Is the game COMPLETELY unbalanced?

[Benzin]

Not saying, asking.
I just noticed that steam sais the "The long journey home" Achievement has been completed by 6.9 percent of all players!?

Please correct me if im wrong, but ist this acheivement for successfuly completing a run?
So, of all the people that play the game (on steam), only 6.9% have managed to end a run??
Even on the easiest difficutly???

[Wrzlprnft]

Here is my take on it:
Now, this is a very complex topic to unwrap, and I would dare to say that the main reason is not balance being completely out of whack, but rather the opposite.
The game is by no means perfect. It is made to do a very specific thing: to have you make survival decisions while the ship falls apart. To drive you to the point where you think you lost, but then you realize the decisions you made allow you to slingshot you back into the game. To give you basically a cultural shock in regards to the aliens, but once you note down their preferences and tricks, it's you who manipulates them, not the other way round. To make you think that you cannot explore any of the galaxy, because the hostile environment just kills you, but once you know how to survive you find out that there is a novels worth of words in the alien interactions.

In other words:
It is more of a old school text adventure game underneath a layer of space games, made to have you claw your way back in. It shows you how to play the game, but it totally let's you in the dark on how to win, you need to learn that yourself. The meta gain across runs in this rogue-lite game is knowledge.(instead of the nowadays more common gain being equipment)

But a run, especially if you are new, can take 4 to 6 hours, sometimes even 8.(which goes down to 2 to 4, speedruns in a known seed have been optimized to 20 minutes without glitches and cheats).

The game, aside from making obvious mistakes like attacking a superior enemy or flying into a black hole, doesn't straight up tell you how you are doing. You need to analyze your situation, and especially your long term trend and adjust/change your game plan from there.

So to make your decisions matter, it always saves when you enter a system or an encounter and doesn't feature a load an older save system.

The difficulty modify alien trade prices, damage you take from stuff and so on (so basically mitigates lack of experience with the controls and Ressource Management), but not necessarily make the more text adventure style part of the game any easier. It is still about the decisions.

Which is far from mainstream gaming interests these days.

But you'd need to look a bit past the steam page screenshots and descriptions to really reveal that.

Also, it's initial release wasn't that far away from the initial no man's sky release, and it has procedural generation, while at the same time the marketing of the long journey home wasn't as focused on the survival part. That attracted a lot of the wrong crowd of people. (Grinding ressources by landing on every planet really isn't that efficient in a game based around the decisions on where you can afford to land)

It also has been now in the "sell it at any price" mode for a while, going down to a couple of bucks, or being included in pc game magazines, which also bumps up the numbers of players.

[Wrzlprnft]

Also, i see an "ist" in your comment. If you speak by any chance german, there is a great podcast with lead game designer Andreas Suika, where he talks about what experience they tried to achieve with the game, and where they might have overshot that goal at the cost of accessibility https://www.gamespodcast.de/2020/07/19/runde-276-the-long-journey-home/

[Wrzlprnft]

So, it's a game that is good at the one thing it wants to do, but that unfortunately is to throw the players into new and unknown situations. (At least at the beginning/the first 20 hours/the first 5 to... 10 runs). And on a surface level, the game doesn't look like that. Which leads to a clash of expectations and players buying and trying the game which this is definitely not the right kind of experience for.

But the way it commits to its intended experience and atmosphere is why I like it a lot. I'd compare the challenges and feel when I am playing remotely with RimWorld and Sunless Sea/Skies, if I were looking outside more obvious/quick/too easy comparisons.

[Benzin]

After about 8 hours of play, im beginning to see why only 6.9% of people have finished a run.
Frustration
And for me, this frustration comes NOT from the game being too challenging, but for it doing a TERRIBLE job, at comunicating information to the player.

- I enter a solar system, star map sais "normal" radiation, i immediatelly start taking radiation damage even though im not near any star. Why!? who knows. Game wont say.

- My ships starts displaying a yellow "halo" as if its broadcasting something, what is it? is this good? bad? who knows.

- After navigating the ATROCIOUS (i say again) ATROCIOUS user interface for a shop / space station, i see things for sale wich sound nice, but are they for the lander? for the ship? for the pilot on the lander? no idea.

- I would like to get a good look at my current solar system! to explore my options! Too bad. Youre stuck with the tiny "minimap" on the top right corner. There is no way at all to see a larger map of your solar system. Wich BTW, would be VERY useful for more precise navigation.

Add to this, my other complain. The User interface is just terrible. It feels completely awkward and totally unintuitive. It feels like an UI designed for mobile games.

I honestly think the game is beautiful in many ways. It has awesome scenes, great immersion, very nice sounds, excellent music, and (mostly) solid mechanics and gameplay. Challenging? sure! but i like that, just like i like it in rimworld, FTL, etc. Thats not the problem. But the UI and the terrible way it forces the user to interact with the game, ruins the experience. At least for me.
:(

[Wrzlprnft]

Originally posted by Benzin:

- I enter a solar system, star map sais "normal" radiation, i immediatelly start taking radiation damage even though im not near any star. Why!? who knows. Game wont say.

The radiation on the star map is for the entire sector/cloud, and referrs to the amount of pulsars and black holes within the sector/cloud. You can recognize those as red colored stars on the star map.

In the system map, the types of planets are color coded, and certain types of resources are only on certain types of planets, and rare resources are on more dangerous planets on average.

But yeah, basically every bit of information(that includes which interactions in the single google translate word thrown at aliens communication style) is based on recognizing small clues and interpreting text, which is kinda what I meant with overshooting the goal for the experience on the devside.

Thank you for your honest feedback, may it help others decide for themselves.

[Benzin]

I see the game came out in 2017, so i guess hoping for an update / patch is pointless now. But how do i wish they would update the game to have a better way of providing information to the player, improving the user interface. Adding tooltips to the stuff in the screen, better maps, etc.
It would probably be one of my favorite games of all times!

[Wrzlprnft]

Oh yeah, the dev team has been disbanded for a long time now.

[QSYOPORFABB<3]

Wow this is so sad, it look like a really good game, whitout the luck or attention it requires.

[tuxdelux]

Hard to believe that the lunar-lander minigame is so, so bad, when there was so much time and resources that went into the music and videos. I understand they were trying to make a challenge in the spirit of Starcon 2, but somewhere along the way, it should have been clear early in the game development that it is was not any fun, interesting, and accessible. And it takes a long time, with loading times, cutscenes, and control interactions, to get done with each painful planet exploration. It simply killed the game for me.

[GreatPalm]

this game just not feels like a 'game'. I tried first time and it did not hooked me at all. I thought 'maybe next time'. Never finished a single run.

[Insane]

I've also tried it the first time, fairly high. Got stuck between figuring the UI, controls, flying the ship, pretty visuals, animations and some of my thought loops.
Next time I booted it up, though, blasted through training and got absolutely hooked. Love this kind of text-based game with interesting mechanics and good trading.