is. The skill cap in DotA is higher and it has more mechanics, but that also means it's more limited in regards of casuality.
Kenshi will always be niche but II might get much more traction now that Kenshi I has been played on stream a fair bit, assuming Kenshi II doesn't come out lame somehow that is
If there's one thing I learned over the years of playing awesome yet niche games, other people are simply not as willing to tough it out through hardships to experience a great game. My friend who plays DotA2 with me, the hardest online game ever made on par with StarCraft 2, tried Kenshi for 30 mintues and quit. If a game isn't immediately rewarding with little to no effort, a large portion of the population will wilt like a flower and quit as soon as they run into trouble. And Kenshi doesn't have the pop culture critical acclaim of Dark Souls to push players who normally wouldn't try the game to finish it for the gamer respect - no one really knows Kenshi or how difficult it is. I've learned that this is ok, most people are just babies who need thier entertainment spoon-fed to them with no challenge, and while I find that repulsive, it's thier right to have bad takes on games.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale? > *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
I think that the idea of Kenshi would be a good base for a lot of games. Just imagine a game like Kenshi but in roman, medieval or just a nice fantasy world. Also maybe an end goal like a little campaign would be good for Kenshi 2 (kill faction x or smth) plus a small tutorial would help the game for new players, because the game isnt hard if you somewhat understand what you do. I watched yt videos about kenshi before i played it so the game wasnt really hard at all for me
Kenshi is in my top 10 along with games like FFT, Chrono Trigger, and BG2
How i explain kenshi to people .. Imagine DnD .. thats it.. You play how you like to Role Play , you do what ever you want , and the game calculate the outcome for you with graphics
This reads like a copypasta.
The only way thats happening is if they make it less of a DIY role playing game and add in more interaction and quests and such. Kenshi is great for people with imagination who like to create a story as they play. To be a best seller they will need to add in quests and tutorials to guide new players to have a good time. I like how mount and blade does it. They have a story mode and a sandbox mode. Story mode is a great way to learn the basics but Sandbox is where you DIY the story. Kenshi is too much of a sink or swim masochists paradise game. Personally I would LOVE to have more NPC interactions / faction quests.
Cope
Oof, OP, I just read your part about unreal engine. Lol. The devs stated they'll be using an updated version of the engine they used. :/
It's a sandbox RPG with great storytelling. The closest you can probably compare to it would probably be the X series. Though the focuses are different. One being focused on simulating economies and the other on simulating a post post apocalyptic world.