I think the best feedback we can get is new let’s play videos / streams from people playing Thrive for the first time as they have fresh eyes to notice everything wrong with the game or UX that is not intuitive.
That’s true to an extent, but we do have 3 starting “locations,” though they are quite similar.
I think this will get more interesting when we add more customization options when starting a new game.
I think we absolutely do not want new players to get stuck in the new game customization screen, so it still needs to be hidden away with just a few presets being available to pick from and very heavy guidance on what scenarios are not good for new players.
With the new mode of tutorials only showing the new ones, I don’t think people are going to turn off tutorials anymore. So even experienced players will play with tutorials enabled.
To me this sounds more like a special scenario to play. Which I’m totally onboard with adding for players to select for their further playthroughs to keep them interesting.
Shame that this PR has not progressed: Add dots indicating player population on patch map by CI09 · Pull Request #5880 · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub
Our GUI space is pretty limited… and if we remove the population counter then we are shifting vibes towards a gamified game, rather than an evolution simulation.
What’s your thoughts on temperature and radiation metabolism? Those are the only ones I’ve seen players complain about. So I think we need to do something to those first before considering tweaking any other metabolism. I’ve seen many players lament that those aren’t viable strategies. If we balance those well we get 2 new gameplay avenues to the game with minimal effort.
Well it is on the roadmap that it should be allowed to spread between patches, which could lead to it being a super volatile compound not always available.
I can see that. However due to a recent let’s play on Youtube I’m not convinced the average player can manage the tolerances system (in that the player got to like almost 80% debuffs before tweaking the tolerance). So it needs to be forgiving enough (at least on normal difficulty) that you can just kind of ignore it. Or at least it needs to not be a softlock, like if it costs too much to change so that you need to pre-plan multiple generations, then it is basically a beginner trap that can kill your run. That’s not very good. It also would be quite a lot of effort for little return if the oxygen mechanics were different in hard mode. Though something like the sliders being less efficient in hard mode could be done. Like maybe if the max slider value was 30%, then you’d need to be careful with the amount of oxygen tolerance debuffs you have as you couldn’t just crank the slider to survive any realistic oxygen level.
I would put this in the very hard category as this means that you can get at most like 10% resistance to oxygen per generation, and oxygen levels can increase more than that per generation. This also means that you cannot pre-plan as most oxygen prevention organelles only unlock once you have oxygen. So any player would need to know how much buffer they need to have for the inevitable oxygen tolerance debuff hitting them…
Overall though I think we should first focus on the average and new player experience before trying to get the deep end of the game complexity good.
I think it is a big deal for any photosynthesis build as it gives them a 50% resource debuff for multiple generations.
The early tutorials and tooltips rely on the nucleus being visible. Though I guess we could do a special condition of a certain size being required before you can place it.
Reading all of your points so far, to me it kind of seems like the nucleus is kind of what you want from the other systems: preplanning required from the player for certain gameplay aspect to be successful. (not all of your points are like that, but I saw many points that would wreck new players as they lack the foresight to know what’s coming and preparing for it)
Though endosymbiosis is an extreme difficulty right now so it needs changing. Or auto-evo needs changing to make sure less species die all the time / endosymbiosis targets aren’t as likely to die.
Not patched as auto-evo has not been updated related to this.
I think this is only a problem for experienced players. For new players getting excess stats for the nucleus or binding agents (or maybe it was some other organelle which had an unlock condition needing that) are quite challenging ends to the stage already. So I’d say that your points here are more about adding extra depth at the end of the microbe stage if someone isn’t in a hurry to get to multicellular but instead decides to take some extra time in microbe.
+1
Easy mode specific bug that was reported while I was away:
I agree with the sentiment that if we have a bunch of features that are difficulty level specific, then we’ll have way more extra bugs that are very hard to catch, but at the same time I agree with Thim that adding complexity to the early game that is meant to be the tutorial for later stages, is going to go really badly for new players (who don’t usually play on hard mode, which is why I’ve honed in on that difference).
Unless we want to do the early game twice, it needs to be so that the early game is compatible with the tutorial.
I think in general that is good. But in Thrive specifically we have the case where experienced players want the game way harder, and the only way we see on doing that is adding extra complexity that will wreck new players. So we either need a checkbox for extra complex systems mode, or we need to tie the extra systems the players are forced to interact with with the difficulty. So far we have done that second thing. For example many of the in-depth features like controlling your AI species behaviour is kind of soft-gated to hard mode with the other species members dying penalty being way higher in it than in normal or easy where it is basically laughably tiny. So that way difficulty already kind of “enables” features the player needs to know more about.
It kind of might as well not exist at that point, as if you have 2 hydrogenosomes you are already at -1% effective tolerance even if you crank the slider. So it is basically pointless. Though, again it could be difficulty dependent how much the max tolerance on the slider is. It could be 50% in easy mode and 10% in hard mode, where you basically must use organelles to supplement it.
This would in effect remove the mechanic of continuing your previous life from normal mode, so that would make it a mechanic “exclusive” to the hard mode…
Someone opened a PR about resetting the game environment entirely on exiting the editor. I still don’t like the consequences of that but I said that I would accept that as a feature if there is an option to explicitly turn it on.
How would you fix the player seeing AI cells being quite useless with the mucocyst? I’ve seen let’s plays where a player just sits around for 25 seconds on each mucocyst cell they want to eat and when their shield runs out, they just eat it anyway. I think that gives the impression that the AI is useless.
I think this is too hard to try to shove it into the roadmap.
Sulfur change to be toxic if you don’t have the organelle is perhaps simple enough to fit in, but this is also a complex change as it requires a new system (as there’s no such compound right now that causes damage and forces itself to be picked up). And it also has effects on the tutorial and balancing how much damage it does to ensure a player doesn’t die to it during the initial generations (when playing the tutorial).
I think even this wouldn’t significantly change the outlook of that organelle.
I think you might need to discuss with a few of the community members who seem to pop up quite often to complain that thermosynthase is not very useful / so hard to use they can’t manage it.
Have you tried this again with the new feature that always pulls an AI species along with you when you migrate to an empty patch?
I have a feeling that this would just make the problem of the microbe stage feeling like it is too slow for experienced players even worse. As they would be arbitrarily kept from achieving what they are going for. Though I guess that depends on the presentation like with the unlocks system.
Well hopefully you have another suggestion what is a good meta, then. Because the tutorial flat out recommends this. I think our game is so complex (even without fleshing out the microbe stage end game even more) that we have to have an official “easy” strategy we can tell to the players. There’s been many people asking on the Steam forums over the years how they can survive in the game, and my only go to advice is to head to the surface quickly and photosynthesise.
It’s certainly interesting and could add extra depth if we need it. But I think it is a bit late to suggest such a large feature. Plasmids have been talked about in the past as well, but they would be a pretty huge feature. We’d need the new parts, new movement modes, new auto-evo features for plasmids, GUI for managing / viewing the plasmids, and maybe new AI behaviours. So it would be a pretty huge feature. And would only add extra depth to the game for the experienced players who specifically engaged in it (as depending on how the feature was presented it might be extremely well hidden from players due to all the prerequisites before getting started with it).