Feedback after 40 hours

[DWeird]

So I played a lot of Oxygen Not Included. I played the first 16 hours of it in a deep trance, without breaking away from my computer for longer than five minutes. I wasn't sure that was physically possible, I checked the clocks and everything. I now have serious concerns about my health and mental wellbeing. But I also have a deep and gentle love of this game... Which is nonetheless tempered with the knowledge of the many tiny tiny shortcomings it has. And so I am here now, showing my love through extended complaining.

 

TL;DR - love the art and love the game. Want more catastrophic failures, stress either doing more or made much easier to manage, tech/inftrastructure options for easier mining and hard materials transport, more ways to mark your progress, and better tutorials and tooltips.

 

I like the design of the characters and their expressions a lot. They're goofy, mostly competent, and content to live in this inevitable deathspiral of a place. They never direct their frustrations at me directly, but just go on with whatever task they are doing. Their tantrums are silly, childish, and mostly inconsequential. I find it all incredibly endearing - and so, the way I play, I am very committed to keeping these goofballs alive and happy.

I also like the core hamster wheel of progress the game posits - you need oxygen to live, but oxygen is limited, so you need to turn resources into oxygen, but that requires infrastructure, which requires more resources but also has unforeseen consequences that need more infrastructure to be managed, and so on. The pressure never quite lets off (unless it's of oxygen, heh heh), and there are always problems that can be managed or avoided through cleverness of base design.

But there are problems.

Failure is slow. If I make a mistake, it will take a long time for it fully manifest itself, which means that I don't really have a story of catastrophic failure to tell. No matter what happens, there's usually enough duplicants to keep on limping along, but not enough duplicants to get rid of the problem issue in a satisfying time. Meaning, you restart when you get bored of waiting for death, not when give it your all and fail regardless.

Stress does either too little or too much. I found it impossible to keep my duplicants happy in prolonged playthroughs - there's too much deathlands to go through to mine precious algae or slime for them not to get fussy about it. But maxing out nearly every duplicant's stress mostly gives temporary, mostly annoying setbacks that you need to micromanage to fix. Going for 30 cycles with every duplicant either breaking stuff every five minutes or just vomiting all over the place when you have the twin goals of keep playing and keeping your duplicants happy is annoying.

There's no efficient way to mine or transport hard resources. The natural life cycle of the colony is to grow while consuming nearby resources. This means that resources will stop being "nearby" pretty soon, and your duplicants will need to go longer and longer distances, which means more and more of my time as a player is spent waiting. Unlike the movement of gasses or liquids, there's no way build infrastructure to either mine faster or transport hard materials around, which means it's going to take ten cycles to build a goddamned ladder and that there's nothing I can do about that. Pneumatic tubes? Conveyor belts? A giant mining laser that liquefies hard stuff so I can pump it around and sort it?

You're incentivized to build up as little as possible. So I'm incentivized as a player to make as efficient use of resources as I possibly can. A lot of the buildings require resources to function, and so I'm incentivized to avoid building them if at all possible. So I don't have a fridge, I don't have a cooking station, I don't have potted algae or a CO2 scrubber. This is fine as far as the optimization game goes, but this place is also a dollhouse. I know I'm progressing in the game because I'm putting all these neat things in! Either make any building that requires key resources to function *damned* useful, or put in more of a variety of pointless show-off stuff. Similar concern with duplicants - you are heavily incentivized to keep a skeleton crew running, but having a bunch of the fools running around is what makes you feel like a successful oxygen manager. Make late-game duplicants better than early-game duplicants?

Finally, a lot of the systems are opaque. Sometimes there's a problem and it's hard to isolate the cause (my crops are wilting due to temperature changes. Where is this excess heat coming from? How does heat even transfer?). Sometimes you only find out about a problem after it already happened (Biodistillers emit contaminated oxygen as well, apparently! Or is this the lumps of slime doing it, with biodistillers acting as containers? I still don't know, and the help text of either the building or the material don't tell me this.) It's a complicated game with a lot of moving parts, sure, but I'm playing the game to manage all those parts, which I can't easily do without good information.

[tehMugwump]

Looking at Steam right now, I've got 167 hours in ONI already.  Funny thing is, as much as I fail miserably at most of my builds, I jump right back in and start a new map with what I've learned.

I look at ONI this way: Right now it's proof of concept(s), so it's not nearly as fleshed out as it will become.  90% of your games will end with everyone sloshing around in their own waste while gasping for air - I've just gotten use to that.  BUT it will get better.

There's been talk of wanting tutorials and things and I can't argue with that, but for now, it's trial by fire.  Oh, those lovely flames!