Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
11/27/2014 6:23:20 AM
Subject:
RE: Think I should get Dragon Age: Inquisition?
Goat Simulator has features I've never seen before, including randomly generated world clipping and persistent god mode. You never know when collision detection will work, which adds an unprecedented level of unpredictability. Your goat can be down but never out. Need to complete the Michael Bay quest? Just headbutt a gas station. As in real life, your goat will be disoriented by the explosion, but he'll shake it off and get back into action -- same with NPCs. It's like anti-permadeath.
This seems to be a compensation for not being able to save your game, which is understandable because the object is to see how many destruction/trick points you can accumulate during a given session . . . I guess . . .
Other interesting features:
1. Almost everything is lickable. When you lick an object, your tongue stretches like a bungee cord until it reaches a certain point of resistance, and then you can pull the object with you. This, along with headbutting, is how the goat manipulates objects. If you would prefer not to blow something up, you can lick it. Some objects, such as houses and trees, resist displacement, but a great many other things, including humans, crates, oxygen and acetylene tanks, and other goats, can be moved. If you get a certain perk, you can amass a near-endless number of objects in a kind of giant snowball (like in that Japanese cat game) and haul it around with you, though at a certain point your CPU will begin to protest.
2. You can enable several mutators. I won't list the multitude of mutators you can get, but I will say that some are available in a menu so you can enable them before you start your session. Some you can find in the world. An example is the jetpack.
3. The jetpack changes everything. If your goat needs to break the surly bonds of earth, look no further than the dimension-defying jetpack. But you should expect a learning curve here. This is not your average arcade jetpack. It takes a while to learn how to go where you want to go. In fact, it takes . . . I'm guessing here . . . about 1200 years. I'm sure there's some way to master the jetpack, but it takes great persistence. Meanwhile, expect your goat to be flung around randomly in the air, on the ground, inside buildings (see the clipping feature above), and to the edges of the known world, where invisible walls gently dissuade you from running off to blurry buildings and grassy grids.
4. The game now has an MMO DLC which, as far as I can tell, is free for owners of the game.
4a. The MMO DLC allows you to pick classes for your goat, each with its own advantages. The melee class gives you extra butting power. The mage class lets you do card tricks and make bombs. The "rouge" class apparently lets you wear makeup (and may let you be more stealthy, though I'm at a loss to understand why you would need stealth). The hunter class evidently lets you catch fish but not hunt. Then there's the microwave class, which turns you into a microwave. I'm not sure what this does, but it's touted as the most "evil" of the classes.
4b. You also get scrolling text chat. I can't tell whether the people chatting are real or fake players, but I can't deny the importance of this feature. I haven't tried MMO mode. This, I think, would be a good way to determine whether the players are real and whether their goats would appear in your world in some cooperative or competitive vein. I should probably test this.
From the length of my post, you can tell that Goat Simulator is a very complex game with many things to do. I haven't even scratched the surface. I got it for $5 on sale, and I must say that I am utterly stupefied by the breadth and depth of goatness here. Does it faithfully simulate the life of a goat? I can't answer that. All I know is that you won't find the life of a goat better simulated in any other game.
