Can I open with another GIGANTIC THANK YOU TO SNOWBEE for that awesome Hashtag shoutout in his comeback video? (Big welcome and hello to fresh faces that found us because of his video, we’re glad to have you!) I encourage you to watch it because it’s a great introduction to Hashtag, and he 10000% has a better radio phone-sex voice than me, so it sounds extra great!

When someone like SnowBee - who understands the chaos and the charm of survival games - decides Hashtag is worth pointing his community toward, that really means something. He didn’t have to do that! No one pays him in coupons or friendship points! (Unicorn bucks, maybe.) It’s just genuine respect, creator to creator, and I appreciate the fuck out of it. (And srsly, if you are into 7D2D mods, SnowBee is a fantastic resource!)

Moments like that are a big deal for Hashtag. This whole project is built on signal-boosting good games, good devs, and good creators (alongside calling out asshat ones), so when one of those (non asshat) creators turns around and says, “Hey, Hashtag is doing cool work,” it hits me right in the feels. It tells me I’m doing something right. (Or, alternate theory, something loud and unignorable, which is basically the same thing around here.)

SCUM used to be one of my favorites, and I honestly haven’t opened it since… April? (Shitty implementation of hordes, anyone?) And that was just to check an update that clearly didn’t impress me, because I closed it and never went back. They recently pushed some changes to a new testing branch, and while a few ideas are interesting, they're not enough to make me reinstall!

They’re tightening up the loot, finally, shifting it toward something closer to DayZ’s CLE. You’ll get proper loot tables in Police Stations and clothing that actually fit the biome's weather. No complaints there.

But then they swing straight into changes that basically soften the game: less RNG, more guaranteed loot in special cases, easier access to vehicles (which were never hard to get to begin with!), and generally sanding off edges nobody asked them to sand??

Isn’t this the same game that used to constantly fuck with DayZ, warning DayZ players during free weekends to hold onto their tits and brace for “real” difficulty in SCUM? Now they’re bending over to make things easier?? What a strange pivot. I guess this is them trying to go more mainstream as the long-timers get frustrated with recent changes.

Fairview Games announced a co-publishing partnership with Sightline Games for The Gold River Project, their open-world camping survival adventure game. Anyway, I’m browsing this press release and see the following:

I’m sorry, is the best-in-class survival game in the room with us? Is it hidden behind the four years of community mouthpieces for the team/game pointing the blame in every single direction regarding the years of delay post-funding campaign, hanging onto Epic’s skirts for every single problem, and releasing a demo to backers (and later the public) that was so poorly received that there were pages and pages of folks literally floored by how badly it performed and how blase it was for the requirements and hype? Maybe it had a huge glow-up since I last tried it a few months ago, but geeze- I get that a press release needs to sell folks on the VISION, but at this point, I wouldn’t even know what game he’s describing.
Anyway. Credit where it’s due: 100k wishlists is huge! I hope it becomes the thing people are hyping it to be. At the moment, it feels more like a shaky prototype than an experience, at least to me, but that’s the kind of thing time and work can fix.

I was chatting in SnowBee’s Discord the other day, and someone mentioned Zeverland, yet another zombie-and-guns thing that’s apparently aiming for PvP, but then POSSIBLY a subscription or some MMO vibes?

Anyway! That popped back into my head when I saw Lost Rift’s new roadmap announce an “experimental PvE mode.” ( Cue shocked face.) Back when they first pitched the whole “leave your base to go fight on forced-PvP islands” idea, folks were very MEH. After people played it in Early Access? Bigger shrug. The game’s been Mixed forever because it’s not “PvP-adjacent,” it’s “PvP or eff yourself”

If you want to make a PvP game, make a PvP game. Stop trying to juggle both sides of the PvP/PvE divide. We all know how this story ends: another “WE’RE TOTALLY DIFFERENT” PvP project quietly sliding into PvE like the rest of them (hello, watered-down PvP in New World, soon to shutter) or hullo long dead Last Oasis. Just staaahpp.

Coffee & Create

If you’ve got a handful of minutes and an open brain, go read this because it’s kinda a whole academic rant on how Valve and tech giants didn’t ‘kill capitalism’ so much as replace it with a digital feudal hellscape.

Simply Hashtag

After months - and months - of folks asking me if Derelicts was dead, abandoned, or a scam collecting Patreon cashouts, I made a public post about the entire debacle and tossed it on the website. Don’t worry, I made sure to text Romain first to let him know I was about to vent!

[ Random: I have a spare key for DUCKSIDE - if you’d like it, message me back!]

Kentum (added), The Last Caretaker (updated), Dream Garden (updated), Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2 (added), War Tales (added), Anchor (added), Heart of Altai (added), Legend of Khiimori (updated), Flotsam (added)
Mystic, for some reason, I can't search/add it on Curator, so here's my blurb: "Feels like they’re angling more toward Conan Exiles’ generic videogame vibe than Starsand’s ‘new biome, new twist’ survival. Maybe that shifts later."

Hope you guys had an excellent Thanksgiving holiday, and you’re braced for the upcoming snow AND Christmas mayhem! We received an early Xmas gift from a family member- a Steam Deck OLED. (It’s kinda Xmas, 10th wedding anniversary, and dual birthdays in one!) We reshuffled devices (she inherited my Switch OLED, and the Deck became my primary device), and holy fuck, I am way more attached to it than I thought I would be?

Maybe it’s because I’m not into the primary heavy hitters on the Switch, things like Zelda, Pokémon, and Mario. Maybe the layout (and heft, man, it’s a big boy) of the Deck appeals to me more?

I studied my library and installed Wartales, a gift from a friend that I had tried and failed to enjoy on the PC, but it’s sooo much fun on the Deck! Something about the top-down viewpoint and just the gameplay feel, maybe? (I also added Tactics Ogre: Reborn to my wishlist because apparently it’s very similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, which I loved.) Wartales also has a bunch of DLC content, including a brand new one that dropped today!

If you have a Deck, please share any game or accessory suggestions. Everything is so shinynew to me!

- Jordan

P.S.: I respond to every email, so lemme know your questions, feedback, criticisms.