I completed the story on "hardcore mode". I've explored the whole map and made an ugly MsPaint map (link to blogpost with screenshots at the bottom). I've built a 1km long base (from ILZ to the containment door). I haven't used bioreactors or growbeds. Yet the game was easy. It wasn't bad, because the puzzle was interesting. But it was a one-time fun, like a book. It's over now, and I don't see reason to play again. I'm not alone. Steam Spy
says 1835K people bought the game, but only 182K played it in the last two weeks. 90% of the players said "this was fun, goodbye". This is called "no replay-ability". Why is it important? Because it increases the amount of play the player gets from the
same game, ergo, he is more likely to promote it to other people. I sure won't blog about a game I no longer play and staying as it is, I won't play again. Replay-ability also allows allows streamers, bloggers, video makers to promote the game, as currently they can make one playthrough and that's spoilers anyway.
The key to replay-ability is hard mode. One that the player can't beat first time, so he plays again. Then on a harder setting, constantly challenging himself. This is my main point, a game needs a hard mode,
any hard mode to give a reason to play again, after the story is complete. No, the current hardcore mode is piss-easy, you can only die if you do "hold my beer" class stuff, like hugging a reaper or dumb mistakes like making a new air tank and leaving it on the fabricator table.
I designed a hard mode, but any mode that challenges the player is good to provide replay-ability.
Note to trolls: I'm talking about a new game mode you select at start. I don't want to take away your Freedom mode!
Developer note: only #4, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10 and #15 need to be implemented for playtesting, as the rest can be “imagined there” by a benevolent tester (who doesn’t build “disabled” stuff despite they aren’t disabled).
- Disable growing any edible or material (deep shroom) plants. Also disable breeding edible fish in the alien containment unit.
- Disable bioreactor, that thing is just broken as biomass is infinitely available in the game everywhere.
- Disable medkit replicator (except the one in the lifepod), as one can make medkits with the normal fabricator, using energy
- Disable any respawn of any resource or creature (including the silly sea treader spawns shale, but that’s not needed for playtesting). Beside the Sun and the heat, if you take something, it’s gone.
- Make leviathans unkillable and impossible to lure away from their patrol point
- The current energy production of a single solar panel is about 1/second at sea level over a daily average (more at midday, none at night). That’s “infinite” considering the energy demand of items. I can charge 2 batteries and a Seamoth inside the Moonpool with a single solar panel, which is bizarre. Energy should be a limited resource, forcing the player to either choose what to manufacture or spend lot of time farming materials for many solar panels, as time means hunger and thirst. I suggest 1 energy/minute per solar panel. Yes, I suggest a 1/60 nerf in this mode. The lifepod can have the output of 3 normal solar cells.
- Decrease the scanner room energy consumption to 1 energy / minute (or even free), so a nerfed solar cell can run it. As the map is fixed, the scans can be bypassed by memorizing locations, which is anything but fun gameplay or even worse, pausing the game and looking up on the internet. As scanning has resource demands, memorizing will be still advantageous, but not a “make or break” thing.
- The current energy production of the thermal plants is also too high, especially since there is 50oC everywhere in the inactive lava zone and 70oC in the active. Players should either find hotspots or build many (which is time finding magnetite, gel sack and ruby). I suggest 3 energy/minute for a plant placed at 50oC and +1/minute for every +10oC with 7/minute max. Thermal plants shouldn’t be able to build in the 5 m range of another plant (not needed for playtesting), preventing abuse of surface heat spots (one small vent shouldn’t power a dozen plants). You can take that energy of course, but not infinitely. If you want lot of power, you must go the lava zone or farm awful lot of copper and quartz for stupid amount of solar plants.
- Decrease the power production of a nuclear plant to 10/minute and a rod should deplete after providing 200 energy, making it enough for a pit-stop or temporary scanbase, but not for a real habitat, forcing players to either use the Sun or heat. It’s a micro-plant anyway, fitting into a room, not a real big nuclear plant!
- Batteries should spawn empty when crafted. No more infinite energy from copper and acid mushrooms! At start the player should get 2 full batteries, (along with the 2 snacks, water, flares and fire suppressor), as you can’t build battery charger without habitat builder and a scanner and those need non-empty batteries to work.
- The Cyclops and the Prawn recipes require no power cells but they spawn with (full) power cells. The repair and pathfinder tools spawn with a full battery inserted but need no batteries in the recipes. This is a bug, inconsistent with Seamoth and other tools and should be fixed in all game modes. I suggest items to have no batteries/cells when built but need none to build and the player inserts them before use. However the alternative, demanding batteries/cells in the recipe is good too, assuming that the charge of the battery doesn’t change (no fully charged flashlight built from an empty battery).
- Power cells should inherit the charge of the batteries they are built from. Having a full power cell from 2 empty batteries and some rubber is a bug.
- Disable bleach recipe, it’s both stupid (you can use bleach to remove bacteria from water, not salt from seawater) and is making water trivial to make. Players should either catch bladderfish or spend energy on purifiers.
- Fish should not live forever in a locker. After capture, the fish should rot in 10 minutes, the player should either fry it for immediate consumption or salt it for storage (which would give purpose to all the salt the purifier makes)
- The ion power cells are created from ion batteries as usual and the ion battery recipe is the same too. But the batteries should hold 10000 energy instead of 500 and spawn empty. Ion power cells should hold 20000 energy.
- Remove the functional blue tablet from the game. 2 are needed to complete the game, one to open the containment facility front door and one to open the Emperor container. Replace the tablet with a broken one (if that’s too much work to create, just a placeholder item), that provides the recipe for crafting the tablet, like scanning the broken purple tablet at the enforcement door gives the purple tablet recipe. Change the recipe to use 5 ion power cells instead of a single ion cube, accepting only fully charged power cells. That makes the crafted blue tablet cost 100000 energy. Yes, as I proposed 5 energy/minute for a thermal plant placed in the 70oC active lava zone, that’s 333 hours for a single thermal plant to charge the needed 10 batteries. This should give the player a hint to find more materials for more power plants and maybe hotter spots. Optimizing this would be the main challenge of the mode, giving constant place for improvement and allowing players to show off their monster power bases. Also, the time building this monster base would mean need for food and water.
- Of course this difficulty mode should have only one life like hardcore mode, to prevent people bypassing leviathans simply by “I swim like they aren’t there, if I die, I just respawn at my last base losing 3 minutes”, keeping the World dangerous.
Finally, please realize that while this mode is much harder than the current “hardcore” mode, it’s still doable by any player who puts in no brains just grinding and waiting. After all, 100K energy can be collected with a few thermal plants and lots of AFK waiting, eating an odd fish every now and then. So here comes the infinitely scalable challenge mode (this does not need to be implemented to playtest, a benevolent tester can just imagine it):
Early in the game the player gets a Sea Emperor vision that many sentient creature eggs are held in the failed research facility and they sensed the presence of another sentient being (the player), so now they will hatch on day X midnight (X needs to be determined via playtesting) and will die in that facility. At the usual place, the player finds buddyfish eggs that are available at infinite numbers (respawns in 1 sec), the player can take as many as he pleases. To keep them alive after the hatch timer is up, they must be in alien containment units (they are very vulnerable to the infection, wouldn’t survive in the ocean). When the hatching happens, the buddyfish who don’t have their living space die. The eggs everywhere in the World are removed (hatched and died). The hatched buddyfish can be removed from the containment if the player wants to move it between bases and held in inventory or even lockers, with the restriction that they all must be in containment units again at midnight or they die.
The buddyfish also need to be fed every day, each consuming as much food as the player does (which is about 36 units per day, a cooked peeper is 32). For simplicity, the food is removed every midnight from the lockers of the base where the containment units are in the order of old cooked fish > cooked fish > salted fish. Rotten cooked fish, raw fish, snacks and player-edible plant parts are not accepted. If the lockers don’t have enough food, the buddyfish that didn’t get fed die.
The player gets credited for the amount of buddyfish alive when the cure is found (from there the buddyfish can be released to the ocean, they will no longer die to the infection). As there is no limit to grab more buddyfish at start, there is no limit for the difficulty of the game. The player must plan bases and balance farming fish and salt (some comes as byproduct of water purification for himself, but not enough) against farming materials for his cube charging base. Please note that there are little amount of fish and no natural salt in the hot areas where heat power plants are feasible, so travel and proper planning is required. Please also note that the amount of edible fish and salt deposits are limited and with no respawn, it will run out. The player must go further and further from the buddyfish base to find food and finally he’ll find none. You can’t solve this problem by playing hundreds of days and grinding hard, as the buddyfish need food every day, while you need food and water. If you plan wrong, your buddyfish will die, making this a challenging problem to solve and its own endgame competition with videos of guys winning with some huge bases with large number of buddyfish containment units along with another huge base at the lava zone charging the batteries.
My blogpost with all the screenshots.
