General Feedback

[PickyEater]

First of all, I would like to say that I'm enjoying playing Oxygen Not Included so far. It's easy for me to see it being developed into a truly great game.

I would like to give you my feedback after playing about 35 hours and starting (and burying) about 6 colonies.

Positive impressions:

- Presentation: The overall presentation of ONI is already in a very nice place: The sound effects are fitting and evocative, the animation in particular is very charming and characterful and the music fits the atmosphere of the game. the character models themselves are varied enough to stand out as individuals. Them using several different tools is also a nice touch.

- Challenge: Even though the content is limited at the time of this feedback, the difficulty of managing your base has kept me engaged. Good to see that Klei seems to realize that this is an important factor for a game in this genre.

- User Interface: For this beeing a pre-alpha build of the game, the UI seems very mature. Even though one can easily imagine it being improved in certain aspects, it is nonetheless easy to use without much hassle.

 

Negative impressions:

Lack of content, missing balance of certain gameplay aspects and buggy weirdness is to be expected. They are forgiven, thank you for trusting us with such an early build.

- Base layout: It appears to me that a stack of 4 tile high rooms is the only valid layout for an efficient base. That's boring! Creating a new room is almost always a matter of digging a 4 tile high rectangle. I would like to see systems that reward players for varying room layouts.

- Starting resource variety: Simply put, the amount of resources you start with in your immediate vicinity is just too varied. Starting 5 colonies until you hit that water basin jackpot is not fun.

- Decor expectations: I get that there are those duplicants who aren't really thrilled about their existence living inside of an asteroid. On the flipside, i really don't think its fitting for me to have to create the flipping modern museum of art just to prolong the times between temper tandrums or forced bowel evacuation. I just recently discovered that one of my duplicants has a decor expectation of 90. Yes, 90. He would probably be puking his soul out even if he was living in the Louvre. Euthanization incoming, that's not fun.

- Building redundancy: When it comes to games, i sometimes care more about aesthetics then efficiency. I really don't like the view of a 4 tile high room with 25 storage compactors built side by side. It's ugly. I would suggest that you should improve the capacity/size/cost of most buildings. A modular approach to buildings could also prove to be more interesting gameplay-wise than to spam the same building over and over.

- Building material default: This is a minor but nonetheless bothering bit of code: After loading the game, please don't default the materials used for buildings, pipes etc. to the leftmost material, which most of the time is obsidian, and instead default to sandstone which should be abundant in most colonies.

Again, thanks for providing us the chance to give you feedback at such an early stage of development.

Best Regards