After a long silence and one small final update, Keen Software House have declared Medieval Engineers done and shoved it out the door. First launched in 2015, the build ‘n’ siege sandbox hadn’t seen a substantial update in the past year year of early access while Keen focused on its sci-fi sibling, Space Engineers. Keen had insisted that Medieval Engineers wasn’t abandoned but now with one final round of bug fixes, they’ve called it quits. Welp!

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While Space Engineers receives a fairly steady flow of smaller updates, developers Keen Software House have been saving up for a big’un with their other early access sandbox game, the low-tech follow-up Medieval Engineers [official site]. This week has brought an update big enough that Keen call it a “re-launch”, boshing in everything from a huge new world to land claims and female player models. … [visit site to read more]

Of all the fanciful claims made of video game technology, my favourite has always been neural nets and artificial brains. Imagine if video game men were alive! Your soldiers would learn from battle! They’d write letters to their virtual families – which you can read! Gasp as the life leaves their little digital eyes, and wonder what they believe comes next! Oh, it’s always a load of tosh.

You’ll excuse me if my meatbrain smirks as I respond “Whaaat?” to Space Engineers developers Keen Software House announcing plans to make an AI brain “which operates at the level of a human brain and can adapt and learn any new task”. Bit late for an April Fool, isn’t it?

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It was only when Marsh prematurely evaluated all over Medieval Engineers [official site] that I realised its initial Steam Early Access launch lacked multiplayer. I’m inattentive, me. But developers Keen Software House (them lot also behind Space Engineers) had shown multiplayer in its trailers and screenshots and I’d blithely assumed… that doesn’t matter now.

Multiplayer arrived in the castle-building/smashing sandbox yesterday for both its creative and survival modes. You can now smash your pal’s castle to pieces.

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Each week Marsh Davies punches a hole through the vertiginous walls of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or watches with grotesque, wet-lipped arousal as the entire structure disassembles in a shower of hot, hot physics. This week, he makes, then mounts, the battlements in Medieval Engineers, a castle construction sandbox. And then he unmakes them, too.>

Once you ve built a castle in Medieval Engineers, you can look at it, hit CTRL-C, then CTRL-V and paste a brick-for-brick duplicate of your entire complex anywhere else in the level. Including the sky – though they are not wont to stay there for very long. Castles, despite a plethora of idiomatic song titles suggesting otherwise, are very much a ground based medium, and when placed in the sky, they attempt to revert to form, with glorious physics-enabled results.

… [visit site to read more]

A touch over a month after announcing Medieval Engineers [official site], Keen Software have now launched the low-tech counterpart to Space Engineers. Well, they’ve launched it into Early Access. I can’t imagine a sandbox crafty build ‘em up doing it any other way, though. Actually. How would Minecraftbuts turn out if they did launch without that lengthy phase of large-scale testing and feedback? Perhaps closer to a LEGO set, made with a specific purpose in mind, than a jumbled box of bricks? Or over-ambitious and under-delivering? Anyway, I don’t have time to ramble on about that now.

… [visit site to read more]