New Game+, Replayability, and From Beyond

[LavenderMenace]

Hello Klei, and fellow starvers! I've been thinking a lot about From Beyond recently, and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts.

Personally, I love from beyond in concept, as the idea of adding more weather effects and challenges into the game as optional extra things is fun to me, and it doesn't interrupt the learning curve for new players, which I think is valuable. There is an issue with it though, and it's one I've seen on the forums a lot. These are updates for long term worlds, and boss rushers, and thus the interesting new challenges are essentially locked behind game progress.

This is a fine way to do a game, and games like Terraria do it all the time. There's no option to start in Hardmode, after all, but it leads to a bit of an issue for players like me, who reset their worlds a lot.

Once you've seen the grasslands once, you've seen all grasslands, and so on. Optional content like the ocean is often ignored, and the game becomes monotonous.

This is where a suggestion I have comes in: New Game+, and it's one already in the game to an extent. If the main worry with frontloading new challenges is that it would mess with the early-game balance too much, then, like in Singleplayer's DLCs, you could keep the earlygame the same, but offer options for people regenerating worlds.

I.e., once the rifts are active in one world, they can be active in all regenerated versions of that world. Now, this feature is already in the game to an extent, and I personally really enjoy playing with the rifts on via. world settings (thanks Klei!) but I believe there could be so much more.

Take, for example, Worldhopping and the Teleportato from singleplayer. They offered a way to have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, where one could experience a whole new world while keeping parts of their progress.

A New Game+ option or preset could allow someone to either create a new world with all of these interesting challenges and stuff from the off, plus perhaps new challenges and mainland biomes (to break the monotony, think corruption or crimson from terraria, or swamps and mangrove swamps from minecraft), and allow players who reset their worlds to experience all the new stuff you're adding, with it in their faces instead of off on some distant island like Moon Quay.

And, thinking about this, I started to think more about world options and presets, and it lead me to thinking about Secret Seeds from Terraria. For those unfamiliar, secret seeds allow people to make a new world with the basics of the game radically changed, like a whole world of jungle or a whole world where every biome is underground, and you spawn in hell.

If Don't Starve added secret seeds, like ones where the biomes are seperated on the ocean so boating is required and stuff like the Lunar Island and Moon Quay are more naturally a part of the game because of it, or where the caves and surface world are one, or where rifts are always on, or the biomes are replaced with alternate version, or or or or (plus the ability to mix and match with the menus already in the game), that could add a lot of replayability, and also add in the potential for World Hopping to be a much more attractive thing to be added into the game.

Based on previous updates, Don't Starve Together doesn't like to directly port old content, so I don't expect story mode or hamlet or the teleportato or even the gorge to be added in directly, but based on updates like Waterlogged, things inspired by old content can and are added, and I'd love to see a version of worldhopping and secret seeds in these new updates, depending on if that's something yall can and would like to do.

Ultimately, I'm enjoying the new updates, but I'd love to see them become more accessible for players like me, who like making new worlds and new experiences.

Plus, interworld progress seems more likely now than before, with insight being added, hence why this doesn't feel so far fetched anymore.

[chirsg]

I kind of like this. Recycled seeds on regenerate. I have a 10000 day world though. I'd love to see concessions for this if it ever made it into light. 

My world gen is so close to perfect and I'd love to start from day 0 with the exact same seed. 

[Uedo]

That's quite a nice idea. Who knows what they've got planned, I hope something like this is on the table.

[Jakepeng99]

15 hours ago, LavenderMenace said:

Hello Klei, and fellow starvers! I've been thinking a lot about From Beyond recently, and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts.

Personally, I love from beyond in concept, as the idea of adding more weather effects and challenges into the game as optional extra things is fun to me, and it doesn't interrupt the learning curve for new players, which I think is valuable. There is an issue with it though, and it's one I've seen on the forums a lot. These are updates for long term worlds, and boss rushers, and thus the interesting new challenges are essentially locked behind game progress.

This is a fine way to do a game, and games like Terraria do it all the time. There's no option to start in Hardmode, after all, but it leads to a bit of an issue for players like me, who reset their worlds a lot.

Once you've seen the grasslands once, you've seen all grasslands, and so on. Optional content like the ocean is often ignored, and the game becomes monotonous.

This is where a suggestion I have comes in: New Game+, and it's one already in the game to an extent. If the main worry with frontloading new challenges is that it would mess with the early-game balance too much, then, like in Singleplayer's DLCs, you could keep the earlygame the same, but offer options for people regenerating worlds.

I.e., once the rifts are active in one world, they can be active in all regenerated versions of that world. Now, this feature is already in the game to an extent, and I personally really enjoy playing with the rifts on via. world settings (thanks Klei!) but I believe there could be so much more.

Take, for example, Worldhopping and the Teleportato from singleplayer. They offered a way to have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, where one could experience a whole new world while keeping parts of their progress.

A New Game+ option or preset could allow someone to either create a new world with all of these interesting challenges and stuff from the off, plus perhaps new challenges and mainland biomes (to break the monotony, think corruption or crimson from terraria, or swamps and mangrove swamps from minecraft), and allow players who reset their worlds to experience all the new stuff you're adding, with it in their faces instead of off on some distant island like Moon Quay.

And, thinking about this, I started to think more about world options and presets, and it lead me to thinking about Secret Seeds from Terraria. For those unfamiliar, secret seeds allow people to make a new world with the basics of the game radically changed, like a whole world of jungle or a whole world where every biome is underground, and you spawn in hell.

If Don't Starve added secret seeds, like ones where the biomes are seperated on the ocean so boating is required and stuff like the Lunar Island and Moon Quay are more naturally a part of the game because of it, or where the caves and surface world are one, or where rifts are always on, or the biomes are replaced with alternate version, or or or or (plus the ability to mix and match with the menus already in the game), that could add a lot of replayability, and also add in the potential for World Hopping to be a much more attractive thing to be added into the game.

Based on previous updates, Don't Starve Together doesn't like to directly port old content, so I don't expect story mode or hamlet or the teleportato or even the gorge to be added in directly, but based on updates like Waterlogged, things inspired by old content can and are added, and I'd love to see a version of worldhopping and secret seeds in these new updates, depending on if that's something yall can and would like to do.

Ultimately, I'm enjoying the new updates, but I'd love to see them become more accessible for players like me, who like making new worlds and new experiences.

Plus, interworld progress seems more likely now than before, with insight being added, hence why this doesn't feel so far fetched anymore.

You can turn riffs on in world settings if you wish

 

Also i kind of wish they would add back the old *Everything set to tons* world