Where did it go wrong

[Ratconned]

What could've been done better to make this game, you know, more accepted.

I think more accessibility with an 'even lower difficulty'. Game is very good however, among the best few I've played and I wouldn't have gameplay changes, any other way.

Just seeing it in comparison to old games which broke the market in their time by doing what they did well… the game would've had a lot more sales and enjoyers if it had an easier mode still.

The lack of it is not a flaw from a gameplay point of view. But from a businessperson's point of view if it had an even lower, casual like difficulty which did not come at the expense of current gameplay, this game would've broken the market.

I do not care about popularity and I enjoy the game more than most as it currently is.

[Hekateras]

Ooh, this is fun. To be blunt, no, I think InvInc is a near-perfect game as it is. I don't think the game needed to be easier, what it needed was:

1) Being better at communicating its customizability to the player (everything hidden in the 'campaign options' menu)
2) A MUCH better tutorial

Elaboration on 1: "You can enjoy this even if you're bad at it" is a big part of what makes popular. Compare something like Darkest Dungeon, which is very difficult but has a flourishing fanbase, including people who don't care about the gameplay much if at all, but are more interested in the characters, the emergent storytelling, fanfiction, all that stuff. Invisible Inc has the potential for this, but too many people give up on the game without ever finding out that you can turn it into a much more casual experience by tweaking a few numbers in the settings.

Elaboration on 2: The tutorial is bad. Anyone who's watched new players on Twitch struggle through it and applying its lessons to the game will know what I mean here. But there are several big lessons in particular that it failed to teach:
- The distinction between noticed/peripheral tiles and seen/watched tiles. Not only does it fail to teach you this, but it actually doesn't let you move into noticed vision at all! As a result, many newbies both miss out on the crucial opportunities for distraction and manipulation that deliberately moving through noticed vision offers, as well as play far more cautiously than they actually need to, because they act like noticed tiles get them overwatched too.
- On a related note, the tutorial fails to teach you that you should probably not play this game like XCOM, and if you try to KO every guard in your path, it will end badly for you until you get so skilled you can get away with it. You encounter four guards in the tutorial. One is unreachable and behind a counter, one is armoured, and the other two you knock out, and the only distraction tactic used is toggling a door (to lure a guard into being knocked out). No wonder newbies end up with the impression that you should KO as often as possible.
- The way cover works could have been shown better. "This guard is patrolling, you have to change your hiding spots to get past him" would have been better.
- For some bizarre reason, "how to survive if you're overwatched" is omitted from the tutorial and reserved as a little pop-up the first time your agent gets seen in the game proper. Not great, for one of the more complex mechanics AND one of the more important ones (the one that directly precedes your campaign ending).