Will Arcen ever make a Crafting/Building game?

[Misery]

Terraria for instance.  I know everyone freaking LOVES it, but I get bored by it.  One of the biggest reasons is the combat.  It quickly becomes UTTERLY MINDLESS.  Basically every boss in the game is just a gear-check.  Whenever I watch anyone playing this (and when I play it myself), boss fights are sooooooo boring.  Because your character ends up overpowered, and you just can fly all over the place, shoot a bazillion lasers, and you dont have to dodge ANYTHING, because your armor will handle it. 

One of the Terraria fans here: I agree with some of your arguments, but I don't think they are a downside per se. Boss gear-check for example is fine by me: Just the feeling of accomplishment after finally beating the boss that surprised you and beat the shit out of you the first time you met him, makes it work in my opinion. And to be fair, once you progress further into the game you just can't tank the bosses anymore even with the (at this point) best available equipment...(not including the pre nerf spectre armor).

And when this ISNT the case, it's mindless sword swinging against enemies with simplistic attack patterns.  Starbound is even worse about this, where the enemies are *very* simplistic.

That's true, however, and partially due to the 2D nature of the game, I think.

....also the blocks are FREAKING TINY in Terraria and digging/mining takes bloody forever.

Did you ever try the picksaw? I don't know about you, but if that's not fast digging... Plus as of one of the latest patches there's a toggle to enable automatic block targeting (might not be the best phrasing...)

And the progression... ugh.  I honestly dont like a sense of linear progression in a game of this sort whatsoever.  It eventually hits about where you cant go any further, because there ISNT any further to go.  Minecraft doesnt have that; I dont just start using diamonds for some things and then never need to use iron/stone/leather for things ever again (which is what Terraria does; something like copper never needs to be mined again once you're at the next "tier" of equipment, because it has no conceivable use other than making the now obsolete copper equipment).  In Minecraft, I'm still goling to be making TONS of iron equipment even when I have found alot of diamonds, and I'm always going to be mining iron (or whatever) because it always has about a bazillion other uses as well.   Alot of games of this sort screw up this aspect badly, at least in my opinion.

Well, copper, iron, etc. *do* have further uses beyond weapons and armor... Personally, it didn't feel like a linear progression to me, because you don't have set quests or goals, but you're always exploring and finding new things.

The main difference, I think, is that Minecraft is more of a "sandbox" game, whereas Terraria has some platforming, progress, "story", (insert word I just can't come up with here...) feel to it. I haven't played Minecraft, though, so keep that in mind. It always looked kind of boring to me (comparable to your description of Terraria bossfights above ).

Not trying to convince you or anything, just giving my view on things you mentioned

Hm, mostly the gear-check thing bugs me because it feels like a badly made JRPG; the sort where there's some powerful boss, but you dont beat it with tactics or thinking or skill, you beat it by squashing rats for 20 hours (how anyone finds that fun in JRPGs, I'll never know) so you're levelled up, then you go into the fight and just hit the "attack" command over and over and over until the boss is dead.  Even Minecraft has a gear-check boss (the Wither), and I consider it to be the 2nd worst-designed thing in the game (seriously, it's not a fight.  Get diamond armor, enchant armor, stand in front of the thing and click alot.  And then the REWARD from it is the #1 worst designed thing in the game).   And overall whenever a game of any genre pulls this one, it feels like the devs just honestly couldnt figure out how to balance things.  It's like, why program all these bosses with all these elaborate attacks if I'm going to just ignore all of that, sit on their heads, and click them into oblivion?

It's also a sticking point for me simply because I need a challenge in order to hold my nearly nonexistent patience... which that concept doesnt provide.


I forgot whatever else I was going to say.

[Draco18s]

+1 from me.

I recently had to kickstart another company's designers to create enemies that were something other than "punch it in the face until it falls over."  They've turned a game that I enjoyed playing a year ago into a Skinner Box that is so pointlessly unrewarding that the "*Force compulsion* play me!" mechanics actually make me go play something else instead.

It may be a while before any fruits of that come to pass, though.

[Tridus]

If you're going to make a crafting/building game, I hope you make something like Capitalism. That was a game where you run a business and create products, market them, and such. Was quite a lot of fun, and I thin it's something Arcen could do well. Could probably even bring back multiplayer in it.

[x4000]

One thing I should make clear is that this not a game that has crafting or building at all anymore.  Go figure! -\o/-

(That's the space hulk shrug.)

[steelwing]

One thing I should make clear is that this not a game that has crafting or building at all anymore.  Go figure! -\o/-

(That's the space hulk shrug.)

No crafting at all?  What did this game turn into, then, since it's now completely different from what it was first imagined to be?

[x4000]

One thing I should make clear is that this not a game that has crafting or building at all anymore.  Go figure! -\o/-

(That's the space hulk shrug.)

No crafting at all?  What did this game turn into, then, since it's now completely different from what it was first imagined to be?

It's more of a roguelike than anything else.  Thematically speaking it's still the same idea in terms of setting, etc.  But in terms of how exactly you go about doing your activities, I've come across other games more recently that really speak to me much better in terms of mechanics for how to handle progression and whatnot.  I don't want to start making comparisons to other games just at this moment, though.

[steelwing]

Ah, understood.  So it'll look a bit more like Bionic Dues, then, but with more "active survival" mechanics (a la Minecraft, where you have to deal with a day/night cycle and monsters trying to kill you).

[x4000]

A little more traditional roguelike than that, in that it will have runs and then persistence outside of that.  Rogue Legacy or some other ones like that might be the closest comparison point, although they're still really far off.

[crazyroosterman]

so will you ever make a .survival game. in the true séance of the word in the far future?.

[wwwhhattt]

so will you ever make a .survival game. in the true séance of the world in the far future?.

I know it's not what you meant, but I now need a game where you have to help some future guy survive and you can only communicate with them through séances. All you'd know about the future would come from educated guesses based on the present, and how well the séance works would depend on how accurately you went through the rituals. Asymmetric multiplayer, maybe.

[x4000]

so will you ever make a .survival game. in the true [sense] of the word in the far future?.

I honestly don't know!  It's certainly a possibility, but I'm getting a bit weary of that genre the more I play it.  I'd have to have a really good hook to get myself interested in it.

That's usually a good sign that I will eventually do something: I like that thing, but then get bored of what's on the market, and then come up with something to rekindle my personal interest in it.  But right now I don't have any particular ideas (and am not seeking any, for the record -- my mind is full enough with the new game, heh).

[crazyroosterman]

so will you ever make a .survival game. in the true [sense] of the word in the far future?.

I honestly don't know!  It's certainly a possibility, but I'm getting a bit weary of that genre the more I play it.  I'd have to have a really good hook to get myself interested in it.

That's usually a good sign that I will eventually do something: I like that thing, but then get bored of what's on the market, and then come up with something to rekindle my personal interest in it.  But right now I don't have any particular ideas (and am not seeking any, for the record -- my mind is full enough with the new game, heh).

no problem the main game I've played from that genre love that game even though I'm terrible at it like I said the far future.

[NichG]

For me, the thing I like in building games is when I can make things that then actually 'do something', not because I used the 'do something' block but because of the ways that the various elements work together. I loved making canals in Minecraft that would deliver items automatically to a central collection point, or elevators or things like that. That's part of what I felt like Terraria was missing for me - most of the stuff you build is just aesthetic, not functional; or its baked-in functions like 'build the workstation/furnace/etc and make sure you have one of each' type stuff. Usually the point where Dwarf Fortress gets boring for me is when I've basically finished wiring up the things that need to be wired up to survive, but then there's no goals that I need to design and build in order to reach - its just accumulation or checking the tick boxes for necessary structures - got enough beds?, got enough food?, etc.

I like the idea in abstract that at first you're doing everything yourself, and then you gradually build up automation into the world that lets you extend your agency and scope. Instead of accumulating items in an inventory, you accumulate structures you've added to the world which work together to let you do things in new ways or just on very large scales. I haven't quite figured out the right way to gamify that idea though, in part because requiring things to function through interaction rather than identity is a lot harder to control. The result often ends up being something more like an physics or ALife simulation than an actual game.

If I really want to go off the deep-end with this, I could imagine boiling this down to constructing different kinds of autonomous intelligences that actually become your swarm that you control. So instead of just building physical structures, you're building behaviors that you can deploy - starting from individual custom-crafted robot butlers, and then turning into self-replicating robot swarms and robot societies that you're only controlling indirectly or hierarchically by the end-game. So at the beginning you take your pick and mine out some silicon for chips, but by the end you say 'go, my minions, and eat that planet over there and build me a new factory' or something like that.

Edit: Wow, I just noticed that the above post was kinda old, sorry about that... would there be a better place to bring this up?

[Sounds]

What about Terraria could you not get into? It is one of a few games my wife will play with me, so in the continuum of coops, it is pretty high for me.

This is pretty much my wife and kids go to co-op game. The crafting, room building and the craziness of stumbling upon the various goody bags (kids term) and having a heated discussion about sharing rights.

One memorable play through was a Saturday night when the wife made the call at the start of the night that kids were only allowed 1 hour and then its off to bed. I look up at the clock and its now 11pm (4 hours had passed). Thinking the wife would be mad I suggested we call it a night. The response from the wife: "just give me 5 more minutes". Wow I thought I was in the wrong house.

It seems the game really clicked for her, because the next morning (when I dragged myself out of bed) I could hear the distinct sounds of Terrarria coming from the veranda. It seems the wife had gotten up in the middle of the night and had continued to play. When I enquired what she was doing, "I need to finish the 20 story tree house so the kids play in it.". Yeah right. She sure was hooked.  

[x4000]

It was Minecraft for a while for my wife and I, and then it's been 7 Days To Die for the last couple of years.  We sure are hooked.  We never have been able to really get into Terraria for whatever reason.