Mikey posted the two part interview on the discord, links below. I had some additional feedback and comments after listening. Thought I’d make a discussion thread everyone could jump into.
Part 1
https://youtu.be/J1Vqg3iyQAQ?t=836
Part2
https://youtu.be/pxCXZFBAxXM
Wicked, a gourmet restaurant.
Crucible, the rogue like appetizer at the top of the menu. An experiment based on the foundation of the game and how it plays in the overall experience.
Part 1 notes/comments:
Crucible. Should it be an endgame exclusive mode. Personally I hope that it is not strictly because of the current need for item progression. This problem can be solved by many things in the future so I’m not against something else taking its place if needed. The existence of exalted which I believe are a great addition to the game (which had to many RNG mechanics stacked on top of one another previously) surely pose an issue as we get more content. Perhaps the exalted vendor should be locked behind higher levels of the crucible which are only unlocked after completing the story; therefore crucible at lower levels will always be available as a side bar to the story while progressing. Alternatively the story leveling up along side the character has been done before so it could be another route worth exploring while allowing crucible to be fully unlocked from the get go.
If this is an experiment what is moon testing? Personally I thought the echos are a fun way to add some extra flavor. I’ve enjoyed the modifications to my build I’m able to incorporate and the variation every run is refreshing. That said I end up targeting the same general bonuses because of how well they influence my build. I’m sure in the future more echos will be added. That said be cautious an ever growing pool of : loot, echos, enchantments, etc. Random can be fun but also frustrating, it’s a double edge sword. I think it’s a good design element when dealing with random buffs and rewards to have a selection from a random pool in tiers. For instance instead of the echo sample we have you could have 3 sets of defensive, 3 sets of utility, and 3 sets of offensive. More a pick your own adventure rogue-like rather than trying to make a good run out of the random interactions. Both have good merit.
I think the more important experiment is the one that hasn’t happened yet. New crucible = fun. Now what? Well where to you place crucible in the story, etc. To me the answer will revolve around Moon asking themselves what is the intended experience around crucible. If it is meant to be a part of the game or a feature within, the rewards, etc. Take for instance equalized pvp in something like GW2. It is truly separate from the game you can go into the arena as soon as you make a character will full access to the equalized equipment for pvp with full access to customize your character. This experience doesn’t level your character in any way but there are rewards for participating and even more for winning. It sounds like multi-player and inevitably pvp will be another menu item so with that on the horizon it’s worth considering.
Initially I latched on to the Gennadiy’s response “a game that people don’t have to turn off”. For now I’m not going to reach too far on this and just express that I hope this is because they’re having so much fun and not because of tedious mechanics holding back the most enjoyable content. Exploring and appreciating the world that has been made (and not procedurally generated) I’m all for -so long as it is not at the expense turning it into a job like task. A big part of this I believe will be centered around how many resources will be available to the player at any given time and how many of those resources are needed to progress.
On the discussion of expectations and the progression of early access. Without doxing myself I’m comfortable saying my day to day grind is being a project manager. I’ve never worked in game or content creation but I can’t stress how important managing expectations is for a constructive environment. Something I think would help Moon going forward is to release a dev discussion in addition to the polished overview videos they produce. Similar to the launch trailer but perhaps a little less formal. Phreaks patch videos from the early days of LoL come to mind as an example. If we’re the gunnie pigs testing new features, please be more direct with what it is your trying to accomplish with the patch and why in short form. No need to explain everything but similar to this interview the information is invaluable compared to the even shorter version we get in the patch notes. You can’t get an answer without first asking the question. So give us a task, be very direct with that it is you’re after. I and I’m sure many others have little to no interest trying to put together a beautiful mind board of all the snippets from devs we get over different media platforms and put everything together.
Doubling down on the previous point as the discussion moved towards growing pains and the ambitious nature of the project. Again, put us to work without it being work. You just need to be explicit in, we wanted to test “x” this and see how it feels and the responses will continue as they have. It just seems so haphazard to have all this undirected people power. I believe it would be much more constructive and beneficial to Moon if they would communicate more directly.
Part 2 notes/comments:
Additional modes to Crucible. Yes, please, sounds dope
I don’t have much to add on part 2 without repeating parts of the information above. I like what I’m hearing from Gennadiy and am looking forward for what’s to come.
I liked this interview quite a lot and am happy Gennady gave some insights. Here are some of my thoughts.
Part 1
Wicked as a platform
The idea of Wicked being a platform where you can do all sorts of things is a great idea. It really reminds me of simulation games where you can mine, farm, do combat and socialize. I can see this happening in Wicked with farming resources, crafting items, enchanting them and finally exalting. I just wish those processes are more streamlined and require more interaction from the player. Especially enchanting and crafting which has too much RNG to it. If it is to be seen as a platform all elements of the game should be fun. Maybe on Monday I will focus on crafting my own helmet and enchanting it. I would prefer it to be more labour intensive but then for it to be more rewarding by allowing more customization. The current crafting and enchanting is not a fun experience.
Gennadiy mentioned that the various elements of the game are similar to dishes and together they form the menu. I like this idea a lot, however, I do feel some dishes are rather bland atm. Specifically crafting and enchanting need some extra seasoning and depth.
Crafting
I really want the feeling of creating hand crafted and customized gear. I don’t want to create a generic piece of armor, I want to add something of my own to it. Maybe focus more on lowering the weight or adding more armor. Something to influence the modifiers and such. Maybe add smaller slots to armors for smaller components. Battle Brothers has an interesting system where monsters would drop resources and these could be used to craft unique enhancements for armor. Like a fur wolfcloak which give X amount of stats to an item. Or additional armor plating for more armor etc. I would want more agency over my crafter gear outside of affixes. Let me interact with it to make it my own piece of gear.
Enchanting
For enchanting I would like some customization and randomization working together. Maybe something similar to their boon system, but you sacrifice gems and the gems sacrificed influence the probability of certain affixes to choose from. Ruby gems give Heat based affixes etc. If the developers really want us to see it as a platform we as players should have incentive and fun when interacting with the various components. Currently there is too much RNG.
Part 2
Game modes
Defense missions similar to Warframe. Team up with 3 more players and defend an artifact. Or maybe have daily missions where a transport cart has crashed and is being raided by the Risen. And, you as player have to defend it from several waves of enemies.
Also, hell yeah to a survival mode – I am assuming an endless wave mode.
Now, if the different statues mean different game modes, then I think the Crucible will be insanely cool. I can see the replay ability as each mode can get expanded upon and we as players can have endless amounts of fun during end game.
Timers
Gennadiy mentioned that with farming people can get behind the delayed rewards for the sake of realism but people object to it with building.
Here are my thoughts.
In the interview Gennadiy already mentioned how people can see the crops grow. But, we can’t see the buildings being build. When you are constructing/upgrading a building nothing changes on the overworld. I would add scaffolding and have Maker Danos actually work on upgrading the stores with some hired hands. It adds that much realism to it. Maybe Meri and Mira are arguing with each other to Danos about how they want their store to be decorated and such. Visually show us the process of the various shops being changed. I think they a lot more people will be supportive of the timers.
Final Words
Hope this helps the developers and please don’t give up on the vision of Wicked becoming a platform.
Seeing the Timer as a number is probably the issue because taking the farming example, you never see a timer over the crops but you see the growth and the growth gives you excitement because you expecting to harvest when its done. So perhaps with the City it can be a visual timer with Scaffolding and Construction workers hammering away and that will allow people to accept it because they are Visually watching it Develop which in turn makes a person realize it takes time to reap the rewards instead of an number that visually does nothing.
Agreed, I also think people are mostly obsessing about it because it is a number and the lack of a visual representation of progress. The scaffolding, construction workers will add to the excitement. I would also include the specific NPC’s in it as it adds more depth to their characters and the immersion.
They could also change the X amount of time remaining with Maker Danos with a progress bar or even X% completion tracker which various city builders have.
Agree agree agree…
I’m totally on board with the platform concept and looking forward to all the updates to come.
When it comes to crafting while I agree and the idea of a soft influence on the RNG would b welcome. We still need a way to target farm/gather bases but that problem can be solved many ways.
Overall the RNG on RNG is not something I enjoy and agree with you there. The exalted craft is a good bandaid for now but the overall system could be improved to let players make tailored gear for each build which I’d enjoy. One bit of hesitation however is that in creating a system for specific crafts I hope they avoid the mistakes of PoE making crafting and endless string of hoops to jump through. The idea of the taking a good exalted smash and perfect rolling the affixes is easily accessible to everyone and that in itself is a nice feature.
I see where you’re coming from on the timers. If they truly want to players to see the world grow it be a nice step in that direction. However I believe for a large section of the player base the function of the upgraded town will drive each users interest in it moving as fast as possible. Speaking for myself here, I really appreciate the town and how far it’s come but I get that feeling from logging on the game day in and day out, not waiting for the wood mill to upgrade. I’ll admit, I ran my clock forward because there was nothing I wanted more than to try new bows from the shop my first playthrough. This could be circumvented by increasing drops from enemies possibly but currently the towns upgrades have a huge factor on character power level and it doesn’t feel great to be making your way through the game to be hit with a timer several hours long. Stacked on top of that the time investment to generate the materials for the crafting. I had to make copy worlds just to do material runs. My playtime is focused on weekends personally and I’m sure I’m not alone in having a specific time to grind, I don’t think this style of player will be thrilled with any form of time gated mechanics that aren’t minimal.
Could a 30 min or 1 hour timer for all buildings be worth testing?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know in my case the objection to the timers is very much not “it’s just a number” or that I don’t see buildings being constructed. I wouldn’t feel better with a progress bar, and I don’t think animations showing stuff happening would help either.
My problem is they simply don’t work well in this style of game, and the fact that they’re not a problem in a game like, say, Stardew Valley simply isn’t relevant here, IMO.
To use SDV as a useful contrast, in that game, yes, there’s plenty of timers, you have to wait for crops to grow and work to get done and so on. But the thing is, in SDV, that’s a core part of the gameplay that interacts with other parts of the game in interesting ways. You’re making decisions like “If I buy another sack of potato seeds and get them planted before the day is over, I can get them sold in six days and have just enough money to upgrade my barn before the season ends, but I won’t have time to go to the mine today if I do that, and without starting the extra ore smelting today I won’t have all the sprinklers I want when Summer starts.” You’re making meaningful, interesting decisions about it, and it works well, because SDV is, at the core, a game about time management.
Contrast that with NrftW, where the experience is “I just spent ten minutes getting the ore to upgrade my sword. Now I have to wait ten more minutes for it to smelt into bars so I can actually do the upgrade.” There’s no decisions to make, and the timer doesn’t change anything or add anything. It just makes a task you want to do take longer in a way that doesn’t involve any player decisions or interaction with the game. It’s purely passive waiting for the sake of waiting.
Having a cool animation of Ginnich upgrading the smithy isn’t going to make waiting four hours for the upgrade less obnoxious to me, because animation or no, it serves no useful purpose in this sort of game.
This is the main issue here. The developers have stated several times that they don’t want Wicked to be perceived as a ‘‘style’’ of game or be labelled as something or shoe-horned together with other titles. Wicked draws from various genres and forms it’s own game.
Not just simulation games but also survival games feature crafting timers. Some folks like them others don’t. Now I understand that time management is not a core component in Wicked as with those genres.
I also think it is important to understand that we don’t have the full game yet and don’t know what will be added. So time management might play a more important role in the future. And, we might be able to do more things during down time, such as waiting for crafting timers.
A middle ground could be an in game day and night cycle that is shorter and then having the construction take 3 days. Each day would then be half an hour or something. Which can then be sped up by sleeping and such. The only issue is that I don’t know what they have planned.
I do get the frustration though, especially if people have limited time due to their job. Having to wait 4 hours effectively means you can get to enjoy it the next day. IF you have time.
I don’t know if a shorter day/night cycle is needed, but I actually really like the idea of being able to sleep at the inn to pass time. I think that would pretty much completely solve the issue. It keeps the impression that things take time to do in the game world, but without wasting my time in the real world.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head about how the current system feels for people with a schedule, too. If I only have 2 hours to play today, spending an hour getting resources for town upgrades then being told “yeah, you don’t get any of that for 4 hours, see you next time you have time to play I guess” just feels awful.
This.
The inn idea sounds great tho. Normally I’m against adding steps if you could just remove the problem in the first place but that seems pretty minimal and provides use for the facilities already in game.
Dig the resting idea for now but thought I’d add some context to how Wicked time gate feels worse than, crops need time to grow.
Take Minecraft of all things. Crafting stuff to mine with mining stuff to craft with… Gotta love it.
So organic things need to grow in Minecraft, and this is generally accepted. While things take time to grow you can still gen plenty enough food (aka resources) from the open world to sustain your character and keep doing cool shit.
But at some point you want to spend less time gathering and desire to automate having plenty of resources so you can focus on not just staying alive but thriving in your environment and doing more cool shit.
You spend the time and resources to build an automated system, things grow and are gathered to a chest and from then on life is cozy.
The key differences from my perspective is that you’re constantly working on your progress and you the player are interacting with it directly during your play time. And the resources you’re growing over time don’t feel out of reach via other methods if you need some right this minute to keep working on something.
In wicked we are extremely limited in resource gathering. This includes base materials, new items, etc. just resources in general.
And a timer doesn’t interact with the the players in any way you’re just waiting.
To me a lot of this argument could be circumvented by having more resources in the open world so that the time gated aspects of the game are a cool feature and don’t feel like a hard stop for the players.
I’m still on the train of once you have a better tool than whatever the one-hit tier is of a resource, you should be getting more of that resource when farming. When I hit copper with a T10 pickaxe don’t just give me the same amount as a T1, give me like 3-4 instead
That could work really well considering the map isn’t procedurally generated so all the resource spots are where they are for a reason.
In addition to that I’m talking items as well. If you want to smash X item at the enchantment vendor you need a lot of bases. Currently the best way to do this is grabbing them from vendors. Hence the need or the perceived need to get vendors up to T3, etc.
Hmm, I think I would prefer it if dailies would give specific crafting materials as reward. Such as a quest to defeat a Monster that is consuming all ores in the mines - a miniboss. And, when you defeat him you get various ores. Or he spits out ore nodes.
Also larger ore nodes or an area with plenty nodes could be a thing as we progress further.
I like the idea of dailies and quest being more impactful for sure. Don’t think it would solve the issues on its own but would be a welcome change no doubt.
I still think this game could take even more BOTW inspiration than there already accidentally is. Add the big rock monsters + tree monsters for resource rewards
I dig it.
You’re saying like, defeat a rock golem that might say have a node on its back. Death animation puts them down face first and you hack away for resources?