My opinion from alpha to now

[GADefence]

I played the game in alpha and now and I'm glad to see a lot of positive movement in the game.

I appreciate that the start was made dramatically less boring. The best way to play the game at the start of alpha was to just use the minimal resources while researching everything in the base biome which was very annoying.

Now the pace is far better at the start. As a negative, while the monster in alpha showed up quite fast and was a consistent threat - it barely shows up now and is nearly a none presence until the end, mostly being in flavour text. If you guys are doing any more addition, consider making a visual only change where it has a small chance of attacking and killing the fish that wander around near you outpost, if only to give you a scare/give it more of a presence without affect gameplay at all.

The fish rebalance is very nice. In the original a lot of lower quality fish where stronger then rare fish for making clones and it was really weird, now you feel like using a variety of rare of uncommon fish a lot more. Granted, once you start getting a lot of fish, you end up having a hard time remembering where they all are and so on. The sub map's habitat view should include the fish and a colour bar for if it's stable/regenerating/depleting to make it easier to remember where stuff is.

The early middle of the game, when you expand out of the original biome, should be a bit reworked. You should be forced to go to the coral biome from the kelp forest - as the kelp forest has aluminium. I went to coral first, and I felt the game ground to a halt for about an hour in the middle here. As well, a new quest allowing you to get a few more people - probably 1 scientist, 1 engineer and 2 workers - would greatly help with getting over this hump.

The rest of the game was pretty good but the pacing was still a bit glacial. I'd recommend dropping 1 worker from most support buildings like coal generators, and upping the advanced oxygen generator's production from 7-10 to 10-15 to free up people. I ended up having 2 cloning labs running 24/7 just to keep up with population demand and it made the pacing go very slow near the end without adding any fun. I'd also say upping the alloy foundry and the ammunition plant's production by x3, as well as it's maximum workers by x3, would make those buildings feel more meaningful, but that's just me.

Explaining that the pioneer is basically a super worker that does what the engineer and the scientist does would also help. I am unsure if a tutorial pop up explain it as I went straight to the hard mode difficulty, but there is 0 tool tip pop up that informs you of this in case you forget and it took me a while to figure out I should be making these guys more.

The POIs were made a lot better. In alpha, they were super deadly (like 50% chance of killing your sub) while the payoff was tiny, usually at the cost of the sub you just risked. Now they feel rewarding. As does mining with your mining subs. I recommend adding some more risk back in but putting that risk mostly onto the drones, especially early on, and the clones later on, due to how devastating 1 clone dying early on can be.

Otherwise I don't really have any other statements. I did notice that combining outposts seems to mess up O2 layout - I had guys constantly running out of oxygen when I combined 2 outposts despite having positive O2 production - this was near the anomaly so it may be another bug. Also, the volume on the voice actor is out of whack. It's like 3x louder then everything else on my PC so I'll be playing the game and listening to a movie and then he'll just come out and scream COMMANDER at me when a cutscene comes in which can be annoying at 1 am.

When you beat the game, you seem to get a new biome start? I seem to have posted this when only 1.2% of people got basic achievements and only .1% of people got advanced ones so I assume not many people are playing - are you guys planning a DLC or more content? The ending was abrupt, I hope we get more stuff however as the setting is unique.

[PeKay]

Hey thanks for the feedback. These are definitely all things we would like to work on.

I would be keen to keep the Coral Reef and Kelp Forest as being available in either order, but I agree that the Kelp Forest is a bit easier to go to first. I think they could use a bit more balancing. I think we should be forcing Dark Glows before Volcanic though.

We have some more explanations in the tutorial scenarios, but you are right we don't explain that the Pioneer can go everywhere. That should be added.

We should also make a separate audio setting for voice.

The last patch there should hopefully fix that O2 issue.

[Tyrax]

Originally posted by PeKay:

I think we should be forcing Dark Glows before Volcanic though.

Unless I missed something, I'm not entirely sure what's the point of the Volcanic biome right now - besides getting you a free pioneer sample, which I already had from a very rare habitat. I did find Lead there, but no building uses it yet. It feels like there's something off with the pacing since I'm finding materials I have no use for yet.


Speaking of POI-s, I feel like there's some missing from the alpha. I found the airplane, submarine, mine, whale, carcass, corals, old ship, brine, oil drill and giant shells. And...that's apparently all of them, on repeat. I remember reading something in an older post about event chains and story - but I couldn't see or find any of that, which is weird since I got the achievement saying I found them all...

[GADefence]

Lead is used in making weaponry for the end of the game and also in making the +50% clone longevity module. So the volcanic biome is very end game. This biome is also where the trench excavator goes now. Also, anything powered off should not get immediately damaged in the volcanic biome. It's really annoying setting up where stuff is and then needing to setup the aqua tuner and them all getting very damaged.

[Tyrax]

Originally posted by GADefence:

So the volcanic biome is very end game. This biome is also where the trench excavator goes now. Also, anything powered off should not get immediately damaged in the volcanic biome. It's really annoying setting up where stuff is and then needing to setup the aqua tuner and them all getting very damaged.

I've already built the trench explorer and all it does is give a purple sample...

Maybe it's because I played the alpha, but when I got to volcanic I felt I was more in the mid game..

[Tyrax]

After finishing the main story, I agree with OP - it ends abruptly. The narrator mentions they want to build a new colony 40km away from the original one and continue research, but there's no new game+ mode so I guess that's something that got scratched from the original plans?