My humble thoughts on thrive's replayability

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

Recently, on the developer’s forum there was an short discussion about the unicelular stage replayability, and also recently i’ve been playing spore for the second time, and wanting or not, thrive has pretty big inspirations on spore, so i think it would be nice if i gave my two cents about the replayability of thrive in general, by comparating it with spore. (disclaimer: obviously this will be very spore centered)

One of the biggest things i didn’t liked about spore was how every game, every species journey to the endgame, was absolutely the same, but just with a different paint. suuure, you got some different habilities depending on what you eats, kills or not, you’re forced sometimes to get better parts to progress, but beyond that, everything follows the exact same linear story: paspermia, interact with the same maxis creatures and get smarter, supremacy over other species, supremacy over your own species, find the destroyed civilization in your home system, meet other empires (which after a while get repeatitive) go to the center of the galaxy and hurray! you won the game.
Altought this kind of linear story works well with other kinds of games, an evolution sandbox game like Thrive shouldn’t have this kind of constrait at all.
Every time you played, you should get an different story.

In the last years, Thrive has made some quite neat additions that i think could help on the point i’m talking about, as such choosing your world type and origin, random events, sea biomes, auto evo, etc. but i believe that, in the future, there is potential for even more, and considering how much depth and gameplay unicellular has in comparision with their spore equivalent (which is the shortest stage), i don’t think what i’m saying would be too far fetched from reality.

• for example, imagine if the transition from aware to awakening is more gradual and totally optional, because you would be able to unlock primitve tools to help you kill other animals, instead of evolving an permanent feature.
• Or imagine if you’re in industrial, and at war with another global superpower, both of you use nuclear weapons, collapsing the ecosystem and your species, but instead of getting an game over screen or returning to the start of the stage (the way spore do) you keep playing as an survivor species of that disaster, and as you progress again, there is to be seen the once great ruins of your previous creature’s civilizations, now with the help of reverse engineering their tech, but the drawback of less oil.
• Imagine if there there could be two sapient species in society stage instead of one, and one gets enslaved by the other, and on industrial you are given the chance to develop civil rights moviments to make them equals, heck, imagine if you could get that same ufo event as in spore creature stage, but instead of being a one time thing you actually finds a seed world with the species that got abducted, during space stage!

i could spend alll day talking about theses possibilities, because they’re unlimited. thats kinda of what i want thrive to be, an game where you can do everything in between LUCA and transcendence.
thanks for coming to my ted talk

[hhyyrylainen]

@Trappist-1e

for example, imagine if the transition from aware to awakening is more gradual and totally optional, because you would be able to unlock primitve tools to help you kill other animals, instead of evolving an permanent feature.

How is your suggestion different from what is already planned? To me this sounds pretty much exactly like the plan: once awakened the player species gains the ability to unlock technology (with the first technologies being primitive tools and fire) but pretty much nothing else changes.

Awakening Stage

@Trappist-1e

but instead of getting an game over screen or returning to the start of the stage (the way spore do) you keep playing as an survivor species of that disaster, and as you progress again, there is to be seen the once great ruins of your previous creature’s civilizations, now with the help of reverse engineering their tech, but the drawback of less oil.

I’ve recently said that we wouldn’t add regressing back stages into the game for two reasons:

• It’s going to be a ton of programming effort meaning that we are pushing back the farther stages even more years than they are going to take at the current pace
• It’s also going to add a ton of testing work to ensure nothing breaks. Imagine the bug reports if someone regressed back to the start of the society stage and as a result got a softlock due to missing some key resource in sufficient quantity to advance further. That would be a doozy of a bug report to read and figure out with the user that the root cause of the bug is actually regressing a stage (as players are really terrible in general writing bug reports with sufficient information that is critical that they don’t think to include). So we would have to test each stage multiple times more than before to catch any edge cases caused by going back stages.

For those two reasons I want to stick to not having stage regressions put into the game. Or at least that feature is not considered until we’ve reached (or are about to reach) Ascension Stage development, when all the other stages are done which would make it much easier to add stage regressing without that feature breaking with every major update to one or more stages.

@Trappist-1e

enslaved

Slavery Take Two

I ask the mods to not lock this unless it goes to Belgium. Alright, another take two thread, here we go. So I would suggest a system like Total War: Rome 2 where after defeating an enemy army you can enslave the prisoners. As well as having the option to enslave or kill the population of cities you raze. There could also be slave races in the space stage who you can buy and sell slaves to but if your fleet is caught in a weakened state they might attack and enslave your crews. Slaves could requ…

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

@hhyyrylainen

How is your suggestion different from what is already planned? To me this sounds pretty much exactly like the plan: once awakened the player species gains the ability to unlock technology (with the first technologies being primitive tools and fire) but pretty much nothing else changes.

I wasn’t really aware (pun not intended) of the plans for awakening and i think its cool that is planned this way.
I was also comparing to the way spore does its stage transitions, which are pretty abrupt (yes, im talking about YOU, tribal to society.)

@hhyyrylainen

Or at least that feature is not considered until we’ve reached (or are about to reach) Ascension Stage development, when all the other stages are done which would make it much easier to add stage regressing without that feature breaking with every major update to one or more stages.

Thats pretty much reasonable. What about going extinct in unicellular and continuing the game as other species? I suppose this would be way easier to code and easier to add waay earlier in development

@hhyyrylainen

@Trappist-1e

for example, imagine if the transition from aware to awakening is more gradual and totally optional, because you would be able to unlock primitve tools to help you kill other animals, instead of evolving an permanent feature.

Slavery Take Two

I’m surprised this wasn’t locked yet, but my original point was really about having two different, rival sapient species during society and industrial, and the consequences of that in the gameplay.

[hhyyrylainen]

@Trappist-1e

What about going extinct in unicellular and continuing the game as other species? I suppose this would be way easier to code and easier to add waay earlier in development

I think this should be theoretically already in the game if you play on the easy difficulty. No one has reported a bug related to this so it either works just fine, or not enough people play on easy mode / get extinction once they make it to multicellular for anyone to have ever experienced this condition. If that second situation is what has happened, that kind of goes to show that not having the ability to go back stages doesn’t impact the game much at all as it is a very rare condition to trigger.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

@hhyyrylainen

or not enough people play on easy mode / get extinction once they make it to multicellular for anyone to have ever experienced this condition.

I have a feeling that this might be the cause why no bugs were reported of that feature, especially as from what I recall rather little amount of players plays on easy regularly, and of these few would go extinct due to the game being easier for them on the difficulty.

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

Im a easy player, but everytime i start constantly dying due to food being too far away and having no energy, i give up and wait until the next update to try again
also its almost impossible to me to get 20 cells needed for late multicelular

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Have you been always playing a heterotroph?

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

I don’t think i know how to go to other patch regions (thats the name of the other groups of patches right?) and i’m too comfortable in my home region to bother.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I can bet there would be suitable prey species in the other regions… And I thought it would be rather easy to go to other patch regions. Don’t icons beyond your patch light up if you click on some of your region’s patches?

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

I’m not sure? I will need to check when i get home.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Also do you play with the ingame tutorials?

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

I think i just did on my first and maybe second time playing it

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

You probably should do that again, especially if you find it hard to figure out all the new features added since your tutorial-having playthroughs.

[Trappist-1e ("shot for the moon, and if you miss, you get on sun orbit lol")]

I replayed thrive yesterday, and the continue-as-other-species-when-you-get-extinct system seems to be working just fine. And yeah i just didn’t understood the region maps lol

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

You do understand them now fully, correct?