I only have a couple of the beta's campaign scenarios left and now that I've spent a few days with it.. understand it.. and have taken in the majority of it's story and method of story telling.. I don't think it will do well on Steam.
I feel like, as I usually do, writing up several pages of ideas and problems and ways they could be fixed to send to the developer. As it's a beta and they claim to be open to feedback.. maybe it could help. I don't think anything will help.
My opinion from the first attempts with the sandbox due to extremely limited resources that aren't replenishable.. making that experience short and frustrating.. I just don't understand why people make games this limited. You can't play for very long. Coming from several other games that have resources and trade.. It's like, that's it?!
It hand-holds too much and has a few technical problems with the story. A story that services the game itself.. as a video game. There's little illusion that you are a commander of a colony trying to get it off the ground and accomplish some meaningful goal. As in the crew of the Mothership do reference you as the commander BUT they don't let you participate in the development of the story.
This is a big point because the story progresses based on your ability to complete objectives successfully at which point the crew of the mothership will chat amongst themselves. If you can't complete the mission objectives you get replaced. And each objective only has specific and often useless rewards, instead of letting you choose what you actually need at any given time. The game basically tells you, you're only there to get the story moving along. Put the square peg into the square hole, when you're told to put the square peg in the square hole. Never mind that the triangle peg just got stolen, or that the circle peg is on fire.
And again.. fire, and other internal hazards, floods etc, don't exist. All of the claimed hermitically sealed tunnels and buildings apparently suck in hazardous air from outside such that the colonists suffocate and die pretty easily.
AND very annoyingly.. there's no transportation system. This annoys me because all of the utilities and commodity storage magically moves around. How hard would it have been to include transportation drones so that freight gets moved around in a practical manner. Water would flow through tubes which could burst and cause floods. I mean it would suck to see a tube filling up with fluid as in clean or dirty water.. and all that but the game is too limited.
The mini game of managing the transportation and storage of all this shit IS why people play these types of games.
The thus contrived settings and mission/game design limitations, like one mission for no specific reason gives you a tenth the amount of resources as you'd normally get in any of the other missions. No reason is given though for the lack of resources and you're given no heads up. It didn't matter for you to know it, or you should have figured it out.
For that specific scenario I went into the scenario with an aim to jump the lack of resources and go for renewables. Which is always a mistake. The only path to success is to follow all of the set objectives. I jumped through the silly hoops they gave me and suddenly ran into a shortage. I was like why the hell am I suddenly out of resources?! I just started this mission! Only to realize that while I was succeeding in getting to renewables, I'd run clean out of iron.. again. But only because the game knows iron is limited so they start the mission off with a tenth of what you'd normally have.
Why?!
It took 3 or 4 tries to actually accomplish what I'd easily managed before running out of iron simply because I knew I'd run out and had to ration what ridiculously little was available.
I'd be reminded of similar situations in Ark except Ark doesn't have a campaign or story. Every shortage you might run into literally is your own fault and is easy to fix by finding more of whatever you're short of and fixing it.
In Aven Colony it isn't that simple. After a few tries to get off of iron and on to renewables, pretty much the moment I did, the scenario end objective popped up. Which was also exactly the moment, for no real reason, I started running low on water.
That's pretty much end game. Once there's no water or food or electricity, the whole card castle crashes. The colonist piss themselves and refuse to work.
I'm like look you morons, we have the capacity to make food and produce water.. Its the same capacity we had 5 minutes ago. GET BACK TO WORK! But both water and ran down to zero and there was nothing in storage.
I'm like ok wtv then, I've seen this happen eighty dozen times already.. scenario over. Failed.
But no. Despite it being nearly impossible to recover from any instance of a zero resource shortage.. and they get mad and stop working, especially during the winter.. somehow there was enough power and water and food trickling in to get to spring.
I can't remember if anyone died in that event but it was an extremely close shave.
I just sat back and took in just how difficult it is to recover from an actual crisis, and actually recover.
But I mean that's the point right? It's a space colony and the game's main objective is to show you how dangerous it can be. There's no Cenotaph.. I mean among other things that are missing with regard to personalizing the game.. making sure that you know each citizen colonist IS a person and that each of their lives are critically important.. You'll never realize it until they start dying. Oddly enough they don't praise you at all either. Black and White was an amazing game because when you got close enough the peasants would talk to you and praise you. And cooking up crisis situations is really too easy, even in scenarios that don't have extra bullshit like plagues, alien spores, and giant sand worms trying to murder you every few seconds.
I mean I like that these colonists know a much better life than the one I can bring to them in this colony.. but when stuff doesn't go their way they are more than happy enough to complain. Your shitty little lives are in my hands though.. :/ and though I am not your god... a little praise would be... beneficial twitch twitch..
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So I visited the forum.
The game has been in beta for several months apparently and few people are talking about the games broader flaws. They seem to only be picking apart the tiny little things.
Why isn't corn a food!? Why can't I make fuel out of my corn?
Um.. corn, like rice, is a terrible food when considered for its nutritional value. That's why we make flour and bread.. And fuel for what? Bio-fuel to power what exactly in a game where everything is sterile and electronic? sigh.
On the other hand Bio-fuel to power a transport system would be excellent. I figure these guys are more into keeping the extremely deadly planet clean of fossil fuel emissions from the get go...?