Thank you for this video - very good analysis, thoughts and critique on the game. I also agree with most of the criticism here, the game falls short of the potential it could have in many regards. I think one of the main reasons for these problems is that I originally never thought the game would become this big nor that the development would last for nearly as long as it has. With the unexpected success of the Steam launch we've had the privilege of expanding the game a lot further than we initially planned, and that has meant that many of the technical and design decisions done in the earlier stages of the project have become problematic, and at this point it's extremely difficult (and resource-intensive) to address many of those problems. That being said, the sales are still going strong, so we are still in the very fortunate position where we can afford to keep the development going, keep addressing many of these issues, and slowly getting the game closer to reaching it's full potential. :) And of course, there could be a sequel at some point in the future, which would allow us to take what we've learned working on the first game and do things right from the very beginning...

Wow just keep rubbing in that you have two friends.

An actual ex-submarine mechanic here and I can confirm that the psychological tests are in deed there to make sure you are just enough insane but not too much. could not stop laughing at that one sentence...

Dosh: *Explains Technical Debt* Me, looking at my Factorio world: Yeah...

I know you can click the button to repair faster.

11:24 "Also sending out an active sonar ping doesn't immediately liquefy the innards of anyone outside the sub" ... unless you download the 'sonar pings immediately liquefy the innards of anyone outside the sub mod' of course, which is an actual mod and it's terrifying. I'm especially pleased that Highfleet got a mention in this video.

I work in IT, the scariest phrase I can hear is “We still use XP”

Playing public servers on this game is so funny because it’s either a server where no fun is allowed, the most chill gaming session you’ve ever had, or the most brain rotting experience ever, with no in betweens

A fun fact about repairing stuff is that it's actually a mini-game. If you noticed there is a white bar that shows up and moves to the left. When that white bar is on top of the colored part, you can click the "Repairing..." button again for a small boost in the repair. The bar resets to the right and you can keep doing this to speed up repairs. And yes, I did find this out at 200 hours when a friend who was knew to the game nonchalantly mentioned it to me in passing, promptly blowing my mind.

"Mighty morphine power rangers" is actually an incredible play on words. It's one of those things that is excellent in hindsight, but I think most people would probably never think up. Props to whoever concocted that name.

*Dosh:* Can you guess what game I'm thinking of? *Me:* Noita! *Dosh:* That's right it's Factorio. *Me:* Oh yeah.

Just sat down with major diarrhea and pulled up the dosh channel to get me through it. God bless your timing

Dosh’s impression of an alarm at 40:57 is genuinely perfect I love it.

Wonderful. Literally as I am looking up videos on what the fuck barotrauma (the game) actually is outside of a social experiment in how quickly humans will terrorize and rip each other apart given even the slightest capacity to do so, Dosh uploads this.

The runescape clip made me trip as the other half of my monitor is me chopping logs on OSRS

It's not just that the alternative to graphics is hard: It's also not easily quantifiable. Better graphics is something you can literally point at and show: a well balanced gameplay element meanwhile is less easily noticed because ideally, if it's perfect, you never have to think too hard about its inclusion.

Your discussion reminds me of Fear And Hunger, and a discussion of how one of the lengthy piles of spaghetti code could have been replaced with a two line code solution. The problem was, of course, that the single developer didn't know how to do that, so he basically had to type out hundreds of lines of code to do the thing he wanted to. An indie dev is going to have a lot of limits on what he knows how to do.

Hearing the SS13 clown honk as you said the words "exact game I want to play" was quite the jumpscare, despite the fact that I was thinking about SS13 for the entire video. I spent many years as the maintainer for tgstation's atmospheric simulation subsystem, which is a truly beautiful example of technical debt. I had a refactor PR with 800k lines changed. I fixed bugs that had been introduced when I was 3 years old. I pushed code that made the game completely unplayable to the production server... several times. I was raised in the fires of technical debt and sometimes I fear that I don't know anything else, even after all these years

Dosh: "You don't see that kind of acrobatics in Rain World" 40 page document for movement in Rain world: "You sure?"

Genetic dead-ends is by far the best insult I've ever heard for cheaters

My favorite way to "upgrade" submarines in Barotrama is to dedicate a wall to the circuit blocks in order to install a PID controller (well, specifically just a PI controller) to control the reactor and obsolete my job. The game already has a reactor automation feature, but it's deliberately very slow to react in order to ensure that a human operator is better. But simple proportional and integral control is enough to control the reactor MORE accurately than a human, so it feels like you've accomplished something really cool towards improving your sub.

You've managed to perfectly encapsulate all of my frustrations as a game developer. I want to make something, but having to balance technical debt and optimizations for the start of any idea completely drains all of my energy. From that I have a pile of barely touched projects that will likely never see the light of day. Either I start a project with good well thought out code and burn out before it's playable, or spaghetti all over the place and give up because it's too hard to work with the codebase. Best course of action I can think of is to make highly modular prototypes that just barely work, build on top of it and replace spaghetti coded modules as needed. Paying off technical debt in small sums instead of tearing everything down with a single lump sum rewrite.

2:30 I think one of the reasons we're seeing a rise in more CooP PVE experiences is a general age shift in the gaming population. The pressure to do well in PVP, the stress it causes, the toxicity that emerges, as we get older we get enough of that in our day-to-day lives to not want that as much in our gaming. And with gaming being less of a taboo or "childish" thing these days, it's much easier as an adult to find other people to play with. Cheating not affecting ones enjoyment as much in a PVE game is just a cherry on top.

I love the idea that all of the enemies just want to attack you to shut up the sonar.

Never expected Dosh to play this game, but I love that you did.

That KSP discussion hit home. So sad the studio closed this week.

One of the ideas the people I've played with that we've been bandying around is the idea of a cooking update. The idea of frying up some crawler to fill the bellies of the crew is just so theraputic to me that I really wish it would be a thing. Also, can confirm that larger crews are the better experience because you can utilize bigger subs, organize and react to stuff even worse, and the diversity in depravity in how certain crew members kept killing station personnel via drowning with no apparent consequence.

Hi dosh, beans

Do note that the Gravity Thing at 11:00 is actually part of the lore. While the game does happen under Europa, it's more specifically happening around a gravitational anomaly refered to as The Eye of Europa, which is your destination in the campaign, and also the reason why there is the same gravity as on Earth.

I was not expecting to hear Overgrowth mentioned, but I'm so glad it did. I've been following the development of that game since near its origins, going so far back that I played Lugaru. I still do dabble in Overgrowth every now and then because the way the combat works fascinates me and who doesn't love ragdolls? Lugaru even had a "scent system" that was built around wind so you had to kill enemies in areas and wipe off the blood off of your weapons in places that won't attract enemies, or do it in places that will allow you more stealth kills. I also recall that the different kinds of animals had unique traits. The wolves had an incredible sense of smell and were all-round stronger, the bunnies had amazing hearing and dexterity, etc etc. The entire experience of Lugaru and Overgrowth were just phenomenal and I'm so glad Overgrowth's Workshop community keep it alive.

I love the fact that Rain World is now widely considered to be the gold standard for environmental simulation and procedural animation. I need to play more Barotrauma now, good video, Dosh.

My favorite way of vetting how much responsibility I'm trusting my friends with as first time players is assigning them to reactor duty. The longer they go without caving and cramming a fuel rod in each slot for the FUCKING DUGONG, is a pretty good barometer for how good they’re gonna be at this or that job. The excuses I've gotten range from Logical ("I thought it would help it spool up faster.") to the unexplainable yet inevitable ("I was curious") to the outright malicious ("It was funny"). Only one lasted longer then a single round, and I always stick with simple, short cargo transport missions for this introduction. I quickly learned that the longer we go without incidents, the worse it’s gonna be when it happens.

No warning for the Navier-Stokes jumpscare!!?!??!??!! Man I just passed Transport Phenomena and I felt the neurons violently refire

I should not have stayed up long enough to witness a Dosh upload, now I've really done it. This will be a "sunrise before sleep" kind of night

New Dosh vid dropped right after dinner? What a great night!

It's always funny hearing someone unexpectedly reference SS13 whilst playing the game.

The reason why the junction like to burst into flames can be two reasons. A. Difficulty can just make it so it just randomly catch fire. B. The more likely reason is the reactor overloading and the junction boxes are hitting max capacity of the boxes and when sustained for to long at this level it will burst into flame. Now why this happens most of the time at the beginning of a game is because everyone sets it to AI control but AI is not as reactive as a human so the slow start up can sometimes lead to the reactor overloading the boxes.

Dosh has inspired me to use Nutty Putty as a verb now. 'Lunch was an hour ago but I'm fuckin nutty puttyed in this meeting right now.'

0:07 I mean, we discovered all (or most, I can't remember which) of the planets in our solar system, with MATH no less, before we even found Antarctica.

One of my favorite youtubers, posting a video on one of my favorite underated games. Weekend just got better.

6:15 you can actually repair things a lot faster if you click the button again when the thin bar is inside the hp bar

i love your factorio videos a lot, its how i found you, but these more "philosophical" videos about game design are easily some of my favorites on youtube. its nice to know someone besides me is pondering stuff like this.

Your videos are great Dosh! Would enjoy more videos like this, although ive been absolutely addicted to your factorio content for like the last week.

It's always a good day when Dosh uploads a new video. Thanks dosh!

Watching this just before enlisting. Thanks for everything man, see you again in a few months

Your reviews / discussions about different games are always my favorite videos of yours! You've got a very eloquent and comprehensive way of covering them. Now you need to cover Space Station 13 ;)

i just needed this video thank you i was serching for a long form vid of barotrauma and then you drop on thank you

Dosh, when I see your videos, I click like just as it starts. They are always a treat.

As someone who’s never played, the only suggestion I could give to the game would be things that have interesting benefits, but equally interesting drawbacks: - You could find a blob-thing that likes keeping the room it’s on fully repaired, but it also draws a LOT of energy to do so - how about a school of fish monsters that you could follow to lead you to their den, allowing you to risk diving into it for loot - maybe you’ll find a base that’s overrun by fungus monsters, but so long as you walk slowly and DON’T USE FIRE, they’ll keep pretending to be human, and thus allow you to utilize the base, maybe to purchase that strange Blob-Thing mentioned earlier Stuff like that

You know it’s a good video when Dosh starts the video with ghosts and stuff Lord sif dance meme

Excellent video Dosh, yet another classic.

I think you do a great job of explaining the ins and outs of video games and their technicalities. Your channel is easily one of my favorite sources for deep dives on all things gaming. Keep up the great work!

woah i was just about to sleep. perfect time to listen to his soothing voice

What mod of Factorio is this?

Glad you're branching out like you said you wanted to on that podcast. I especially like all the extra programming and game design tangents you go into.

Just wanted to drop a comment and say thanks for the video. I watched your ADOM video one day and after that I am basically just here waiting for the next random game you'll talk about. Great stuff 👍

As someone who did development work for a Space Station 13 server.... god Technical Debt is real and alive in that game. Unless you have a extremely curated code base like CM13 or Goonstation... its a mess. However its a mess that... mostly works. Its also a mess that only someone who came long before you only understands and didn't always leave comments so you have to scratch your head and figure out what they did. And even then you don't always fully understand the Technical debt. You just inherit it.

It’s very nice that you can tell Dosh is passionate about the game’s success. Hopefully in time the game can be the best it can be.

Not the game I expected from this channel but I am all for it!

Yo, super glad to see another game review/ spiritual journey vid from you. Keep it up. Also, I would like to put fourth Against the Storm as a game you might like.

When you are about to go sleep, but Dosh release 40 minutes video... I guess no sleep tonight.

absolutely insane segue to open the video with

beautiful Dosh, perfection, I really hope the devs watch this and take notes or take action, you really slapped everything in the rear lmao

been playing this game for years its great to see you cover it

The Witness does have some unique requirements for an engine, like the perspective puzzles and some lighting stuff. It also looked amazing for the time and had great performance, so I'd say the decision paid off. And yes, Blow hates all third party software, so it's probably a big part of it lol

Twice I've been blasted by high amounts of water from something big hitting the boat. The first time was in a smaller boat in a vanilla server I had setup with a friend so I could get a grasp for how the game worked, and they were somehow able to save me. The second time was in a 40k modded server a group of they're friends had setup, and the ship was so large that I was easily lost and died from my injuries. If terrible things start to happen, and you feel the hull might break, rush for a diving suit of sorts. Trust me, pressurised water hitting you at mach speeds will not feel too good.

Really glad to see you branching out.

Another excellent video as always

It's 3:07 AM here. Hehe. Love falling asleep to Dosh's voiceovers anyways.

This vid says a lot of things I’ve been thinking for a long time, but haven’t had the words to say. I’ve been playing the game for a long time, have designed a bunch of submarines, played with friends, played in random lobbies, played by myself, and I generally have had a very good time. I will say, public lobbies are always operating on a complete polarity, either being in some custom overpowered sub where it has 10 guns on the top and bottom and the captain (who does everything) is some douchebag with a god complex, or it’s a lobby that never manages to get out from the station because everybody gets merked by the oh-so-funny never-gets-old method of security shooting people, doctors overdosing people on meth, and everyone else either dying in the airlock or rewiring the entire sub. I really liked you ideas for how to make the game more engaging and promoting teamwork, but I feel like the game is torn between its roots (ss13), and something more serious. But if we’re talking ideas, I’ve always thought of making it so mounted guns don’t let you directly see your targets, instead a blip or some kind of representation of the target is shown in its place. Think alien isolation or duskers. I’ll finish up this way too long comment with an anecdote: One of the most memorable lobbies I’ve ever been part of was one where the philosophy was “NO DAWDLING.” Basically the captain and lobby host put a huge emphasis on doing everything as fast as possible with as little downtime as possible. No 20 min trips to the outpost, it was in and out. No sitting around at the ship waiting on people to finish a mission, we had to go ahead and clear out a thalamus or mine for resources. No waiting on people to make stuff at the fabricator, it either got made in between stuff or didn’t get made at all. As long as we kept doing stuff as frantically as possible, random people who would usually grief the hell out of you would actually chip in. It was a stacked lobby, like 8-12 people at a time, and we got all the way to the third biome in one sitting without anything horrible happening. We even bum-rushed a pirate vessel by strapping a shit ton of c4 to the bottom of our sub and then dove directly on top of their reactor. So much fun.

You’re making me visualize the idea of salvaging upgrades from wrecks as a deal of taking parts and retrofitting them onto your ship. Like, taking a part that has to be manually placed down and integrated into the sub’s wiring, like something that’s a middle ground for engineers that bridges the gap between, “mechanic but junction boxes,” and ,”guy who single handedly optimized every single electrical appliance on sub.”

I was not expecting you to do a video on Barotrauma. Pretty cool!

Speaking of technical debt... SS13 essay when?

the dancing palpatine is just so Dosh

Dosh's evolution in narration and vibes from the first few Factorio videos to this is awesome. Love the video n I'm only 15 minutes in

Born too late to explore the earth Born too early to explore the stars Born at just the right time to be too scared to explore the ocean

6:30 if you click repair again when the white bar is within the repaired section you get a boost to repair rate so you repair faster. Very minor QuickTime event. Nvm you do it at 37:49 11:30 if you want sonar to liquefy your crew's insides there's a mod for that 13:52 I mean you see some pretty impressive acrobatics in rain world at the higher level of gameplay 26:15 iirc there's a "mineral scanner" upgrade that shows you which minerals are present in a small cave if within range which is useful for spotting said useful minerals like uranium for spare fuel rods 39:33 I hope you know about passive sonar and how active sonar attracts enemy attention haha

damn, hyped that dosh is going from horrors on land to horrors in space to horrors under the water hyped for the space station 13

I've spent the last 4 year covering the development of the game- watching how the devs navigate and expand the limits of the design space has been fascinating- it's imperfect but I really love it and keep coming back One thing- there is some narrative continuity in the campaign in the form of story missions, special crew members, and faction interactions- but I agree there could be broader ramifications for those ALSO, for sub tiers there is a mechanic ability- the end of the scrapper skill tree- which allows you to upgrade tier 2 subs with tier 3 parts. That entails getting a mechanic to that level and choosing that skill tree, but it's doable.

Didn't expect you to play this game! But i am glad you did so, makes a very great video

This whole video, there was one game I was expecting to come up, but, oddly, didn't, despite its seeming relevance, Space Engineers, which has a lot of the same issues, but also doesn't have a good number of them. It's sort of like space Minecraft, you get dropped into an empty world with effectively nothing except the bare essentials, and no defined goals. However, unlike Minecraft, (and Barotrauma), there is no end goal, if you don't know what you need to do, it can appear as if there is nothing to do, which is a problem that could have existed in Minecraft, in theory, but massive popularity saved it from that. It is not necessarily impossible to intuit what to do, you have a drill, the drill marks ore deposits on your HUD, go get some ore, but, then what do you do with it? Nothing. You can't process ore yet. No, what you actually need to do is mine stone, and put that into one specific block on your starter ship, in order for it to be refined into a mixed blend of various starting materials. Then, these materials need to be once again processed into the actual building supplies you will use to build every one of the game's various building blocks. Then, once you understand the building process, which, to be fair, isn't as complicated to understand as I've made it out to be, then what? There is no incentive to leave your starting planet, to do, well, anything. But, this, of course, forces you to make your own fun, unlike barotrauma, which, by having missions, makes the player assume there is no point in doing anything, if it is not for a mission. For example, at no point does the game say "go to Europa", but, if you do choose to go to Europa, the surface is almost entirely ice, one of the most useful materials in the game, as it can be converted into hydrogen, to power hydrogen thrusters, the perfect site to build a refuelling station. Or, on a more simple level, if it takes too long to gather ore, build a bigger mining ship. This open-endedness, much like that of Minecraft, is, by far, its greatest strength, you set your own goals, and your own win conditions. Let's say you want to do a barotrauma, and make one big, central ship, from which you will do everything, as opposed to a set of smaller ships, or a planetary base. Well, you simply can, there's nothing standing in your way other than the time and effort to design and construct it. Gameplay aside, there are also a few technical similarities to barotrauma, not to mention a few differences. First and foremost, the physics jank, "clang", as some call it (including the developers), it's not as bad as it could be, and has been improved on over time, but it is very much there. Space Engineers uses an entirely in-house engine, however, it isn't fully custom for SE, as the developers did use it for some other games, before and after it. Unlike Barotrauma, there is no water at all, which saves them from the complexity of water physics, which they intend to do away with in the sequel by adding water physics. I don't really have a conclusion to all of this, other than saying I don't really have a conclusion to all of this, but I think you'd like Space Engineers, assuming that you've not already played it.

I agree with most of your statements in the video but i am surprised you did not mention the moding seen of the game. For some if not all of your complaints can be solved with a mod. Ex not being able to change your sub up to your liking try barocraftables or want more realistic healing try neurotrauma. Thanks for reading and i do agree, we need an AWWWOOOGGAAA alarm.

Good video. Insightful, well iterated, concepts translated well even for relative beginners. Good stuff.

Was not expecting a dosh video on Baro right in the middle of my obsession with it, hell yeah

Really happy to see you take on this Finnish game 💪🏻

I haven't played the game in over a year now. My group all stopped playing after a big update to the inventory system. Where we left off last in our campaign we already had to do a lot of inventory management before making our way through an area that already killed us 3 times. When we came back to the game just to see that now our lockers were bursting with all the resources we collected took the wind out of our sails. Inventory management is by far my biggest gripe with the game. Previously we had the locker linked to the crafting station full of suitcases so we could store more stuff and keep things organized. Now I don't even think suitcases can be put in that locker and it felt like you could store way less that the previous, already miniscule storage system. Ideally I'd love for them to have a bottomless storage container linked to the crafting station. No stack size limit inside the container, sorting functions, filters, the works. Alas, that won't happen and my friends have already given up on coming back to the game with me.

Nice to see you sp[reading out from equally insane factorio challenges into more insane games!

I LOVE THESE VIDEOS SO MUCH

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that the devs ALSO MADE SCP CONTAINMENT BREACH

HIGHFLEET/SYNTHETIK/COGMIND MENTIONED

loved this video, I'm always excited to see more submarine content

I absolutely love this game, and I absolutely love your channel. This is heaven for me

BAROTRAUMAAA

I’ve played and modded this game for years. At this point I don’t even know why I mod it anymore. It’s very satisfying to work on but I always find myself disappointed while playing it. The developers seem preoccupied with working on whatever new idea or distraction catches their fancy over actually improving or fixing the game. As far as I (and most of the modding community can see) they don’t have much intention or drive to improve the game and this is about what’s it’s going to look like in ten years time.

No WAY you just uploaded a vid on one of my top 5 favorite games. I am gonna enjoy this! ... I'm not good at it but I still love this game.

When Dosh was asked for his flavor of autism, he chose neapolitan

So what I'm hearing is that Barotrauma is a good game with a lot of potential. The only bad part about having a lot of potential is that it probably won't live up to it (without outside help anyway). I just hope that others will take the ideas and expand on them in their own way, and that we'll see more high quality Barotraumas in the future. Personally, what I think could be fun would be a 3-way fusion between Barotrauma, Lethal Company or Content Warning, and Iron Lung. Something not to complicated that focuses on the exploration aspect, while keeping some of the sub combat for when something big shows up.

i love your videos! keep it up! :D

Absolutely amazing video, I’ve been having a shit week and this really helped. Ima take some of these lessons and try to apply them to my game :3

2:35 DRG mentioned ! You know what is means, Miners ! ROCK AND STONE !