Long-winded Rant/Critique

Started by TrashMan, May 25, 2020, 05:07:46 AM

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TrashMan

Rimworld is called a Colony Sim, but a simulator requires actual simulation (even if simplified) and common sense rules. No wonder Ty has lately refered to it as a Story Generator, because that's a much, MUCH lower bar.
There's so many thing that are wrong and have never been addressed. It physically pains me to see just how much better this game could be with a just a little work. There's nothing sadder to me than wasted potential.
I honestly don't know if Tynan has grown just lazy, or perhaps being sorounded by yes-men that fellate him on every turn has boosted his ego, but he went from a developer I respected to a cautionary tale. He is more interested in whacky stories than good gameplay.
He will try to force anyone to play his way, he will try to force outcomes that make no sense and he will actively try to make you miserable by implementing mechanics that make no logical sense whatsoever - they are only there to ramp up the difficulty and create drama. Drama and lolssorandom = whacky stories = funny posts/videos = fame.


Let's list a few examples, shall we?

- Biocoded Weapons so you can't use them (because you cannot be rewarded for surviving a raid with weapons, even though they are mostly broken down shit quality - even that is too much). No rewards, only misery. The opposite of good game design.

- Manhunter pack and you defeated it? Oh no, now you have plenty of food. Can't have that! How about a magic desease that instantly rots all meat? There's no way the food abdundance could have been handled in a more neunaced, natural way - like let's say, making larger freezer harder and slower to obtain, making meat rot faster in general, requring you to focus on butchering right away. Nope, can't have that. Or simply removing manhunting events, or restricting them to early game.

- metal burns. He never fixed that because he thinks that loosing your metal stores in a fire is a good thing. A literal 5 second fix, but Ty has been too lazy to do it for years.

- catastrophic surgery failures. Operate on a leg, end up cutting someones eye out. Unpredictable, as it defies common sense, and also forced drama/loss. How can anyone defend this is beyond me.

- infestations and mountain bases. Instead of making digging trough solid stone REALLY slow and/or add possiblity of cave-ins/earthquakes (thus requireing solid walls and supports), he adds infestations. Or requireing pickaxes to dig. Either of it means that mountain bases are far slower to get up and makes it so it's a slow transition form outside to inside.

- Lack of colonists presonality. Soulless, without any real personalities to speak off. Nothing to differentiate their behavioral patterns. Psychology went way too deep, but have at lest some basic system in place.

- "Incapable of" mechanic. It's not enough that some colonists might hate doing some type of work and will recieve ever increasing mood penalties the longer they are assigned to a specific job - a great system from a great mod - no, that's not annoying enough and it's too realistic. What is required is a magical force field that prevents paws from doing some work, even if their lives and the lives of everyone they hold dear depends on it. But that's good design, because "muh drama", right Ty?

- mental breaks that happen at the most retarded times. Ate without table is enough to cause one to abandon their wife and kids to burn to death, can't go putting out the fire now, I'm off to food binge in the burning kitchen!

- raids are RNG based. Nothing else factors in. Distance? Terrain? How many nearby enemies the faction has? When has it launched the last raid against you? How did it go? Factions can pour infinite manpower and resources and attack without any thought. The raiders teleport to the map, no chance of interception or detection. 0 simulation for a supposed Sim game.

- Tied to that, other settlements/factions that are static and lifeless. They do not interact or wage war with each other or grow or fall. Again, something that is simple to add, all it takes is a few variables to track settlement population, wealth and defenses and some basic logic to govern behavior.

- defenses are garbage. He has been nerfing all turrets and defensive structures to the point of uselesness. The very reason people build killboxes is because a normal, realistic defense has been rendered unfeasable by his design. And then to get rid of killboxing, he added mechanoid clusters. "Fixing" a problem he created with an even worse problem.

- Granite or steel walls can be broken trough WITH BARE FISTS. How about making walls practically immune to certain weapons, make sapping and proper equipment actually matter.

- hamfisted population mechanics. Instead of players setting their own limits based on hardware/wants, the game will try to brute force it. Over the fixed magical number of people? Every attacker drops dead, no capturing for you. Tasers, bolas, blunt weapons, fists. Doesn't matter. They will DIE because Ty doesn't want you to have more

- resource costs and gains are all over the place. Why does dissasmbling a giant robot tank give me less resources than is needed for a club?

- enemies (and pyromaniacs) can set fire to everything without any tools. You can't.

- stack sizes. Default ones often make no sense. You often need massive freezers because you can apparently only store a few potatoes in a 2x2 meter space. But at least this one is easily fixed.

- a permanent hidden negative mood modifier for higher difficulties. Apex of bad difficulty design.

- Solar flares kill all of electronics. But only yours. Your enemies are fine.

- cut grass yields nothing (why can't I feed my cows with it?)

Aside from those?
Clear gaps in tech progression, holes in the tech tree. Early game techs missing, the massive gap between caravan and spaceship. No zeppelins, helicopters, trucks, boats. When asked why, when mods already did those things - Ty answeres because something being in the core requries a level of QUALITY and testing.
And his half-baked expansion that no one asked for, that contains a few things that other mods did FAR better (for example, hospitality is a million times better system than what he made, Rimword of Magic has better and more balanced powers, etc..), ends up being a buggy mess requireing a new patch every day. Mechanoid swarms balance? Bio-coded muskets? Crashes? Where's that quality control now, Ty? One and half year in the making for an expansion that shat it's bed on arrival.
Why are supposedly complex changes jurry-rigged by some drunk slav more stable, better balanced and less buggy than your own additions? Anything a modder can do you should be able to do better, faster and cleaner, you wrote the code, you have the source for the love of God! So I don't buy that excuse. Just say you don't want to do it, I'd respect you more.

And lately he's been pushing for modders to make the DLC a requirement. Scummiest move of all.
I used to like him, but the more I saw of his actions and way of thinking, the more disgusted I became. I don't recall last time my opinnion on someone tanked so hard.

P.S. - in case the whole "if it's so bad, more people would complain here" brigade show up:
By Steams own data, most people that buy a game either only play for a few hours tops, or never start it to begin with. Lord knows a lot of people have a backlog of bought games that they never got around to installing. Very few people ever finish a game. Of those that do, only a fraction will come to this forum, an only a fraction of those will feel strongly enough or bother to speak up. And this forum is very defensive of RW and Tynan, so even less incetive to speak up. Not a single person I know in RL or on-line that plays RW plays it without a bunch of fixes mods. You might want to keep those in mind.



eugeneb

Sorry this game is not working out for you. Perhaps install mods or just move on to another game? For me personally it's one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played - I clocked in 1k hours before even bothering with mods. I also find the game mechanics extremely thought-through and well polished. I am not going to address all these points but just to pick the first one - biocoded weapons. In the old times this whole "researching weapon techs and crafting them" part of the game was pointless because you would just pick weapons from pirates. This fixes it quite nicely.

TrashMan

Quote from: eugeneb on May 25, 2020, 10:08:27 AM
I also find the game mechanics extremely thought-through and well polished.
Some people are beyond help

QuoteI am not going to address all these points but just to pick the first one - biocoded weapons. In the old times this whole "researching weapon techs and crafting them" part of the game was pointless because you would just pick weapons from pirates. This fixes it quite nicely.

No. You usually get broken down weapons and usually simple ones.
Good quality weapons still have to be created.
Biocoded weapons are just stupid. The only time it makes sense is for very high-tech weapons.

The basic idea of survival - scavenging, looting - has been destroyed becasue of backwards game design. Don't want player to get guns? Then don't give attacker guns. Have different kinds of enemies instead of humans with guns.

Let me remind you that Biocoding was not there when the game released and was "feature complete" (Ty's words). The game was going just fine for a long time without that feature, and no one complained. So either Ty didn't design it good initially and waited for years to fix it, or he designed it good from the get-go, thereby making this addition a a step back. Pick one.

Canute

QuoteBiocoded weapons are just stupid. The only time it makes sense is for very high-tech weapons.
Agree with that.
Biocoding should only be on special weapons, like legendary versions or spacer weapons.

Quote from: TrashMan on May 26, 2020, 04:00:49 AM
Quote from: eugeneb on May 25, 2020, 10:08:27 AM
I also find the game mechanics extremely thought-through and well polished.
Some people are beyond help
I agree with both.
The gamemechanic isn't perfect, that why many other and i use so many QoL/vanilla tweak mods.
BUT you can work with it.
I think every game it is an own universe with own rules, sure you can try to argue with some reallife mechanics, but at the end it is the decision of the game developer.

TrashMan

True, but the mechanics still should make sense. Especially for any game with even a remotely serious tone. Especially for a sim game.

Yeah, in Super Mario, you pick up a flower and shoot fire. No one complains, because the game itself is a platformer set in a drug-induced dream world that doesn't treat itself seriously and it's aimed at kids.

The abject refusal of sensible mechancis and solutions and insistance on forcing a specific gameplay at gunpoint is a detrement to the game.

eugeneb

Sorry but I'll have to disagree that it made sense. I played this game from a very early alpha and this was one of my primary complaints about it - crafting cloth and researching and crafting weapons wasn't necessary because you would pick both from dead raiders. Yes, someday you will craft a better quality, etc but this would happen very late in the game because a normal/good sniper rifle works just as fine. It makes sense immersion-wise too. If I lived on the Rim and owned even an average gun, I would absolutely biocode it to myself. I also don't think Rimworld was ever a scavenging/looting game, it was always about resource management.

I think the game strikes a very good balance between serious tone and fun gameplay. It cannot be 100% believable and realistic. It's not even about burning steel and biocoded weapons. Consider core Rimworld mechanics. Like, how an average Joe who is amateur when it comes to construction, can go dig out some metal scraps and fossilized iPhones from the ground and then build Wind Turbine, AC, mini-turet, etc.. You know, an automated mini-turret alone would probably take a large team of very skilled people specializing in different areas to develop and make. If Rimworld was realistic, game would have revolved around gathering berries and clubbing rats.

Bozobub

"Serious tone"..?

Uh huh. *continues turning neighbors into hats*
Thanks, belgord!

Jibbles


Ah yes, the good ole story generator. I guess about 90 percent of the games out there are story generators. I've yet to seen this game do anything different to rely on that scapegoat so heavily.
You know what trips me up?



It gives variations of existing quests/events that have been in the game and creates CONTEXT. I've seen these features requested so many times over the years, after all we try to come up with cheap ideas. It's absurd that it's not vanilla, that THIS is locked behind expansion in a game that claims to be a "story generator" yet lacking such elements.

As for things like gaps in tech progressions etc, I don't even want to go there. Don't get me started on things like mech clusters or factions that will be added in future expansions.

I don't mind concepts like psychic powers being in DLC (if I was okay with dlc being added in the games current state) I never had the thought that this game NEEDS psychic powers tho it was something that might be interesting to tinker with. In other words I definitely don't want features that people been requesting for the longest time, or things that are just obvious to add/improve in vanilla behind expansions.  Throw your adventurous side or turn the game on it's head in DLC, doesn't bother me.

I can't go over all the points but I do see the impact it has on modding and other issues like you've listed. I've focused quite a bit on DLC in this topic cause at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised to see negative things intentionally added to base game or more illogical balance decisions, then throw content in DLC to help counteract such things. Tynan is no dummy in marketing, and as of lately there seems to be no boundaries. That is my perspective after watching things unfold. If vanilla players just get the short end of the stick with updates then I have no problem calling it out. Not ecstatic at all about direction of this game but I am trying to chill and give another chance since we are supposed to see more things with a larger team behind it now. Only time will tell cause things are operating different lately. Not sure what it would be like a year from now. Hopefully we'll get some improvements that will be different than what we've been seeing.

Chicken Plucker

I agree with a lot of things said here.

New updates lately have felt like many nerfs to fun and helpful things while adding new features to make your gameplay an annoying chore. Its so convenient to have more problems to deal with with less options to overcome them. It's obviously the design Tynan is going for.

I don't regret buying RimWorld but with all honesty I don't see myself playing past the Royalty DLC without the mods that address many of the problems in this thread, and yet asking people to create or use mods that fix these problems doesn't really fix RimWorld in the long run.

lugaruclone

#9
I actually like posts like this as communities tend to be very hive minded and even the extreme contrarian is a breath of fresh air.

Personally I think games should never aspire to realism, realism is always lost in games either through systems, game play or changers made to keep things entertaining. But games should always be intuitive.

Steel burning is a great example of something easy to fix that is not intuitive, that a simple electric fire can have you lose a stockpile of steel. At worst it should turn your steel into slag or some sort of ore that requires refining... only there is no such ore in the game since steel can be scraped from mountain walls with your finger nails.

This is an example of a concession made for 'fun' because having to use pick axes and furnaces adds complexity... but it also provides the difference between a stone age and iron age society.

I think wood and metal should require an extra step like stone does and some mods do this to great effect.

I think the food economy is insane... while it is easy to stockpile steel it is hard to get enough grain or meat to live unless you do what every one does... sun lamp for year round crops, a single AC unit turning a room into a freezer. People look at me like I'm an alien when I say that I just grow crops in season and sit on huge stockpiles of corn and rice... which is the way things actually work in the real world even to this day.

Of course I'm not gonna call a mega successful developer and game a cautionary tale... that just feels factually inaccurate. I would say the following systems of the game could really use with a re-work:

Pawn Verbs: lack of personality? Maybe the ability to hug, kiss, high five, sing, kick (in combat), hook up, etc would make this game more like the sims and provide a lot more story hooks. More relationship types, personalities, weird needs and unique moods would rock. The Sims had a ton of unique conditions based on peoples favorite and least favorite activities.

Resources: The current game will let you build a huge castle quickly but not let you feed more than a dozen inhabitants without serious min-maxing.
- Food gets better yields and the economy is based around stockpiling things that spoil slowly. Realizing you can turn an air conditioner into a sub zero walk in feels like a cheat code and is not intuitive, give us an industrial freezer that is resource intensive and small (1, 2, 4) space fridges.
- Steel and Wood require processing similar to stone. Wood can be processed at the start, steel requires a medieval technology.
- Mining and building is slower making tools that boost work speed a must.

Defense: Smarter foes with a trade off that is reduced wealth scaling. The only people who REALLY need killboxes are turtlers who already won the game but do not know it. If you had much fewer foes spawn but they had rocket propelled grenades that can punch through walls at any perimeter point and stuff like satchel charges or even medieval siege items (sledge hammer, catapult) you would see less killboxes and therefore no need for 100 pirate sieges. Defense should be a 360 degree thing and if it ever stops being 360 then the  players are allowed to always dictate the rules of engagement.

Space 3 things that take up the same amount of space: a person, 7 days worth of food, a t-shirt. This game really should bake in some version of deep storage. It always felt like cheating so I avoided it but now I cannot go back... without deep storage I am building sprawling hangars to support a very small population.

I think it really comes down to seeing 'look what you made me do' (killboxes, freezer rooms, grow rooms) and tackle those behaviors as they are unnatural and results of the games systems. With that fixed you might get more variety... villages instead of bases, seasonal food growing, a greater need for trading, small but unpredictable battles, pawns that care about more in life than room and food quality.

Bozobub

I'm not saying your entire point is invalid but I literally NEVER (barring very long-term and/or early disaster) have issues with food in most biomes.  Crop excess and finished meals are nearly always major trade goods, and I have to make sure and don't drive up my colony wealth too far with stored meals.  I have been able to maintain this WITHOUT specialization in either hydroponics or Sun Lamp greenhouses, with enough storage to maintain through outrageously long toxic fallout or similar issues.

Food is nowhere as near as difficult to handle in RW as you're implying.
Thanks, belgord!

TrashMan

Quote from: eugeneb on May 26, 2020, 10:14:00 AM
Sorry but I'll have to disagree that it made sense. I played this game from a very early alpha and this was one of my primary complaints about it - crafting cloth and researching and crafting weapons wasn't necessary because you would pick both from dead raiders. Yes, someday you will craft a better quality, etc but this would happen very late in the game because a normal/good sniper rifle works just as fine. It makes sense immersion-wise too. If I lived on the Rim and owned even an average gun, I would absolutely biocode it to myself. I also don't think Rimworld was ever a scavenging/looting game, it was always about resource management.

Biocoding is a high-tech thing and an unnecessary expenditure of resources. 90% of the people attacking your colony would not have the resources or the knowledge to bio-code to begin with. Why bother bio-coding an musket or a spear?

Futrhermore, if you are worried about getting weapons from looting dead raiders (the most sensible thing to do) you can solve this by limiting the kind, quality and type of weapons attacker bring and/or by having more attacker, but far more willing to retreat AND they pick any worthwhile weapons from their dead when they do.


Quote
I think the game strikes a very good balance between serious tone and fun gameplay. It cannot be 100% believable and realistic. It's not even about burning steel and biocoded weapons. Consider core Rimworld mechanics. Like, how an average Joe who is amateur when it comes to construction, can go dig out some metal scraps and fossilized iPhones from the ground and then build Wind Turbine, AC, mini-turet, etc.. You know, an automated mini-turret alone would probably take a large team of very skilled people specializing in different areas to develop and make. If Rimworld was realistic, game would have revolved around gathering berries and clubbing rats.

Up to a point. There is a level of abstraction, but humans are quite adaptable and crafty. There would be more tech levels and tech to research, but an actual automatic turret isn't that difficult to make. Especially a dumb one*.

Also, I don't buy the "if it has one stupid thing in it, then 9999 stupid things in it are ok." It's a dumb argument. It's not an either/or, 0 or 1.

* I honestly think you should start with manned gun emplacements, early turrets should fire on anything in their front arc, with you having to turn them on/off, and fully automated turrets being the late game stuff.

TrashMan

#12
Quote from: lugaruclone on May 27, 2020, 11:52:19 PM
I actually like posts like this as communities tend to be very hive minded and even the extreme contrarian is a breath of fresh air.

People tend to be a lot more criticial of something outside of it's specialized community.

Quote
Steel burning is a great example of something easy to fix that is not intuitive, that a simple electric fire can have you lose a stockpile of steel. At worst it should turn your steel into slag or some sort of ore that requires refining... only there is no such ore in the game since steel can be scraped from mountain walls with your finger nails.

This is an example of a concession made for 'fun' because having to use pick axes and furnaces adds complexity... but it also provides the difference between a stone age and iron age society.

I've been advocating for pickaxes are a prequisite for mining from day 1. It is intuitive and makes mountain bases slower to get.

Quote
I think wood and metal should require an extra step like stone does and some mods do this to great effect.

As long as you don't end with a thousand production tables. Especially with mods added, you end up needing so much space indoors. The outside penalty really should be removed for half the stuff.

You can make walls, beds and furniture from logs and thick braches - they won't be pretty, but it works. How much is too much is at least partially subjective. I wouldn't mind seeing cutting of wood in planks (for nicer beds/walls) and refining of iron into steel, but it should only go with the re-balancing of costs. Some crafting costs are absurd.


Quote
People look at me like I'm an alien when I say that I just grow crops in season and sit on huge stockpiles of corn and rice... which is the way things actually work in the real world even to this day.

I do that too. I'm not even using tiled soil and similar. I just plant a lot. I do use OgreStack because how little food you can stockpile in one square is criminal.

Quote
Of course I'm not gonna call a mega successful developer and game a cautionary tale... that just feels factually inaccurate.

I would. Financial success and quality have little in common.


Quote
Pawn Verbs: lack of personality? Maybe the ability to hug, kiss, high five, sing, kick (in combat), hook up, etc would make this game more like the sims and provide a lot more story hooks. More relationship types, personalities, weird needs and unique moods would rock. The Sims had a ton of unique conditions based on peoples favorite and least favorite activities.

Just add scales for the 4 personality variables of the Mayers-Briggs test:
extroverted <-> introverted
sensing <-> intuition
thinking <-> feeling
judging <-> perciving

Simple, powerfull, covers everything

Quote
Realizing you can turn an air conditioner into a sub zero walk in feels like a cheat code and is not intuitive, give us an industrial freezer that is resource intensive and small (1, 2, 4) space fridges.
- Steel and Wood require processing similar to stone. Wood can be processed at the start, steel requires a medieval technology.
- Mining and building is slower making tools that boost work speed a must.

Yes to all of that.

Quote
Defense: Smarter foes with a trade off that is reduced wealth scaling. The only people who REALLY need killboxes are turtlers who already won the game but do not know it. If you had much fewer foes spawn but they had rocket propelled grenades that can punch through walls at any perimeter point and stuff like satchel charges or even medieval siege items (sledge hammer, catapult) you would see less killboxes and therefore no need for 100 pirate sieges. Defense should be a 360 degree thing and if it ever stops being 360 then the  players are allowed to always dictate the rules of engagement.

Does the enemy need rocket launchers? Granite/steel walls can be broken with fists, the AI is just too stupid to do it.
I try to build sensible defenses, but they only work if I use mods (embrasures, barbed wire, moats, etc..) and only if you don't become too rich.
Honestly the way the raids are generated is probably the worst thing about the game ATM.


Quote
I think it really comes down to seeing 'look what you made me do' (killboxes, freezer rooms, grow rooms) and tackle those behaviors as they are unnatural and results of the games systems. With that fixed you might get more variety... villages instead of bases, seasonal food growing, a greater need for trading, small but unpredictable battles, pawns that care about more in life than room and food quality.

Again, agreed.


To quote a guy from another forum:
"Anyone can make a simulation but the carefully balancing act of randomly throwing shit at the player? now that takes some dedication and masterful skill"

Ilya

I agree with most of your points, but I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned the worst example of artificial difficulty in the game: pawns freezing up after shooting. No other mechanism in the game has ever made me as mad as this. I've lost many games just because a raid managed to get through my door simply because my pawn stays paralyzed for so long after shooting that the enemy manages to reach the door and then they all start pouring in. It wasn't always like this; you used to be able to move immediately after shooting, but because people were using this to skirmish from doors, this got changed to how it is currently. Completely artificial. There were other better solutions that could be implemented instead, for example finding a way for the AI to deal with this by programming them to start aiming at the door when they see that it's opening up.

TrashMan

Freezing after shooting?
Can't say I noticed that one, but I've been playing with run and gun so maybe that's why I don't see it. That does sound annoying. I suspect it was added as a stupid way to make melee more viable.