My thoughts on why Rimworld feels frustrating rather than fun much of the time

[Boba Phat]

I enjoy a challenging game and I've been playing roguelikes for 20+ years so I'm no stranger to unfairness in games.  Still, instead of falling into a pit while holding a cockatrice corpse and feeling eager to start a new character with what I've learned from dying, I often find myself either switching Rimworld off in annoyance, savescumming, or even hacking the save file.  And that just shouldn't be happening.  So I spent some time making note of what's annoying me over the last few games and I hope it might be some use to the developer.  To other players, please note that this is my personal opinion, to which I have a perfect right, and sneering fanboy injunctions to "git gud" will be gleefully ignored.

First, Rimworld often feels malicious.  Game mechanics can be challenging without feeling like they're screwing you over.  I think it may be the way the game is designed to throw multiple challenges at you at once; because of the stochastic nature of the game, they often interact with each other in ways which feel punitive and sadistic, such as hitting you with plague which knocks down half of your colony instantly, then throws an infestation in the middle of your doctor's bedroom and kills him instantly, causing his grizzly bear to go insane and murder the only people not lying in the hospital.  That or some variation of that happens often enough that I find myself putting the game away for days to get over the bad taste in my mouth.  A random number generator shouldn't have the power to just throw up a "game over" screen.  The knowledge that any game can end instantly due to nothing under my personal control is actually a really good way to induce what psychologists call "learned helplessness," with the net result of creating a negative emotional aversion to playing the game.  When things go haywire in Dwarf Fortress it feels exhilarating to watch all your careful planning fly apart like springs out of a broken cuckoo clock; when things go haywire in Rimworld, it just feels like schadenfreude on the part of the developer and I'm not quite sure why.

Second, there's the grind of getting yourself back to where you were.  As I mentioned, as a long-time veteran of roguelikes I'm not unfamiliar with instant unavoidable game overs.  But in NetHack, if my cockatrice-wielding tourist dies, I can cleanse my palate so to speak by switching classes with an entirely different skillset in an all-new dungeon.  In Rimworld, instead of feeling excitement to start my next colony, I find myself just bored by the prospect of playing the same early-game elements all over again just to get to the part of the game which requires creative input.  I find myself save-scumming rather than throwing a couple of hours of tedious grind down a hole just to essentially recreate the game I was playing before.

Third, I think there's too much luck in the game.  A certain amount of luck keeps things exciting, but too much luck -- good or bad -- feels like heads-I-win-tails-I-lose.  For example, getting a cat or a yorkie instead of a working dog for an initial pet makes a huge difference, since an early hauling animal is equivalent to an entire extra colonist.  Likewise, I've simply quit games where my first Wanderer Joins is abrasive or a pyromaniac.  And having your only doctor drop dead of a heart attack at the age of 51 with no way to prevent, predict, or fix it also amounts to a helpless game-over.  And don't get me started on diseases.  Bazinga, 3 of your 6 colonists (including the only two colonists with medical skill) have sleeping sickness -- enjoy!

I think more thought has to be put into giving players more sense that they have a hand in their own outcome.  Note that this doesn't necessarily mean giving them more control!  Psych studies in hospitals have shown, for example, that when patients are given a button which they're told will release a tiny amount morphine, they end up using an average of 70% less painkiller simply because they now feel their pain level is under their control.  I don't want Rimworld to be less challenging, I only want it to feel less frustrating.  Malaria drugs and the like are a good first step, but we need more preventative steps we can take, even if they aren't magic bullets.  For instance, I've suggested in the past that it should be possible to have doctors do check-ups which would reduce the chance of having a random heart-attack.  And if you're going to make bonded animals go on a killing rampage when their owner dies, I should have some control over whether or not a given colonist bonds at all; when 82 year old Engie is force-bonded with the colony's warg, I know I'm going to have a bad time and save-scumming is the order of the day.

[koisama]

Are you playing with Cassandra? Those sets of unfortunate events are her specialty, and she won't stop until you give up in a good (build ship and run away) or bad (game over) way. Randy is way more fair.

[Listen1]

First of all, Thanks for taking the time and posting these detailed and well written diagnosis. I'll say my own opnion based on what you said:

First. I only find some of the elements of Rimworld feel malicious. Specially events that you cannot do anything about. For example, Blight and Zzzt. These two, have no way to get around, predict or prevent. Blight even destroy hydroponic crops. These events are malicious true and true. They add nothing but frustration. I trully believe that other events will on time be improved, like you can watch a volcanic winter coming through the world map. The other ones you mentioned don't really feel wrong in my opnion. Diseases are not fleshed out, but since you can build your own medicine and drugs, it got a little better to control. The other events can be controlled. I like the madness spiral that happens, but I agree that it could be better.

Second. Since we have the caravans update, I haven't started a new world yet. If I focus on the research in the first colony, my later ones are better. Right now, i'm on my 4th colony in the world, making a gigantic killbox inside a moutain because I made over 200 components and had over 30.000 silver with my muffalos. The replayability of RimWorld is completly awesome right now. The best thing is that you can escape with one new colonist that will hold all the progression until that point.

Third. No problem with it. Diseases needs a fixing but they are already better manageble.

In general, I agree with some of your points, but I believe that the control is getting more into our hands. In the past it was far worse. Also, there are some points you pointed out that I don't want to change. I love to build something and trying to make it withstand no matter what the game throwns into me. I agree that some of the events will make you lose you colony, but you can fix it in the next one.

[Boba Phat]

I agree that some of the events will make you lose you colony, but you can fix it in the next one.

I just played a game where I had 10 colonists.  Three got sleeping sickness, including two of my doctors, but I had one trained doctor left healthy so it was tolerable.  Then five colonists got malaria, including two who already had sleeping sickness -- and my last remaining doctor.  Then I got a raid.  Stuff like that doesn't feel epic to me.  It feels contrived and malicious.  There's SFA I can do about it.  If I chose to keep going, I would need a new doctor.  That means spending an hour or two -- real, actual time I could be doing something else -- manually grinding medical skill by shooting a llama and then bandaging it.  That's neither immersive nor fun.  It's not even !!fun!!.  It's tedious and unenjoyable.  And my desire to start a new game was nil because I realized exactly the same thing could (and probably would) happen all over again.

It's not just that these things can happen, but that they happen every single game.  And it's not even necessarily that they happen which bothers me, but that they're made to happen in such a way that they take agency away from the player.  Another way to look at it is, if three out of four games contain random, unavoidable game-overs which simply cause me to waste my time and grind out an identical game to get back where I was, then I want the ability to eliminate all that time in-between which I'm not enjoying so that I can play a game the whole time instead of gritting my teeth through the parts I hate in the hope of eventually getting some parts I do enjoy.

I'm not trying to analyze this game for me.  There's thousands of games I could be playing, which I actually enjoy.  I know this is alpha, so I'm trying to give feedback on how to improve the feel of the game.  Again, I'm not saying the game should be easier, just that it needs to give more feeling of agency to the player so it doesn't feel like I'm being trolled by the developer.

[Anomaly]

Good write up.  If I had to distill it into one statement I would say this is about the game throwing challenges at us while neglecting obvious mechanics that would let us deal with those challenges.  We know the goomba is coming but we cant jump.

Giving regular check ups is something a doctor in such a situation would do. Not only that, but doctors, being doctors, often know when something is up with their own health.
Diseases, being diseases don't just come out of nowhere. Now that we have a world map, we should be able to monitor other settlements and guess when carivans might be bringing trouble. "Nope, sorry entrance for the Plaugeville caravan is denied"

Players should be able to bond an animal to more than one person to reduce the mood hit for that warg or bear.

The trade off is that these preventatives take time and resources. Its the player's choice though.

I completed one play though and I don't think I would have attempted another without mods. Exploding wires (really? exploding?)  and rescues who leave your colony, naked and wounded to die in the wilderness pulled me out of the game too completely and too often for me to try another.

There are still events that drive me to save scum though.  Recently a fire destroyed much of the colony and killed colonists because it was bed time and no one wanted to stay up and fight the fire - even when their bedrooms were burning.

[Houkime]

Good write up.  If I had to distill it into one statement I would say this is about the game throwing challenges at us while neglecting obvious mechanics that would let us deal with those challenges.  We know the goomba is coming but we cant jump.

Giving regular check ups is something a doctor in such a situation would do. Not only that, but doctors, being doctors, often know when something is up with their own health.
Diseases, being diseases don't just come out of nowhere. Now that we have a world map, we should be able to monitor other settlements and guess when carivans might be bringing trouble. "Nope, sorry entrance for the Plaugeville caravan is denied"

Players should be able to bond an animal to more than one person to reduce the mood hit for that warg or bear.

The trade off is that these preventatives take time and resources. Its the player's choice though.

I completed one play though and I don't think I would have attempted another without mods. Exploding wires (really? exploding?)  and rescues who leave your colony, naked and wounded to die in the wilderness pulled me out of the game too completely and too often for me to try another.

There are still events that drive me to save scum though.  Recently a fire destroyed much of the colony and killed colonists because it was bed time and no one wanted to stay up and fight the fire - even when their bedrooms were burning.

That last one could be avoided by building things out of stone.
I've had enough fires that taught me to replace steel/wood with rock as early as possible.
(It is very useful that blocks can be smelted from those plentiful maces)

But yes, pawns could be smarter. Including not going away naked (this one should have been fixed by Join_if_not_survivable in a16 but seems to work strangely sometimes)

Zzzt which is indeed malicious and unrealistically probable (but happens IRL and really does often start fire, even without too much of explosion.) can be avoided as well. All wiring into stone walls (prevents any along-wire fire spread and feels like having lover chance), burnable things away (not too far) from wired walls and from each other. Backup batteries on a switch and/or emergency generator to quickly save crops. (wood from smelted maces and spears as emergency fuel)
Doubling power circuit helps with disconnections because of Zzzt and other reasons.
(+stone tiles have beauty bonus. Like them. Do mosaics with them and it looks funny.)
Works quite well for me. Now Zzzt is mostly "Here goes one wire = 1 Steel. Well... ok".
At least game is mostly fair and seems like not targeting _specifically_ weak points.
(Well. At least Randy.)

Some thought on diagnostics:

We already have Vitals Monitor. It would be nice if it showed some of hidden incubating deseases etc in the Health tab. I imagine this info refreshing every time pawn is completing a bill "Medical Check" which would require a doctor and a Vitals Monitor to reveal hidden stuff... or constantly while pawn is in a bed connected to Vitals Monitor.

***********
I agree with that near-absolute majority of bad stuff should be foreseeable or/and avoidable, at least in some very hard way.
Effects of both Blight and Poison Ship should be realistically avoidable by growing indoors.
Solar Flare impact on indoor stuff can be avoided by having a thick roof.

I also want every problem to be avoidable in several different ways for each playthrough to be more different. (Essential for replayability IMHO)

And all of this is actually achievable with one huge and hard process: more logic, physics and overall realism implemented to Rim. Because reality is the best in terms of problems and solutions. Limitless amounts of both (procedurally generated!) and only one Physics that rules them all.

Ideally we don't even get any "special events". It will just go naturally.

Pirates are attacking because of your jade statue and a bad pirate faction economics at the moment. Or they want a leader's wife back.
Or they are demanding money for NOT attacking you and for protection from other pirate bands.
They won't just go and attack you to "be satisfied with damage" or just to kill everything including (!!) cats.

Wires start fires because of Some_pawn being a terrible constructor not knowing how to properly use insulator.
Or/and because some player decided to make a long unroofed and unwalled wire into the wilderness, open to all rains and rodents.

Blights and Snaps are from wind naturally coming from North ("Listen to your morning Weather forecast on RimRadio! 50% accuracy guaranteed!"... Or launch a satellite using  Chemfuel and see weather globally... until Mechanoids capture it for spare parts.).
Good insulation and you're good anyway.

Mechanoids want your AI core back or they are here for plasteel and Components. (some hugely simplified hive economy should cope with creating deficit)
Or they want to save ecology from you. Then you will have messages "DO NOT TOUCH FOREST!!! DO NOT BURN WOOD! WE CAN SEE YOU FROM ORBIT! WE WILL COME AFTER YOU!" Kind of incentive for eco-friendly style.
If they are from orbital hive, they dispatch in numbers and construct a launchpad to transport loot and themselves back once they are done or fleeing.

Same with Transport podded siegers and pirates.


The thing is that it is impossible to prevent _everything_ on early stages (and even later). So even without it being Unavoidable in principle very wide-range (huge interconnected mechanics can provide this even without special dev's help) quasi-random events will make you busy improvising. Every time anew. Wider range and more interconnected complexity - longer time enjoying.


Conclusion:
There are lots of stuff to do on the system integration side even without adding really new concepts.
All of these can improve gameplay by providing more naturally generated situations and depth needed for their improvised and unique solutions.

I think Tynan will get RW near there some time in future. Looks like it. He really works hard.
Caravans idea is good.

[JaxelT]

I agree with all of the OP's sentiments, though I think some of the problems go a little deeper than what's expressed here.

[voldemort]

Hmmm.. I'm not sure about OP's opinion, for me personally I think luck is what makes the game interesting. If you get a cat at a start or pyromaniac, just accept it and continue the game, because that is exactly what it is in real life sometimes - we should expect even worse in Rimworld! If everything turns out so perfect, the game gets boring very quickly.

If you find it's too difficult, why don't you tune down the difficulty level a bit? I don't see why that doesn't help your issue now.

[Boba Phat]

why don't you tune down the difficulty level a bit?

Translation: git gud.

I went to some pains to explain (several times) that this has nothing to do with difficulty.  I've played and enjoyed many games much more difficult than Rimworld.  I've beat NetHack, for example, and more than once.  My critique of Rimworld is based around the feeling of lack of agency in many parts of the game.  Again, I'm not saying the game needs to be less difficult or that it even needs to actually give more agency to the player, just that it needs to give the feeling of greater agency.

Tynan is on record as saying he intends Rimworld to be a story simulator.  In order for a narrative to be gripping, there has to be engagement.  That is, the player has to be invested.  Where there is no agency in a game, there is no investment in the outcome.  And contrariwise, the history of gaming has shown that if there is player engagement, even games with minimal inputs from the player can be spectacularly popular.  The Telltale Walking Dead games are an excellent example of this: despite a complete absence of micromanagement, the feeling of agency the player has creates intense investment by the player in the outcome -- even when we know that in many cases our choices don't actually matter a single bit under the hood.

[Lightzy]

Everything you said boils down to one problem the way I see it: not enough content.
That's fine, it's early access and, I think, quite far from absolutely done.

Just adding more content will void most of those 'problems'. If there was more choice in early game strategies (say, you could go for any kind of specialized colony, like a raider tribe, trading town, roaming bandit or vigilantee troupe without a permanent residence, treasure seekers, etc), that'll already do it.
Or more RPG like elements which force certain colony specializations (like if you could upgrade a pawn so he, and only he, could build high quality furniture, or instead upgrade him to a mutually exclusive specialization of being able to build defensive buildings) which give you choices, also helpful.
And if there were simply more items to build, so you'd actually have to choose between them instead of always needing all of them pretty much, then that'd completely solve it.

[Negator]

I must agree with the OP about there being a lack of engagement, although I would say is a more a feeling that engagement is punished by randomness. Yes, randomess is challenging, and yes, we should git gud if we want to mainline Randy Extreme all  day, but the game still have a lot of "Dumb Stuff" that makes the game very unexplorable without savescumming. In order to play the game well, you need to learn what it does badly and it seems to do important stuff more badly than other games.

As an example I has someone join who was a multiple drug addict (I had no warning, she was not a prisoner). I build a nuthouse for her but in order to keep the door closed I couldn't just forbid it as enraged pawns are not stopped by forbidden doors. There being no other way to lock a door I just build wall in front of the door and demolish it every time I want to deliver food.

Either make Forbid work all the time, or give us proper locks, but either way the fact that forbid doesn't work surprises you when you first see it. Plans borked, challenge destroyed by misplay that could not be avoided because the UI is a lie. Restart game or savescum ? hmmm.