One of the things that bothered me more than I thought it would was the way evolving a microbe works. While, realistically speaking, undoing changes costing points makes sense, in terms of someone jumping into the game from a beginner’s perspective, it severely hinders experimentation, and because of that, coupled with the inability to re-open the creature editor as needed, even with the ability to save, if you built wrong, you’d be quite literally dead in the water regardless. While this might be a rewarding way to play for a veteran of the game who’s already fairly familiar with the ins and outs of how creatures work, for such a complex game as Thrive where not every part is a straight upgrade (unlike Spore), new players will need that freedom of mechanics exploration so the game doesn’t boil down to what is effectively a roguelike with a save button. It would also make testing that much easier and accessible and so, imo, should be implemented asap.
That said, keeping the points loss mechanic for editing as a difficulty setting would be great for veterans. In fact, more in the long term, I think the game would benefit from dynamic and varied difficulty settings, letting the player adjust resource scarcity, AI difficulty, evolution rate, and of course creature editor points return. While scientific accuracy is a great thing to strive for and I really applaud that, I would also like to see the option for the game to be friendlier to players so that it’s more accessible.
5 Likes
Deathpacitoast
(Destroyer of worlds. Eater of babies.)
2
I definitely understand how you feel. The game is still currently quite a tricky thing to understand once you first begin. I remember how i felt once i tried playing thrive. I felt so alienated and confused.
However.
i can’t help but feel like the game has already begun moving towards the direction of being more beginner friendly. With the implementation of the atp bar alongside other planned features im sure that the game will be streamlined enough for most people to enjoy rather easily regardless of whether or not they know how to play the game. For example the planned feature of organelle unlocks would prevent new players from making the mistake of placing down thykaloids in the deep sea patches where light is absent. It would narrow their options and allow for features like organelles to be gradually and naturally introduced. And with the implementation of an intuitive and non intrusive tutorial alongside possibly tooltips the player will still be allowed to safely experiment with their limited options.
One thing I don’t want to add is that organelle cost could be refunded (other than using the undo button), as then we are basically an unnamed other evolution game, where the player could just completely redo their creature any time they wanted.
I Agree with you, evolution is a forward moving ball. Having a Rest or undo button kinda breaks that point.
Instead of that we can provide, Redistribution of organs or organelle, Eg, Turtle has a strong cover because it use to be it’s rib Cage.
{but it should have a limitation too, as eyes can’t be far away from brain, as Eyes was the reason we have brain }( well, first a bunch of specialize cells(brain cells) got accumulated at one part, at that point we had something which was a photo receptor, which evolved with eye and improved our brain along with it)
and Puffer fish use it’s stomach for inflation {for defence than digestion }
We can improve the system by -:
let’s say, if a creature gave up on having hands, this creature should get an ability point which could be used for some specialization} ( tunneling locomotion) {eg. snake}
or if a land animal chose to grow fins out of limbs, ability points into size { eg. blue whale }