[1.0] RimWorld is being sucked dry of its flavour

[Madman666]

Good stuff. I have quite a bit of things i'd like to roll back to B18 state, so I'll definitely keep watch on your mods page for when it comes out. Thanks. Incredibly high modability of RW is one of its strongest most tempting points.

[IndustryStandard]

Assuming that because you're a long time player that most other long time players share that thought is very bad thinking. I'm a long time player and think the complete opposite. The entirety of the combat system in this game is being constantly changed with each revision to the 1.0 build so it is way to early to be trying to claim these are causing some loss of "flavor"

I don't really understand what you mean by flavor either, I would assume you mean the things that make Rimworld Rimworld, but like, these aren't even remotely unique or interesting.

[XeoNovaDan]

...

I never said that most other long-term players would share the same opinion; I said "I'm pretty sure [other long-term players] out there would [also share a similar opinion]". Two pretty different things. We all have our own opinions, and the beauty of discussion threads is that we can share them.

You're right that it's early, and I am being particularly critical because this is 1.0, the most important release for RimWorld. As an unstable release, feedback is what drives how the final release turns out, and this is simply feedback.

In this particular case, my use of 'flavour' would probably lean more towards complexity than anything, and doing something like normalising one thing that previously set weapons apart from eachother is reducing complexity - good for newcomers, and with varying degrees of impact for the existing playerbase; I tend to favour complexity and thus dislike this particular change. The degree of complexity (combined with reasonable user-friendliness) is what got me into RimWorld in the first place.

[TheMeInTeam]

I thought it was melee cooldown that was normalized?  I didn't have a chance to play with that yet, so don't want to comment on the long thread.  Given cooldown is a significant aspect of DPS it becomes harder to make melee weapons unique this way.

My impression when reading that was that gun cooldowns wouldn't be changed...logically since doing something like giving snipers and pistols the same after-shot move cooldown would be an enormous balance change and one that takes some of the ability for micromanagement skill to alter outcomes out of the game.

While some of the complaints are aesthetic and balancing dominant/weak stuff makes sense, I don't like the idea of less variance between good play and bad play.  I've had a hard time keeping up with playing around with the changes lately.  I guess I'll see for myself soon enough.

[Scavenger]

Having seen the change log for the latest build, and also having recently finished a run, it's no secret that many unique characteristics of things in RimWorld are being axed, and it's been a growing concern in my eyes. Let's briefly outline what's changed so far which I believe warrants this thread, and this does include changes which have been reverted:

No more stat changes on apparel - While this has thankfully been partially reverted with armour affecting movement speed again, it's still disappointing to see that apparel such as parkas and power armour no longer having work speed penalties (something which could be attributed to their 'bulkiness'), and other larger apparel items no longer giving movement speed penalties (e.g. dusters). To a lesser degree, there's also the removal of the protection deviation between jackets and dusters, meaning that dusters are now decisively the superior apparel item to go for, rather than previously being situational (although dusters were still mostly superior due to their coverage, presence of blunt protection and heat insulation).

Normalisation of weapon cooldowns to 2 seconds - One of the most recent changes, and one I personally heavily disagree with. Each weapon feels kind of the same now, bar damage differences and costs; no more semi-unwieldy yet powerful longswords, or nimble knives, or anything in between. This is also a similar story for prostheses.

Generic renaming - The renaming of Some Challenge, Rough and Intense difficulties to Medium, Hard and 'Extra Hard', Pekoe to 'Tea', Gravel to 'Stony Soil'. Overall, everything just seems to be made more generic, and if anything, that's just somewhat tragic. Granted, this is a minor issue.

While I do understand that since 1.0 is going to be a 'To the masses' release where there will be an influx of new players, dare I say RimWorld's losing some of its flair and even appeal to us longer-term players - there is also the challenge of catering to the casual and hardcore at the same time. I personally think that the saying 'don't fix what isn't broken' fits very well in this situation.

I still very much enjoy RimWorld, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely sad from a hardcore player's perspective to see some of these changes happening. It'd be nice to see other thoughts on this too, perhaps adding to anything that I missed.

I don't think dusters should have much impact on movement, they are basically just light trench coats with mobility in mind made for horsemen and older gunslingers.

As for the rest.. I quite agree. The names were fun! And i think rather clear what they meant, and would suffer none for having the plain names in ().

Weapons speeds were fun, and made sense. Harder to balance, sure, but most of this game is hard to balance lol. Knives should be much  faster than steel maces!

[Namsan]

Normalisation of weapon cooldowns to 2 seconds - One of the most recent changes, and one I personally heavily disagree with. Each weapon feels kind of the same now, bar damage differences and costs; no more semi-unwieldy yet powerful longswords, or nimble knives, or anything in between. This is also a similar story for prostheses.

I strongly agree, I clearly think it's not good change.
melee weapons had their own traits, but that update removed them.

No more stat changes on apparel - While this has thankfully been partially reverted with armour affecting movement speed again, it's still disappointing to see that apparel such as parkas and power armour no longer having work speed penalties (something which could be attributed to their 'bulkiness'), and other larger apparel items no longer giving movement speed penalties (e.g. dusters). To a lesser degree, there's also the removal of the protection deviation between jackets and dusters, meaning that dusters are now decisively the superior apparel item to go for, rather than previously being situational (although dusters were still mostly superior due to their coverage, presence of blunt protection and heat insulation).

I disagree, because the removal of penalties made micromanegement far less important.
For example, Power armor had workspeed penalty, so I needed to make colonists to remove their power armor when Raid is finished.
It was rather tedious.

[Tynan]

For example, Power armor had workspeed penalty, so I needed to make colonists to remove their power armor when Raid is finished.
It was rather tedious.

This is the reason.

Also don't worry too much about melee, I'm still working on it.

Current plan is to find a good "medium" speed and then split the melee attacks into three groups - fast (knife), standard (gladius), and slow (longsword, spear).

What I don't want is a bunch of micro differences that are just adding noise, like differences between 1.6s cooldowns, 1.65, 1.70, 1.75... this kind of difference isn't really conceptualizable. I'd rather the weapon just say fast, standard, or slow, and then the cooldown can perhaps be affected by the user's skill (which would make melee skill more "visible" without clicking to inspect numbers).

There's some other weirdnesses in melee, like the lack of any warmup; I'm still thinking on what to do there. Overall melee is a bit weird.

[Crow_T]

Current plan is to find a good "medium" speed and then split the melee attacks into three groups - fast (knife), standard (gladius), and slow (longsword, spear).

What I don't want is a bunch of micro differences that are just adding noise, like differences between 1.6s cooldowns, 1.65, 1.70, 1.75... this kind of difference isn't really conceptualizable. I'd rather the weapon just say fast, standard, or slow, and then the cooldown can perhaps be affected by the user's skill (which would make melee skill more "visible" without clicking to inspect numbers).

I like this idea of simplification by using words instead of numbers, flipping between weapon stats can get a bit involved as it stands now. Even very fast, fast, average, slow, very slow gives 5 levels to consider which seems like it would be plenty fine-grained enough. One thing to consider is perhaps adding coloured bars to represent things, eg. a bar where red = poor, green = good, and for ranged weapons have a bar for long, medium, and short ranges so at a glance one could get a good picture of how they perform. Would be nice for armor too. Obviously these would be in addition to the numerical stats, one could create a basic stats and advanced stats view.

[Razzoriel]

For example, Power armor had workspeed penalty, so I needed to make colonists to remove their power armor when Raid is finished.
It was rather tedious.

This is the reason.

Also don't worry too much about melee, I'm still working on it.

Current plan is to find a good "medium" speed and then split the melee attacks into three groups - fast (knife), standard (gladius), and slow (longsword, spear).

What I don't want is a bunch of micro differences that are just adding noise, like differences between 1.6s cooldowns, 1.65, 1.70, 1.75... this kind of difference isn't really conceptualizable. I'd rather the weapon just say fast, standard, or slow, and then the cooldown can perhaps be affected by the user's skill (which would make melee skill more "visible" without clicking to inspect numbers).

There's some other weirdnesses in melee, like the lack of any warmup; I'm still thinking on what to do there. Overall melee is a bit weird.

Because you can't conceptualize important enough differences in melee to make anything other than DPS matter. You can't make "this weapon will make pawns bleed more, but they'll take longer to get down because it brings less pain", or "this weapon here will put toxic build-up on the first pawn hit, then it will revert to the standard weapon", or "this weapon here can't cut limbs off, but it will hit internal organs more often". You can't even bring more variety of shields, or even make physical shields like bucklers something plausible.

You can't do anything of this, because it's clear in this update you don't want to cater to the audience that made this game famous, you want John and Jane Doe to play Rimworld after they're done playing Fortnite, because this is the public that haven't tried Rimworld yet, and they like streamlining, so you're streamlining, making everything easier on the layman. And if you call this out on you, the first kneejerk reaction is: "oh, the modders can fix that and revert it!". It's a receipt for making your game become deserted, and kill any chances of a next success on your part. I want this game to work out, but your prioriites are in alienating your current audience progressively in lieu to archieve a larger audience. If that will work out, only time will tell, but history has a good track record on being quite unforgiving to those that try something close to that.

[Oblitus]

I like this idea of simplification by using words instead of numbers, flipping between weapon stats can get a bit involved as it stands now. Even very fast, fast, average, slow, very slow gives 5 levels to consider which seems like it would be plenty fine-grained enough.

Bad idea. How much faster is fast when compared to average? Words are hollow without numbers to back them up.

[Tynan]

Razzoriel, I appreciate the mind-reading attempt, but I'm not attempting to change the audience targeting of RimWorld in the slightest. I've always targeted a very broad swathe of players, which is why RW has had difficulties ranging from Peaceful to Extreme for years. I'm not attempting to focus on any one group here; if I were it would definitely be the Extreme players since they're the ones most over-represented on this forum :p

Also, Razzoriel, given the hostile mind-reading, your post is beginning a Rule 2 violation; please tone it down going forward and focus on: what's been done, what's known, and what you'd suggest. Hostile (and incorrect) mind-reading and teardowns don't help anything.

If you do think I made a mistake, give a concrete example of what it is. Here you're just saying I'm thinking these foolish internal thoughts (pure assumption) and the only evidence seems to be that the melee system doesn't have a ton of complex internal variation like toxic attacks or bleed attacks - which is a feature that  I don't ever recall even being discussed here. It's not like it used to have this and I removed it.

[Razzoriel]

Razzoriel, I appreciate the mind-reading attempt, but I'm not attempting to change the audience targeting of RimWorld in the slightest. I've always targeted a very broad swathe of players, which is why RW has had difficulties ranging from Peaceful to Extreme for years. I'm not attempting to focus on any one group here; if I were it would definitely be the Extreme players since they're the ones most over-represented on this forum :p

Also, Razzoriel, given the hostile mind-reading, your post is beginning a Rule 2 violation; please tone it down going forward and focus on: what's been done, what's known, and what you'd suggest. Hostile (and incorrect) mind-reading and teardowns don't help anything.

If you do think I made a mistake, give a concrete example of what it is. Here you're just saying I'm thinking these foolish internal thoughts (pure assumption) and the only evidence seems to be that the melee system doesn't have a ton of complex internal variation like toxic attacks or bleed attacks - which is a feature that  I don't ever recall even being discussed here. It's not like it used to have this and I removed it.

I've gave you already multiple times my opinions on your nomenclature patterns (and others already did). The opinions were given on the basis of everything you've done during the progress of the game, and it's a little disturbing to see you equate personal attacks to wishes the game to be successful. If you want to discuss melee having weirdness, on top of my head those are the most glaring; lack of variation, extreme focus on DPS, no repairing mechanic to synergize with high-maintenance weapons being more effective (did you check the amount of repair mods out there?), no variations of melee-ranged hybrids other than the pila... Dodging was a big change to melee that was in the end quite positive, but you keep making positive changes to make melee viable and also buffing ranged attacks. 1.0 so far is the only update where everyone can positively say melee was changed for the best, and all it took was for you to disable shooting weapons in melee range.

No mind-reading attempts here, just pointing out patterns and comparing with what keeps happening. Again, I love Rimworld and only want best things to happen; updates so far since A12 have been hit-and-miss, but at least you're listening to the community and that is commendable and respectable.

[Wintersdark]

I'm a reasonably long term player; started on A13's release anyways. 

I *like* a lot of the "simplification".  Not because I don't like having options - but rather because when there are too many options differentiating them is just noise. 

Look at leathers.  There's still, what, 19 different types of leather.  Each of those 19 types still has different modifiers to armor and thermal properties.  Still many different types of cloth too with all their own properties.  It used to be way more types, though, and it was ridiculous.  Oh, you want to build some pants... Sorry, you've got 30 Emu leather, 40 Turkey leather, and 40 Cassowary Leather.  No pants for you. 

Hell, if anything, I think it would have been better to go down more.  Fewer types with bigger differences.

Ultimately, though, rarely you're choosing a specific material for it's own properties, and much more just using what's readily available in quantity.  Once you're getting to a point in the late game where you can really pick and choose freely for what material you're going to use, you're almost inevitably going to go to whatever is "the best" (see: most people outfitting in Devilstrand later in the game).  But at least when I look in my store rooms now, there's roughly half as many stacks of leather because so many more types stack together. 

Parkas, power armors?  Losing the work speed penalty is fine.  There's simply no good way to automate clothing changes, and until there is, it's dumb micromanagement.  Nobody enjoys "Oh, there's a raid, everyone strap on your power armor really quick, then take it off again"; it's just a pain in the ass.  Pawns don't take off their coats when they come inside, either. 

Now those things could be changed, but it'd likely be a bunch of work for very little gain.  Just removing the penalties makes it fine to have your pawns wearing parkas throughout the winter without worrying with needless micromanagement whenever they come inside.

[TheMeInTeam]

Giving melee warm-up would be interesting, but it might make the disengage from melee more easily accomplished unless the slow comes before swing...but doing that results in a similar problem to now (plus being hit from apparently further away).

[Scavenger]

If you do think I made a mistake, give a concrete example of what it is. Here you're just saying I'm thinking these foolish internal thoughts (pure assumption) and the only evidence seems to be that the melee system doesn't have a ton of complex internal variation like toxic attacks or bleed attacks - which is a feature that  I don't ever recall even being discussed here. It's not like it used to have this and I removed it.

We totally had those... We even had that awesome Insect stinger dagger that impregnated its victim with a Alien style chest burster! I can't believe you removed that.. Or the psionic vibro blade that made the victims flee in terror!