The Rimworld conundrum

Rimworld is a game that swallows time. I swear, it's as though a black hole was coded and sold across the internet, slowly consuming all of space and reality one prolonged colony management debacle at a time. Everytime I sit down to play bushytailed and sunny in the morning I feel like I barely get anything done, just some basic revolutions of the clock- simple base building a few disasters maybe a raid or two- and then I turn around and it's nighttime otuside. I feel like an addict to a time stealing drug far more potent than any of the illicit market- only for the life of me I still can't figure out how to smoke the damn thing properly and still feel like a novice in a game I've sunk, gimmie a sec, 270 hours into. (I know, rookie numbers, right?)

So why do I play Rimworld? What is it that I hope to gain? Would you believe me if I told you that I don't actually know? Yeah, even after all these years diving into the game's systems figuring out what I like and don't, I'm still drawn to it by absolute mystery. What is Rimworld? A colony management game- so why do I treat it like a soap opera? A soap opera where I play the damn dorm matron trying to keep the entire block from starving to death because our only cook decided to go wandering out with the daisies. Rimworld is pretty much to my what the Sims was to everyone else- whereas I treated the Sims like a mission based narrative experience and become increasingly frustrated with the in-built tedium that Sims 4 in particular embraced; Rimworld is like watching the most twisted version of Survivor where the contestants start eating the limbs of their fallen foes if they get a bit too peckish.

I suppose that really is what makes Rimworld such a great game- it's a story engine that seems to expand out in depth every year or so. Mostly. There have been a couple of DLC that are more really specific verticals of play such as big chunks of 'Royalty' which are tied to a very specific fantasy of vassalhood and the recent 'Anomaly' which wants to survival horror in a matter that more comes into play very late game. (Wish the alerts to build holding cells weren't permanently plastered in my early-game colony!) But Ideology adds incredible levels of personality to your colony, variety to your playstyle and depth to the way you interact with the colony building process and Biotech literally rewrote the way pawns work. Semi-Alien races with individual buffs and weaknesses atop of a 'pregnancy and child raising' system for good measure just felt like an overall revolution upon what the base game offered.

But through all the years there is one aspect of Rimworld I feel has been woefully underserved for so many years that is simply begging for a focused update to totally overall- and I'm talking about the wider factions that inhabit your planet: they need to be something more. Currently factions are merely the relationships that connect the various outposts and settlements dotted across your world that you probably never visit because they're so horrendously far away. If you attack a settlement than relations settlements of that faction will be similarly peeved- it's a ramshackle and basic way to impart vaguely wider reaching consequence for unsociable action. And it's sooo unrefined!

For those who've never had the pleasure of actually playing this spectacular game, a lot of effort is dedicated to creating factions that are distributed at the start of the game. You can choose how many there are, what sorts of ideologies they follow, how friendly they might be- (as based on their archetypes) all to serve as largely inconsequential set dressing to your story. It feels like placeholder menus for a more indepth system that the Rimworld team just haven't managed to conceive of yet- which seems so frustrating when you remember DLC like Ideology which seems to touch on these very play avenues just on a more intimate scale. Even just the scaling of that upwards to a geopolitical scale would supremely enrich the overworld play experience. 

What if the factions of the Rimworld were actual living groups shifting lines of territory across the world space, shifting as outposts are overthrown and allegiances shift. What if factions could actually be affected by the player attacking leaders and capturing captains? What I'm basically thinking of is a system vaguely reminiscent of the way that Kenshi has it's breathing world set-up, except obviously to a much less grand degree considering we are talking about AI designed systems here. Of course the focus will always be on what is happening with the colony itself, that is the heart of Rimworld, but if the changing state of the world becomes relevant to that colony, how will that affect it? What if that colony offers a strategic advantage as a forward operating post? What if it lines up with a bombing strafe? How will residents react to being dragged into a war they weren't ready for.

As they currently exist it really is pretty common to interact with literally none of the other factions across this highly reactive world during an entire playthrough outside of immediate neighbours- and when we're talking about a generated world as big as Rimworld's- even on default world generation- that just feels like a total waste. But then- I can't shake the reality that there is some undeniable overlap in the sorts of updates that will cover wide-swept factions and the Royalty DLC. The Empires from 'Royalty' are supposed to represent this big interconnected faction, afterall. Although I suppose we just need to emphasis that the empire is a space faction and we're dealing with land factions? Still haven't figured out the kinks yet.

Right now, especially following the horror-themed Anomaly update, it seems that the developers are treating the core vision as a completed package to be added onto- when I think the meal is still a little undercooked, albeit in a currently superfluous area. There's plenty of space to get weird and wacky with strange yearly DLC that does nonsense stuff later, but core systems are screaming out for a bit of the refined and specified attention that brought complexity to matters as insular as diet preferences to the Rimworld. But maybe this is just me looking for a reason to spend another unsanitary amount of time within this gameworld. (Is that really so bad?)