Hopes/Vision For The Future Of O.N.I.

[Stretchytall]

Let me start by saying I have no idea what you guys on the dev team have in mind for the future of Oxygen Not Included, so maybe you've already thought of a lot of the ideas I'll share below. The following is an example of my hopes for how far Oxygen Not Included will continue to develop.

I love ONI as a game. However, once I got far enough to find out the game has only been developed as far as the Neutronium walls, I immediately lost interest in playing. This is because for some reason my psyche finds sandbox games boring. Thus, I value goal and story in games. Once the mystery and goal of discovery was gone, my interest in playing ONI as a sandbox plummeted. But I see massive potential in ONI for being an absolutely amazing building/survival/exploration/mystery game. Therefore, I hope the dev team taps into that massive potential with something like the following...

1. Allow dupes to drill outside the asteroid into The Void.

2. Create space suits and maybe an Airlock Chamber structure to allow dupes to traverse the vacuum outside the asteroid.

3. Create a structure such as Scanner that allows the player to detect other asteroids/moons/planets beyond the starting one.

4. Create a Launch Pad structure that allows the player to direct dupes to build a short range space vehicle, Shuttle, that can be used to send dupes to other asteroids/moons/planets. The shuttle would have to be stocked with food, oxygen, materials to support the travelers.

5. Create a structure such as Command Center. Similar to the research machines, the player can access a menu through the Command Center structure that allows the player to see other asteroids/etc and launch the shuttle, loaded with dupes and supplies, to whichever is chosen. Upon launching to another asteroid, the game opens the new asteroid as a unique game file (hey, RAM is finite). Time stops on the first asteroid until the player returns attention to it.

6. The player will have to explore other asteroids in order to find advanced materials that will allow for longer-ranged space travel. The various astroids/moons/planets also won't have a full array of materials like the starting asteroid. Therefore, the player will have to learn to use the various colonized asteroids/etc to support each other and advance in solving the mystery of why their colony started in the middle of the original asteroid.

7. Some asteroids/etc will contain artifacts that move the player closer to solving the mystery.

A framework like this for the future of ONI has massive potential for developing the game into future expansions and would offer countless hours of gameplay. And by including a story and goal driven element (solving the mystery of dupe existence), the game remains delightfully intriguing.

So those are my two cents on what I think would be awesome for the future of ONI. Whatever you guys produce, I look forward to seeing how the game grows in the future.

Keep breathing!

~Stretch

[Sevio]

Nice writeup, I too hope there are things to discover and do outside your starting asteroid. However there is also still plenty of room to refine the game, including discovery, mystery and story within the starting asteroid as well.

The early and midgame where you're just getting established and researching new technologies, discovering your surroundings don't last very long and could be extended with more research and more immediate (story or event-based) goals for your duplicants to work towards that aren't simply excavating the asteroid for resources and expanding the base.