The base-building and survival crafting genres are in a golden age. Sequels to major successes like Sons of the Forest continue to impress while new entries and franchises join the field all the time. Even storied franchises like Fallout and Dragon Quest have dabbled with base building, and it’s against this backdrop that Farworld Pioneers enters the scene.
Like many games in the genre, Farworld Pioneers takes its inspiration from one of the early leaders in the genre, Minecraft. But the lead developer of the game, Starbound veteran Rho Watson, was as inspired by what Minecraft left undone as much as the things he was able to do in the seminal sandbox, he discussed in a recent interview with Game ZXC.
In this, Watson is hardly alone. The upcoming Nightingale looks to address Minecraft’s shortcomings, albeit different shortcomings in different ways. The existence of games like these shows the evolution and increasing depth of the genre which grows more ambitious and complex with new innovations in building and survival gameplay. For the shortcomings Farworld Pioneers addresses, though, Watson explained his frustration with Minecraft’s limitations in an interview with GameZXC.
"Like most people do, I was building a sort of base. I’d spend days and days on it. It was this huge facility with underground tunnels and mine shafts and I built this giant pyramid on top of it. There was this huge grandiose project. And once I was done with it, I took a step back–in game, of course–and I was like, ‘Well, what do I do now? I've built this huge facility, and I'm the person who's really using it.’"
Watson wanted more to do in his base than simply build it, show it off, and then forgot about it. It was ultimately an empty structure, so what he wanted was to find a use for his creation beyond its mere existence. He tried pitching the idea to Starbound while on its development team, but that didn't manifest. Watson described the NPCs Starbound provided its builders as mere “eye candy,” still devoid of the purpose he sought.
“The NPCs in Farworld Pioneers can actually be ordered around to help you do things. It's sort of like a hybrid between Terraria and a real-time strategy game, in that the AI NPCs you recruit, they actually serve a purpose and bring value to your colony. Whereas in games like Starbound, they're interchangeable and don't really serve any real purpose besides being extended eye candy for your base.
Watson compares Farworld Pioneers’ colonies to Rimworld, but highlights a unique feature that allows the player to step into the shoes of one of their colonists to advance the needs of the colony with direct influence. While it is possible to progress in the game without diving into colony management, managing NPCs helps accomplish the game’s goals faster and easier, making the approach of going it alone more of a challenge run. The emphasis on this mechanic traces directly back to Watson’s pyramid in Minecraft, and the lonesome feeling he had walking its halls over a decade ago.
“I was trying to solve the problem that I spent days building this whole thing with dorms, facilities, and purposes. There was no one to use them or make use of them besides m, and it felt really lonely. Truth be told, I stopped playing Minecraft because I felt like I fulfilled what I wanted to do, and there wasn’t anything else to really do with it. That stayed in the back of my mind for years.”
Finally deciding that if he didn’t make the game, someone else would, Watson embarked on the journey to create Farworld Pioneers in 2018. And now, years later, he can give his old base the new life he wanted so desperately in Minecraft.
Farworld Pioneers is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.