50 days in game my thoughts and suggestions.

[Eagle]

So Ive gotten 51 of 56 items ive mapped every location minus every single drill spot. Ive been in the cave and flown over the island back and forth many times now, I have been to all locations and built everything there is to build and still have not found the 5 missing items in the Item Creation Box you place down. The items must be glitched out.

I think you guys need to revisit the systems. Hunger needs to drain faster for the amount of fish you have available and can catch along with the different types of foods you can cook.
I think I probably cooked 3x about 2-3 fish each time the entire time Ive played in 50 days time in the game.

Instead of allowing the player catch lots of fish using a fishing pole why not let them catch one fish per cast and add an item called "fishing Net" that you have to find the Blue print to create or catch a certain amount of fish before you can unlock the fishing net or even just find it as an item at one of the many wrecked fishing vessels.

Limiting the fish caught with the fishing pole per cast would limit the distance the player could cover with the sled dogs more realistically requiring you to do more to explore further beyond just spending 30 seconds in a kayak about 3 times to have enough fish to explore the entire world of Arctico. Doing this would require the player to grow the plants to make the recipes amd acturally cook and use those recipes making hunger a bit more of an issue or a working part of the game and food and the stove far more useful than it is.

The building that allows you to create the Workshop... I basically finished the game and explored the entire map and cave before I even saw that you could build a workshop and could upgrade fishing kayaking and other skills... I kept wondering why my hand held drill said lvl 0 but had no way of knowing how to increase that level.

You have to find the Blueprint for the workshop and even then if you don't know where to go to find that you could end up exploring the entire map without finding it till you're done. At which point paying to increase these skills is pointless and those skills are not a big concern anymore since you've found everything and have nothing more to do.

You have heated facilities but there no existing temperature so the heated aspect is pointless at this time and if you added temperature you could make it so that its colder during blizzards with windchill and the player would have to stop and warm up at perhaps an existing heated facility OR place down a small campfire out of the wind.
Its been mentioned but Blizzards and fog plus temperature effects on the player and Dogs would be discouraging travel and would help alot to make the gameplay longer.

The existing letters the player finds need to be PROOF READ for spell check and grammar errors. I think adding mentions of places as sorts of side quests would help to guide the player on an actual storyline guide them to places VS them just going to each place they see in the distance. Giving the places more purpose. All of the places are unlocked for the most part and items are just laid about and really dont serve much purpose other than decor for your short lived base in the short time it takes to discover everything and unlock everything.

The Drills being placable and adding directly to the players inventory make the player easily over stocked with DATA they need to process and ores they need to weld at the bench that end up giving the player way too much. For example I have drills at about 5 data collection loactions and in just days my inventory is filled with almost 100 Data which requires me to build a few more data processors and with just 4... I can end up with cheat code amounts of money and hardware very fast all from placing about 5 drill location drills. Which is why I said you should have to visit locations to collect these ores and data vs it just automatically collecting in the players inventory making everything avaiable to the player in a very short time and kinda ruining all your hard work you put into creating the game since they can unlock everything fast and visit every location honestly in just a matter of hours.

Last and most biggest complaint is the solar panels. While cool and all the low amount of energy that a single one produces with no ability to upgrade it to collect more requires the player to build about 25 of these things to run a base efficiently enough to process data and hardware cook and fly or drill locations. Making the ability to build a nice base FPS intensive all from just solar panels... when you could just allow the solar panels to be upgraded instead of building an entire solar panel farm and taking about from FPS to allow the players to build a nice base. Why not allow leveling up of the solar panels to allow their top energy to increase by 10-30 per upgraded level so you would only need 5-10 max and have tons of electric.

Added cooking sounds, added sounds while the dogs are running to be more immersive.

If you made even a few of these changes even in small ways the replay value would go up alot the time needed to explore all locations would go up more and give the player a bit more of a challenge to unlock everything in facilities ect. It would make all you have done here a lot more worth it.

At this point I dont think theres much more for me to be able to do in the game. With ore levels overflowing data compacting into the hundreds and all facilities built. These are all my suggestions to help improve the game.

[Jahay35]

I'd disagree with you on a couple things. I feel like the game is meant to be an explore/craft rather than survival, and honestly I like how easy it is. It's one of the few games that when I'm stressed out a lot or just in general having a bad day, I can hop on this game for relaxation. This game wasn't meant to be a long play, as they do point out that your only objective is to find Dr. Garcia's blueprints. I feel like the drills being automatic helps a lot with the base building aspects, because I'm don't really want to spend hours grinding for materials. The letters with spelling/grammar mistakes I feel is good. It adds personality to each explorer. You can't backspace on a typewriter, so it adds a little more human element to see that mistakes can be made sometimes. I think the heated facility kinda emphasizes that it is a building in the arctic, and it is usable because it's heated. I do agree with you on the solar panels though, I don't exactly like having 48 solar panels just to meet the energy demand of my base. That's just my opinion though.

[Eagle]

Originally posted by Jahay35:

I'd disagree with you on a couple things. I feel like the game is meant to be an explore/craft rather than survival, and honestly I like how easy it is. It's one of the few games that when I'm stressed out a lot or just in general having a bad day, I can hop on this game for relaxation. This game wasn't meant to be a long play, as they do point out that your only objective is to find Dr. Garcia's blueprints. I feel like the drills being automatic helps a lot with the base building aspects, because I'm don't really want to spend hours grinding for materials. The letters with spelling/grammar mistakes I feel is good. It adds personality to each explorer. You can't backspace on a typewriter, so it adds a little more human element to see that mistakes can be made sometimes. I think the heated facility kinda emphasizes that it is a building in the arctic, and it is usable because it's heated. I do agree with you on the solar panels though, I don't exactly like having 48 solar panels just to meet the energy demand of my base. That's just my opinion though.

Add a Story mode and Creative Mode.
Creative could be as is.

Story mode makes it more immersive and the player have to do things to get to places and eat and cook more realistically. If easy suits your play style that's fine but the majority of people buying this are expecting a little bit more.

Game modes would allow for this.

Theres no pipeline that leads from the drills to the players base for ores. You should have to retrieve those. There's nothing else to do once you've hit all the places so it makes sense.
Once youve done everything theres not much more else to do and it loses any replay value it had.

Adding mechanics would give a lot more replay ability.

[Agentfive]

I think it's very relaxing and I love how I am not going to die all the time.

I do think the animation blends and - for example fishing - all of this could be smoother and have better transitions. I love the game - it does need to have a polish pass.

The ability to chain items and also the solar upgrades in the first post would be awesome,