itch.io

Hey thanks for taking the time to reply. I'll go more indepth on some of the points to help understand my thought process a little better and alleviate a misunderstanding or two.

1.1; In my opinion it is just far too much for something far too unimportant. At most add a chair in the tutorial and add floating text above it that says "You can sit in chairs by looking at the seat". And to me it significantly takes away from the immersive-ness of the game

1.2; My complaint is that it's not immersive when you have large low res numbers show up. It's not a massive complaint, not all of the points are equally important to me but it's enough to mention.

1.3; My problem again stems from how non-immersive it looks when you're dealing with it, a large pile of unchanging mystery trash that suddenly disappears when you meet the number limit of how much you took out. I'm also not sure it does affect performance noticeably as the largest performance hog in the entire game is shadows. In the base with shadows on 2 or 3 I get around 20-30 fps with all the lights on and 40-50 with either the lights off or on shadows 1 with actually worse performance in 0.9 compared to 0.8.2c.

And I'm fully aware of the value of scraps and such.

1.4; And yes my complaint is that it takes longer based on rng and if you're already running low on time (If your timescale is on 1 it can be a real mf) it can cause a lot of grief for not improving the experience at all. I'd be fine with it if it didn't fail and retry constantly.

1.5; I tried the sound toggle options, none of them toggled the detector. My issue stems from the fact that it is *always* beeping incessantly, it does so especially if you don't have a signal selected. The rest of the sounds that they added to the download process I also find annoying but it's less of an issue.

1.6; This was a very minor gripe I had that I just decided to add anyway cause I didn't want to create another section specifically for minor ones. With stuff like putting drives in the slots you can throw it from across the room and get it in the slot which is a lot of fun but for the  new stuff like the reels and disks you can't do that.

2.1; You pointed out something that I didn't consider, which is exactly why discussion is important and I can see the point of the ATM for that specific purpose.

2.6; I believe I didn't fully touch up on the tutorial part. My point is that it almost completely restricts freedom now if you do decide to go along with it. I will mention that the wording is significantly better at explaining the mechanics of the game now but letting the player have the option to mess around on their own terms if they so wish seems a lot better to me than disabling features of the game until you do a specific action or cross a certain step. I liked having the steps and such just written in bubbles that aren't glued to the screen when I was first playing the old tutorial.

You pointing out the lack of .0's was mildly funny but I've always started from 1 when doing a list like that as the title/topic itself is the 0.

I do hope this cleared up any misunderstandings, apologies if it didn't.

I would like to start off that I love this game and that's the entire reason I'm writing this. I don't have much more to add besides that so let's begin.

--- Things that I haven't seen other people mention ---

1.1; The Blasphemous Chair Icon. Do we *really* need a giant white chair icon blocking our view every time we're close to a chair? 

What's next, an icon on the doors so that new players can tell that it's a door? It's simply annoying, distracting, and unimmersive as shit.

1.2; The extra UI stuff when handling the knobs is useful in theory but in reality it's just unhelpful and once again unimmersive, Maybe instead of that you could just add a tidbit to the tutorial telling you that you can look around while you're holding the knob.

1.3; The new trash piles are odd and just make the process of trash collecting a little bit more tedious and unimmersive. Why must I grab, let go, grab, let go a set number of times before the trash pile finally relents and de-spawns all at once leaving me with the pieces I magically plucked out?

1.4; I'm guessing this is what the server upgrades are for so do we really need to bog down early game so much that in order to get the hashes (Which now you apparently need to get even more of now?) you need to spend even longer on each hash as it fails to get it ~8 times before relenting and giving you the data wasting precious minutes. Is playing on 0.5 speed now gonna be mandatory to have time to complete all the necessary work *and* have time to properly explore the game world and its other mechanics? I doubt most people here are playing it for the job simulator part of the game (Even though previously I did find that part quite enjoyable)

1.5; I haven't found any way to turn off that incessant detector beeping, it's just so damn annoying and it's constant. It isn't even helpful.

1.6, It seems that you *have* to hold and click on a lot of the newer stuff to insert them; Aka you can't grab it and then throw it in the slot or anything like that. Maybe an oversight cause it's a test build or just very low priority.

[Late Edit] 1.7; Most game rules being locked behind days played is just silly. Having sandbox and the new debug thing locked behind days is fine since that contains big spoilers but not being able to use custom content or the funny setting doesn't help anything imo. I played my first playthrough with 0.7 speed days, the funny setting and custom content on and it was a complete blast and depriving people of that experience because "uh oh you haven't played the game enough!!" makes no practical sense.

--- Things that I have seen other people mention ---

2.1; I know the first 3 things I said here mention immersion but that sometimes realism and immersion touch tedium and become an unnecessary bloat to the game. The ATM and limited vending machines are a good example of this; It's just quite unnecessary in my view and makes the already rather unused part of the game even less used.

2.2; The single most useful and important tool in your arsenal, the ATV, now looks really cool but becomes quickly useless as it lacks an alternator and can't charge it's fairly expensive (Around 150 I believe?) battery. Plus when it used to be a titanium brick that would get hit by a bomb and only fall to 50% now you hit a fence (It feels like the handling is off currently? Maybe something to do with the physics changes I've heard about?) and suddenly you're pisspoor again as the wheels got launched into the atmosphere and it costs 200 to replace each. It's somewhat realistic, sure, but I believe this game is supposed to be a horror game and not a life simulator; Though I suppose those go hand in hand, don't they.

2.3; The new triangulation system; cool in theory and looks however quickly loses its punch as you spend more than double the amount of time on getting a new signal as they often de-spawn before you can encompass them. It would feel infinitely better to use if you could do something like use the part that doesn't move any of the sides to 'lock in' a signal so that it can no longer de-spawn. This would also make that part of the terminal actually useful instead of a waste of time to use.

2.4; The control scheme. Somehow feels significantly worse to use than the previous version. If you got used to the old control scheme you had near perfect control over what you wanted to do and you could do it near instantly. In the new version not only are some things time based (You have to perfectly hit some buttons in a limited time window or you'd do something completely different that you didn't want to do, like dropping or unequipping your item trying to use the precision place feature which IMO is an fantastic addition or once again dropping or unequipping something you're holding trying to throw something you're holding which I don't think was ever explained and I only found out how to do it through a reply on one of these posts) but some actions are forced to be slow with seemingly about a 2 second hold time before it happens when before all you had to do was hold alt at the same time. Though I do see a lot of people praising it so removing it entirely isn't an option so I beg of thee to make it optional *at least*.

2.5; The fuses. They cost a lot and it seems like you also need a lot of them constantly or your game is over. Not completely certain on them

2.6; The tutorial is TOO hand-holdy, feels more like a mobile game tutorial now which is the worst feeling a tutorial can give you. Being able to do it at any pace you want makes it way more enjoyable and new player friendly, I can already think of a couple people I know who love the game but would immediately get bored and turn off the game from the new tutorial.

To end this segment I'll try to explore (Albeit to an absurd, comical degree) where doubling down on all this would lead to, which is pure My Summer Car TEDIUM. At this exact rate in the full game when a demon breaks open your door you won't be worrying about the demon trying to kill you, it'll be "fuck I'm gonna go broke fixing that door now". It would be a glorified life simulator with the paranormal and aliens being more of a mild annoyance. You'll have a cool event happen in the distance but your response will be "Well I'd like to check that out but my ATV battery just died and I can't afford a replacement since I had to spend my last funds on cleaning out the vents of dust so I guess can't". 

--- The Stuff I actually Enjoy (plus some minor gripes with them if applicable) ---

3.1; The new base looks awesome from the inside; Very fancy and a lot more official looking (Though for now some parts look obviously under development still which is expected)

3.2; The elevator from the garage to the storage bay is now fast enough that it might actually be kind of useful.

3.3; MRE's opening up is really cool and also realistic (Though maybe should be tweaked a little as opening an MRE just to find 2 crackers that barely fill a quarter of your food bar isn't very enjoyable)

3.4; Surprisingly to myself I actually enjoyed the generator minigame a little. Though I disagree with the opinions of many of the praisers as they seemed to focus on it adding spice to the end game; Which is a questionable stance to me as it seems to only make it slightly more time consuming and it would eventually turn out quite tedious to constantly do just like the server math minigame.

3.5; The Precision placement feature is simply a good addition to the game and gives you more options for decoration.

3.6; The visuals of the new ATV are quite nice although I'll definitely miss that titanium brick.

3.7; The physical module system, mostly. It's def a really cool immersive addition held back by larger prices and the necessity to get an expensive extra tool ontop of that. Also having to turn off the power seems odd. Otherwise only praise.

3.8; The new computer looks very nice.

3.9; The game rules when making a new save slot are a good addition and opens up a lot of possibilities.

3.10; The option of seasons. I always wanted to properly play on winter but the only option was a decent experimental feature that wasn't recorded in the save file so you had to reactivate it every time.

3.11; Just most of the model changes in general are positive, like the new radio model and such.

3.12; Adding a video camera is really cool but I feel the price could be toned down significantly as it's really not that big of a deal, no?

3.13; The new drone system seems really nice, being able to put everything all at once and then send it out is a much needed improvement over the 1 item at a time rule.

My Ending Statements

I believe this update actually decided on a really interesting and cool direction but stepped off on the completely wrong foot and the annoyances that arrived with it both mild and extreme make the game significantly less player friendly in general. Especially when it comes to new players. I will still love the game but people glazing every change like the messiah are dangerously lethal to a game's further development and I hope that is recognized and understood. I do not expect my review to completely change everyone's mind or make the developer shed a tear and become a new man, I just hope it melds together with all the similar posts and the developer makes the best decision as a whole instead of doubling down on a life simulator, though then it would truly be an effective horror game.