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Pioneers - It's like Oregon Trails, but bigger

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Site | Trailer | TIGForums | Greenlight Concepts | IndieDB
Alpha available to download here


What is Pioneers about? Well it's a turn based exploration game with some RPG elements where you lead a party of pioneers each with different professions, skills and attributes. You start out in a town where you first have to assemble your party from the tavern, plan out and buy equipment you need from the supply store and get yourself a ship. Or two. Then by conversing with different people you get quests, which may be to follow the steps of the previous explorers that never came back and find out what happened, find treasures, compose an accurate map, find contact with unknown native tribes and 'export' religion or simply be the first to disover a piece of the world. You do all that while surviving the harsh environments with seasons that change each bringing with them a different set of challenges, fighting wildlife and tribespeople, finding food and water and trying not to die of dysentery. With each part of the world you discover, you gain access to larger regions further away from home. It's not that you couldn't go there to begin with but you need more men and supplies, which means you need to collect more wealth beforehand.


Anything else you can do? One crucial, sort of, aspect of the game will be communication. You see, when you encounter an unknown tribe you are not able to understand them because they speak an unknown language. All foreign communication in the game takes place in form of icons/symbols/glyphs that you have to decipher. To make the players life easier, animals and tribes both share the same system. When you see a wolf start to attack you and this certain icon appears over its head you better remember this, because when you interact with some tribes and the same icon appears, you know you better get out of there

 
My pioneers impressions from the may Indie thread: Surprisingly deep survival game with control issues. The game seems to be really worth a try. You basically start in a village where you can buy equipment and get quests to explore more of the world and find valuable plants etc. There are tons of possibilities for how to add to this kind of game. Really promising. Pioneers seems really good with 2 semi-big flaws. Quick gif of the preparation screen:

1. The UI is horribly inconsistent. Actions sometimes are done with left click, sometimes with right click. Closing windows is X sometimes, sometimes Escape.

2. Probably also due to the UI, the gameplay seems a bit slow. It takes very long to navigate around the actual islands and do the actions. Here is some Island landing and fight preparations + bear fight:

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Seriously, if you like these kind of games, you guys should visit us over in the Indie threads sometime.
 
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