I haven’t written about the open world Samurai game Kenshi since it was first announced, but the one developer has done quite a bit to the game since then. Before I do that let me give a short overview of the game, for anyone who knows of the game already skip to the next paragraph. Kenshi is a small open indie Samurai game that is made by one person at Lofigames. The first build of the game came out back in October and while it was very crude it was easy to see the large amount of exciting possibilities that could come from Kenshi. The game has an open pre-order module, like Minecraft did, where you can play the newest versions of the game and own the game once you pre-order. The game has a lot of great ideas, like building settlements, an interesting combat system that makes injuries quite significant, a party system that requires you to rely on others to survive, factions and a lot of promise. It’s really easy to compare it to the game Mount and Blade for it’s lofty aspirations of a huge open world and it’s party based system. Check out this first trailer for some idea of how the game looks, so far it has fairly poor graphics but the developer really wanted to get down the ideas of the game before graphics and promises to make it more visually appealing by the end.
Trailer – Indie DB
Most recently the developer has been talking about the newest update which has to do with carrying. What that boils down to is merely being able to carry corpses or injured allies but it also means you can now capture enemies. With this he plans to have bounty hunters capturing people for ransom, police taking prisoners, cannibals taking prisoners to eat and all kinds of interesting options. Carrying also has to do with being wounded. So when you are injured to the point where you character falls, or one of your allies, that character will stay down for a while because of their wounds. In order to get them out of that area, since healing in such a state takes quite a while, you have to have someone carry them. To make this idea a little less harsh there is now a new type of med kit that allows you to heal individual body parts, so you may heal an injured leg in order to let someone walk again.
There are quite a few things that are being coming up next after this carrying update. The developer wants to bring in the option to purchase buildings soon, which will allow you to heal quickly and store equipment. There will also be imprisonment in the near future, which ties back to some of the ideas about carrying/capturing people. You will also be able to get captured by enemies, so you may have to go on some rescue missions in order to save a comrade who was captured by slavers, police or an enemy faction. After you are able to purchase buildings you will be able to outfit it for crafting and research. The best equipment in the game will taken out of shops and only available through crafting or research once it gets to that point. You will also eventually be able to make a building you own into a shop or hospital. All of that is high priority for the near future and there is also a list of loftier aspirations, like siege warfare, ranged combat, mining, farming, larger world map, building your own outpost out in the desert, huge armies traversing the land, a larger complexity and number of factions, wildlife, creatures and so much more. To check out that list head over here. Assuming the developer stays focused on the game and keeps releasing updates in a timely fashion then Kenshi is going to turn out to be quite fantastic, keep your eyes on it. If you want to check it out now you can head over to the main website and pre-order for $10. Here is a more recent video that shows off a little bit of combat, healing, vendors and inventory management. Thanks for reading and I hope to be back shortly with more news. Main Website: http://www.lofigames.com/index.php IndieDB Page: http://www.indiedb.com/games/kenshi