Post by Arcanestomper in Cycle of the First Dawn comments

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The wilderness is pretty boring. You pick an option and just leave it running. But the affinity gain is pretty weak, and there really isn't a reason to try and get qi. The martial will is nice, but the only thing is does is let you survive a little bit long in the wilderness. Which means the only reason to go to the wilderness is for the imprints. Which have a single roll to be discovered with a relatively low chance.

That means the best thing to do is to go to the wilderness select any of the activites and wait for a decade or two. Then manually restart and do it again. Over and over. With no real variance between the different wilderness regions. Doing 45 dual element towns was already a lot, but at least they had marginally different narratives. The wildernesses is only distinguished by a few lines of description.

At least give us a way to increase the chance of finding something. As it is just not worth doing. Plus it seems to imply that there are ways to progress deeper, but once you go to a wilderness area you're stuck. You can't go back. You can't go to a different region. You can't even go from a mono region to a dual region. So unless you get the imprint its basically a wasted life.

DoorWatchers6 days ago(+3)

This is useful feedback. I’m not going to argue with whether you find the wilderness boring, but the point about the current loop becoming “enter, wait for the discovery opportunity, restart the life” is a fair one.

The affinity/Qi/combat rewards are meant to give reasons to actually spend time out there, so if the optimal feeling is still to abandon the life once the discovery opportunity has passed, then that part of the design needs another look.

The references to going deeper are also not a hidden unlock you’re missing. The current regions are the outer wilderness areas, and the deeper areas are groundwork for later content.

I’m also going to look at the travel restriction. Committing to the wilderness for a life was intentional, but being unable to move between wilderness regions once you’re out there may be making the whole thing much more rigid than it needs to be.

Thanks for writing this out. The detail here is much more useful to me than just saying the wilderness isn’t fun.

Arcanestomper5 days ago

You're going to have to explain how getting Qi is supposed to be a reason to spend time there. Why would getting more Qi be useful beyond one life?

Arcanestomper5 days ago (1 edit) (+2)

Also my friend group has discovered that there is more than one imprint per element. Which instantly at least doubles the amount of runs we'd have to do. Probably a lot more because of the diminishing chances to get an imprint. If you're going to make so many at least make it easier to get back to the wilderness.

DoorWatchers5 days ago(+1)

That actually touches on something I may need to make clearer: you aren't intended to find every imprint.

They're meant to be small permanent bonuses you may discover while spending time in the wilderness, not a checklist you're expected to exhaust before moving on. The diminishing discovery chance is partly there for that reason. Eventually the sensible choice is supposed to be to leave some things undiscovered and continue progressing rather than repeatedly restarting lives trying to clear a region.

I am aware that, because of where the current end of the available content is, wilderness grinding may effectively be one of the few things left for players who have reached that point until the next content update. That can naturally make the imprints feel like the remaining progression objective. They weren't designed around the expectation that someone would collect all of them, though.

If the game is presenting them in a way that makes them feel like something you're supposed to complete, that's useful feedback and something I should look at making clearer.

Border425 days ago

A lot of incremental game players, myself included, tend to be completionist about bonuses, and not getting them will feel bad. If you intend them not to all be gotten, I'd suggest either put a hard cap on the number you can get, or make the bonuses themselves diminish the more of them you get in order to help hammer in the whole 'there's really no point to continuing this'.

DoorWatchers5 days ago(+1)

My original goal was for different players to come away from the wilderness with slightly different discoveries, but you're both making a good point about how that clashes with the completionist structure the rest of the game establishes. I'm a completionist with incremental games myself, so I can definitely see why leaving permanent bonuses behind would feel bad even if the game says they're optional.

I'm looking at reworking it rather than just adding clearer warning text. The direction I'm considering is making every imprint eventually obtainable, while moving most of their mechanical value into a shared permanent bonus with diminishing returns. That way each discovery still matters, the last few aren't hiding some unique must-have bonus, and someone who genuinely wants to hunt down everything still can.

I'd still keep discoveries rare enough that wilderness finds remain long-term surprises rather than something you're expected to clear before moving on. I need to work through the numbers before I lock the exact system in, though.

onehalfsaint5 days ago

I think clarifying that diminishing chance / not supposed to get them all with some slightly less vague text would be helpful. It's less that the game presents them in a way that makes them feel like you're supposed to complete it and more that all the other systems in the game up to that point do work on a completionist model (put simply), so why should this one be any different?

DoorWatchers5 days ago(+1)

Yeah, that's exactly the distinction. It's less a problem with how it's presented and more that the rest of the game has trained you to expect permanent progression systems to eventually be completable. Having the wilderness suddenly be the exception makes it feel inconsistent even if I explain the diminishing chance better.

That's a big part of why I'm looking at changing the system itself rather than just clarifying the text. I'm in the middle of a fairly large content update and some bug fixing right now, so the revamped wilderness system will most likely come with that update as well.

onehalfsaint5 days ago(+1)

Ok love the thought that went into this clarification--really enjoying the game so far, I must say. Thanks for being so diligent with these updates and responses. <3

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