A Bit Too Quick to Resort to Cannibalism

[HoroSaga]

This is more an observation than anything, but I feel that the expedition members are a bit too quick to resort to cannibalism when your sanity runs out. Since the game hit release, I've had more than one expedition come to an abrupt end when my Sanity dipped a little too low and an expedition member immediately started murdering and eating the rest of the expedition.

Most recently, I lost a very promising campaign because I misclicked a movement by one space and my group's Parsi Trader immediately turned into a cannibal and devoured my expedition's Level 3 Native Warrior. He did this even though I had a dozen canned goods and a perfectly delicious pack animal in my group.

The loss of my Native Warrior made it impossible to avoid enemies surrounding the Golden Pyramid, and impossible to actually defeat them in combat, so I attempted to withdraw back to my ship. This required depleting my Sanity a second time, and the instant it ran out my Parsi Trader decided to also eat my Missionary.

While I was able to return to the mainland on my ship, my expedition party was literally gutted, and I was completely underequipped for the final two expeditions. I risked keeping the Parsi Trader in my expedition, in hopes of cleansing him at a Shaman's Hut, only to have him eat my brand new Soldier the first time I stopped to camp. At that point, it was pretty much "game over".

Given the severity of the Cannibalism events, I feel like there should be some more checks and balances in there, to make it a bit less likely to trigger - especially when the player still has adequate supplies in their inventory.

[Kaileris]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/358130/discussions/1/350540974002405753/

Apparently the community doesn't see it like we do.

[HoroSaga]

Originally posted by Kaillera:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/358130/discussions/1/350540974002405753/

Ah, I didn't think to look in the bugs section since I don't really consider it to be a bug. Really, it's just the RNG being a jerk.

But, that said, the Cannibalism-related events definitely feel like they need some tweaking.

[Lemonhead]

To me it feels like sanity events have a bit to wide spread randomness. Sometimes nothing happens, other times a member just gets eaten out of the blue.

It feels like people go from sane to insane with no inbetween. In my opinion it would be better if sanity events went in stages. So you could either get a catastrophic event based on one of your current ailments, or you could contract a new one; not both in the same event.
(Note: I am not saying they should go cannibalistic less frequently if that is the balance they want to go with. Only that there should be signs beforehand so we can interact with it)

[Kaileris]

Originally posted by Lemonhead:

To me it feels like sanity events have a bit to wide spread randomness. Sometimes nothing happens, other times a member just gets eaten out of the blue.

It feels like people go from sane to insane with no inbetween. In my opinion it would be better if sanity events went in stages. So you could either get a catastrophic event based on one of your current ailments, or you could contract a new one; not both in the same event.
(Note: I am not saying they should go cannibalistic less frequently if that is the balance they want to go with. Only that there should be signs beforehand so we can interact with it)

That's the problem Lemon. That event instantly turns people into a cannibal and make you instantly lose another trek member instantly. It's worst than the one where your explorer just shoots your trek member out of the blue, because you will start to lose other members having them eaten. At least by that point you can prevent it via raw meat. You can calm the arrest event with chocolate.

[Moomaw]

I think the idea is that reaching Zero sanity is a really big deal, and really risky, even for a single movement. The Cannibals aren't eating people because they are hungry, it's because they've gone completely insane, ie Zero Sanity. I'm one of those players who really like that aspect of this game. It makes managing your Sanity super important, cause you just have no idea what might happen when you push your crew past their breaking points. When I play, I try to never get down to Zero sanity if at all possible, and it often is possible, at least on Normal difficulty. Traveling while psychotic should be super risky. It also fits perfectly with the theme of the game, which includes heavy doses of HP Lovecraft and the notion of the lurking horrors in the hearts of men, and the fragility of the mind when exposed to ancient secrets, and whatnot. Maybe the cannibalism trait appearance should be dialed back a touch, but it's definitely one of my favorite aspects of the game. It only happens to me maybe once every 3 or four runs, and I will often just dismiss the Cannibal from my crew at that point and cut my losses.

[ByteRiot]

Thanks for the feedback! It's something we're actively monitoring. As Moomaw says dipping into zero sanity should be a big deal. There are low sanity events which have a more gradual impact, like making a character paranoid, but zero sanity events should differ from these by have an immediate catastrophic impact most of the times.

We don't want it to feel like 50% of the no-sanity events are just the cannibalistic event though. We'll look into the tuning for the next update and are also currently working on adding more variation for the sanity events in general.

[Lemonhead]

Originally posted by ByteRiot:

Thanks for the feedback! It's something we're actively monitoring. As Moomaw says dipping into zero sanity should be a big deal. There are low sanity events which have a more gradual impact, like making a character paranoid, but zero sanity events should differ from these by have an immediate catastrophic impact most of the times.

We don't want it to feel like 50% of the no-sanity events are just the cannibalistic event though. We'll look into the tuning for the next update and are also currently working on adding more variation for the sanity events in general.

In my experience, zero sanity events feel a bit like running across a road with very busy traffic. You might get over in one piece, but since the consequences for failing can be catastrophic, you just don't do it. If this is the feeling you tried to create, then you succeeded.

I think it is an unfortunate design though, as it is not fun to play with RNG that cannot be manipulated. Especially RNG that can have severe negative impact. There are some articles about good vs bad RNG, and sanity events falls very much under bad.

If events that could occur were foreshadowed (via ailments like cannibalism/cleptomania/etc.) I think some of the bad feeling about hitting those events might be mitigated. You would then either get an event tied to a negative ailment (a known risk), or you could contract a new negative ailment; increasing the spread of disasters that can affect you if you carry on.

(Sidenote: It would be good if the game would convey that resting outside when below 31 sanity can also be disasterous. For example a different coloring on the last 30 of the sanity bar and a tooltip explaining when hovering it)

[ByteRiot]

Originally posted by Lemonhead:

In my experience, zero sanity events feel a bit like running across a road with very busy traffic. You might get over in one piece, but since the consequences for failing can be catastrophic, you just don't do it. If this is the feeling you tried to create, then you succeeded.

I think it is an unfortunate design though, as it is not fun to play with RNG that cannot be manipulated. Especially RNG that can have severe negative impact. There are some articles about good vs bad RNG, and sanity events falls very much under bad.

If events that could occur were foreshadowed (via ailments like cannibalism/cleptomania/etc.) I think some of the bad feeling about hitting those events might be mitigated. You would then either get an event tied to a negative ailment (a known risk), or you could contract a new negative ailment; increasing the spread of disasters that can affect you if you carry on.

(Sidenote: It would be good if the game would convey that resting outside when below 31 sanity can also be disasterous. For example a different coloring on the last 30 of the sanity bar and a tooltip explaining when hovering it)

Thanks for your feedback! I don't fully understand the remark about not being able to manipulate bad sanity events. The whole game and resource system is solely built around you managing your sanity bar and therefore controlling these events. Also yes, we want dipping into the zero sanity area to be a considerable risk. If you have one of those articles at hand I would happily read how they apply to our zero-sanity events.

The design you describe already applies our low sanity event types, which apply when you have between 1..30 sanity points. At a 25% chance a low sanity event instead of a zero sanity event is triggered when on zero sanity points.

There is also already a text about what kind of event to expect when hovering over the sanity bar, but adding more visual segments to the sanity bar is also something that is on our todo list for the next update. I hope that will help more with explaining the system.

[Lemonhead]

Just a reminder that I really think you have made an excellent game, and that the following is meant to be constructive criticism to illuminate my own experiences with some of the parts that felt less enjoyable to me.

Originally posted by ByteRiot:

If you have one of those articles at hand I would happily read how they apply to our zero-sanity events.

There are many articles, and much discussion about this subject. Usually they talk about competitive games like chess (as the non-rng example), card games, dice games or strategy games as examples of different games with varying degree and various types of RNG. I think much of it applies, even though The Curious Expedition is a single player game.

However, I cannot give you one single article that would tell all the truths about RNG in gaming, since everyone has their own version of what is good and what is bad. Search for it if you have time. It's very interesting reading. If you don't, I'll give you an example here.

Simply, good RNG increases the enjoyment of a game; bad does not. As enjoyment is largly subjective, what is good and what is bad will vary from player to player. This is how it affects me: When I roll a 0-sanity event

• which doesn't kill my run, I feel I succeeded due to dumb luck.
  
• which kills my run, I feel I failed because I ran out of sanity in the first place.

What this shows is that regardless of the result, I feel I failed before even rolling and thus get no enjoyment out of any outcome. The later I roll the 0-sanity events, the greater this effect becomes. Only a run where I roll no 0-sanity events is truly a successful run.

I don't think it has to be this way though. I honestly believe that sanity events could be designed in a way that is more enjoyable than it is now. Something that feels part of the game, instead of just a last chance on a run you have lost control over. I'll go a bit into what I mean below.

Originally posted by ByteRiot:

There is also already a text about what kind of event to expect when hovering over the sanity bar, but adding more visual segments to the sanity bar is also something that is on our todo list for the next update. I hope that will help more with explaining the system.

You mean the text saying 'Moslty Good, Neutral, Mostly Bad, Catastrophic'? That's not very descriptive, and leaves you only one choice. Increase sanity, or don't.

Originally posted by ByteRiot:

Thanks for your feedback! I don't fully understand the remark about not being able to manipulate bad sanity events. The whole game and resource system is solely built around you managing your sanity bar and therefore controlling these events. Also yes, we want dipping into the zero sanity area to be a considerable risk.

Originally posted by ByteRiot:

The design you describe already applies our low sanity event types, which apply when you have between 1..30 sanity points. At a 25% chance a low sanity event instead of a zero sanity event is triggered when on zero sanity points.

Managing the sanity bar does not manipulate the RNG. It only affects whether you make sanity rolls or not.
Manipulating the RNG means that you can make actions before making the roll that changes the possible outcomes you may get. Maybe there are a lot of this in the game already, I don't know. In any case, it is not being communicated, so I cannot work with it.

The really bad events are when someone dies, or someone decides to eat an animal. Those events can break an otherwise great run if it hits someone you really relied upon. In my opinion these events should only happen if you suffer from bad traits that causes them to happen.
A few examples of various traits to foreshadow these catastrophic events:

• Starving: May eat an animal on a catastrophic event, or turn cannibal when no animals are present.
  
• Cannibal: May eat another trek member if also starving on a catastrophic event.
  
• Depressed: May kill themselves on a catastrophic event.
  
• etc.

If you get one of these traits you will now have an option beside raising your sanity; clearing the trait before moving on, or dismissing the member if you find him to great a risk to travel with. Food could clear starving trait (that could develop into a rationing strategy that may be interesting if you see that you cannot do all the things you need with the sanity you have at your disposal). Maybe loyalty necklace or the puppets could clear the depressed traits, or other items introduced.

These are just some ideas to try to convey what I am talking about; ways to work with the RNG other than just managing the sanity bar and roll the dice when that is not an option. Something like this could create tangible links between the negative traits you have contracted and events you get. You'll see a cause and effect, and have something you can interact with to make 0-sanity travel an option rather than a failure state.

[Kaileris]

I think the issues with those events that are above catastrophic is that, you have to be resting for it to work. Where as insane events can work whenever it wants, even as to cancelling your resting.

[HoroSaga]

I would say that one of the biggest things that probably bothers me about cannibals is that they automatically kill another member of your traveling party, with no input from the player. Even with the cannibalistic abominations, the player is given the choice to either look the other way and let an abomination eat one of their party members, or to defend the person being attacked.

Normal cannibals, on the other hand, are like hungry ninjas. They strike without warning, immediately killing and eating party members one after another without any way to stop them (short of dismissing them - and even then, they'll have already murdered one of your party members before you can do that). Aside from stress events, this also makes the "Find missing husband" quest one of the most dangerous quests in the game, because those guys constantly murder and eat your party members while you're in the middle of rescuing them. :P

At the very least, I'd love there to be some sort of "warning" stress event where the character becomes a cannibal without automatically killing someone. Then the player would be given the chance to mitigate the impending murderfest, either with items or by dismissing the hungry party member.

[Moomaw]

Huh, I just couldn't disagree more strongly about this. Insanity SHOULD be unpredictable, that's the very definition of insanity, a complete break from reality. It means you have lost control, which is always a risk of heading off into the unknown. That is the very thing that drives the tension in this game. The complaints about this feature ignore the various options the game gives you to strategically deal with this. As mentioned, the most simple way is to simply keep your crew happy! Buy plenty of chocolate and/or whiskey, buy a tent, spend lots of time resting. If you prioritize keeping your crew sane, it's really not that hard to do. However, if you are taking risks by pushing your crew into the unknown with no rations or tent, you are choosing to push your luck, and there should be potentially fatal consequences. I completely disagree that there should be some kind additional warning or indication about what kind of insanity event is going to happen. That is totally not how insanity should work. If insanity were made predictable, that wouldn't be very insane, would it? Besides, the heart and soul of this game, and the fun of it, comes primarily from all the horrible stuff that happens. Regular "perfect" runs where you just stroll through and get all the treasure and leave would be super boring.

I find it's the runs where things are barely hanging together and have a full breadth of high moments and low moments where the game really shines. And again, you can always just dismiss cannibals from your party. No one is to blame but you if you keep a cannibal around and lose yet another party member. How does the saying go? "If you eat one of my friends, shame on you. If you eat another of my friends, shame on me..." It's something like that... I still remember one of my favorite runs where one of my members got eaten by a cannibal in the second expedition, and then my main character kept having nightmares about it the rest of the game, even though we kept coming in first, he was continually haunted by the horror of what happened. That is brilliant story-telling! So much better than just "I got first place and no one got hurt."

[Moomaw]

Perhaps players who find this lack of control to be a poor design choice, are missing the connection to the archetypal stories known as Tragedies. This type of story goes way, way back and can be found in almost every story-telling tradition around the world, however, has not been utilized much in video games, until the recent popularity of Rougue-likes, which more often end in failure than success, and do so intentionally. Tragedies are stories that rely on horrible things happening to characters in order to drive the drama, and they don't have happy endings! I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the following films were an inspiration for this game: Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre the Wrath of God.

They are all built on the Tragedy mode of story-telling and include lots of chaos and bad things happening. The thing about tragedies that make them compelling though, is that all the bad stuff could have been avoided, but the main character's ego causes him to make selfish decisions that ultimately lead to all the horrors. The fine line between control and chaos is what makes tragedies work, and I feel like this game captures that element perfectly!

Here is how Roger Ebert sums up of Aguirre Wrath of God (one of his all time favorite movies): "Men haunted by a vision of great achievement, who commit the sin of pride by daring to reach for it, and are crushed by an implacable universe."

The Curious Expedition is one of the few games that contain this element in such a direct and pure form, and I would be incredibly upset if it were changed to become more tame and predictable...

Also, I highly recommend watching those films if you haven't seen them, they are masterpieces of cinema, and might help you appreciate where this game is coming from.

[Earnest]

I actually love this game. I want 50 DLC. I want more depth, I want progression from session to session (my only true complaint) - perhaps a "base building" component or the ability to start a new series of expeditions with successful adveturers. Something. I hate that "winning" just ends the game.

I love the game, tho.

That said, if I get to zero sanity, I just end the game. Not because of the degree or type of consequences, but because there is no longer any management of the game. Hitting zero sanity, as it is, should simply end the game, IMO, because unless you are very near the golden temple, there is no reason to keep playing. You are dead.

For the same reason, if you play around a specific gimmick - say the chef - and a random event eliminates the chef, just quit the play through. There is no mechanic by which you can assuredly replace the chef, so your game is now over.

Believe me, I love the game, so I'm not trying to run it down at all, but the lack of progression and the arbitrariness of session-ending events are flaws. I recognize that playing around some gimmicks may be so unlikely to work out that arbitrarily losing isn't really any worse than a normal loss, but (again, eg) losing the chef in a built-in play style should not end the game, and it mostly does.

I do not dislike the unpredictable nature of the game, but rather the "deadend" nature of many events. If there is no reasonable chance to play your way out of an even, then it should end the game - not continue to punish you for playing.

Another example of what I feel is a design flaw in an otherwise brilliant game, is the binary nature of many events that would not, in any real world situation, be binary. The "arrest" event, where you must arrest one of two of your compatriots - I don't believe that event has ever fired and arresting one of them felt anything like natural to me. In general, if there are only 1 choice to be made from among only 2 options, I feel the event is flawed. It's an illusion of choice. It's a 50/50 event that hopes the player feels as if they are participating, but they really aren't - and this is egregious because the events fire more or less randomly. If there was a mechanic to avoid the event all together, then the event wouldn't be a bad thing. But if the event itself cannot be gamed by either "choosing" a path to avoid or intercept it, then it should not also itself have no means to game the event.

I guess the ultimate problem with the game is that, even when sanity is high, there is not a feeling of choices and consequences because so much is determined randomly. This would not feel bad if there were actual paths out of all events, but there aren't.

Again, sanity is high, you only recently picked up an expedition member, there is no history of problems between him and anyone else, there is no reason on the character's screen to believe they have any chance of firing a negative event with anyone else, and BAM - you must arrest him or another party member.

Feels bad, man.

I think this is much less of a problem when sanity is at zero - but it's still a problem if there is no viable way forward. Because the sessions are so short, losing all of your comrades essentially means losing the game, so even if you yourself make it out, you get more satisfaction by simply starting over and trying again. If there was progression - if you could play the same character again in a new session - then at least surviving, even when coming dead last in the "competition" - would have value; a catastrophic event leading to ending an expedition with only yourself and zero equipment feels like a harrowing escape, not a delayed end game.

[Moomaw]

What? If you get to zero sanity, you just immediately end the game? Dude, you are missing out on half the fun... Every successfully completed full run I've done, at some point involved dipping to zero sanity, but I still made it to the end... That's when the most exciting stuff happens! So many times I have thought things looked impossible, only to somehow find exactly what we needed to survive, like a cave that takes us right to the pyramind, or something like that. Those are the best runs! And if you really think you're in a complete jam, that's what the Ballon escape is for...

And part of this game is filling in the story gaps yourself. It gives you room to make up stories about why these characters are getting into a fight. Keep in mind that each time you move, there are multiple days passing by, which is plenty of time for arguments to start...

Also, if you are putting all your eggs in one basket by investing everything in one character, that is your choice, and you should make that decision knowing what the consequences will be if you lose that character. I don't see why that is a problem. And it's also not impossible to come back from that situation. It's just harder.