Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Maybe this belongs in suggestions, but since I, for ONI, for some unknown reason, kind of exclusively lurk in the general discussion forum I'll post it here....

I think something is a bit of balance with the rare end-game materials apart from the super-coolant. That one is on spot.

The thing is.. You do not really need them, they are convenient. And you kind of need thermium for automation and wiring around a hydrogen rocket but the point it come into play is a point where you are almost done with the main goal of the game.

What I m trying to say is really that for most part, except for very small quantities, the late game materials are not needed for anything except toying around after being done with all the goals in the game.

All the real challenge in game comes before having access to those materials forcing you to work around the problems and solve them without it, dealing with volcano heat by using vacuum setups etc...

Super coolant comes in to play with rockets, Thermium if you want to keep using your rocket bay continuously after sending of your hydrogen rocket and duplicant into the unknown. But at that point you are done with all goals.

Power setups, like using thermium to setup a petrolium boiler is not needed, you have your power by now. 

There is no real reason to go on, construct even more complicated machinery that require heavy use of cargo-rockets etc other than just toying with stuff and see what you can build.

I feel the endgame lacks some kind of goal that force you to farm space and the actual need of setups using materials from space other than just getting to space 

Don't get me wrong. It is fun to think up machinery that does stuff, but it is a lot more rewarding if it is to solve actual in-game problems than if just make them to see if it can be done.

Maybe some stuff below a ton of magma to be explored? What i am trying to say I guess is that I either would like larger amount of those materials earlier, to actually make use of them for something i do need or harder additional later game goals to, again, use them in larger extent for something i really need. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Ketmol said:

Maybe some stuff below a ton of magma to be explored? What i am trying to say I guess is that I either would like larger amount of those materials earlier, to actually make use of them for something i do need or harder additional later game goals to, again, use them in larger extent for something i really need

I think this is spot on. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree at some extent. Current late game is a problem. I do space very rarely as it is slow, grindy and utterly boring. The rewards are ok, but not needed as you mentioned. At this point of the game the player already solved the main problems of the colony with the resources of the asteroid... or just left the run!


Robo miners tricky cooling, very long space trips and poor late game performance are the main offenders IMO.

2 hours ago, Ketmol said:

I feel the endgame lacks some kind of goal that force you to farm space and the actual need of setups using materials from space other than just getting to space 

Any mechanic forcing us to farm the worst part of the game would be a disaster. Please no.
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Ketmol said:

...you kind of need thermium for automation and wiring around a hydrogen rocket...

Only if you don't have wolframrite/tungsten, as I think that has an even higher melting point than thermium.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@JunksteelI don't think farming or cooling in space is that problematic It takes time to set it up well and automate everything.

The major problem I felt was that once i had done all that, including making a fully automated double cargo bay petroleum rocket going back and fourth to a close asteroid getting materials, there was nothing else to do.. nothing that I really needed those materials for as I had already made my long distance hydrogen rocket and finished all goals in the game (around cycle 700)

Sure I could go perfecting the base, replacing water airlocks with fluid ones, make petroleum refinery more efficient by boiling etc..But nothing I really needed. It would be purely toying around with the base to make it prettier or more efficient. Nothing that served a real purpose.

Hence why I either would like those materials earlier OR have a goal that would make my cargo rocket and all of the space setup useful in order to get the materials to build something to unlock another goal.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I strongly agree on this topic and feel to approach the problem on an even wider spectrum.

It is true that most of the space materials doesn't enable the player to solve actual unsolvable challange and usually the best use you have for them is build crazy piece of machinery(which at this point you could build straight away in debug mode) or perfect your base.(but in general they could always become usefull with some dlc and new problems, I'm couting on it to be honest)

If you are exploring the game and reach space after you get them your brain is telling you are done with the game, but it is not the only case. After a while you become accustomed to the game mechanics and basically nothing more is really a challange and all the notions and solutions you have learned will serve you nothing more that to exercise repetitions while slowly smoothing the angles of your strategies.

In my opinion what is really missing in the game is external disturbance.

The first stage that last roughly 300 hours allow the player to learn the world, mechanics, materials, problem&solutions than what?

What's the use of all these accumulated knowledge if not apply it blindlessly at each run. It comes down to a couple of decision points depending on the available materials.

I'd really to see external "events" or disturbance to keep you on your toes while playing.

I will leave here some examples:

Fires, earthquakes, electromagnetic storms, critters more aggressive(even more than crabs, like the bulls in don't starve with the mating season), make the germs actually be a thing (peoplea complain about them but they are not even worth to be considered a minor disturbance), aliens kidnapping of dupes in space, vulcanoes eruptions more vioent(i.e. to force you use space insulation), falling rocks in tunnels if not ceiled and really there are countless ideas that could be added to me.

I do understand that the learning curve is already steep as it is but nothing forbids to introduce a new play mode with the concept of external disturbances in mind named like "dynamic survival", "extreme" or similar

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Tenedas said:

Fires, earthquakes, electromagnetic storms, critters more aggressive(even more than crabs, like the bulls in don't starve with the mating season), make the germs actually be a thing (peoplea complain about them but they are not even worth to be considered a minor disturbance), aliens kidnapping of dupes in space, vulcanoes eruptions more vioent(i.e. to force you use space insulation), falling rocks in tunnels if not ceiled and really there are countless ideas that could be added to me.

Maybe a way to solve this without making the learning curve to steep for new players is to (I guess it would be good as DLC) have something activate once the temporal rift have been reached.

..By disturbing space-time something have awakened threatening the duplicants left behind... resulting in new aggressive beast spwning, new volcanoes erupting and a new goal, a hard one at that. Create a machinery to close the rift and stop the madness,,,

Pretty much initiating hard-mode upon reaching the rift witha rocket unlocking new harder goals and a harder game-mode

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Ketmol said:

Maybe a way to solve this without making the learning curve to steep for new players is to (I guess it would be good as DLC) have something activate once the temporal rift have been reached.

..By disturbing space-time something have awakened threatening the duplicants left behind... resulting in new aggressive beast spwning, new volcanoes erupting and a new goal, a hard one at that. Create a machinery to close the rift and stop the madness,,,

Pretty much initiating hard-mode upon reaching the rift witha rocket unlocking new harder goals and a harder game-mode

 

I feel like it is even better yo unlock it based on the "old" end game goal without having to add yet another game mode and is a concept a lot of games like this does(take terraria as an example)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know this might sound trite, and maybe a bit devils advocate...but really the heart of this game is it's sandbox nature. You can tell the devs added many of the end-game goals to appease players of the "I need goals plz" mindset.

There will probably always be a divide in mindset here...I fall into the "I like to make my own sandcastles" category.

I've played ONI since before there were geysers and space...And I actually found the end-game far better than it is now with LESS objectives. The goal was to see how long you could get your colony to survive before heat death...and sustained colonies were either a stroke of pure engineering autism, or exploitation.

End-game materials are collected because you *want* them for more advanced builds...not because you *need* them for more anything critical. What's wrong with that?

However, I do feel there should be some things you can *only* do with specific space-age materials, as most of them kinda fall by the wayside. But really, before ANY of that happens...

End-game performance should get sorted out, before more stuff gets added, or changed.

In sandboxy games, the best end-game goals are what you make up yourself in my opinion. I understand that what we're used to in gaming, is having our end-game goals set out for us by the developers. ONI is one of those rare instances where the more satisfying goals are the ones we create for ourselves.

I also find it amusing how demanding we are as gamers nowadays. Oxygen not included is like...25 bucks and some change on steam. If it even provides 20 hours worth of entertainment, that is more value per dollar of entertainment than buying a movie ticket.

Most people who enjoy oni have thousands of hours....How much more satisfaction do you need? :S

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While i agree about the differents approach to the game i have to point out sandbox mode is there, i think we are more on the survival mode here.

I think the main point of the post is not demand or pretend but just suggest^^

And the suggestion is probably from the ones that feels like they want to expend all the knowledge accumulated with the play through in more difficult challanges that actually have an impact to actually keep the colony surviving.

This survival task become boring and trivial at some point and who really loves this game is just suggesting the devs to implement more reasons for them to come back.

On the money part i will talk for my self stating that I've already bought several copies for friends and feels still guilty to have got back 800€ hours of fun for so little. I'd happly pay 50€ more per copy should the devs need it to expand the game, even if it's not in the direction i desire^^

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your complaint is that crazy space materials aren't needed because good engineering can solve most of the challenges just with much more difficulty? You sure you're playing the right game? Engineering challenges are like the entire point, and if you gate most of them behind the utter obnoxiousness that is dealing with space infrastructure, the game will only be made worse for most players. Lategame resources are meant to make it so you can go "haha, I can do this easy now!"

What ONI should be doing right now is making the endgame less obnoxious to get into. Specifically, buildings should conduct heat with other buildings on the same plane and with their foundation if they need one; the lack of heat conduction leads to specifically robominers overheating without thermium or slightly ridiculous setups. Also, solar panels need a ton of batteries which mean heat which means yet another steam turbine and aquatuner etc. etc. as there aren't many middle-tier heat deletion solutions you can bring up there.
Then we can talk about adding more to actually do once you're there. That more should probably involve new industry (propane, mercury, nuclear) and mechanics (artificial satellite creation, anyone?) that space helps with rather than gating anything we do right now further behind thermium/supercoolant/etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Rocketry is definitely the weakest part of the game.  It is incredibly grindy and after you've done your first launch there really isn't any challenge to it.  All you're doing is waiting for the rocket to come back, drop it's stuff off, get refueled, and go off again.  The only research you get is more rockets, rarely are the resources you get important except for small things like super coolant for more rockets.  With destinations as random as they are there is no guarantee you'll actually be able to get some of the stuff you wanted out of rocketry.  On top of all that, it only comes into play when the player has basically accomplished everything in the main game.  They've solved all the puzzles and almost certainly established a stable base.

At that point the only things left are crazy projects.  If that's your thing, great.  Though rocketry probably isn't even all that important for most crazy projects.  For others, they may as well restart so they're dealing with survival needs and a new set of puzzles to solve.  Admittedly those puzzles are fairly similar from one game to another, but the new asteroids have helped that problem far more than anything rocketry ever did.

Having rocketry provide more useful things, like research that affects other parts of the game, go far faster on each trip, and/or provide new gameplay beyond waiting would certainly help extend the lifetime of a base in terms of how long players stick  with it.  Challenges to tackle that can only be solved with rocketry would be another important step.  These have to be vital too, like if geysers provided less and less resources over time and you needed to move onto space age tech to move past them.  Ideally tied to the start so newer players don't have to play on sinking ships.

The same problem of people running out of things to do will still eventually happen, but as was pointed out the game doesn't have to have infinity playtime.  Players move on eventually from most games.  Having a point where the game is done is totally fine, though it would be nice if that wasn't about when you launch your first rocket.  There's so much in there that just isn't worth the bother to wait for by that point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Welp, you can't appease everyone.

Just about everything becomes boring and trivial once you master it...That's one of the more obnoxious traits of the human brain. It's the journey to mastering it that should be enjoyed eh?

Aaaand...There used to be threatening challenges to overcome, but people complained about them to the point of removal.

Meteors for example, used to be much nastier, and would punch through the surface and start eating away at biomes. People complained about this and it was fixed...Unfortunately....

I used to really enjoy seeing how fast I could get steel production going to wall off the top and save my world from meteor death...

Challenge in a survival game would logically be a direct threat to the "survival" part. Something to be overcome, or it kills whatever is trying to survive. It is then left to the player to creatively solve this problem.

I think there is a ton of room for creativity with regards to the different asteroid types and the limited resources they come with. Maybe this should be emphasized more.

I still see the same trend though : If the devs don't give the players enough stuff they complain...if the devs give the players too much stuff, they complain...End result : Someone is gonna complain, about something.

Really, I just hope they can get this game to run smoother for end-game...that seems like the biggest End-game issue atm, and I don't think anyone would complain about a smoother game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well challange to me was part of the promise in the title "not included" means you have to fight your way through to get even the obvious.

So said it is a natural consequence to shut off the game once boring time arrives but what is the post suggesting is to add more reasons to stay for some and won't impact others ^^

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Workflow

Silly users like this one can be ignored. The problem starts when behavior like that is found in code. Unfortunately this happens quite a lot, if not usually in such an exceptionally demented way. The problem is that most coders these days do not actually understand what they can use reliably and what they should most definitely not assume (and be prepared for to change/vanish/show up/change behavior). This is mostly a problem in performance and security.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Ketmol said:

@JunksteelI don't think farming or cooling in space is that problematic.

I got you point. Absolutely. And I agree with you that isn't problematic but rather obnoxious. It is unpleasant for various reasons, one of them being, to agree with you, the waste of potential for those materials.

We agree there is a problem with the end game, but we don't agree with the solution. A mechanic forcing us to go space in order to survive would solve one aspect of the problem, but would create several others. While having a new fresh goal is exciting, attaching it to space exploration isn't the best approach because of the poor end game performance for a great portion of players. Fixing performance must be a priority before branching out more mandatory gameplay options from space

This is the main point I believe. The rest is well explained in this post below.

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

What ONI should be doing right now is making the endgame less obnoxious to get into. Specifically, buildings should conduct heat with other buildings on the same plane and with their foundation if they need one; the lack of heat conduction leads to specifically robominers overheating without thermium or slightly ridiculous setups. Also, solar panels need a ton of batteries which mean heat which means yet another steam turbine and aquatuner etc. etc

Those are reasons to not force players into space before making it more enjoyable. But we agree once you spaced out the game is pretty much done and it can be a problem (that will most likely be solved through DLC).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, ruhrohraggy said:

Welp, you can't appease everyone.

Just about everything becomes boring and trivial once you master it...That's one of the more obnoxious traits of the human brain. It's the journey to mastering it that should be enjoyed eh?

Aaaand...There used to be threatening challenges to overcome, but people complained about them to the point of removal.

Meteors for example, used to be much nastier, and would punch through the surface and start eating away at biomes. People complained about this and it was fixed...Unfortunately....

I used to really enjoy seeing how fast I could get steel production going to wall off the top and save my world from meteor death...

Challenge in a survival game would logically be a direct threat to the "survival" part. Something to be overcome, or it kills whatever is trying to survive. It is then left to the player to creatively solve this problem.

I think there is a ton of room for creativity with regards to the different asteroid types and the limited resources they come with. Maybe this should be emphasized more.

I still see the same trend though : If the devs don't give the players enough stuff they complain...if the devs give the players too much stuff, they complain...End result : Someone is gonna complain, about something.

Really, I just hope they can get this game to run smoother for end-game...that seems like the biggest End-game issue atm, and I don't think anyone would complain about a smoother game.

If nobody was complaining, that would mean the game is perfect in all possibly ways including mutually-exclusive ones. That's impossible, so of course people are complaining, but don't dismiss their complaining without evaluating it properly.
In regards to meteors especially, they were everything you don't want to do in game design, because they were an untold arbitrary limit that forced particular playstyles on everyone; fun as that may be to fight, not everyone asked for it and it can make for gameplay being too boring overall via repetition. Something like Oasisse introduces a time limit to overcome that threatens survival that you know about, only when you select that map.
Diseases are a different matter, they were mostly okay, but I think the major misstep was in giving us insufficient tools to prevent and respond to them, so most of the time it was just a bunch of "oh well so and so gets medicine" that was rather boring. To this day, the ore scrubber is pointless.

1 hour ago, Junksteel said:

...

Those are reasons to not force players into space before making it more enjoyable. But we agree once you spaced out the game is pretty much done and it can be a problem (that will most likely be solved through DLC).

Well there's always something crazy like using all your space materials for as many sour gas boilers as you can build...but anyways, I would like to stress that a lot of my point is the challenge of space is an initial hurdle that frankly has very annoying yet unvaried engineering solutions (practically everything is doors or robominers below bunker doors or steam turbines, water on your robominers to cool them, and in-vacuum solars below) because everything is a little too specifically-designed by Klei and not wholly intuitive. The best stuff in ONI is the result of putting machines and tiles and automation all together for things way beyond their immediate purpose.
I really hope that gets an overhaul before more content gets put on the space side.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Your complaint is that crazy space materials aren't needed because good engineering can solve most of the challenges just with much more difficulty? You sure you're playing the right game? Engineering challenges are like the entire point, and if you gate most of them behind the utter obnoxiousness that is dealing with space infrastructure, the game will only be made worse for most players. Lategame resources are meant to make it so you can go "haha, I can do this easy now!"

What ONI should be doing right now is making the endgame less obnoxious to get into. Specifically, buildings should conduct heat with other buildings on the same plane and with their foundation if they need one; the lack of heat conduction leads to specifically robominers overheating without thermium or slightly ridiculous setups. Also, solar panels need a ton of batteries which mean heat which means yet another steam turbine and aquatuner etc. etc. as there aren't many middle-tier heat deletion solutions you can bring up there.
Then we can talk about adding more to actually do once you're there. That more should probably involve new industry (propane, mercury, nuclear) and mechanics (artificial satellite creation, anyone?) that space helps with rather than gating anything we do right now further behind thermium/supercoolant/etc.

Nope. My complaint is that space materials are not used to survive at all playing in survival mode. There are a lot of stuff in game that are situational, or transition technology. Space materials, for the most part, comes into play so late that you will never use them.

What I love most about ONI, and have since I started playing back in the days when you had to put a bunch of crying stressed out duplicants in a room to get sustainable water is that every short term solution create a long term problem, that you have to solve with another solution, that will create a new problem. It is a bit less of that now with all new sources from vents and alike. But at least most of the stuff fills a role in one play-through or another and in some situation.

Space materials don't. Super-coolant fills the goal of facilitating space travel but that i's about it. The materials comes in to play way to late in survival mode. And there is no problem for long term survival where they are needed.

And for creating big machinery that you don't need. Well lets say watching your spacecraft make roundtrips for 150 cycles at a point when game already start to get laggy to get enough materials to create a machine you don't rreally need to survive....? I rather just sit in exploration mode if I like to just experiment... Survival-mode should be about survival.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

If nobody was complaining, that would mean the game is perfect in all possibly ways including mutually-exclusive ones. That's impossible, so of course people are complaining, but don't dismiss their complaining without evaluating it properly.
In regards to meteors especially, they were everything you don't want to do in game design, because they were an untold arbitrary limit that forced particular playstyles on everyone; fun as that may be to fight, not everyone asked for it and it can make for gameplay being too boring overall via repetition. Something like Oasisse introduces a time limit to overcome that threatens survival that you know about, only when you select that map.

Even if the game were perfect, there would be perfect game haters out there...

If I recall, ONI was originally intended to be a sandbox survival game. I don't remember exactly when this was mentioned during the weekly stream, but I do remember it being mentioned.

Which means there was likely no main end-goal originally in mind. The end-goal being "space" was most likely added to satisfy that particular group of people who like end-goals...

And Klei is the king of unknown arbitrary stuff, in both DS / DST and what used to be ONI....

Take shipwrecked for example...You survive the first season and a half, and then a giant seal tornado shows up on your doorstep and wrecks you. (Lets be honest, if it's your first playthrough and you didn't spoil it for yourself, it wrecks you) It was annoying, but fun, and when you beat the stupid thing, there's definitely some satisfaction involved. And then you finally make it through to dry season...and some weird noise starts happening...And all of the sudden volcanic boulders rain down and demolish / set your base on fire...

 

ONI basically IS done when you launch your first rocket. You can tell that's about as far as they had intended to go with it originally. It just so happens that they put the best items in the game after the final boss.

Game is "boring" because there's no real threats to survival anymore. The biggest threat to a dupe, is itself , or another dupe.

There just happens to be a bit more you can do after that. That's probably why space age materials have no main usefulness in progressing game-play.

So the general vibe is : Not satisfied with game ending, want more game?

Of course want moar game...duh.  Who doesn't want moar game?...but NEED more game? Meh, game is pretty darn awesome as it is, all I'm sayin'.

Knowing Klei...they're probably working on more stuff regardless, because they're awesome and they love their games and playerbase.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

57 minutes ago, Ketmol said:

My complaint is that space materials are not used to survive at all playing in survival mode.

...Space materials, for the most part, comes into play so late that you will never use them.

Those are two different complaints.  To address the latter, you can rush to space.  It makes the game more challenging, but you can get there pretty quickly if you really focus on it.

Now for the former issue.  It's true, you don't need anything from space.  Sure, it can make your existing survival easier, but basically everything can be done without space mats.  However, I see space rewards in a completely different light--they give you options.  Want to run high temperature steam for geothermal energy plants?  Now you can do that.  Want to melt otherwise indestructible objects in the world without resorting to (arguably) exploits?  You need to go to space first.

That said, when it comes to offering new things to do, I feel niobium/thermium and supercoolant greatly overshadow visco-gel and insulation.  Not that the other two are bad, just they let you do things you were already able to do more easily or efficiently, whereas the others let you do completely new stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

×
  • Create New...