Please Just Actually Change the Revive System.

[c]

It's time. The feedback has been handed to you, countless viable alternatives have been suggested, and the consensus is clear at this point. The way player revival is handled, and I mean the mechanic itself, desperately needs to be changed for this game to maintain longevity. Dying in KLETKA is such a miserable experience that even the thought of dealing with it has been actively sapping away my entire friend group's desire to play at all.

It should be clear to you by now that endlessly tweaking everything surrounding these mechanics without actually touching the mechanics themselves is not going to appease anyone. We don't need changes to how ghosts move around the map. We don't need a new item that takes, bare minimum, a full exploration of three floors to save up for. These "fixes" are like applying Band-Aids to an amputated limb. They do not change the fact that you can die once to a buggy trap and be out of the game for twenty minutes. They do not change the fact that it is miserable to watch a single player do nothing but silently gather resources to revive you. They do not change the fact that every last player is almost guaranteed to be sapped of any vigor they started the game with after watching something as cool as a single person bringing their entire team back from certain death. This can be a change as simple as letting ghosts revive after being dead for a certain number of floors, or it can be something truly unique and new. As long as it is fun.

Please. It is time. Even if you want the game to be hard, this has nothing to do with difficulty. Staying dead for such a long time doesn't add significant challenge. It just makes it less enjoyable. Please let KLETKA be as good of a game as it can be.

[Synnical77]

Yup, 100%. I played demo with a friend. Them dying and them waiting for so long created a situation where I didn't want to continue since they were just sitting there being bored.
Quit and started a new session. They died at some other point and were left waiting forever. Stopped playing the demo at that point.

I did buy the release version in hopes that this system was changed. Obviously it hasn't. I want to play this with friends but flat out won't suggest it with the current system. I don't care if you make a seperate mode called "Baby's first game: Trivial easy mode for babies" - I don't care - we need a mode where death doesn't mean watching other people play for large periods.

I still keep going back to reviving a player costs half your current health and the revived player only gets that amount of health. Player revives weak and the reviver gets a decent hit.

If you leave a dead player behind then there should be a significant penalty whether it be losing bottles or some penalty to the elevator. Regardless of the penalty, all players should be reviving on the next floor. This introduces a decision of if you want to risk reviving a player on the level or suffer the auto-revive penalty in the elevator.

There's a lot of ways to tweak/balance these fairly basic concepts. Tweak the amount of health lost/gain. Tweak elevator penalty. Maybe every new revive costs more and more? Just figure out how you can balance the game in your own minds while still allowing people to keep playing.

**Another idea that I like a lot less, maybe having a pool of player lives. Take the Helldivers 2 idea. Team starts the game with X number of lives that decreases each time someone dies.

[c]

Originally posted by Synnical77:

Regardless of the penalty, all players should be reviving on the next floor.

I think that's a bit excessive considering you can just leave a floor whenever you feel like and stop at another right under it, but there should definitely be some sort of auto-revive system. I saw a cool suggestion on the Discord to make it luck-based for each player, but the chance to revive goes up the more floors they've passed as a ghost. Living players have to decide if they want to push Kletka without stopping to increase revival chance, or if they want to stop regularly to continue gathering resources with less people.

I like your health mechanic idea too, though. Honestly, anything besides completely shifting gameplay focus to nothing except collecting bottles and watching in silence is good. Like I said, they're being handed 100 different ideas from every direction. They just need to pick one and adapt it.

[Synnical77]

There's a bunch of ways that the devs could go. I was just floating the revive per floor being contingent on getting a progressively worse penalty if you didn't (or weren't able to) revive teammates yourself.

The Elevator montior could even directly say what the penalty is so that the remaining survivors could weigh whether to take the hit or to trek back and try to revive. For example, if I only had 10 health left and my teammate died deep into the current floor. I'd be faced with the decision either:

1. trying to find them and reviving - thus leaving each of us with only 5 health each.

-or-

2. accepting the displayed penalty. The display could say something like -20% fuel or something. Could even make it start as a randomizer where you know the percentage loss but you don't know what stat you're going to lose when you close the doors. Maybe lose fuel? Maybe lose Repair? Maybe get 20% degradation on all stored and held items.
Maybe disable monitor for 5 floors.

The interesting thing if the penalty was randomized, it would open the door for using upgrade cogs to upgrade to reveal more information on the penalty section.
It is all about balance.


There are a lot of options that could be looked into. It just requires thoughtful balance to keep things difficult/painful.

And, none of this has to effect the 'core' game mode. The game already is set up to have different modes of play. Alternate revive mechanics could go into that separate game mode leaving the original mode pure for those that like the current death mechanic.

[Terran]

Having me or some of my friends dead in an annoying loop means half the people in our lobby are just alt tabbed and then we don't want to play KLETKA again. Which is super disappointing. I don't care about difficulty, I just want to have fun.