Dissapointed with the evolution of the game and difficulty

[Neyreyan_Youtube]

Played until endgame in January but now i see we have a lot of difficulty sliders and you need to "tailor" your difficulty.
Are you for real? Then why even make the game? Just leave it to the modders to balance your game and give them a part of the sales.
The hardest part of a game these days is to balance it, most studios can't balance 2 difficulties or even one for the base game but giving difficulty sliders is just saying the developers gave up since they are clueless or have spaghetti code.

So beyond choosing a difficulty, i have to chose a challenge difficulty, a room keyword shuffle and other things.
The new research screen is fancy but not practical since the icons are so small you need to zoom in and look at each one individually wich is horrible for the start of the game when you need to research a lot of basic stuff.

the performance is better
the stats shown on wizards is much worse, i can barely indentify the stuff i need to see so i gave up trying to get good teachers and pressed start.

The game went so backwards that it feels more early access than the early access release because that one had vision and clarity, this version is just confusion with extra steps.

[Houjuu Byakuren]

Are you trolling?
The difficulty slider works of percentages as far as I've noticed.
The room keyword shuffle was always a thing, you can just not choose more types than just normal and random.
New research screen is much better, it also has a search function, which you apparently aren't using?!
Stats is actually a lot better (it shows you more), except relics (only for new players).
Main annoyance I have is with iron being underschool only, ngl. Everything else is just better.

[Dedmoin]

There is still balancing needed for default difficulty. The game just added more options to address more players and give new player the option for an easy start and the more advanced players to have more challenge.
Those options are standard nowadays. tbh all base building games in my library offer those options and to fine tune certain challenges.

The icon in the research screen could be a bit larger but this is just a nice to have.
I doubt new players chose their techs solely on how icons look like but they have to browse all techs anyways. Experienced players know what categories they have to look in or use search function.

I am not sure what stats you need to see to know what characters to chose from.
You won't have the best characters with best stats at the very beginning anyways.
Knowing what are the primary and secondary skill should be sufficient?!

[Ivydoom]

Just so you know; this game has evolved and changed a LOT since its first iteration.
Not all EA players are happy where this game has been going.

Speaking for myself only: I have been keeping up with updates and forum for about 8 months now. I haven't played seriously for 6 of them. I support the devs but for myself I decided to wait it out as the game is changing a lot between updates. It's a personal preference.

For me, I like to have a decent preparation so with each upgrade I want to start a new school. But game (EA that is) has come to a point where restarting is not useful anymore.

It's fine, but this means that now that I do own the game I can start a new school whenever and it's my game to play. So who cares if I start today, yesterday or tomorrow.

I am at the point where I want the game to be finished, and where EA updates are about fine-tuning stuff, not adding more things. But I am a simple player and not a dev. I will come back some day.

[n3mes1s]

Originally posted by Neyreyan_Youtube:

Played until endgame in .

I wonder how did you manage that since there is no end-game in this game.

[Neyreyan_Youtube]

Originally posted by n3mes1s:

Originally posted by Neyreyan_Youtube:

Played until endgame in .

I wonder how did you manage that since there is no end-game in this game.

the early access endgame, finished all the undergroud and built everything.
And i was right, there is literally no balance on the hardest difficulty and it's all a big rng fest of restarting and geting the time down, looking at details but it's mostly dumb luck:)
After a few restarts of using the same strategy it worked wich is not the point of difficulty levels.
They should just have 3 balanced difficulties, magic school easy mode, normal mode that is challenging and fun, Hard mode wich is max difficulty but balanced with iron mage and other stuff

[kaibioinfo]

In my opinion the game got A LOT better with the latest updates. The updates clearly adressed the biggest issues in the game. That's said, there are still many issues remaining, but I think the game is on a good track.

I agree, however, that the game difficulty settings are horrible. I really don't like them. As a player I want at most three difficulties: easy, normal, hard. I think it's totally fine to offer easy difficulties for players who just want to build a magical school without too much challenges, while a hard difficulty is always good for players who don't mind to restart many times until they found their perfect strategy. I don't like "advanted difficulty settings" as some games offer them, but if you have stuff like this you should hide it in an advanced settings panel. Every time I start a new game I'm confused which setting I should choose.

[iNSANE BUnNY]

Endgame? its a sandbox >< they don't have endgames

[Neyreyan_Youtube]

Originally posted by iNSANE BUnNY:

Endgame? its a sandbox >< they don't have endgames

its not a sandbox, its done when you complete exploration and build all rooms or what you need to finish

[The Doctor]

More options are a good thing as long as the Easy, Medium and Hard settings have defaults. In my session at the weekend, I had a thunderstorm destroying my roof, three spectral croa pecking equipment to death and one staff member approaching a breakdown and then a spectral rift opened. I saved and quit because it felt overwhelming.

About an hour later, after a break, I came back and fixed each of the problems and I felt really good about it. I managed a the crisis but I needed a break before I could face it. At the time, it was overwhelming and I can understand why some folks might want to disable events like the thunderstorm or spectral rifts opening up to make for a more pleasant, stress-free experience. But that's part of the 'fun' for me.

Originally posted by iNSANE BUnNY:

Endgame? its a sandbox >< they don't have endgames

Endgame conditions don't exist yet but an actual endgame is on the roadmap.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1270580/view/4195747069378942127?l=english

I dare say you'll be able to play on after you have defeated the challenge though.

And for the OP, ONI also changed very drastically throughout Early Access. At the start, it was a reasonably chill experience but after the automation update, it stopped appealing so much to me. That happens with EA, particularly with Klei. It's not always a smooth ride and you may end up not liking the way the game is going.

[kaibioinfo]

Like in ONI it seems to be part of the game experience to fail and retry - the problem is, that this kind of "rogue-like" experience is totally unappropiate for the pacing of the game. It's fun to fail and retry if a game round takes an hour. it's no longer fun, if you built up a mage school for 10 hours and then fail.
That's said, most of the difficulties come from a lack of explanations. The research tree is so complicated no newcomer understands it. Thunderstorm damage can be prevented by building lightning rods - but you first have to experience what a thunderstorm is before even understanding why lightning rods are important. Spectral croas can be easily prevented by first building a jelly beast and set croa corpse refinement to infinite - easily solved, but you have to know that.

In some way learning these things is part of the fun of the game, but it's a balance act between fun and frustration. What prevented me from playing on high difficulty so far is that the difficulty is not a constant pressure but rather spikes during the game. You can have a relaxed game for hours and then having two mana lanterns appear directly after each other - game over if you haven't prepared anything to boost your staff member convictions.

I don't think that the game is pure RNG - but situations like these can be frustrating if you are not prepared.

[Jay]

As troll bait posts go, this one's about a 1.5/10.

Complaining that *checks notes* the game has sliders to let you choose what kind of difficulty you want - including which challenges you want turned on/off at any given time?

You can do better than that, I have faith in you.

[kaibioinfo]

I think the complain is valid. It's not about offering detailed settings, it's about forcing the user to decide for difficulty settings two times. It's very confusing and unnecessary.

[Neyreyan_Youtube]

Originally posted by kaibioinfo:

I think the complain is valid. It's not about offering detailed settings, it's about forcing the user to decide for difficulty settings two times. It's very confusing and unnecessary.

Exactly and its not balanced or explained what changes. This is the developers job to balance the difficulty.
I like the hardest difficulty a lot but i am hiting a lot of artificial roadblocks and silly mechanics.
Like: i didnt have enough stone to make a classroom, my student died because i didnt click the "revive ritual", sometimes i couldnt push the fog because the trees didnt grow in time, the combat can be unbalanced because you dont know what to expect.
But i dont think there should be this many options for difficulty, just balance the game in way where all you need to do is chose one of the 3 dificulties and the 4th option is custom

[ShadowTani]

Well, you're in luck, the devs plan to simplify the difficulty setup when starting a new game according to their newest blog post. I didn't have an issue with it personally, but anything that makes the game more accessible to new players is a good thing.