Late game rewards

[misotoma]

So take this with a grain of salt since I've returned after a year so I don't know the game changes so well. I've noticed many mods have stopped being updated. I have the feeling the game is becoming very limited and there is no real reason to start another map for the nth time - hence people stop playing.

It would be nice if Klei could add something into the game that makes: Niobium, Thermium and Isoresin feel rewarding.

As of, even before DLC was out, I could use simple materials and make sour gas boilers, regolith melters, infinite ice storage for liquids, etc. This game has gone through SO MUCH change but what really has changed?? I feel the game is still the same with just a bunch of options that really do not have major impact. If only Klei would be so nice to make the late game materials feel rewarding to make. That Experiment 52b is annoying plus the isoresin I get only produces a tile of insulation per cycle lol.. so why even tackle it? I don't want to use mods to play this game but the list is already getting long!

I wonder who else feels this way. Anyway please make Thermium and Isoresin feel rewarding in some way! Everyone says "oh, its late game materials and super rare" okay but it does not feel rewarding or exclusive enough.

[gabberworld]

1 hour ago, misotoma said:

I wonder who else feels this way.

i personally never feel something like this.  i have total other coals, like can i handle 500 dupe base.

also i think you missing something. there is a story trails or something like that what they included. but those start only with new save game. and when they add more. you need start again as it not included for old save

[meekay]

I find Niobium and Thermium super useful in DLC-based games. If you run your cooling loops with super coolant, use Niobium for the Aquatuners, and have 2 aluminum turbines for each 'tuner with some smart automation, you can basically run your whole base just on waste heat. Your Thermium conveyor equipment can sit in the same high-temperature steam chamber as a metal volcano, which lets you extract even more heat into useful power.

I keep colonizing the tree planetoid but have never been able to make much insulation. Others approach it more rigorously though.

[sakura_sk]

6 hours ago, misotoma said:

It would be nice if Klei could add something into the game that makes: Niobium, Thermium and Isoresin feel rewarding. 

[...]

That Experiment 52b is annoying plus the isoresin I get only produces a tile of insulation per cycle lol.. so why even tackle it?

So... what would be "rewarding"? They found a way to make you work for it instead of getting as much as you want from space but you find that way "annoying" instead of rewarding.

The way I see it, is that on one hand there is the "overengineering" in the game, big thousands of cycles bases that almost don't need duplicants anymore and there is overproduction of things, and on the other hand experiencing the same asteroid differently every time depending on what is or isn't around (cycle 0-500+). There are people who play the same seed over and over again, others search for their perfect seed (usually using TNI) and others who generate the first seed that pops up just to see how the colony will develop this time. There are people that like playing the first 300 cycles just to see how the colony will develop and others that stay in one colony for a year, an IRL year.

6 hours ago, misotoma said:

Everyone says "oh, its late game materials and super rare" okay but it does not feel rewarding or exclusive enough.

I don't see a suggestion as to what could be done to make end game materials "better" though. These end game materials are more of a "players' request"  anyway. Viscogel to replace the lost old stacking naphtha, insulation to replace abyssalite perfect insulation tiles. Maybe thermium and supercoolant where by design? However, they weren't meant to change the way you build. These materials are just an improvement/upgrade on your builds. If you managed to build without them, then kudos to you for not needing them at all.

Anyway.. Game is a sandbox (after you play for a long while and survival is now trivial). I'm not sure how an end game material could be made absolutely necessary for your builds without breaking all builds that exist currently. And even if that happens (like.. it already did, with abyssalite built tiles), someone will find a way around it.

[gigamoi]

Yup. I feel the same.

Those resources are hard to collect, but do not offer much more than what you already have plenty of by the time you get them. So why get them?

That being the case, if they are to be rewarding to get, they should as a result give something we don't already easily have through other means.

But I don't know what it should or could be. Some way to build/maintain new teleporters? With the need for the rare resources induced by room constraint, let's say on board of a thight space station perhaps? This could be enabled through some story traits maybe?

[asurendra]

We surely need new lategame mechanic. Something you cant reach by simple measures, something that adds new valuable experience. 

Other sandboxes has that. In Minecraft you have to go to End, suffer all its dangeroses, but in reward you get ability to fly, which change game a lot. And there is no way to get it by staying at home. 

In ONI you can fly to Moo asteroid, yes. Build complicated ranch, spend a lot of time. And what you get as reward? Some Nat gas? The same gas that you have plenty of at home? 

Make a colony with 500 dupes? Sounds like challenge, but problem is that 99.9% of time this dupes will be idle. There are no tasks for them, so its making dupes just for dupes, huh? Do not fun... If I could make them useful, thats will change a lot, yes. But I cant. And mods isnt helping with that too...

[sakura_sk]

1 hour ago, asurendra said:

Make a colony with 500 dupes? Sounds like challenge

Challenge? More like a challenge for your pc or the game itself because they would give up before you do.

Sure the game could give you "rewards" by limiting what you can do. Imagine if you had a limit of "x" amount of tiles/buildings you could build per asteroid until you discover and visit a new asteroid in order for the limit to go up.

Would it be rewarding visiting other asteroids then? Sure it would

Would it be annoying as hell like every "inventory/backpack" restrictions in most games? Sure it would

[NeoDeusMachina]

The recent wave of veterans "complaining" and "requesting" devs to solve their inability to entertain themselves in oni after playing 4000h is honestly hard to read (not only in this post).

Let me sum up oni's survival aspect when you are familiar with the game.

Step 1: find renewable source of water.

Step 2: end of survival challenge.

That's it. You have 02 and food sustainably for your colony. From there, it's a sandbox. Not gonna lie, that can be achieved pretty early.

I don't understand when some say "by the time you get X you don't need it anymore. It's not rewarding enough". To me, it's all about what i decide to prioritize in a given playthrough. Ofc if I spend 2000+ cycles on my classic start asteroid and wait until my base is fully sustainable to go to space, I will certainly find little reward in getting access to renewable resources via space mining. But i could also prioritize that instead. That's just an example.

I also don't understand this "power creep" phenomena that's been discussed recently. Power creep doesn't make sense in oni. Having more options doesn't trivialize the game, it offers alternatives to solving a given problem. If you find it easier to solve problems now, maybe it's because over the 4000h you've played the game (you as in generic veteran #235), you have already solved the same problems so many times that no matter what is added, you will find it much easier than when you started playing oni.

There's so many different ways to play, so many things that some find rewarding and others simply hate. I honestly don't know how Klei can make everyone happy. Anything they add, it seems, will give our brains a bit of fun for a while, but at the end of the day, it won't change that oni is a sandbox and the player is driving where the challenges/rewards are in a given playthrough.

[Kderosa]

47 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

From there, it's a sandbox. Not gonna lie, that can be achieved pretty early.

This is just another way of more concisely saying this "space-colony simulation" game lacks a late game given all the resources the game provides since the "goal" can be readily achieved in the mid-game without obtaining any of those materials or traveling to any of the outer planets (except to open up the temporal tear), so it becomes a sandbox experience.  I like a sandbox as well as the next player; however, I also like completing game goals even more.  And, no one is arguing that the sandbox elements be removed.  They just want an additional late game goal that relies on late game resources and space travel that you spent the early and mid games building up to.

No doubt the late-game content was postponed because it takes hundreds of hours of game play to get to the late-game and very few players can reliably get to that point over a year after the game was released and early and mid game content was prioritized to get more bang for the buck.  But more and more players are reaching the late game and realizing there is no late game, but rather a sandbox experience because, well, there is no late game content which utilizes the late game resources and outer planets.

Call me crazy but it seems kinda pointless to tame volcanoes to obtain refined metal, build sour gas boilers to obtain energy, build entertainment rooms to obtain moral, etc. that isn't needed for any aspect of any goal of the actual game.  And, mind you, I do like all the content the devs have been adding to the game as it gets developed. But, I, and apparently others, would like some of that effort be directed to finishing the game at some point. So, yes, as much as I like using the colony I've spent dozens of game hours building and stabilizing to build yet another purposeless petroleum boiler to produce petroleum I'll never need or use, I think that colony is better used to accomplish an actual challenging goal using all the currently available resources that also currently have no real purpose. The potential is there, it's just being utilized yet and that's what experienced players are starting to notice. 

[NeoDeusMachina]

1 hour ago, Kderosa said:

This is just another way of more concisely saying this "space-colony simulation" game lacks a late game given all the resources the game provides since the "goal" can be readily achieved in the mid-game without obtaining any of those materials or traveling to any of the outer planets (except to open up the temporal tear), so it becomes a sandbox experience. 

Nah, it is another way of more concisely saying the survival aspect in ONI is much smaller than the sandbox aspect. That's just how the game is, especially when you have played it a lot. The survival aspect becomes more or less trivial, even at the hardest difficulty settings. The sandbox nature of the game just puts the responsibility on the player to define and shape their own playthrough, from Cycle 1 to however long they want to play. You can say it is pointless to tame metal volcanoes or build sour gas boilers in your game, and I cannot argue, because it is your game and you define your own goals, and you know what you like. It doesn't mean it is an absolute truth and applies to everyone, though. Some need a carrot at the end of the stick to keep playing, the proverbial "reward", but that usually doesn't rhyme well with sandbox game.

It is also another way of more concisely saying that if someone has played  a single game for thousands of hours, maybe it is normal that they have exhausted the list of "story" objectives, or progression objectives, e.g., colony imperative achievements and the like. I can't speak for others, but If I look at my steam library, there aren't many games I have played in the couple thousand hours range. There is ONI, and that's about it. I somehow still manage to find ways of shaping a playthrough around something different each time, and I ignore a lot of the colony imperatives or achievements most of the time, unless that is what I feel like doing in a specific game. I actually don't use any mods, can you imagine?

And it is another way of more concisely saying that each story objective they add will result in a one time completion that will feel nice (gotta check that off of our bucket list), and then we are back here complaining about lack of end game content, until the next.
 

[Kderosa]

1 hour ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Nah, it is another way of more concisely saying the survival aspect in ONI is much smaller than the sandbox aspect.

Or it's just your way of excusing the fact that there is no end game in this game.  In ONI you typically end the game out of boredom because the goal of the game was over practically as you were getting started and then you restart the game to re-play the parts of the game that are actually a game.

It is a very good game and that's why players rack up hundreds of hours playing. But, that is despite the fact that there's no end game not because of it.  It's like a 4X game except they forgot to add the last X (the exterminate or end goal part), but gave you more of the 3rd X (the exploit part) than what is needed to achieve the intermediate goals that are present (plant pods and collect artifacts), implying there is more game to be had but it isn't there yet.

[Sasza22]

The thing about rewarding the player is that the reward needs to be useful in some way so that the player feels like it`s worth to pursue it. Now lets think about that for a second. What would be a rewarding end game goal?

Morale? - Nope, we have no issue with that already.
Food? - We already overproduce it.
Power? - There already isn`t enough stuff to waste it on once we use nuclear reactors.
Extra dupes? - Not like we can print one every 3 cycles.
Super resources? - The ones we got suffice for most applications anyway.

So what do we want? What is "rewarding" after spending 800+ cycles on a colony that basically can play itself without us managing it at that point. What would be rewarding at that point?

 

[Bluefoxfire]

8 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

The recent wave of veterans "complaining" and "requesting" devs to solve their inability to entertain themselves in oni after playing 4000h is honestly hard to read (not only in this post).

This right here. It just too often reeks of the fact they only played with meta builds and never bothered to even try to try a different way of doing things.

[NeoDeusMachina]

7 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

The thing about rewarding the player is that the reward needs to be useful in some way so that the player feels like it`s worth to pursue it. Now lets think about that for a second. What would be a rewarding end game goal?

Morale? - Nope, we have no issue with that already.
Food? - We already overproduce it.
Power? - There already isn`t enough stuff to waste it on once we use nuclear reactors.
Extra dupes? - Not like we can print one every 3 cycles.
Super resources? - The ones we got suffice for most applications anyway.

So what do we want? What is "rewarding" after spending 800+ cycles on a colony that basically can play itself without us managing it at that point. What would be rewarding at that point?

 

Basically. And what is rewarding for some might not be for others. For example, the Somnium synthesizer story trait... If I'm playing on hardest settings, it's most likely not because I want a stress reduction for all dupes across my entire cluster. I'd prefer if my dupes had nightmares at this point.

And for reference, dupes -can- fly, as a "reward" for building any sort of petroleum refinement (ideally, sustainably if they are to remain airborne indefinitely). And it does change the game for the dupes, they can go anywhere, they don't need to build ladders, they don't take fall damage anymore (/s), and so on. But, and there's always a but, we all know how that goes.

[NeoDeusMachina]

11 hours ago, Kderosa said:

Or it's just your way of excusing the fact that there is no end game in this game.  In ONI you typically end the game out of boredom because the goal of the game was over practically as you were getting started and then you restart the game to re-play the parts of the game that are actually a game.

If -your- goal in the game is to make sure your dupes can survive, then I can understand why you would say that. Maybe you could just accept that you've won (good job, pat pat) and move on to another game. Alternatively, you can take advantage that ONI is mostly a sandbox, define new goals for yourself and keep playing the game for as long as you want. I personally don't suffer from the issues you mention. I don't consider the game to be over just because I reach some arbitrary in-game milestone. You can't "beat the game" in a sandbox game, why are you even trying? Seems to me like you don't enjoy the sandox part of ONI and would like the devs to transform their mainly sandbox game in a mainly survival game? In any case, you don't seem to even try understanding what I am posting, so that's all the attention I could pull myself together to give you. Enjoy ONI your way, hopefully!

[gigamoi]

I do agree a lot with what @NeoDeusMachina is saying. "Surviving" in this game is trivial, once you know what you are doing. Past that point it is all self imposed objectives. What is "to do" then is only a matter of personal preferences.

For instance, I like to set up a bunch of morale buildings for my dupes because I enjoy making their tiny lives as pleasant as can be, some don't. I can't be bothered with achievement runs, some love it. I like the constraints of tiny asteroid and having complex cross planetoid shipping strategies, others have asked for "giant asteroids" recently. Having a moonlet dedicated to crew a somnium synthesizer to send dreams to my dupes all across the cluster, even though it is not very useful, is an idea I love. (it gives me a "good reason" to colonize some place.) Others wont care. Some like to give their dupes their own individual bedrooms and beauty builds, but I couldn't be bothered with allocating the space. Some like symmetry. I personally don't care.

What you do in this game pretty soon becomes whatever arbitrary thing you decided for yourself. But, whatever our personal likes and dislikes may be, we will all ultimately run out of content at some point and that's to be expected.

 

 

 

As far as rare resources are concerned, I like to set up some way to renewable get some (not maxing, just "some") with ease, even though I am doing very little with thermium and absolutely nothing with insulation, just because it is somewhat fun and scratches the itch of what "completion" means to me. That being said, it does feel a bit like a waste to me. As stated:

On 1/19/2023 at 11:30 PM, Sasza22 said:

The thing about rewarding the player is that the reward needs to be useful in some way so that the player feels like it`s worth to pursue it. Now lets think about that for a second. What would be a rewarding end game goal?

Morale? - Nope, we have no issue with that already.
Food? - We already overproduce it.
Power? - There already isn`t enough stuff to waste it on once we use nuclear reactors.
Extra dupes? - Not like we can print one every 3 cycles.
Super resources? - The ones we got suffice for most applications anyway.

By the time we get them we are indeed all set up with all we could possibly need.

On 1/19/2023 at 11:30 PM, Sasza22 said:

So what do we want? What is "rewarding" after spending 800+ cycles on a colony that basically can play itself without us managing it at that point. What would be rewarding at that point?

I was asking myself this kind of question and the only thing I could think of is transportation. As far as my experience of the game goes, it is the only thing that can remains cumbersome late game. For dupes, you need rockets. For resources, payload launchers are quite fine for most uses but may be difficult/annoying to scale up, and rocket ferries are a whole other can of worms. For that reason, I never bother myself with automating the transfer of more than 1 or 2kg/s between asteroids and never do it for anything I deem "critical" such as oxygen related supplies.

Some sort of player buildable teleporter would remove all the constraints related to having multiple asteroids. It could work like the existing teleporter for ressources and/or more like rocket doors currently do for dupes (free, instantaneous, automatic pass through). Absolutely OP, I think. And it should therefor remain locked in the very late game. Sure, by that point you are already swimming in all the relevant resources but, as we have established, that's already the case for most of the game. Much like flight in minecraft or crisis relics in stellaris, even though you have already won, doing your "victory lap" using those may none the less be fun.

I believe this kind of teleportation would reward the player by allowing all kinds of crazy projects. You want to send 10kg/s of super hot fluid somewhere for some reason? You can with relative ease now! Imagine if you were to build a magic dupe door between your main base and the interior of a rocket for instance. Send the rocket somewhere and, bam! Your whole construction crew is here to work.

I don't know how to meaningfully connect this idea to gathering rare resources but that would give a worthy incentive I believe.

[goboking]

On 1/19/2023 at 4:30 PM, Sasza22 said:

So what do we want? What is "rewarding" after spending 800+ cycles on a colony that basically can play itself without us managing it at that point. What would be rewarding at that point?

Lore.  I want to know what’s beyond the temporal tear.

[misotoma]

Let's put a situation out there. I tame the tree, I get my insulation and now .... i Build an insulated pipe made of insulation or I make a 2 tile liquid lock. Hurray! You beat the game or you have accomplished something great for going through the headache of feeding a tree for CYCLES in order to get a little bit of this rare material to make one pipe section.

That is how it feels to me. Also, why?? Why should I make insulated pipes out of insulation? If I'm smart I'll use other materials and bridges, *****, miss me with that ish. So as you can see late game materials are not that special or even necessary. I can burn petroleum with a niobium thermo aquatuner, I can tame my niobium volcano with obsidian pipes and by cooling the niobium down to an acceptable temperature so it doesn't break the pipes. Done. I finished the game with absolutely no need for these late game materials. 
Now with that argument out of the way, please let us do cool stuff with these late game materials besides the options that we already have, Klei, I would appreciate it. 

[tuxii]

I wish endgame in ONI was handled better.  With only 1.1% of ONI players on Steam getting the Great Escape achievement it's obvious that finishing ONI doesn't excite most players.  It almost feels unfinished in this aspect.

Lore is also handled poorly by ONI.  A couple short videos and some random data entries is almost all there is.  The worst part is how scarce and random the data entries are and that it is impossible to collect all the entries on one playthrough.

Imagine if sending a dupe to the Tear was just the gateway to endgame.  Instead of doing practically nothing as it does now, this event could cause the Starmap to grow 5 tiles larger on all sides.  Isoresin and Niobium could even be gatekept in this extra space behind sending a dupe through the Tear.  The event could also give the player access to a new planetoid with a massive energy sink, to encourage the ludicrous contraptions like nuclear power, sour gas boilers, etc.  Powering this device might even be required to maintain access to the extra tiles...  as if the accessible universe for the dupes is like a warp bubble like Beverly Crusher got stuck in.  Also, this event should also open a path to 100% lore collection.

Unfortunately optimization has to come first.  They can't add really cool endgame content to ONI if anything less than a NASA super-computer can't run the game at that point.  I certainly have an above average computer and ONI starts running poorly long before endgame.