How Difficult Should Thrive Be?

[Deus]

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.

@Rathalos

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.

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.

@Rathalos

“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.

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.

@Rathalos

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?

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

@Deus

The life counter would also probably have to reset once a different stage is reached.

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.