Kinda going out with a whimper (spoilers)

[outseeker]

Where to begin.. I played hundreds of hours before buying the DLC.

I replayed countless times, to (re)make the cool machines/systems and nice homes for everyone, to build things I had seen others build, to make use of the many awesome add-on-type mods available (rip blow dryer mod!), and I rather enjoyed myself for a long time.

Having completed all achievements in the base game and played forever, I finally I bought the DLC, expecting to enjoy being able to double my hours played or maybe more. Instead it kinda killed my interest in the game after not too long, and I will try to explain as best I can, if I can..

So I installed the DLC and began a new game. The starting biome was unfamiliar, which was cool. I had to work out how to create necessary resources and research using some new materials, stations, plants and animals, which was also cool. Things were pretty good at this point.

Looking into research, getting into space was quite trivial compared to normal- a major change to the overall game. Rip lime/steel I guess lol u aren't really important stuff anymore once people have the DLC. Along with the major changes made to research topics, stations and materials it's kinda like a different game to play, with different priorities and goals.. I mean it feels like a re-imagining Of the base game more than an expansion For the base game, if you know what I mean?

Side note: to be honest I would recommend the base game over the DLC I think, like it's a very different experience. You don't expect a DLC to change the game so drastically- people might not even realise that disabling the DLC provides a quite different game if they bought it all at once. That's wasting the base game you created and really bad I think, because the base game is brilliant yet some people may never have actually played it, even though they have played with DLC enabled. Sorry about this one, I don't know what could possibly be done about it, just I feel like the DLC is almost a stand-alone-ish different game, and potentially there are things people might not like about how the DLC plays that don't exist in the base game. People Should play the base game first I believe, but they need to know/choose to do that.

Anyway the new space map, space tiles system, and space ship interior worlds are super sweet! Let's get to finishing off these steam achieves!

So I did just that. I played until I had finished all but 2 DLC achieves, and I think that's when the fun kinda screeched to a halt.

Particularly getting the achievements for having a mutated seed of "all" kinds, and having to mine a massive amount of space resources using costly diamond drills. Getting these achieves was almost like just leaving the game to just run itself until success, except I was forced to be there to micro manage the radiation lamps for the harvest of every plant on every planetoid to not waste precious resources, and forced to sit and wait while ships flew off and drilled, so I could organise them to come back, be emptied, restocked, and sent back out again, just for the sake of getting to the required number of KGs harvested.

At this point I think my interest in the game had been killed. Even after building the research reactor, purely for the sake of getting the seeds achieve, and generally building everything in the game because at this point why not, I was still grinding space trips forever, with nothing really to do in any of my colonies. Really most of my colonies had long been idle too, as they had what they needed and I just plain couldn't think of anything else to do with them. Some worlds have hardly any resources, and they're relatively small- sometimes just being pointless to explore/harvest/build a colony in really, outside of just needing the artifacts for that one achievement.

I haven't played since getting that final DLC achieve, and I don't know when I will play again. Having played the DLC for not all that long, the game has just kinda lost it's magic sadly :<

I don't know if it was just not having any achievements left to do, but perhaps not having any goals anymore at all is exactly the trouble. I'll come back to that in a sec XD

About the "ending", or the final unique thing you can do in the game before it's just assumed to be "continue playing if you feel like it" kinda deal, the game feels like it still isn't finished even with this turn of events, and said event is tragic if I understand it correctly.

Spoiler

We go to all the trouble of colonising an otherwise somewhat unnecessary planetoid, finding and charging the mystery device with rad bolts, opening this temporal anomaly thing, then we fly a ship into it, only to have the ship explode and rain debris consisting of what the ship was made of/loaded with onto a nearby planetoid, pretty clearly obliterating the pilot in the process.. Is this really the end of the game outside of achievement hunting? :< TIHI lol I want happy endings! I want rejoining with lost kin, rejoicing and such! I want them to find "us", the overseer guiding them through this whole journey, or for them to find something on the other side of that wormhole we can see and maybe interact with, or to find out the printing pod is actually using teleporter technology, and we discover those re-stocking it on the other end. A utopia? A desolated world seeking to help rebuild ours? idk.. precious lore! lol

Or the whole multiverse thing we see in that cutscene being in some way actually present in the game? or idk just some kind of True Ending that is pleasing, that wraps things up, achieving the happily ever after goal of the colonies? Or maybe a reason to replay the game from scratch, like to get a different outcome perhaps? There's no real end to ONI I'm aware of, and unless there's to be another separate ending DLC, I feel like this DLC should wrap up the game story, so it's not left open ended, tragic, and kinda vague as to whether we really fully succeeded and beat the game.

So that's where the title is coming from. Topping the game off with this DLC kinda saw the game going out with a whimper, not a bang in my humble opinion, even though the base game was awesome for a zillion hours. The DLC adds a lot of content and it re-jigs the whole base game, so it's not like you didn't put in heaps of hours and effort, clearly- please don't take anything I say as belittling your work. Honestly I just want a reason to play again (and again, and again).

I would be all over it if I heard there was a true ending of any sort added, or an expansion of lore/story telling, or a final colony goal/achievement that sees a "congratulations, u won" event of some kind take place.

Something that explains and finishes our story succinctly would be just great, if there's any way at all you can manage it.

[Sasza22]

I feel you. While i didn`t spend that much time playing and didn`t do everything that could be done due to lack of time or rather terrible time management on my part i feel that we lost a lot with the dlc but gained a lot as well.

First off i never liked the base game rocketry. It was fine but felt unfinished. I imagined it should be something like in the dlc all along. Then we got that but it was made easier (understandbly beacause it couldn`t be a dlc selling point if it was late game) and didn`t require all the resources. The meteors were gone, nobody liked them anyway right, but so was the need for bunker tiles and steel. I wish more planetoids would get meteor storms, like maybe the teleport one.

The new stuff is fine and exciting but still feels like there isn`t enough you can do with it. It`s different. I like making multiple bases and using different stuff on different planetoids but there`s stuff like the juicer that is pretty much unusable in the dlc.

Another thing is the goal of the game. For me it`s playing until i get sick with managing my messy base i didn`t touch for 5 weeks and i don`t remember what was the actual plan. Then i start anew and i have a much better time. But it`s the same in games like civilisation so i don`t blame them.

One thing that makes me feel like the game is unfinished is the lore. The planet is still in the background but it is no longer a space destination. I really hope it gets some explaining. Even if we still can`t land on it maybe we could interact with it in a different way. I also hoped we would get a force field building.

Anyway i still like the game and how it progresses but i feel like it`s lacking. It like a great foundation (kinda similar to what Don`t Starve was) but needs more build on top of it. DST got an overarching story. While i know ONI probably can`t get that much content i hope it gets something similar in the sense of an unfurling story that requires us to collect stuff from planetoids that we wouldn`t consider visiting and build stuff we wouldn`tnormally build.

[pether]

For me the DLC makes the game better in every aspect with making nothing worse. I like new challenges, research tree is much more fun, the difficulty is a little higher and I can finally see stress reactions. I understand others may have different opinions, but for me there is no turning back to the vanilla game, it's just worse and more boring.

However, I agree that those 2 achievements are terrible and no fun at all. Mutating all seeds requires terrible micro management to setup several different farms around the same Research Reactor, and mining the gap is just waiting and staring at the screen... Kudos to SGT_Imalas for making "AI controlled rockets" mod, it saved my sanity while doing this mostrosity.

I don't really understand your complaint that there is nothing to do in the end-game of the DLC - vanilla was very similar in this area. There was little you could do, the ending was even more boring (OK, the ending is the same disappointment, but the DLC has now more fun aspect of opening the tear), so if you had fun during vanilla end-game you should be able to do exactly the same things in the DLC

[outseeker]

3 hours ago, pether said:

I don't really understand your complaint that there is nothing to do in the end-game of the DLC - vanilla was very similar in this area. There was little you could do, the ending was even more boring (OK, the ending is the same disappointment, but the DLC has now more fun aspect of opening the tear), so if you had fun during vanilla end-game you should be able to do exactly the same things in the DLC

That wasn't really my complaint man.

[pether]

oh, I misunderstood then, thx

[calibayzone]

I really hate the way the base game rocketry makes distance destinations almost worthless. They take so long. SO rocketry is definitely more rewarding, as it should be, but the base game should still allow multiple destinations or much more fullerene or something.

[babba]

@outseeker I would love some game mechanics which "counter and challenge" the player, according to the players strength and might.

Dynamic challenges which scale with the player. Its an old request of mine, I posted a bit here again recently.

Would you like a bit of that ? Would that make your itch scratch ?

At some point the ( great ) game just becomes boring, I think there is a certain amount of players which would love growing and challenging endgame mechanics.

[outseeker]

@pether actually it's half that, I apologise for being so short.

It's two things. 1 is that I have "completed" the game, but I am left feeling empty with no closure. My colonies just kinda exist, but never truly achieved an "ending" to their story. They just kinda exist for the sake of existing, which feels like way less than a Klei game.

2 is that as soon as I finished the last DLC achievement, I was just done with the game. Partially because it was such a terrible, grindey achievement, but partially because I think there's nothing to do really, as you pointed out.

You're right too, vanilla didn't really have a completion either. I think maybe that the DLC has pretty well the same "ending" upset me a bit, because it was an opportunity to wrap things up in a nice little bundle and make the game/story complete.

@babba I think some of the stuff u want can/is addressed by mods, like super electrical systems/cables, but I agree it would be sweet to have like aliens coming to interact with your planetoids/duplicants, or some dynamic aspects to the game that can make it more fun to replay because new things might happen to/for you.

That's part of the replayability thing I'd really like outside of story closure

I'd be happy with one or the other I think. Like give us a thorough Klei ending to the story so we can feel content in our completion of the game, or give us some dynamic stuff like what you suggested, so replays aren't just more efficient repeats of previous colonies.

I held off getting the DLC for thousands of hours played, then once I completed the DLC/achieves in no time at all, I was just done with the game.

I don't want to be done with the game, but I fear it's perhaps too late in the life of the game :<

[Empa505]

5 hours ago, outseeker said:

then once I completed the DLC/achieves in no time at all, I was just done with the game.

I have gotten the same problem with other games. I feel like making new challeges for yourself can make you get back into the game. But it is certainly hard.

 

5 hours ago, outseeker said:

I don't want to be done with the game, but I fear it's perhaps too late in the life of the game :<

I mean they are gonna update the DLC more so have hope. I think your time with oni isnt over yet, or thats what i feel like.

[Sasza22]

On 9/21/2022 at 8:28 AM, Empa505 said:

I feel like making new challeges for yourself can make you get back into the game.

The most fun i had in ONI was when i challenged myself to use plug slugs as the main power source as long as possible (and reasonable) to the point i was ferrying them between planetoids and sending ore all over the place until most of it ran out. I even got the super sustainable achievement along the way somehow.

Things like that can make you excited to play the game again even if you know everything about it.