How Difficult Should Thrive Be?

Gameplay
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Let’s talk about difficulty. Generally, there are three parts that define how easy or hard a game is:

  1. Balancing - Damage, health, speed, etc. These are a bit easier to diagnose, and a bit easier to set. Ties to immediate combat and gameplay.
  2. Mechanic Complexity - How nuanced and layered the different systems in the game are. Ties to micromanagement and depth.
  3. Information Accessibility - Explanations for mechanics, as well as information on what is going on around you. How much the player knows about what is happening, what is going wrong, and what is going good. Ties to discovery and confusion.

Manipulating these three variables results in what we call difficulty. Elden Ring and Dark Souls are really difficult games, and it achieves this difficulty by saying “I don’t care about balancing, here’s a boss with a one-shot attack that covers half the arena” in the second half of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a very easy game, but to add some element of difficulty and to reward experimenting, it does not fully explain every control and input that the character can do. This rewards players for trying different things, but can also be very confusing for players who have trouble with the sometimes clunky mechanics in the game.

Furthermore, games usually offer various elements of difficulty management:

  1. Difficulty Levels - Easy, Normal, Hard, Legendary. Very accommodating to a player, but can result in inconsistent experiences and can be difficult to balance. We all know games where Easy and Normal are too Easy, Hard is okay, Legendary is Satanic.
  2. One Single Difficulty - Very handcrafted games, such as Red Dead Redemption or Elden Ring, tend to go this way. Probably the best way for developers to design their ideal experience, but can result in sections of the gaming community being dismissed; game will always be too easy or too hard.
  3. Single Difficulty, Feature Enabling/Disabling - A lot of simulation or management games tend to go this way, such as KSP, where the core mechanics are always the same but the player has more or less ability to experiment. For example, disabling money restrictions or progression limitations.

In regards to Thrive, I think staying with difficulty levels is ideal; it would be a big lift I think to reorganize our settings right now to be number 3, and I don’t think we are straightforward enough of a game to just have a single difficulty for.

I think ideally, we should go for the Halo approach, where they explicitly mention that a certain difficulty (Heroic) is how the game is meant to be played. It might be best to have one difficulty where things are engaging for even experienced players, but not necessarily punishing to them, balancing it to be the “ideal” Thrive experience. Then, we balance difficulties to be slightly easier or slightly harder based off that standard.

Enough exposition, here comes the discussion part: How difficult do we want Thrive to be? However, we all know that all game developers love to say that their game “is easy to pick-up, difficult to master”, or “challenging but rewarding”. So perhaps a more productive conversation to have as well: What aspects of Thrive should be easy, what aspects should be difficult?

  • What difficulties do we tolerate that the player reports? In other words, which feature difficulties do we essentially say “figure it out, that’s part of the challenge” to, and which features do we make sure the player does not get frustrated by?
  • Do you guys think Thrive is currently too hard or too easy? What impression do you generally get from the community?
  • At what point in the Microbe Stage do we want things to be most difficult, and at what points most easy?
  • How punishing should a bad trip to the editor be?

If you guys notice other questions coming to mind, do post them. And if members of the community are reading this, do give input on the forums.

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I think the default, “normal” difficulty level of Thrive needs to be about what it is right now. We basically get no complaints about the game being too easy (except from the biggest fans who have become super familiar with all the game systems) and only a few complaints that the game is too hard to get into (which can be further improved by having more tutorials or an optional extreme tutorial mode that forces the player to play a certain way through the early microbe stage).

I think playing microbe stage “normally” to get through it needs to be pretty easy. So that players don’t give up and they get the feel of game progression. Once we have further stages, those can be balanced to be slightly more difficult in comparison as microbe stage has already taught the player all key mechanics and a player that far into a playthrough is less likely to give up and more likely to be willing to experiment a bit to find a workable strategy forwards.

In contrast to just getting by in the microbe stage, I think optimal play should be (very) hard to achieve. This would ensure that experienced players would take long to find an optimal strategy to use. Currently it seems that optimal play is too easy because we get those experienced players saying they think the game should be a bit more difficult. One way this can be achieved is by adding more complex systems that players who have no clue about them don’t need to interact with them but players going for optimal playing need to use. For example I think the endosymbiosis system is a perfect example: it gives experienced players who want to maximise their Thrive gameplay more activities to do in the microbe stage, but anyone not knowing how to use the system is not impacted negatively much at all.

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I think that progression through the stage should get increasingly difficult: surviving a couple generations and making it to a point where you can build a distinct species before you go extinct should be pretty easy, Making it to Eukaryotic status should feel tough but not like a roadblock, and actually reaching multicellular or the “you thrived” menu should feel like a challenge. On a second dimension, increasing difficulty settings should narrow the range of “viable” strategies, and force players to make use of more and more mechanics to reach the same point.

For example, on easy you don’t need to know what Lysosomes are to be able to be an engulfer. You just need to know you need to be faster than the prey, and bigger than the prey. And for a player that only knows that and is only acting on that information, it’s easy to find things to eat early on, and challenging to find enough to eat towards the end of the stage, but you can keep doing the same thing all the way through.

On hard, trying to do that will get you killed, while half your food ejects out the back. On hard difficulty, you need to be looking at species to figure out what digests them and how you can catch them, designing a species without excess parts to keep your species specialized (going back to your previous design philosphy document), and developing counter-measures to predators. For a player that is keeping up with all these things, early gameplay is still pretty easy, and late gameplay is still pretty challenging.

The tricky part with this approach, I think, would be how to make the player understand that going up in difficulty is a matter of learning more, and not being more frame-perfect or just plain lucky. My hope would be that by looking at what the AI does, and being curious about all these new orgenelles popping up, the player would start to poke around and figure out more.

What I’m not worried about is the idea of finishing microbe stage being a challange when it’s only the end of stage 1 out of 8 (7 “finishable”) stages. I don’t think every stage has to be tougher than the last one. Each stage will be bringing new mechanics into the game to learn all over, and each player will probably have different opinions on which was the “toughest” and “easiest” stage based on preference.

And I don’t want the poor space stage fans to need to be dark souls junkies as well…

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I agree. In case your point was kind of a reply to me, I’ll clarify that my opinion was more like that we need to ensure that early microbe stage is a really gentle introduction to Thrive, because I don’t want to lose on any potential players who would like the game as long as they can get into the game. In that sense the other stages can start off being more difficult without us suffering a hit to the potential playerbase.

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Had a quick thought related to our game over condition that I wanted to record. Not something that I deem necessary, but could be an interesting discussion.

One thing about sandbox games, especially editor-based ones, is that they encourage and accept failure. It often is expected that players will likely have unviable builds once in a while that blow up, sputter, and crash - so these games will give the player multiple attempts to fix something. I’m not saying it is something that a sandbox game must have, but it does often encourage experimentation.

One thing that can make Thrive difficult is that if you have a poor build, there’s very little chance for corrective measure unless you get into the editor - which, for an especially poor build, could result in death spirals that result in a game over screen.

Proposal: Lives Via Switching Upon Extinction

We do have a mechanic which allows players the chance to start again - you are able to switch species on Easy difficulties. What if we integrate this more thoroughly instead of having it be a setting?

As is, if you go extinct with the setting enabled, you’re able to switch freely. Instead, it can work kind of like a “life” system, where there is only a certain number of times you can use this before officially losing. On Easy, it could be 5 chances after your initial extinction. On Normal, it could be 2 chances after your initial extinction. On Hard, it can be a single, or no chance.

This can benefit us in two ways…

  • Encourages Experimentation - If players are less afraid of entering a death spiral, they’ll be more willing to try something out depending on how much they value each life. It would be fine if something became obsolete because you’d have another chance.
  • Balancing for Replayability - We can afford to make certain things a bit more challenging or in-depth if we provide players multiple chances. We don’t want to create situations where the player is absolutely trapped no matter what they do, but certain mechanics, especially environmental events, could be made much more influential. For example, Snowball Earth can be much more traumatic if players are offered the ability to retry, and the evolution of the major compounds as the atmosphere develops can be much more pronounced.

There would have to be some sort of selection process so that players are provided options of what lineage they take over. The life counter would also probably have to reset once a different stage is reached. But otherwise, this can be a pretty simple but beneficial change to our gameplay loop.

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One big drawback I see with this idea is that it usually takes 5+ attempts at failing a generation before you get a game over. That means that the player will be already quite frustrated and might give up even before they get to swap to a (hopefully) better surviving species. I think instead it would be more reasonable to show a help message after 3 deaths that the player can load an earlier save to try a different thing in the editor.

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I really wanna avoid endorsing “meta-game” strategies such as that because it inherently suggests that our game is not built well enough to be above such a brutish solution. Since numerous generations of world development and events would be eliminated by loading a previous save, we would also be basically permitting players to readily consider any challenging events that occur to them as illegitimate, to the point that something like loading a prior save is valid. If we don’t present a playthrough as being legitimate enough to not warrant save resets, then that can lead to a slippery slope of players thinking everything they struggle with is broken.

It’s obviously something that gamers will do regardless, but it’s not something we should encourage in my opinion. I can also easily imagine players thinking that it’s a sign of an unpolished game if something so non-gamey was recommended: “I’m dying and this is the best you can recommend to me?”

If there were another solution to the death loop, I would think it would be an automatic free trip to the editor after 2 or 3 consecutive trips. But that also has an issue, since potentially not every build can be fixed with only 100 MP points - so we’d offer them a free trip to the editor, and then they could just spawn right back into a death loop. That’s why I think species switching could be better.

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I think you’ve identified the problem quite well, which is actually made worse in experience by what hhyyrylainen pointed out:

But I do think there are two scenario’s here that may be worth discussing separately:

  1. Oh no, my last edit made my species unviable, and now I am in a death loop until I go extinct.
  2. I was actually doomed since 5 editor sessions ago.

For scenario 1, I think the natural player response is “I just want to retry that last editor session again”. Simply reloading the second-to-last autosave accomplishes that quite accurately. But I can also sympathise with the idea that reloading a previous save feels a bit cheaty or like exiting the normal gameplay loop.

For this, I would suggest an option to re-edit your species. But not for free, it comes at the cost of additional population loss, more than you would get from just dying. Ideally I would also have it set up as a reset of your last editor session, not simply an additional 100 MP editor session. So, essentially, a “reload last save” with a penalty attached, so you can’t keep trying it.

If that’s not enough, we’re actually in scenario 2.

But before we get there, I want to address again:

Yes, that is mighty annoying. I think it is actually quite similar to the annoyance of waiting to be digested after you get engulfed, or dying due to running out of ATP. Fortunately, for those scenarios we have the “perish instantly” button. Here I propose a similar solution: a “go extinct instantly” button. That way once you realize you species is doomed, you can just skip to the “play as another species” part, without having to spam “perish instantly” dozens of times.

There’s also the in-between scenario of your species being doomed in this patch, though not everywhere. Would be nice to escape this too.

So that leaves us with a popup upon death (or after ~3) with the options:

  • Respawn in current patch (population penalty in this patch as normal)
  • Re-edit cell (bigger population penalty (in all patches?))
  • Abandon/go extinct in patch
  • Go extinct

And that brings us to scenario 2.

I think we should not underestimate how much it already feels like a loss to switch to a different species. It would be one thing if you got placed into a previous version of your own species (which obviously would not work either), but this places you in a species full of edits different from what you wanted to do. To draw an equivalent to some strategy games: It’s like having your country destroyed and switching to another (some do offer that option). Yes, you can continue to experience the ongoing story of the world. But I think it’s pretty widely regarded as having “lost” the previous game, and starting a new one in the same setting.

I think the only way species switching in Thrive could feel as a legitimate continuation of your same path is if you switch to a very closely related species, but that could run into the same problem that made your first species go extinct. At least if we’re talking about big things like Snowball Earth.

If total species extinction already feels like a loss, does it make sense to attach a number of lives to how often you can switch? And unlike same species re-tries which are already limited by your population, this would be set up at game start. Would that feel too arbitrary? Is it a good experience if your game ends when you accidentally make your bird too heavy to fly, but you can’t switch to a related species because you already did it twice in the microbe stage?

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I think it is good to separate this into the two different issues you bring up - repetitive dying after one faulty editor step, and your evolutionary strategy just not working out.

I think something like this could be presented as the portion of your population with new adaptations dying off and the only organisms of your species remaining being the ones that don’t display the new phenotype. Obviously that’s not perfect logic - you technically become your new species entirely after a 100 million year jump in time - but hey, microbes don’t live in a 2D world. So perhaps the undo cost would be you absorb your losses due to death and lose the population bonus you got from the last reproduction.

I do think this button would end up barely used because players just wouldn’t want to give up. But if some sort of life-based species switching feature gets implemented and that’s a feedback we frequently get, it could be a next step.

To clarify, I do think this “life counter” should be reset in each stage:

One thing I anticipate with Thrive is that, since the player is experiencing the entirety of their evolutionary history, there’s a bit more room for allowing gameplay beyond just your own species/tribe/civilization/etc. There’s also the sandbox nature/goals of Thrive that could lend more credit towards such a species-switching experience.

I’ll clarify this with a comparison to another game that I frequently think of for Thrive - Civilization. Losing your civilization entirely is a crushing and complete feeling of defeat to the point that even if a “switch-to-other-civ” feature was enabled, I’m sure no one would choose it. But a big difference between Civilization and Thrive is that Civilization has very discrete win conditions, and orients all gameplay as progress towards that win condition.

To win Science, you got to get to a certain point in the tech tree and build the spaceship; to win Culture, you got to secure enough tourism via works of art and wonders; to win Domination, you must capture all capitals; etc. Players spend the entire game working towards this goal, and measure their performance and progression by how close they are to achieving that goal. And if one goal doesn’t work, they can atleast try to switch their strategy towards another win condition. As such, in a game like that, switching to another player after losing can feel really demoralizing because you’re essentially

With Thrive however, there aren’t really comparable win conditions because Thrive doesn’t really give the player discrete objectives - mostly: survive, and reach the next stage. There are conditions on you to reaching the next stage of progression, sure - placing a nucleus makes you eukaryotic, placing binding agents will allow you to become multicellular, reaching a certain size makes you macroscopic, etc. But players aren’t pursuing goals outside of their immediate objectives. Thrive is striving towards being more of a pure sandbox game. It would kind of be like if Civilization had no game-winning objectives, and basically just had you interact with other civilizations up until a certain point.

Based off that logic, while losing a species is doubtlessly a bad feeling, I don’t think it necessarily has to be perceived as negatively as in traditional 4X games. If the objective of Thrive is to just to progress and survive, then the challenges are oriented towards doing that rather than being oriented towards a win condition such as that in Civ. As such, methods of altering strategy, such as switching species, are a bit more normalized imo.

That is part of why I think having multiple attempts of switching species could really benefit the depth of Thrive beyond just making the game more approachable. Many features inherently have to be a bit scaled back because we are dealing with the constraint of “if you lose this one species you’re done”. I’m obviously not advocating for us to constantly throw situations at the player where they have 0 chance of survival, but we can offer more experienced players more of a challenge and strategic depth by offering multiple attempts. And I don’t think that would cheapen the feeling at all - I can easily envision a feeling of intense pride if a player manages to survive through a beefed-up Snowball Earth Event without switching species, or going through X stage of progression without switching lives. It also fits in nicely with a potential theme from the Society Stage and onwards which was being entertained: Societal Stage Fundamentals

On a more personal note, I think that’s a larger theme that Thrive can represent. Our planet’s history is filled up to the brim with examples of niches which were extremely successful at some point in evolutionary history, but became much less prominent - or even disappeared - due to changes in ecology, the climate, freak accidents, etc. In a less “protagonist-driven” narrative of a species which has continuously survived from the literal beginning of the world’s history, that motif can be much more enforced- life is precious, but it is much bigger than an individual lifeform.

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I think it would be quite easy to combat these feelings by rewording the popup that could appear to tell the player that they have a chance to make a different edit if their current species is not viable.

And the reason why I think that basically loading a previous save is superior to the alternatives:

  • It’s already a feature in the game
  • It’s not necessarily easy for the player to fix their species with just 100 MP, and they might not remember what they did. So it is better to reset back to a cell that did work before and the player made it to the editor.
  • Always allowing switching species would mean that there’s actually no way to get a game over anymore. This would mean that as long as you die enough in Thrive you will eventually succeed, and I don’t think that’s also not what we want.
  • If we offered a way to go back to the editor but with some debuff, that would be a major penalty but only for non-meta gamers so the offer to get a new editor cycle but with some debuff would be a beginner trap. Like everyone who knows what’s up would load a previous save at that point. And only new players would get hit with the negative effects. I think that’s totally opposite of how difficulty should work.

I agree with these sentiments. That’s why I think that species switching should be limited only to easy mode as a one more way a new player can get forwards in the game by relying on AI created species that might be better than what a new player has the skills to make yet.

Also ultimately I don’t think we have many programming resources whatsoever to spend on this. I’m willing to listen to what the popup that comes up after some deaths says on it and what the wording is on the button to load the last autosave from the editor. But anything else will need someone else to volunteer to program the change. The reason for this is that there is an open issue about a tutorial that points out the load button, and I’m willing to consider that part of the roadmap but anything more will need extra resources not accounted for currently.

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A first point:

Thrive is going to be a long game, and I get the impression that the proportion of players that end a playthrough because they “lose” is going to be extremely low. (More likely to end if they get bored) Especially once we work our way up to Aware stage, that’s a very long time to re-play to get to the same point again. So I think when going extinct the choice will usually quite simply be between:

  • Use a built-in continue mechanism.
  • Reload a save.

The only exceptions I can see are some kind of self-imposed iron man or challenge run, whether supported by game options or not. So I think outside of actual “hard modes”, you should not expect too much from players wanting to be able to actually have a total game-over.

I honestly believe that for players first encountering the game especially, just the regular dying within species and having to respawn, in addition to the concept of having to reload or swap to a different species upon extinction is enough “failure experience” to push them to want to “play well”.

Because of all that, I actually suggest just enabling “switch to different species mode” for normal difficulty, without any number limit. If a player loses, and they don’t want to, they’ll just re-load a previous save anyway. All enabling switching does is provide them with an alternate option to consider.

More or less what I was thinking of in terms of justification: “this edit didn’t work out, but maybe there was actually another branch of your species trying something else? We didn’t show them yet, but you can make them now.”

I did read it all, so I hope I am not being reductive when I say: agreed on all counts.

But that to me raises the question: if that is the case, why have a limit on the number of times you can switch at all? Is there any point at which not being able to switch anymore is actually adding to the experience? Especially since there is still always the option of loading a previous save, which I think players will fall back on if they can’t switch anymore.

In my view, you take either take the “life goes on, this is just another part of the story” view, or you’re trying to play through a single successful line of descendance. I am not sure if there is that much of an in-between?

This would work also in my opinion, at least for the short-term survival problems.

Not sure if it supports or degrades your argument, but we already have a scenario like this:

If you for example fill up your storage all the way and find a resource-rich location before you reproduce, you set up the best possible start for your next generation. If you then die during that next generation, reloading your last save (start of gameplay) is then the obvious optimal decision. You can also reload that same save just to avoid population loss if you die, there’s 0 reason to take the population loss.

Ah, life’s ultimate constraint!

But, since you technically prompted me, popup on death:

Similar to the extinction screen

afbeelding
afbeelding1920×659 49.1 KB

DEATH
This microbe did not survive to reproduce, but your species lives on in this patch!
Others of your kind continue to thrive.

  • Respawn
  • Return to Editor (actually loads the second-to-last autosave)
  • Go Extinct in Patch
  • Go Extinct
  • Load Game (?)
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I think it is too much to be on death. It seems like overtly disparaging to the player to immediately call out that they have died. The player should have a few go’s before the game steps in. This would be basically our “You can now play as Luigi” moment where the game steps in before the player is totally frustrated. That’s been my whole point why the game should even prompt the player to try something different than just dying over and over again, because that’s going to be a quit moment. And I think in the microbe stage we should protect the player against that.

Also on the prompt, I would make it just a small popup near where the tutorials often appear. And it would be a max of a few lines of text. The player would be totally free to ignore the advice if they are still determined to get through the life. Or if they had been maybe close to rage quitting this validation that it is totally fine to go back and try something different would help the player to continue and not throw in the towel on Thrive entirely.

Like that’s entirely the reason why I want something to happen if the player dies a bunch of times in a row.

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In my fork I attempted to solve the problem by declaring that a “bottleneck” event occurred and at some point had a screen come up that says “but a few of this species survived, and they were exceptional mutants.” It felt fair enough to trade population for a free editor cycle, but that fork also made population mechanics a little more harsh if I recall correctly.

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Heavy agreement here, and a very good point. Especially if we want to genuinely present a variety of challenges and dynamics throughout a playthrough. Otherwise, we could easily fall into the trap of watering down certain features out of the fear that a player could get trapped if they have one thing off.

It’s one thing to have that concern in the Microbe Stage - which I also think would benefit from having wider margins of error - but maintaining this thin margin of error throughout the entire game could have really troublesome effects on replayability for later stages in the game, where the game is supposed to be more dynamic and complex. The Macroscopic and Aware Stages are supposed to be, what, 7 hours or so at the very least? That’s an awfully long time to either experience hamstrung challenges balanced with the fear of dead-ends, constant loading of prior saves thereby undoing progress and extending the stage, or constant game overs and retries.

While I personally would probably have a few playthroughs in this unlimited switch mode, and while I do agree that players are inherently motivated by success and failure even without the presence of an explicit lose condition - I still think a sizable chunk of any game has a playerbase which thinks in terms of win-or-lose. Having some sort of cap makes those players value each species they steward, and also amplifies the stress of being in a precarious situation, as well as the gratitude and pride that comes with potential successes. In my opinion, there is a big difference between infinite switching, and limited switching when it comes to the mental calculus in a player’s head.

If there was absolutely no lose condition, then those experiences could be really cut short for a decent chunk of our community. Because, thinking in the most pragmatic way possible, it doesn’t really matter if your species goes extinct if you can just immediately hop into another species an endless amount of times. For Easy difficulty, that’s acceptable since players on Easy are looking to either learn the game, enjoy the game leisurely, or otherwise struggle with baseline mechanics. For harder difficulties, players generally expect higher stakes. And besides, that technically is already possible since you can go into advanced difficulty settings based on the Normal preset and turn on the switching toggle.

I think if such a feature was implemented, it would essentially turn the “Switch Species” toggle into a slider or dropdown, from 0 additional switches, to 1-5 or so switches, to infinite switches.

I do also agree that this might be a pretty elaborate game over screen to show to the player, as most games (even more sandboxey ones, like Minecraft) typically have 1 or 3 options. Having too many options could overwhelm some players, even if the options seem intuitive to us.

I think it’s fine if the “load-previous-save” route exists as a hint. Though you do bring up a good point of integrating a smooth way to load back into the editor.

The legendary Thim branch. That’s definitely an interesting framing for returning to the editor.

Manpower limitations notwithstanding, I think limiting the number of switches inherently solves this problem, and is a crucial part of this interpretation. We can be more or less strict with the number of chances depending on player feedback.

And considering Rathalos’ point about game length and the general nature of a playthrough in a game, as well as the general challenges we want to present to a player throughout a playthrough, offering some sort of margin of error can actually allow us to bump up difficulty in certain areas without it being unfair. So it could easily have the opposite effect: of presenting players with more opportunities to feel rewarded in succeeding through difficult times.

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I think the microbe stage is special in that it has to be a gentle on-ramp to Thrive. It is the first thing new players experience and it should not be very punishing in my opinion (except on hard difficulty). And the stage should introduce the player to all of the major mechanics they have at their disposal.

I’m of the mindset that I need to get the remaining roadmap items done. As such I will right now tackle this issue from 2021:

Though based on this discussion, I will actually make it not a tutorial but a microbe stage feature, and adjust the wording to just highlight the option the player has to go to a previous editor save in case the state of their current species is not survivable.

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Personally I am still not entirely convinced that a total loss state is even necessary. Especially when you look at all the sand-boxy that don’t have one. But at the very least, the concerns I have about it, if they are going to come true at all, will not until we are a few more stages in probably. So we can see how player behaviour and comments develop over time.

I would just recommend another consideration on what the setting for Normal mode (as far as I can tell, still the default option) should be, if we don’t have the resources to implement a “switching enabled, but with limited charges” option.

Which reminds me: can we have the game remember the settings you used last time you started a game? Some games with a lot of start settings like Stellaris do this, and it’s a big timesaver.

Fair point, and after consideration, it could easily be cut down to:

  • Respawn
  • Return to Editor (actually loads the second-to-last autosave)
  • Go Extinct in Patch

Though in this case, I would personally like to have a “go fully extinct” button in the “select another patch to continue” screen.

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It’s possible but someone would have to program it. And this would be a relatively sizely change (though not as bad as it could be as the descension screen already exists so it has functionality of applying already set up world settings back to the new game GUI already in the game).

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Another point I’ll make for now related to difficulty as a whole: The Microbe Stage currently is the entirety of Thrive. Balancing now for the new player experience taking precedence over depth of mechanics in anticipation of an experience that doesn’t yet exist means that our entire game has its challenge and depth marginalized for more experienced players - which again, serve as the majority of our player base. Especially since we’ve established that we have a tutorial now which adequately equips a player with the fundamentals, and accept other challenges as something for the player to figure out, I think there’s room for placing a challenge on the player. As currently, there is very little reason for a player to try anything out of the norm.

If in a future stage of development we find that an entire playthrough is too challenging, then we can look at ensuring that our balancing for the Microbe Stage makes it an on-ramp. But as it stands now, the entirety of our game is balanced to be an on-ramp because of this approach, which gives less incentive for players to continue playing the game after they’ve learned the fundamentals.

I again don’t want to minimize genuine concern for the game remaining accessible for new players. But since we wish to ensure that positive word of mouth and belief in the quality of the project remains high within our community, enhancing replayability and encouraging experimentation by offering the player challenges, with cushioning mechanics, can help drive really positive word of mouth.

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I think on balance we need to consider new players more than existing ones. It kind of seems like there’s not that much word of mouth ongoing for Thrive, so for the future of the project we need to make sure the new player experience is as smooth and widely welcoming as possible.

So to me it seems only good for short term to balance microbe stage around existing players.

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Ultimately, that’s what difficulty settings are supposed to be for, right?

Do we feel like the difficulty settings are currently not providing the challenge we want out of them? If so, maybe we can look at addressing that. That can include looking at what the default setting is, and how much certain things should scale up at the presets.

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