Late Game is Easy

[Voitan Rex]

The late game is easy, mostly because once I get the engineer ability to repair my condition with scrap, Stabilizers became obsolete. Resources are also abundant, perhaps if the station suffered a scarcity event, maybe even to the point where people are fighting for scraps of food and metal, the easy life of the mid-game's hoarded supplies might actually be finally eaten into. Early game I had the impression I needed to use Stabilizers sparingly, even to the point of having just 2 dice before popping them. That feeling of worrying about supplies is perhaps the best experience this game offers.

But maybe that's the point? I don't know, but by mid game, I have triumphed over my Sleeper's obsolescence condition. I'm no more disadvantaged than any other human that rarely, if ever, takes their meds.

Maybe if more events frequently chipped away at condition, like station conflicts, that might also help the need to use the player's resources.

[Voitan Rex]

I disagree with everything you said.

[Soteria]

The words degrading and denigrate in the sense of making someone feel bad about themselves: Instead of starting the game with a backpack and a lunch packet, Player here starts the game with some sort of body debt, and is swindled out of work, money and health at nearly every junction. Developers these days think it's a winning formula because it worked a couple of times in other games, but it's really an appeal to negative psychology (see my other posts on that).

I never felt bad about myself. And the PC is an escaped slave in a dystopian society--of course it sucks, that's the setting. The point is to see if you can escape the suck. You seem to want to start in a hopeful place, but that's not the setting, the story, or the game the dev wanted to make. And that's ok.

Your point of that we are able to make Stabilizer apart from Essen-Arp forgets the interesting thing: Yes, the developer built it, no, it doesn't make sense in the story progression. Unless we lock ourselves out of the much cheaper Stabilizer available to be bought, simply by following the story line, like we should.

Not sure why you think we "should" follow that particular story. I didn't want to work for the mafia, so I didn't, not until I had done literally everything else, and was playing post-credits to finish off the content.

But I never really needed stabilizer after the first 1 or 2 doses, because engineering is too strong.

So then it works as a fallback solution, so far so good. But now we see: Oh boy!, this item is action-gated, cycle-gated, dice-result gated (dice are rigged), and we have to waste time and clicks to get to the other side of the space station. If we can afford to stay on this side of the space station we are already done with available content, just playing the farming game. My guess is your game wouldn't have lasted 8 hours without the farming. It heavily inflated playtime without offering anything unique or entertaining. It's just grind to nothing.

So no, it doesn't work well as a story point, it works exceptionally bad as a story point, and is the most useless time sink in the game. It's bad for immersion as well, because suddenly we introduce a system with 10 times the effort needed to progress, compared to everything else.

I might have saved 10 minutes if I hadn't gotten the 2nd vial from farming. It really didn't take long at all. You might look at the patch notes... I certainly could have finished much faster if I had simply made some beeline for a "win," but was enjoying the game and wanted to see all the content.

Again, I liked it, except for how easy the game gets after the beginning. You didn't. You seem to be arguing based entirely on your visceral dislike of a game that you wanted to be a different type of game.

[PHOBIE]

Yeah, so there is this elephant in the room, and you try to sugar-coat it. But no matter how much sugar you put on it, it'll still be an elephant. If you buy a new bike that doesn't steer right and has a flat tire, I can see you defending its right to be so to your dying breath, and everyone who doesn't see it your way surely must be a hater and misanthrope.

I don't like to repeat myself, but for clarity; I think one minute of actual content stretched over hours by excessive content-gating doesn't qualify for minimum standard in the gaming industry. It's not a ready product. Using a barrage of cliffhangers, alternating with shock-moments to keep players in the loop, doesn't make for a healthy nor a satisfying product. It's a slap in the face for developers who strive for quality, and it's exploiting the customer's reasonable expectation of stories fully told.

Maybe you live in a world where perfect workmanship is a given, and design skills grow on trees ripe for the picking, and that's why all products are the image of perfection, and thus all attempts to make a product better must be void.

You dispute my points about workmanship by showing how you found a workaround, to then ignore my arguments about design, to then present some oversimplified summary: Yes, we could funnel and sort all feedback into the like/dislike categories and forget about the rest, but that would make us simpletons. So, I wonder if we are having a rational discourse, or just sit in our own echo chamber.

What I understand to be your argument, is that it derives the right to be this way from the process of being created, which guarantees its unchanging wholesomeness through divine powers. And because you can use workarounds, everyone should use workarounds, design is not to blame.

[Soteria]

Actually, I don't think you understand my argument at all. I think the game gets too easy after the beginning, partially because engineering is too strong, and partially because resources become too plentiful. But you keep on whining about the interface and story and "actual content," whatever that means. So no, I don't think we're having a "rational discourse," when you keep on throwing metaphors into a blender and talk about things that have nothing to do with the thread topic.

Maybe you live in a world where perfect workmanship is a given, and design skills grow on trees ripe for the picking, and that's why all products are the image of perfection, and thus all attempts to make a product better must be void.

Obviously, several of us think the product could be made better. But instead of contributing to that, you just wrote a screed about how much you hate the game, and, as far as I can tell, the setting and genre. Whatever, dude. Stop trying to make it something else. Do you post on idle games about how repetitive gameplay is an insult to gamers everywhere and how little "actual content" there is? You need to understand what a thing is and is trying to be before trying to change it.

[PHOBIE]

Apart from repeated defamation, and despite my best wishes, you are contributing very little to the conversation while I do, which you deny. Instead you go against me for no reason. You keep ignoring anything that could show you a world outside your narrow window of experience; and demand your argument to be the sole topic of conversation. I did my best to explain game design and its pitfalls, which doesn't seem to be interesting to you.

If you don't know what "actual content" means we shouldn't even be talking, the knowledge gap is too wide. I don't want to invest more time into this lost cause, and also I gather you are done with arguments, since you resort to ad hominem, which is something I have no wish to escalate.

Here's your little takeaway: Late Game is too easy because there is no Late Game. No amount of tweaking resources and engineering skills will change that.

[sirenderboy]

Ya'll writing as much as the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ devs did