Macroscopic Core Gameplay Discussion

[Rathalos]

@Deus

Games like Mario, Meat Boy, and many others – God of War, Skyrim, COD, etc. – are level-based, while games like KSP, Thrive, are sandbox. Furthermore, Thrive is completely procedural.

I want to contest this, because in the situation I stated, which is a single editor + gameplay cycle, you are facing a relatively static situation. That’s a procedurally generated level, but a static level still.

@Deus

In a procedural game, we don’t even know if the player will encounter the same problem that made them go extinct in the first place if a prior save is loaded. So, reverting to a prior save can very likely mean just flat-out avoiding the challenge which made you fail.

This also does not fit the situation I gave so I believe you may have missed that part?

@Deus

When I discuss difficulty and player-switching, I’m not saying that a standard playthrough of Thrive should have player-switching. I might have implied that a bit with the KSP “crash-and-burn” analogy just because rockets to tend to crash a lot in that game.

Okay, because I indeed was getting that impression previously.

@Deus

That’s a big reason why I am arguing for a lives-system of sort to be attached to this feature instead of just enabling the current players-switch option. It being limited is still informing the player, “hey, that was a screw-up, you can’t afford to do that much more but here’s another try.” I was thinking of Easy difficulty having 2 switch chances per stage, Medium difficulty having 1 switch chance per stage, and Hard difficulty having no switch chances. No carry over across stages.

Note that if a random event can in any situation be insurmountable, that situation can occur any number of times (so also more times than you have lives). So this still needs the same safeguards of ensuring a single-generation change can always be overcome by the player.

In other words, this does nothing to “allow” more severe changes in my opinion.

@Deus

Unlimited player switching is pretty avoidant, and really minimizes the risk a player has in mind in making choices. If they know they can constantly switch, there really is no investment in making a particular species work.

I am pretty sure that losing the progress they made on their chosen progression path will always feel sufficiently damaging to players, regardless of whether it can eventually lead to a game-over screen.

@Deus

Continuing a bit from my previous points about the procedural nature of the game meaning challenges aren’t set – Thrive ideally is asking the player to persevere through challenges. If these challenges are avoidable, as would very easily be if you can just reload a previous save and roll the dice again, we are not doing a very good job of asking for perseverance through problems. A very valid solution to any problem or inconvenience the player faces then would just be taking a very solid chance that the problem won’t show up in the first place.

I want to re-emphasise again that my entire argument rests on reloading just to the start of the latest editor session. So, it’s not giving you any chance to avoid the problem, just letting you try a different solution for the same problem.

@Deus

I’ll give an example: big things tend to die out in significant environmental events, and I am very confident that a lot of players will be big at some point in their playthrough. If we simulate these environmental events realistically, big things will experience a big challenge, facing a very legitimate chance of extinction. That can be a very valid and interesting “design-risk” of choosing to create something large that balances out many benefits.
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As such, the idea that something big can have a much more vulnerable position in the environment – a very legitimate evolutionary trend to represent in Thrive – becomes something we are actively trying to balance against. Which can harm mastery, player engagement, and gameplay transformation. Again, harming replayability.

Note that it isn’t my opinion/expectation that a player has to die if they are above a certain size for a major environmental event. But it should be difficult, and the player really should understand that being big comes with the risk of having your stability knocked out. Not allowing the player to fail graciously really undercuts that.

So this is kind of what I feared you were thinking, which is why I am hammering so much on not making “you can always switch to a different species” an assumption we are completely relying on. Because the above is in my opinion a failed game design result.

If you decide to go big, disaster striking when you are big is a complete chance event. The same goes for any disaster striking that undermines any number of other things you were relying on, which may not even look anywhere near as risky as “growing very large.” If those situations are ever truly impossible, then a lot of people are going to be very upset with that and complain about it *forever." They will rightfully say they were killed by RNG, and were therefore forced to take control of some other species with 5 generations of AI edits. Many people are not going to care about continuing in the same world, because they were entirely focused on what they were doing with their species.

So I think any disastrous event has to be survivable just by trying several different solutions in the editor, and then surviving the gameplay environment with difficulty. That does not mean it has to be easy, and it does not mean that disaster events have to be minor. The player just needs to have enough tools in the editor (and this would obviously involve the player abandoning anything they were planning to do and instead focus all MP on adapting to the new situation), and the gameplay environment, while very different, should still provide its own opportunities to continue.

@Deus

• If we have a fail remedy that allows the player to try something, and if they fail, continue in the world, we are asking them to prove the legitimacy of their design. We’re saying – “hey, you made this choice, let’s see if it works.” And if they fail, we’re saying “that design didn’t work – we’ll give you one last chance to survive this, here’s something else that is experiencing the same challenge - think of something else, or if the environmental event is about finished, be mindful next time.”

If you’re switching to a different species, it’s at the same point in time, and it’s already been edited by auto-evo for this generation. So really, we’re relying very heavily on auto-evo here to make sure it designed something that can survive the situation.

@Deus

• Loading a prior save. Let’s ignore the previous point that a procedural game doesn’t guarantee anything. Asking the player to load a previous save is basically saying, “hey, this build didn’t work. You either try to survive this very difficult situation again with an unequipped build, or you better hope you can downsize quickly enough.” So, being big, they’d be stuck in a loop of either trying desperately to shrink, which can be difficult if they aren’t well designed to be small or are really big, or try their luck with a very difficult situation again.

So, like I said, we have no choice but to make it work, or people are going to hate it regardless. Because not everyone is going to see switching to a potentially very different species as a valid “continuation”.

It’s funny you mention the shrinking, because that’s exactly what I was thinking of regarding “emergency adapatations.” After all, species shrinking can go at least 10 times faster than growing in size.

@Deus

If we only have the first option, can you see how we’d be inclined to de-fang major environmental events? If the player’s only option is to continue banging their head against a very difficult situation, we have three choices – make sure that big things are more resilient to starvation, make sure that major environmental events don’t rock the boat too much, or both. Those are things we should be balancing of course – but we would very likely have to extend this accommodation to a point where it can easily reduce replayability.

So, to summarize:

• We better find a way to make major environmental events surmountable with difficulty by any species that was doing perfectly fine beforehand(hopefully without defanging them), or I promise you players will not accept it.
• I believe you are missing many choices beyond your three, such as:
  • Ensure the player has enough option choice to adapt to large changes.
  • Make sure that large environmental changes don’t just take things away, but also provide new opportunities.

Following your example, without weakening starvation or the environmental change itself, we can still ensure that with skill and knowledge the player can survive this. By shrinking a lot, increasing hibernation, tapping into a different food source, etc. Of course, if you were already small, there are probably other things to do instead. So with possible emergency adjustments depending on both your existing design as well as the exact situation, I don’t think that reduces re-playability at all.

In-gameplay the human player is also much more capable than the average animal, so I think that’s another factor that makes it reasonable for the player species to survive things the species otherwise would not.

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So again, I am personally rather in favour of having species switching as an option. But I don’t want that assumption to blind us from the way many players will want to experience the game. And I already saw evidence of just that happening in this thread.

@MirrorMonkey2

@Deus

Those are also my fears. We could, as a remedy to save-scumming, generate and pre-plan the major catastrophies like massive erruptions and meteor strikes at the beginning of the playthrough.

With recent changes to the game seeds affecting events, isn’t this supposed to already be the case?

@MirrorMonkey2

I thought of the very same example! In the microbe stage the events being rather tame isn‘t as immersion- and realism-breaking as it‘s hard to know which microbes might have survived such events. With macroscopic creatures though, we know with certainty from the fossil record that the really big extinction events inadvertently wiped out most megafauna every time. I‘m sure there are possibilites to account for this other than either making these events toothless or basically soft-disallowing players to become that big through the threat of unavoidable game over through extinction.

And like I said earlier, realistic or not, large size = guaranteed extinction is a terrible player experience precisely because these events can happen randomly at any time.

So yes, we should make it more difficult, but not anywhere near impossible.

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P.S.
Part of the reason I asked before about whether “we need proper failure modes” is truly a factual statement is that plenty of games also do not have a permanent failure state at all.

I know that “unlimited species switching (without lives limit)” combined with enthusiastic encouragement of "reload your previous save) essentially means "you will never actually get a final game-over screen. But that can be an entirely valid way to design a game, with only the lost progress/setback being the punishment. To name another famous example, Pokemon. Yes, another static world, but that’s not directly relevant to “does there need to be a final loss state”. And the fact that are games that tend to take a long time to play through, with a lot of things you do not want to permanently lose, I think the comparison is quite apt.