The core gameplay loop never evolves

[Malidictus]

By this point, I've put ~50 hours into Voidtrain. I've completed the existing story (Journal now says "Coming soon..."), I've maxed out research progression (Research table offers nothing new), I've upgraded the train to its maximum length and unlocked a majority of the decorations. I say this not to brag, but for context in terms of what I've experienced of the game.

The problem I have is that my experience of actually playing the game has not changed from the first few hours almost at all. Yes, the game has added more "stuff" - more items, more structures, more side activities, etc. The core gameplay loop, however, has remained the same. Move the train forward while fishing for materials, stop the train to craft, repeat. Even at the end of the game, on a fully-equipped train, I'm still playing the game like I just started on that one-platform pump car.



The issue with "Early Access Crafting Survival"

What I'm saying here isn't news. EACS games pretty much all still suffer from MineCraft's original sin. Everything from this, to Subnautica, to Raft, to Valheim and as far back as MineCraft itself has the same issue of a core gameplay loop which fails to evolve. We start out gathering resources by hand, crafting items by hand, building structures by hand and managing inventory by hand.

Hundreds of hours later, we've constructed tremendous structures and unlocked complex crafting bluepritns... but we're still doing ostensibly the same thing. There are more resources, the crafting is more complex and the structures are larger, but we're still doing everything by hand. If anything, we're actually doing far more work because we need resources in larger quantities and crafting has many more steps. We may be using more powerful consumables - better healing, better ammo, etc. - but we're also spending far more time actually making those.

Voidtrain suffers really badly from this for one simple reason: the train is feature-complete within the first few hours of the game. Once you have a crafting station, a lab, a kitchen, a foundry and a crusher - we're set for the rest of the game. Sure, larger versions of those do become available, but even those cap before the mid point of the research tree. So much of the game's progression system revolves around getting a better engine so we can attach more train cars, but there's nothing to actually PUT on them. Not anything of substance, anyway. Gathering stations are about it, but those don't really make a significant difference.

Basically, the game lacks a compelling core gameplay loop. Unless the player really enjoys fishing for resources, there isn't much to actually DO in the game.



The "Factory Game" solution

Personally, I feel that Factorio solved this issue of a boring core gameplay loop quite a while ago. The various copycat games which have launched since (Satisfactory, Hydroneer, Dyson Sphere Programme) have put their own unique twists on the idea, but they all share the same solution to this problem: automation. The farther the player progresses in the game, the broader their view of the game's world and mechanics becomes.

We still start out manually gathering resources and hand-crafting items. However, we soon have gathering and crafting automation, so now we're mostly ferrying items between structures. Before long, we've automated transportation, and now we need to manage logistics - getting items past each other to the right places. We eventually start having to come up with compartmentalisation, breaking down infrastructure into encapsulated chunks to reduce complexity and streamline transportation. And it goes on from there.

Obviously, I don't expect Voidtrain to be Factorio. It takes place on a train, after all. However, I definitely feel that there should be some way to automate mundane tasks. Fishing in the void needs to stop being a major aspect of the game fairly early on. Either drastically improve Gathering Stations to replace it, or shift focus towards island/depot item generation, instead.

Hand-crafting basic components (iron, copper, chemicals, etc.) should be phased out towards mid-game. Maybe implement platform-size structures where crafting tables can be linked together and to chests to auto-pull fuel and materials and craft completed products. Consumable crafting definitely needs to be a thing by late-game. Maybe with the ability to link these structures together into a production chain.

These aren't really serious suggestions. I'm more spitballing ideas for the sake of context. I don't expect Voidtrain to become Factorio. I just feel that hand-gathering and hand-crafting lose their charm VERY quickly, especially with more complex production chains.



The "train" bit

To sum up, I feel that Voidtrain focuses far too much on being a run-of-the-mill EACS by ripping off Raft that it almost completely neglects its central selling point - the train. The promotional material sold the fantasy of a rail journey across the void, living and travelling aboard a train. There's a certain charm about this sort of long-distance, almost perpetual travel. Unfortunately, the game's refusal to automate its core gameplay loop fundamentally undermines this.

In my experience, the train spent more time stopped than moving, and most of its time spent moving was moving very slowly. Not only does moving at high speed cost more fuel than the Void will give me, but it also requires my full attention. With the engine at speed, I NEED to be up at the front looking out for mines, witch islands and chunks. If I don't, I'll take damage and miss vital resources. Not to mention, points of interest are jam-packed densely together. I can move at speed for maybe 30 seconds before I need to stop. And once I stop, I usually have other work which needs doing - gathering and crafting, typically.

Maybe that's just me, but I was hoping for a game where I can leave the train running at speed for minutes at a time - where I could busy myself crafting and building and doing other work while train manages itself. You know - that I could do all the stuff I do when stopped, but while the train is moving. Occasionally I would need to stop - either when I ran out of materials or came to a point of interest. Not all the time, though. To me, the ideal train game would have me spend something like 90% of my time moving. It would have me travel kilometers at a time between points of interest. Instead, Voidtrain has me parked the majority of the time.

This is why I find automation so vital. If we could automate enough things and build some kind of early warning system, then we may be able to cruise at speed for a while without having to constantly look ahead. As it stands, this feels less like a rail journey and more like escorting a train on foot.

[MrFisse]

Im in the same train, not sure how you could stomach it for 50 hours though. This is one of the few grindfest games that I actually felt punished the more I evolved and added to the train. Everything just got more tedious and cumbersome. Another one of those games you have to have a really vivid imagination to enjoy or you will end up sitting there with the "what the hell am I wasting time on this for" thought in your mind.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by MrFisse:

Im in the same train, not sure how you could stomach it for 50 hours though. This is one of the few grindfest games that I actually felt punished the more I evolved and added to the train. Everything just got more tedious and cumbersome. Another one of those games you have to have a really vivid imagination to enjoy or you will end up sitting there with the "what the hell am I wasting time on this for" thought in your mind.

I wanted to see the later upgrades and new mechanics, honestly. Again - I've played the likes of Factorio and especially Satisfactory. Those games have a horrendously slow, clunky beginning but manage to blossom into something far more interesting later on. I knew ahead of time that Voidtrain wouldn't be one of those games, but the likes of the Gatherer's Station and the large Crusher made me hopeful that there would be some kind gameplay in designing a functional train. There really wasn't.

Let me put it this way - I could fit my entire train's contents within 3 platforms, not counting the engine. That's 3 platforms for the engine, one platform for the Crusher and Armoury 2, then 1.5 platforms for everything else and 0.5 platforms for storage. The rest of the train was empty space I haphazardly backfilled with a combination of Leemo beds and Gatherer's Stations.

The thing with Gatherer's Stations is that they don't replace fishing for materials. They're actually crafting stations which create resources out of nothing. As a result, I still have to do my own fishing. I was hoping for some way to automate more complex recipes, but that doesn't seem to exist. I was hoping for some more elaborate mechanics, like a train-wide power system, or some kind of larger modular room. Instead, we don't even have grid-snapping, or indeed snapping of any kind.



I compared Voidtrain to Subnautica, but Subnautica had substantially more complexity than this. It has modular buildings with the ability to create external walls, manually install doors and windows and snap machinery to predefined slots so it looks nice. It has functional plantlife and fish farming, including the generation of crafting components. It has multiple vehicles for exploring away from the Cyclops - the game's large mobile base. It has several types of power generation and power management. It has a resource detector which could be tuned to highlight only specific resources required. And more than that - it has a robust progression system which consistently opens new gameplay.

Obviously, Voidtrain isn't Subnautica. I just bring that up to say that I wasn't expecting Satisfactory on a train - awesome as that would be. Even comparing to other games of the genre, Voidtrain still feels incomplete. And yes, I know it's in Early Access. I'm comparing it to other Early Access games :)

It just boggles my mind why you'd host a game on a train that mostly sits stopped. Wouldn't you go out of your way to simulate a long journey as a primary priority before anything else?

[Zothen]

Anybody noticed? In all those shooty games... you always shoot? It never changes?
Weird, almost sounds as if it would be a genre..

[Kailen]

Ah, but in shooting games, the gameplay DOES change. Different enemies and enemy combinations, different weapons, require different tactics. The way the maps are laid out, the ambush placements, good game design keeps things fresh. Some enemies may have weaknesses, either physical hitbox areas, or weaknesses to specific weapons or damage types. One encounter to the next the game is constantly altering. At least, if you're not a Halo clone and stuck to only two weapons at any one time.

Maybe you should wipe that smudge off your nose and listen to the actual criticisms people have,e specially when they're going into detail as to why their opinions are what they are. You may learn something.

[Zothen]

Anyway, Voidtrain seems to have a very significant problem that theres no meaningful vision guiding the game beyond "train in the void, raft-like hook gathering". Everything else seems just to be slapped on to pad out the game time beyond meaningfulness.
And worst: There was no significant additions in the 2 years since it was released on EGS.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Zothen:

Anybody noticed? In all those shooty games... you always shoot? It never changes?

New guns, new enemies, new locations, new mechanics. Granted, that depends on the quality of the shooter, but a lot of older "brown military shooters" receive criticisms along the same lines. But look at something like Half-Life - there's tremendous variety in the experience. Or look at Payday 2. Despite the mechanics being the same throughout, they layer together to add significant complexity.

I'm aware that this type of "Early Access Crafting Survival" game is almost a genre unto itself. I acknowledge this, and cited it as the source of the problem - "MineCraft's original sin". For MineCraft, it made sense since it was charting new ground. It's been over a decade since then. I really wish games would evolve from that original model. Some have, but they all get lumped into the same genre as each other, such that lessons learned from them can be ignored.

I would say that Voidtrain is what happens when you thoughtlessly clone another game without any vision of your own. Which I suspect you disagree with, because...

Originally posted by Zothen:

Anyway, Voidtrain seems to have a very significant problem that theres no meaningful vision guiding the game beyond "train in the void, raft-like hook gathering". Everything else seems just to be slapped on to pad out the game time beyond meaningfulness.
And worst: There was no significant additions in the 2 years since it was released on EGS.

Yeah, pretty much. Like a lot of EACS games, Voidtrain suffers from a lack of coherency and substance. The core experience feels almost AI-generated - mechanics have been translated from other games, but seemingly without understanding of why those games had them or what purpose they were supposed to serve. There seems to have been little thought about how any of the game's mechanics connect to the core gimmick of the train.

Why do people like trains? For the engineering, for the history, for the sense of a long journey - at least as far as I can figure. Voidtrain features on none of these things. Precisely none of the game's mechanics have to do with the operations of the train. The Engine is fire-and-forget. You toggle it on, you toggle it off, you shove fuel into it. The story barely even acknowledges the train - it's too busy talking about lake gods and Nazi soldiers. There's no sense of journey because the paths between depots are incredibly short, the train is incredibly slow even at maximum speed and the player has far too much busywork to actually let the train run.

Most of the game's actual mechanics feel entirely disconnected from the train, besides needing floor space. It's like Raft, except you can only build in a straight line, and you can only build 12-16 tiles. Everything is manual so there's no benefit to having multiple copies of a machine and everything fits in a small portion of the train. Weight isn't a factor, space isn't a factor, ransportation is barely a factor. It's literally just a game of handcrafting the same objects over and over again.

This honestly feels like another Hardspace: Shipbreaker - a neat original idea which ultimately goes nowhere and keeps getting sidetracked by a superfluous story and unrelated side objectives.

[Tachyon]

The first 20 minutes of play will encapsulate your entire gaming experience in Voidtrain. It's rather like a hamster getting on it's wheel and thinking it will get better the more it runs on it.

[Zothen]

Weirdly enough, the first 20mins of Counterstrike encapsules your entire gaming experience, too.

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by Zothen:

Weirdly enough, the first 20mins of Counterstrike encapsules your entire gaming experience, too.

Yes, but the first 20 minutes of Half-Life do not. 5 of those are spent just on the train to the Anomalous Materials lab and the rest is spent chatting with colleagues, suiting up and being let in through security to the Anti-mass Spectrometer chamber. Depending on how much one explores, the "real game" won't start until 30 minutes in.

For the next hour or so after that, Half-Life becomes a horror game, barely surviving a monster infestation while helping survivors to eventually make it out. Then it becomes a military shooter for a while at the start of Blast Pit, then it goes back to survival horror again before it becomes a better train game than Void Train during On a Rail. Then we go for Underwater exploration Crush Depth, then a corridor shooter with Questionable Ethics then back to a modern military shooter with Surface Tension. And that's just like 2/3 of the game.

Gabe Newall talked about the idea of "expansion and contraction of space", as well as adding gameplay variety. Valve understood that you can't trap the player in the same loop for hours on end, or else they'll tune out the game. It's important to vary up mechanics, settings and activities else it becomes tedious. Which they did.



VoidTrain fails to do so. The game never changes or evolves - not past the first couple of hours. Once the player has access to the Crusher, the game is effectively over, because nothing new of substance will unlock past that point. MK2 versions of nearly everything unlocks, requiring MK2 versions of fuels and crafting MK2 versions of items. However, these are all functionally the same, except with larger numbers and sometimes but not always different icons (Armour Plate 1 and 2, say).

Additional side activities do appear, but they're almost all combat-related. Combat in this game is not even remotely good, unfortunately, so these are more of a chore than a benefit. Witch Islands are the only exception, and they're honestly quite fun. Unfortunately, there exist three puzzle types which quickly become routine. Two of those three aren't even all that good, since they only involve finding a sequence to a scroll lock.

Prophecies are an interesting idea with the potential to affect the game in a significant way. However, their implementation makes them into glorified challenge settings with minuscule rewards. Me personally, I would have gone with a route map like The Last Stand game, where the player can choose their own route and their own destination for a different experience. That might have been interesting, but it's not what the developers went for.



There's a tremendous amount which could be done to vary up gameplay and evolve the experience over time. Automation of gathering/crafting and economies of scale. Larger structures which require a longer train. Links between structures which require logistics. Scanning equipment to alert to dangers and resources. Actual functional lighting (including a flashlight) and truly dark areas which require it. Wider/taller/multi-level train cars, with structures which require the extra space. I can go on.

My primary disappointment with Voidtrain is that the development team seem to be focusing on expanding the game out sideways with minigames and side activities, rather than extending the core gameplay loop.

[MeGa]

+1

Also, no more minigames or puzzles.

Expand core loop

[ToJKa]

Yeah, have to agree. Resource gathering seems to be main issue here, With the more complex recipes and larger amount of required resources, it only gets worse as the game progresses.

And the gathering station so far seems like a waste of resources. Is it only supposed to produce scrap metal? Lucky for you that you are cute, Rofleemo.

The endless tech tree requiring the same (though lower amounts of) resource the item itself does doesn't help.

I just have the steam engine on non-fuel consuming speed while i hang in front of the train, with a brake lever next to me, fishing for resources. And stopping every time i see a coal lump or have enough to craft or research something.

And arriving at a station or outpost is worse because then there's fighting with the horrible, horrible fighting mechanics.

The game has potential, and i love the setting, but it isn't very fun yet. Is it supposed to be, though? Because i remember playing a very early development version of Sins of a Solar Empire, where the starting screen explicitly stated "This game is not supposed to be fun yet"

[Malidictus]

Originally posted by ToJKa:

And the gathering station so far seems like a waste of resources. Is it only supposed to produce scrap metal? Lucky for you that you are cute, Rofleemo.

They produce wood, scrap metal and chemicals. Very rarely (as in, I've only ever seen one), they can produce Zinc. I've never seen them produce organics, ice, coal or gasoline chunks. More to the point, though - "Gathering" Stations" don't gather. They "produce" like you described it. To me, that's a really bad way of handling them because it doesn't simplify the player's gathering efforts and also don't really produce very fast.

The actually much worse aspect of Gathering Stations is that they create a really bad kind of optimisation. The player has nothing to do with the majority of the floorspace in their train. Crafting tables take up a very small amount of space and storage isn't needed in large quantities since resources come in very slowly from fishing and "compact" tremendously when processed. As such, optimal use of space is to cram in as many Leemo beds and Gathering Stations as possible, which makes for a very boring train.

I would personally prefer having a hard-cap of ONE gathering station for the entire train, which costs some kind of resource (say electricity) and can be made to work faster by being staffed by multiple Leemos. In general, I'd like to move away from individually-placed props and towards whole-platform structures with potential upgrades. Think old-school Theme Hospital. That would give us more use of cabin space without encouraging spamming the same room perpetually. Would also allow for interactions between objects in the room in ways which aren't possible now.

But I digress.

Originally posted by ToJKa:

The game has potential, and i love the setting, but it isn't very fun yet. Is it supposed to be, though? Because i remember playing a very early development version of Sins of a Solar Empire, where the starting screen explicitly stated "This game is not supposed to be fun yet"

It's been out for a few years, so presumably it would be at the "fun" stage. Obviously I'm just guessing here, but I don't think the core gameplay loop issues are intentional. Rather, I strongly suspect that the developers started with the idea of "What if Raft, but actually Train?" and didn't really move past that point. They were so busy replicating a massively cut-down version of Raft that they never stopped to wonder if... well, if that's a good game to copy from.

But even assuming that it is, they don't seem to have stopped and wondered if all of these Early Access Crafting Survival mechanics are worth replicating. Did we really NEED a hunger meter? What does that accomplish? Just as a random example. Similarly, they don't seem to have considered what the genre is missing. Automation would have been nice to have. That way the player could focus on larger-scale logistical or cabin space concerns.

Unfortunately, what we ended up with is kind of a hollow game. There are a lot of side missions and minigames and distractions all surrounding an empty space where the core gameplay loop should be. The progression system is the only real driving force of the game, but it doesn't actually DO anything. Progressing through the levels doesn't change our experience, allow us to do new things or change the way we do old things. Not past the first hour or so. Most of it is just adding stats to our sheet and steps to our crafting.

Now, this may be a controversial opinion to put in the forum of an Early Access Crafting Survival game, but... I don't consider foraging and crafting to be all that compelling by themselves. There needs to be a compelling game around them.

[Zothen]

Some people waste 60+ hrs on something like PowerWash Simulator, so no, compelling foraging and crafting is probably not exactly mandatory for survival games. Juicy game mechanics help a lot, though.

But yes, the devs had a lot of time to provide juicy game mechanics and havent provided them. Pretty much a bright, red warning light.

[Vine]

what you dont get it is that the game was build this way to compensate the lack of content, just simple as that, "the game lacks in content, then lets difficult the way to ending"

[McSamwich]

Originally posted by Zothen:

Weirdly enough, the first 20mins of Counterstrike encapsules your entire gaming experience, too.

Kind of apples to peaches there though with that comparison. Counter-Strike (and almost all multiplayer pvp games) offer changing gameplay through the addition of a key variable element, other real players. It may be the same map, same weapons, etc....but the players will play differently. The engagements will be different (for some reasonable amount of time).

So I find your comparison lacking a bit. As void train is PvE centric and the elements rarely vary from their given path in any meaningful way.