Grounded --> no guidance?

[Wasler]

I know it's a sandbox game, but I just miss some kind of "guidance" in this game. The first "quests" e.g. the lasers, the oak, the robot is done in ~1h of gameplay. Afterwards there are no more real quests, just stupid "collect parts for Burg.L" and here the problems begin...

In the game RAFT you can farm endlessly, explore the game and do whatever you want, but there is still a quest line. This quest line is not so much interesting or important to tell a story, but indirectly guides the player.

In Grounded, after exploring the oak tree, you just stand there not knowing where to go in the vast world.
Should you first kill bees in the west or rather go to the south or maybe try to dive directly into the lake? You feel lost even after several hours and as appealing as it is to explore the game completely without "help", it is also tedious...

What's so hard about making it like Raft? Huge sandbox and still some sort of assistance. To say it's not like that in this one doesn't make sense either because there are quests like the laser, oak etc but after 1 year of development they take 1h max to complete. After that, you're simply wandering around the world, partly without a plan.

We now have the good spear (after we have killed many bees), but just ask ourselves the question "what now?" Really just collect all those robot parts and that's it?

Great graphics, huge sandbox, but for me after 1 year of EA this is just too little to buy this game for this price at the moment.

Perhaps we are doing it wrong, thats the main reason/hope I wrote this --> chance for enlightenment ;-)

[Deadly Peanut]

G is a sandbox game... so go ye forth and sandbox, ye of little faith :)

i got to the same place as you, then ignored the robot quests, built a main base, gathered resources, killed some large dire bugs, leveled up my gear, killed some more dire bugs, explored a lot, leveled up my gear again, and now i'm building a second bigger base.... all in true sandbox style.

fwiw, i'm happy there's no overbearing lore/quest nonsense that i have to endure... i like sandboxes

[ShockedHearts]

I just play after the oaktree.

so far I did the oaktree and built a base that im still working on and improving gear, while also exploring places like the hedges that have a lot of unique story stuff in it finding secrets and having fun.

its a blend of survival and patient exploration and planning. and you get a good sense of satisfaction for accomplishing being able to survive areas like the pond or hedges, either by stealth and skilled play or having the appropriate gear to take everything on.

also have to realise the games story isnt even close to bening done yet and its still early access. not to mention the burgl chips are spread out to encourage exploration and you can see them on your map.

[Nation]

Wasler eredeti hozzászólása:

I know it's a sandbox game, but I just miss some kind of "guidance" in this game. The first "quests" e.g. the lasers, the oak, the robot is done in ~1h of gameplay. Afterwards there are no more real quests, just stupid "collect parts for Burg.L" and here the problems begin...

In the game RAFT you can farm endlessly, explore the game and do whatever you want, but there is still a quest line. This quest line is not so much interesting or important to tell a story, but indirectly guides the player.

In Grounded, after exploring the oak tree, you just stand there not knowing where to go in the vast world.
Should you first kill bees in the west or rather go to the south or maybe try to dive directly into the lake? You feel lost even after several hours and as appealing as it is to explore the game completely without "help", it is also tedious...

What's so hard about making it like Raft? Huge sandbox and still some sort of assistance. To say it's not like that in this one doesn't make sense either because there are quests like the laser, oak etc but after 1 year of development they take 1h max to complete. After that, you're simply wandering around the world, partly without a plan.

We now have the good spear (after we have killed many bees), but just ask ourselves the question "what now?" Really just collect all those robot parts and that's it?

Great graphics, huge sandbox, but for me after 1 year of EA this is just too little to buy this game for this price at the moment.

Perhaps we are doing it wrong, thats the main reason/hope I wrote this --> chance for enlightenment ;-)

Once you discover the oak tree explosion you'll want to setup a base and make some armor and weapons. then start doing the Burg.L Chip quests which is the main storyline of the game (the only guidance is the riddle in the quest menu) (some of these can be very difficult to figure out) (google and youtube can help you if needed) There are currently 7 of these and can take a long time if your going blind. After finding all of Burg.L's chips there are the daily quests you need to do. Not per human day but in-game day. I personally like doing the hunter quests. So what you do is get all three quests and abandon the ones you dont need. come back the next day and take another roll at the ones you want. This is actually needed content to do because you get raw science as a reward which allows you to unlock all the fun stuff to play with from Burg.L. Just the main story line and all the raw science you find within will not be anywhere near enough to unlock all the stuff. Thus why you'll need to do a bunch of dailies. Along this journey keep upgrading your base and improving weapons etc... this is about 75+ hours of game time trying to just unlock all of Burg.L's upgrades.

[Wasler]

Hmm, i think this is the main problem of the game and not only 4 me.
If you are not exclusively into sandbox games WITHOUT instructions, but would like to have at least a rough direction, you will have fun in Grounded for a short time, but not for long.

I took a look on the achievements, e.g. only 7,5% of the players analyzed 15 raw materials and only 7% of the players ever grilled meat on the grill, this is really nothing. Mutations were added September 2020, again only 7% of the players...
this does not sound good, or?

Sorry, i don't want to blame the game or praise Raft only, but i understand why Raft has 115k reviews and nearly 20k ppl every month and Grounded "only" 17k reviews and only 2k players without the july free-weekend. (i am aware of XBOX btw, but this won't change much)
Many of the negative reviews stopped playing after 2-6h and this is the same problem for me and my friends.
We just feel lost and yes..we have a base, we have already the best bee-spear, we have no problems with water/food, but the only "real goal" in this game is to unlock all upgrades we dont even need for most of the game...lol

I have again to compare it to RAFT, because both are EA and both are Sandbox-survival:
In Raft there are only 6-7 quests in total, but each quest is something like a guidance. For example to reach on of the islands, you should create an engine (the game does not tell this in special, but you recognize it fast, because you drive with your sail versus the wind to reach the island. Also in the quest before you found a blueprint of the engine, so you don't need to be Sherlock...
To create this engine you need items, you need to farm and you can do this in the whole sandbox with your own speed. But you always know: when i feel ready, i can create this engine after grinding or whatelse and drive to the next "quest aka guidance".

But in Grounded I don't even know what the reason is to create a better axe or a better hammer. Yeah, i can then chop down level-2 things, but for what? Do i need this to reach one of the BURG.L things?

Again: we don't need 1000 quests, but at the moment this game feels incredible unfinished and i am aware of it that this is an EA game, but with this "speed", it will be EA for the next 3 years, sorry.

And it is ok that many ppl love this game, but you should also be objective and understand, why so many players leave this game after ~5h playtime, but the same players spend e.g. >100h in games like RAFT.

Raft was in the first 1-2 years in EA also not very good and unpolished (with a small player base), so I will take a look into this game in the future, it has great potential, but after 1 year of development the only "finished" thing is a good graphic...

[EazyLee]

It might just be me but I'm tired of hand holding in games and Grounded has been the easiest survival game to figure things out that I've played so far.

No offence or anything, it just seems weird to me that somebody is complaining at the lack of hand holding in a game like this.

I'm guessing raft might be the only survival game experience you've had, since the majority are a lot less beginner friendly than grounded but in comparison to other games in the genre grounded is really easy and not very challenging.

About the achievements, the game is unfinished and the achievement where only introduced in the last update, those are bugged too nobody is getting them hope that explains the lack of achievements a bit

[TheTool]

POIs and upgrades on a map is hand holding.
Oh, Club of the Mother Demon > Bee Spear.

[Jerry Fletcher]

I don´t know, played 15hrs durig the free time and somehow everything explained itself. I just had to read the infos th game gave me. Why tier 2 tools? yes, to chop down the stuff you need tier 2 tools for. What they are good for? Research them and you will see.

Don´t know where the problem is if you are able to think for yourself. Try, fail, learn, be better the next time. Worked for me and should work for everybody else too. But i guess nowadays people are not amused when they fail from time to time. have to learn and such things. Nowadays it seems that many people need somebody else who plays their games (looking at all gaming stream watchers instead of playing by themselves) for them or tells them exactly every step they have to do next. So they don´t fail even once or otherwise the game is bad.

Raft a survival game, really? Played it when it still was a free game and it got some more content since then but didn´t get any better and still is not near of being a survival game. But tbh like 99% of all so called survival games out there, Grounded included. They are all crafting and building games with the need to eat, drink and maybe sleep from time to time.

But saying you played a survival game when you played Raft is like saying you have been on a survival trip in the jungle while in reality you were camping in moms backyard for the sunny weekend. Sorry to be that harsh but that is the reality.

[TheTool]

Jerry Fletcher eredeti hozzászólása:

But saying you played a survival game when you played Raft is like saying you have been on a survival trip in the jungle while in reality you were camping in moms backyard for the sunny weekend. Sorry to be that harsh but that is the reality.

Agreed.
IMO
The Long Dark = Best "survival" game ever.

[ShockedHearts]

EazyLee eredeti hozzászólása:

It might just be me but I'm tired of hand holding in games and Grounded has been the easiest survival game to figure things out that I've played so far.

No offence or anything, it just seems weird to me that somebody is complaining at the lack of hand holding in a game like this.

I'm guessing raft might be the only survival game experience you've had, since the majority are a lot less beginner friendly than grounded but in comparison to other games in the genre grounded is really easy and not very challenging.

About the achievements, the game is unfinished and the achievement where only introduced in the last update, those are bugged too nobody is getting them hope that explains the lack of achievements a bit

Im unlocking all of the achievements I accomplish? they prolly fixed it or its a specific issue for specific people

[Fractured]

While I don't ENTIRELY agree with the OP, but wouldn't be against what they say. Most people are mistaking what they are saying.

They aren't talking about tutorial steps on how to build things. Pretty sure they are talking about story guidance. Where do I go next to get the next bit of info?

The game kinda just stops guiding you on the next bit of story info. Which is fine for the most part for me. Certain things I wouldn't mind. Friends and I attempted to try and cross a hedge via its leaves for about an hour before someone went off to look for a different path (And found a much more convenient path).

[TheTool]

Fractured eredeti hozzászólása:

The game kinda just stops guiding you on the next bit of story info. Which is fine for the most part for me. Certain things I wouldn't mind. Friends and I attempted to try and cross a hedge via its leaves for about an hour before someone went off to look for a different path (And found a much more convenient path).

Are you requesting a tactical overlay with direct pathing to *the next objective?
I kid really, but the game does give you pathing to the next story points. They are hidden in the BURG'L quests. They will lead you to all the right places.
BUT as with any good sandbox, you do not have to do most of this in any particular order. You can pretty much go to what ever Lab you want and continue to pick up story journals.
(The story/journals don't lead you to the next parts of the game. They just tell the story.)
You go wherever you would like as it's a sand box to explore. You can do many things out of order if desired.
As a caveat: The map does show you where the upgrade chips are even before getting the quests to tell you to go to those places, which is the actual progression of the game for now.
The quests, in a cryptic way, tell you the locations, But if you have never been to those locations would not know that location without exploring first or in the process.

A marker on every Lab door, or dotted line pathing through tree branches would defeat the purpose of a "game" in general.

[Valhalla Awaits]

I'm hoping that the story is just in it's infancy. I quit playing the free weekend as soon as the oak tree was finished, as there was no driving story to continue with, and it felt like I was playing a game where nothing past the tutorial was finished. (And even that was lacking.) Even subnautica (The original) has 10x the story this game does currently. And even subnautica barely has one.

Don't get me wrong, the game world is AMZAZING, and makes me want to explore all of it. But it needs a story to progress in it. And so I'm not going to play/buy this till launch when hopefully some work has been done on that end.

[Deadly Peanut]

Valhalla Awaits eredeti hozzászólása:

I'm hoping that the story is just in it's infancy. I quit playing the free weekend as soon as the oak tree was finished, as there was no driving story to continue with, ...

sandbox games often have very little story. many of us like it that way.

perhaps a nice visual novel... something with endless NPC chatter and unlikely lore?

[Plake]

Nation eredeti hozzászólása:

So what you do is get all three quests and abandon the ones you dont need. come back the next day and take another roll at the ones you want.

Takes way too long... Delivering completed quests, then saving BEFORE opening the new-quest menu and saving-reloading if the new quests are not wanted is much faster...