RimWorld has been around for quite some time now, beginning all the way back when in 2013 with Kickstarter before heading into Early Access and going through a long development process that wrapped up in 2018. Since 1.0, though, the developers have been hard at work on RimWorld, developing what’s turned into multiple full-fledged expansion packs. In 2022, RimWorld is bigger and better than ever, and if you’ve been waiting to check it out, now’s the time.
So, in this article, we’ll explain why RimWorld is worth trying in 2022 and beyond.
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A Gaming Experience Like No Other: RimWorld
First off, RimWorld is simply a game like no other, outside of a peer like Kenshi or a predecessor like Dwarf Fortress, and a big part of why that is comes down to RimWorld’s hybrid status in terms of genre. Simply put, almost all games can be put into categories: Call of Duty is an FPS, Starcraft is an RTS, Witcher is an RPG, and so on and so forth.
RimWorld isn’t like that. Depending on how you set up your campaign and what mods you choose to use (which is extremely user-friendly and easy to do with RimWorld’s Steam Workshop support), RimWorld can be played as an RPG, as a colony builder, as a simulation, as an RTS, a survival game, or even as a co-op experience, among others.
Whether you want to focus on playing as one character or a small group that you slowly build up to be strong enough to take down any threat; you want to just sit back and think out every aspect of a huge, complicated base; or you just want a survival experience where you try your best to make it out of an inhospitable environment, RimWorld’s got what you're looking for.
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RimWorld is a true sandbox. Yes, it’s a top-down 2D game with relatively simple, cartoon graphics, but within that framework, there’s truly an astonishing number of ways to play this game that all work very differently from each other and are all completely viable. In the same way you can play Minecraft as a chilled-out builder in Creative Mode or as a standard survival game in Survival Mode or in an infinite number of totally different ways online, RimWorld works a lot like that, putting the player in the driver’s seat.
RimWorld Royalty DLC
Royalty was RimWorld’s first major expansion, and this DLC changed a lot about how the game works. Put simply, this DLC adds royalty to the game where you can complete quests to become royalty yourself, ascend the ranks, and get yourself access to psychic powers, powerful high-tech gear, and more.
Quests are a big addition to the game such that there’s a new way to get a constant stream of freshly generated tasks to do for rewards that can slowly stack up over time as you climb the royalty ranks. Quests will have unique requests for unique rewards that force you to play the game in ways you wouldn’t normally, and it gives you an important set of side goals to pursue and complete, but you don’t have to make these side goals, either.
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Royalty also added in a totally new endgame where once you’ve ascended through the ranks of royalty, you can invite the King, so to speak, to your colony for a period of time, and if you can protect him and his entourage, as well as keep the King happy, you’ll be granted with the ability to leave with the King, escaping the world you’ve been stuck on.
This is different from the game’s traditional endgame which largely concerns building an extremely expensive ship that you use to leave the planet, while you can also choose to send your colonists off to found other colonies as a sort of endgame unto itself. All told, this gives you a way to play the game through to a completion point that doesn’t involve spending all your time and resources building a ship, which is an awesome freedom for a sandbox game.
RimWorld Ideology DLC
RimWorld’s second major expansion, Ideology, changed the way the game played at a very fundamental level, allowing you to customize your experience in new ways. Essentially, Ideology adds religion to the game.
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You can pick a pre-created religion, or you can make your own, and each religion will come with its own set of beliefs that radically change how your campaign will play out. Maybe you’ll have a dark, bloody, cannibal God you make human sacrifices to, or maybe you’ll be in tune with nature and pray at the base of a tree and summon Dryads to help you. Or maybe you’ll do something totally different.
Not only do religions, or ideologies, impact how you actually play the game, they’ll impact how other factions view you, how your colonists will interact with each other and other people, and much more, creating an endless list of opportunities for emergent gameplay that you can’t quite plan out beforehand, even if you tried.
In short, this DLC essentially adds in a ton of functionality that was once just a player’s imagination or collections of mods. Now, if you want to do a ‘cannibal playthrough,’ for example, that won’t mean downloading mods or just creating and playing with specific characters, you’ll have a huge host of ingame mechanics to allow you to do just that.
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Ideology was a major step forward in helping players get the exact gameplay experience they’re looking for out of every campaign, and it’s hard to go back once you’ve tried it.
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