From the depths is one of the video games of all time.

i've played well over 100 hours of from the depths over the years but the vast majority of that is in the last month a few hours here and there between other things slowly learning bit by bit how to make functional vehicles of war in this absolutely insane game in case you've never seen it before from the depths is a bit of a weird game it combines a large scale campaign map with a vast and complex vehicle building system that will let you build just about any kind of craft you can imagine within the vehicle's admittedly fairly rudimentary physics simulation which sadly doesn't allow for a working ekranoplan or burrowing mechanical worms for that matter realistically you'll spend much more time looking at the parts deep within the guts of your constructions than you'll spend putting them to use as a result of that point i've always sort of considered the game to be youtube bait like many others i first saw the game six years ago when robert started making videos on it and i assume i had the same journey back then as a lot of people did after watching those videos which went something like this you'd see the videos buy the game play the game and then realize that those videos were something like 12 hours of footage condensed into 15 minute packages shortly thereafter you'd stop playing the game but there's two sides to that point from the creator's perspective it's incredibly inefficient to make content with if you make short form videos like rob as did back in the day you end up recording a full day's gameplay for 10 minutes of content which doesn't really work in the modern fast-paced algorithmically driven hellscape that we call home and if you make long-form content or stream then who's going to sit around watching you try to perfect your cram tetris probably just a few people that had flood the comments or chat with their suggestions on how to improve your design and i can tell you from my own bitter experience streaming path of exile it's not particularly fun speaking of bitter experience i have two things to ask of you if you've been watching my videos so far one maybe think about joining my discord it'll be nice to start to get a community going there and two if you haven't already then subscribe i realize it doesn't actually do much for you at this point because youtube may or may not actually feed you videos from channels you're subscribed to but it helps me out thanks back to it six years later i have much more patience and a greater appreciation for spending a whole day engineering things in video games born of an actual engineering career you see when you're technically an engineer but all you get to do is work on telecoms joints suddenly designing your very own destroyer is much more fulfilling than it used to be now veteran players forgive me but i'm going to massively oversimplify things essentially there's four elements to a craft the hull which is fairly obvious what the craft is going to do is going to determine the size shape and material of whatever it is you're building a submarine for example probably isn't going to have an open top and a cargo ship probably isn't going to be clad in thick layers of sloped armor like a combat craft might be this propulsion which is also pretty obvious but a little bit more varied in that there's quite a few different methods of making things move around from paddle wheels and propellers to complex custom jets there's the brains of the craft which include its ai mainframe as well as various detection components like sonar and infrared equipment so the ship can figure out what's around it and behave accordingly and the final major component the only one that any of you really care about the bits that make other things explode missiles and by extension torpedoes guns of various types lasers and particle cannons are all on the table as well as using your own ship as a giant bullet you can get pretty creative with that i've even seen a craft that crawls along the ocean floor underneath enemy boats and harpoons them right in the tank to pull them underwater and drown them i spent far longer than i should have putting together a little personally piloted nuclear kamikaze sub in the designer to demonstrate my point here i was going back and forth between a few different designs deciding between a drill fronted design or the nuclear option if you do have that gene that allows you to get enjoyment from this sort of stuff then you'll melt into this game and not realize that weeks have passed and what you could have sworn was only a few hours from the depths strikes a good balance in his vehicle designer you don't need multiple engineering degrees to figure it out you just need a whole lot of free time like i mentioned earlier the physics system is actually fairly rudimentary it models a lot but it's far from everything and it's not particularly accurately done so far as i can tell what's being modeled is mass buoyancy drag and lift and they're being fudged pretty heavily so are the various control surfaces rudders and ailerons apply a massively disproportionate force when compared to their size and angle and i assume that this is for the sake of more fun gameplay rather than realistic physical simulation i'm not going to go too deep into any of the finer aspects of construction here there's hundreds of hours of tutorial content on youtube for every aspect of vehicle design and from the depths from canon shell design to laser defense systems you don't need me to go too deep into it because a couple of well-spoken englishmen and a german have already got it covered i will just touch on how completely impenetrable the actual interface for the designer looks at first most people will be used to building things using the mouse to point out where you want the bits to go from the depth takes a slightly different approach though using keyboard controls to move your cursor around in space relative to the direction that the camera is pointing it's one of those things where you just have to trust me that it works well once you're used to it even if at first it looks completely insane before we leave the designer behind i just want to showcase another little thing that i spent a few hours making whilst writing this script just for fun it's a little tank that scoots along the sea seafloor and shoots torpedoes up into the soft bellies of its victims i'm calling it the urchin it's not practical it's very slow and it's ridiculously expensive for what it is but it beats anything that sits on or underwater pre-lightning hoods with ease beyond that most things travel too fast or have anti-torpedo defenses strong enough to deal with it it took me about an hour to make and i'll probably never use it but i had a good time let's move on to control then most of the time you don't actually do it you tell the craft's brain how to move around and what to do when it sees an enemy it's a bit of an arcane process but a well sorted out ai will have a craft moving around smoothly and engaging opponents intelligently if you've got a massive broadside gun battery then you want it pointed at the enemy that sort of thing you can't take personal control as you will have seen me doing in a few of these clips as long as your character is within range of the vehicle's controllers you can manually operate all of its movement parameters and assume direct control over the weapon systems which ideally shouldn't be necessary but your battleship's ai isn't going to hit the flying squirrel very often with cannons okay sometimes it will but you're better off doing it yourself so what are we making these things for anyway there's two game modes the more recent addition is adventure mode where you spawn on a raft and have to gather resources through harvesting resource zones or salvaging enemies in order to create a viable craft bit by bit as more and more enemies spawning around you the further you travel getting more difficult when you travel through a portal which you want since a larger enemy craft is worth more in salvage it's a fun game mode and it usually results in very unconventional crafts since you're just tacking on pieces one at a time rather than building in the usual holistic fashion but the original mode is the campaign there are actually a few different campaigns of varying difficulties and themes but for the most part the concept is the same across all of them take over the campaign map grid square by grid square building fleets to crush your enemies and see them driven before you hearing the lamentations of their women is optional but it's encouraged just like in the adventure mode you need resources to build things but in the campaign your resource zones are more permanent and steadily replenish from the global pool as you expand you have access to more resource zones which increases your manufacturing capability and lets you support hungrier fleets which gives the whole experience a decent feeling of scaling how varied and fun the campaign mode can be is dependent on how you play it the easier campaigns can be kind of steamrolled by designing a half decent flagship and running it or multiple of them around offing the factions one by one but it's much more fun to create cohesive fleets of varying classes of ship with supporting logistics craft spy satellites and all of that good stuff in the more difficult options you just do whatever you can to survive because you're going to start getting your ship pushed in by laser wielding hover maniacs after about 10 minutes i think that since i enjoy this game so much i'd probably also enjoy space engineers quite a bit it's a game that's been on my radar for literally years now but i've never wanted to take the plunge if there's any big space engineers folks watching then let me know if now is a good time to jump in and if so how do i get started anyway that's from the depths it's a really great game that's seen so much progress over the years and while it definitely still isn't finished it's totally worth playing provided you're okay with the massive investment of time that's required to quote rob as who exposed me to this game all those years ago very well like and favorite this join the pilkington fleet today and yet still don't go outside it's still really bad out there so just you know stay indoors you

Channel: Hazzor

Views: 28,139

Keywords: from the depths, ftd, from the depths gameplay, from the depths tutorial

Id: HdXOd-4bNk8

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022