Evolution of the game difficulty and design

[gigamoi]

On 6/9/2026 at 12:37 AM, AugyBear said:

According to Steam, only 15% of players have entered the Oil Biome. 5.5% have launched at least 1 Rocket. 2.7% have completed the research tree.

It's not surprising that Klei focuses their DLCs and new features on early-game content, since early-game content is what 95% of the audience actually plays with. Even with the Spaced Out DLC that made rockets so much easier (you can speedrun your first rocket by Cycle 3!), players still choose to sit on the home planetoid, ranching critters, making farms, and focusing on low difficulty content.

While I like the data driven approach of the question, I believe those numbers need to be put into perspective with others. Ease of purchase on steam makes it so that many people buy games they will hardly ever play or even download and launch at all.

According the steam achievements, only 70% of people who own the game ever played enough to get the easiest and most unintentional of all achievements "One Bed One Bath". Taking this as a base for how many steam key owners effectively played the game in some capacity, only 71% of those ever ventured out of the starting biome. Only 63% ever used a grill. Only 49% reached plumbed toilets. And only 31% ever reached cycle 100.

So, yes, amongst people who technically qualify as "ONI players", those who never made it very far are the most numerous. However, this in no way imply that those people still actively play the game and would, thus, be potentially interested by new content catered to them. I would even argue that the opposite is true. They have yet to exhaust much of the base game early to mid-game content so they won't buy more of it,... or anything else related to ONI for that matter.

 

As I see it, many of the DLCs are "planet packs" mostly because early to mid-game is the part of the game most easy to swap for sidegrades. The fact that new late game content would risk being too late game and remain out of the reach of many while the opposite is not/less true also comes into play IMO, but less so. Given that the "late game materials" already trivialise nearly every challenge the game can throw at you, new late game content would be much harder to balance than just slapping one more variation of early to mid-game gameplay on top of what is already there.

Edited June 11 by gigamoi
typo

[JaxckLl]

On 2/16/2026 at 2:08 AM, Neishahunter said:

Am I the only one who's baffled by the direction the game took?

No, because the game today is much more fun than when it first came out. Survival is an interesting challenge once or twice, but after that it's a chore. Especially in vanilla where sustainable survival meant setting up a SPOM. It's a fine challenge, but not an interesting thing to repeat playthrough after playthrough. Personally I've always hated how involved it is to get refined metals for automation. It feels like you have so much more control with just a few automation switches spread throughout the base, but getting to that point in vanilla was an absolute chore.

[Ellilea]

Personally, I like the game much more nowadays, I hated the limited resource times where it felt like no matter what I did, my base was on a timer and then GG WP restart or quit.

But I am a huge fan of customization! I think the game would benefit from adding additional optional difficulty settings that go beyond what it has now. What comes to mind that shouldn't be hard to implement would be, for instance:

1. Reduced geyser outputs
2. Lethal slimelung, as it used to be
3. Food poisoning absolutely draining all calories upon vomitting
4. Lethal hypothermia (is it now? I'm not sure)
5. Lethal and infectuous zombie spores diseases, requiring a quarantine hospital room
6. Meteors destroying the surface again, yes
7. Aggressive critters when attacked

And probably a whole lot of similar tweaks that wouldn't require new programming (either based on old stuff, or just changing some parameters) but could allow people to crank their game up to be really, properly MEAN.

[Twiki]

I'd love a Wildcard system, where you can pick (or randomize) modifiers that change the rules of the game in small or BIG ways. For example:

VEGAN: Dupes cannot eat meat.
ARTIST COLONY: All dupes gain stress when decor is low.
STERILE LUNGS: You start in a rust biome, and Dupes can ONLY breathe chlorine.
CRYO VOLCANOES: All volcanoes and geysers erupt with -extremely- cold output.

Stuff like that.

Then I'd also add that the Temporal Tear would unlock the option to continue that Dupe's life on a new game, with a new Wildcard, and a permanent bonus trait/outfit for that Dupe.

I think that'd make a pretty fun endgame.

[gigamoi]

I believe our ideas of what would "improve" the game are likely to vary wildly because we all enjoy different things the game according to how well they cater to our, very subjective, individual taste.

 

For instance, what I enjoy most about this game is finding new creative ways of solving the practical problems the game throws at you. To that end, mixing up what is made available to me to do so and which sub-problem I must solve to access those options is something I like very much. (I don't want it to be random though as it hinders my ability to plan ahead. I want it to be varied.) Consequently, a content update Idea I liked very much was that of a derelict space station themed DLC with flipped mid-game and early game resource availability (plenty of steel, plastic, glass and power but very little dirt, air and water, with new resource pathways to maintain a colony from those for a while) and whose main gimmick is that your geysers are essentially replaced by some space mining laser beams that you can target to siphon space POIs of your choice on your star map and the creative challenge lies in finding ways to keep the colony running using only the, often wacky, resource bundles your space POIs provide. (Some people do that on remote plantoid late game for niche reasons (or just the thrill of the chalenge) but the idea here is to make that your main sail early.)

This taste for engineering new solutions is also why I often ask for new additions/changes to late-game. Late-game has not meaningfully changed in any way since SO so it is stale content for me now.

 

On the other hand, I have no interest in ever touching the currently existing difficulty settings or restoring the old disease as they were because they don't meaningfully change anything about how I would solve problems, just give me narrower margins and make me scale things differently........ But that's just me. For reasons that are theirs, some other people love these narrower margin, and that's fine.

That why I believe that, whatever may come in the game, what is most important is options. Options that allow players to tailor the game to their liking.

Edited June 15 by gigamoi