With the release of the Community Module coming closer (end of November!), we started talking about what’s next for Crest. For a whole day the company divided up into groups and discussed what the current problems are and how we could fix them. The following points are to be taken with a grain of salt and are not set in stone.
Pacing/Difficulty
The problem: Crest is overwhelming for new players. There are a couple of changes we have in mind to lower the difficulty curve and to let you have more control over it.
- Word tablet: Have empty spaces to show that there are words that you have not discovered yet. We’ll keep the word discovery tab but we feel it should be more visible to let you know that you can discover words. The words will also always stay in the same spot and not switch around when you discover a new word like they do now.
- Tech tree: We’re thinking of adding some sort of tech tree to the word discovery to give you microgoals and have more control over how and when you progress.
- Building of new cities: We’ll change it so your followers don’t build new cities on their own anymore, only when you write a migrate commandment. There’s a huge increase in difficulty when your followers build a new city and we want you to feel comfortable with the one(s) you have first. This will also give you more control in the beginning on where your followers expand, but make it more difficult the more cities you have. In addition there will be greater consequences for overpopulation, making it not sustainable in the long-run.
- Limiting actions: Words like “trade” or “socialise” are pretty much done by the followers on their own and make you as the player feel obsolete. We’re going to make adjustments to those, and also tie them in the aforementioned tech tree to not suddenly overwhelm you with another layer of complexity which doesn’t even consider you.
Follower AI (Free Will)
The problem: Followers are too clever without commandments and too stupid with them.
Tweaks: Followers will take more immediate action upon your commandments, eradicating unnecessary waiting time.
Self-preservation: Followers will be more self-conscious about their own mortality, i.e. they won’t blindly walk into an area full of hippos anymore. Hunger will get adjusted so the priority for collecting food will get raised exponentially until they eventually stop their current task to take care of themselves.
Associations: They’ll be more biased towards similar words to appear less random. Right now each word has three or more words that make sense (e.g. Coast - Ocean, Fish, Food) connected to it, where one of them gets randomly chosen when an association is formed.
UI/Visual Feedback
The problem: Lots of information is hidden or spread out in too many places.
- City needs window: While the spiderweb might look nice, it’s not really useful. We’ll change it to provide a quick overview of the city and summarize Needs, Faith & Doctrine.
- Bubble over city when a commandment has been written: We’ll change it to make it show more specifically why a commandment has been liked or disliked.
- World overview: Every city will be shown in a quick overview to make mid-/endgame navigation easier. The city window will therefore be cleaned up and have more info delivered in the world overview.
- Visual feedback for water supplies: Did you know that mountains are the main source for water distribution on the island, and that water in general has an influence on basically everything? We discussed things like showing snow on top of the mountain, depending on whether it’s full or dried up, as well as animating the rivers that can eventually dry up, but there will probably also be a general overview.
- Free will feedback: When a follower is acting on his own will, it currently states “I’m doing xyz because I want to.”
We’ll change the information in the follower window to also show according to what need/craving they’re doing an action. For example: “We’re farming food because we’re starving.”
Animals
The problem: They don’t really matter or in some cases have too much influence.
The animal world will be more dynamic with more interaction between each other and have more drastic consequences for the world.
- Animals will die more frequently: Starving, killed by predators, hunters or warriors, you name it. Currently too many animals get tolerated within the city borders without any consequences for them or the followers.
- More migrating: It doesn’t make sense for antelopes to hang around next to lions without panicking or hyenas chilling where there’s no food for them. Not only will them migrating more create a more dynamic world, but also more tension between animals and followers.
- Nerf animal stats (I’m looking at you, hippo!): We’ll change how much they affect the environment and also how aggressive they behave against followers.
These are all the changes we want to apply to Crest before the final release. Things like polishing, balancing, bug fixing and technical optimization are not taken into account here since we’re constantly applying them and before release we’ll additionally reserve at least one month for it.
This does not mean that there won’t be any new features coming to Crest after the Community Module. We feel like it’s more important to fix what we have now before adding even more things. We’ll have to wait and see how fast we get through the tasks after the Community Module has been launched, before we can talk about planning production for new features.
You might have already guessed that we won’t have Crest finished as planned by the end of this year. Our new goal is to have it finished by the end of Q1 2018. We’ve already been in Early Access for a long time, it just wouldn’t make sense to rush it now and release something half-baked. Thanks to all your feedback in the recent months, we have a much clearer idea now of what’s left to fix, where the problems lie, and we want to take action on it.
What do you think of all the mentioned changes? Are we on the right track? We’d also like to know what you are currently missing in Crest. Let’s pick up that discussion in the Gameplay/Balancing Suggestions thread.
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