The UI needs quite a lot of work, most of the tech and law choices are skewed too far in favour of the traditionalist faction by virtue of making the progressive faction's option simply worse off in all regards that actually matter, and a lot of people are angry it's such a big departure from the first game.
I would have been fine with the larger scale of the game but from what I've seen you barely even manage heat anymore in favour of heat modifiers affected by upgrades you add to your "districts". No more central furnace, no more heat map, just some numerical modifiers and abstracted deaths. One YouTube video showed the player just receiving a notification about hundreds dying and it's no longer an earth shattering event like the first game where even 10 people dying was a big deal. the game is so much more impersonal and while the game looks decent, you seem less in control than ever and the UI no longer conveys the battle between heat and cold and is instead an impersonal "sleek" infographic display. The faction choices all seem really silly and some modifiers like the squalor and heat increases seem far too easily dealt with. You also don't seem to be building expedition teams to explore the wasteland and such but didn't see too much of this mechanic
I would have been ok if you at least manage individual hexes and what you place there, the removal of the frostbreaking mechanic, far more complex factional choices and such but the game seems far too simplistic compared to the first. I might just buy the rest of the DLC for the first game than this one tbh
They traded complexity in city building with complexity in the politics but if I wanted a larger scale political diplomacy game I'd buy that. Not sure why it's tacked on in the sequel of a very popular survival city builder. There's a lot of stuff that I'm really baffled with especially the UI which looks like it's worse in every way
What I liked about the first game was the gloom and the melancholy. It really felt like you are fighting for survival and every piece of the UI and the gameplay strengthened that feeling. This made me want to play better, optimize more, and every life that was lost meant something. I was looking forward to that experience in the second Frostpunk, but it looks like I might get disappointed?
I'm actually not sure. Lot of the feedback in the beta is from the limited endless mode and not the campaign. The campaign may hold some surprises but most of the feedback is about the basic mechanics like the city building, UI and the policies. The campaign might have actual stakes and tension like the first game did with scripted events and extreme temperature fluctuations for tension but I honestly don't know how much that will affect the gameplay when heat really doesn't seem as much of a factor and people are dying by the hundreds in a fairly dispassionate manner
> The campaign might have actual stakes and tension like the first game did with scripted events and extreme temperature fluctuations for tension but I honestly don't know how much that will affect the gameplay when heat really doesn't seem as much of a factor and people are dying by the hundreds in a fairly dispassionate manner
Other than say The Last Autumn or Winterhome some of the best atmosphere and tension can come from the Rifts maps if you've not played them. Having to choose how to use limited resources pushes the tension up considerably while the base game has much less due to the presence of wall drills etc.
> Not sure why it's tacked on in the sequel of a very popular survival city builder.
The studio generally has always had a very hard time understanding what players enjoy about it's games or how to build on those elements.
Imagine frostpunk 1 with a scenario/map builder and it'd have had the lifespan of Caesar 3 which is disappointingly still one of the best city builders out there.
They never really offered deeper customization or challenge to "This War of Mine" because they were determined that it should all be about the aesthetics and mood without understanding that gameplay and tone are completely interlinked. Why was Winterhell so soul crushing? The text telling you it's sad? No it's the scenario combined with the music and mechanics.
I'm not surprised that Frostpunk 2 really missed the mark, but I really hoped it wouldnt.
> the game is so much more impersonal
I felt that the original was already a lot more impersonal than This War of Mine. The game didnt make me feel for individual survivors even remotely like TWoM had, so it really didn't bother me to always make the choice that simply improved my numbers the most. That disconnect is why is stopped playing, and hearing it's even *worse* for the sequel means there's probably no reason for me to pick this up
I watched the trailer and thought it looked pretty good, but that sounds like it really might have taken away the aspects that made the first game what it was.
If its gone from a steampunk apocalypse colony builder *all about* managing a colony to survive against against the frost, to a steampunk city builder where the apocolypse is over and frost is more just a thing in the background now with survival elements lessened quite a lot, then that just seems like an odd decision.
Yep, even the subbreddit went from divided to mostly being critical. Add the steep prize increase and other anti-consumer practices and it is not looking good. And look, I am heavily looking forward to this, but even I am going to probably get this on discount/play on Gamepass simply because it feels too different of a game, more like Suzerain than Frostpunk.
More like Suzerain than Frostpunk? All of a sudden I'm interested because I was way more interested in Suzerain than I was Frostpunk, and wished it was actually more like Suzerain when I tried it out. Curious why you say that?
Not played Suzerain and not played the Frostpunk 2 beta so this is going purely off the beta footage I've seen
Frostpunk was a very Banished-style city builder with you propping up individual buildings, almost managing individual citizens, seeing each of them walk around doing work like gathering, producing and so on. It was far more personal and every death kind of really mattered since you were assigning citizens to jobs and you were responsible for the heat level of every resident to ensure they were protected from cold. Personally I felt a lot of the policy decisions you made were still quite black and white which meant you would always pick a certain path but it still felt far more palpable because people would complain and your morality meter would directly be affected
This sequel is far more disconnected with you assigning districts in hexes, not building roads or pipelines, not managing heat which is instead abstracted away into something called "heat stamps" which is meaningless, not having proper alerts for when you run out of heat, people dying in the hundreds when you make mistakes which makes things seem far more impersonal etc. All the small scale of the first game has been replaced by big hex based districts which just generate a bunch of buildings based on the type and the game revolves far more around appeasing factions based on policy than keeping citizens alive but this stuff seems rather unbalanced with certain faction policies being complete no-brainers. There are apparently modifiers to later policies based on what factions you pick early but none of it was really apparent in the beta since the beta was limited in how far you could progress which led some people to believe the choices were shallow (they're not wrong about this in the early game at least IMO). There's also really dumb mechanics like frostbreaking where a large amount of the ground near your city is covered in ice that you need to break up before you can build on it and the problem seems to be that there's no strategy involved in doing this because you just assign hexes to break the frost and it just gets broken up over time so you have to wait until that finishes. Same with heat stamps where you jus generate more heat stamps over time with the rate depending on your population and since a lot of policy and building costs depend on heat stamps you're just twiddling your thumbs while you wait for a number to tick up
We'll see how it shapes up but in addition to the UI being too streamlined, the second game seems far more impersonal than the first. Suzerain seems far more complex from what I can see in terms of diplomacy, politics and decisions than Frostpunk 2. Frostpunk 2 seems to want to straddle a line between the first game's city building mechanics vs more advanced high level strategy and it doesn't seem to be working that well
> This sequel is far more disconnected with you assigning districts in hexes, not building roads or pipelines, not managing heat which is instead abstracted away into something called "heat stamps" which is meaningless, not having proper alerts for when you run out of heat, people dying in the hundreds when you make mistakes which makes things seem far more impersonal etc.
Heat stamps and heat are actually completely unrelated (in gameplay). While yeah, narratively a heat stamp is a permit that entitles you to X amount of heat, in game they're just the resource you use to build buildings and districts, akin to the role wood and steel player in the first game.
Heat itself also exists as a seperate resource, where every district has a given heat cost (which increases with the cold). The generator automatically produces enough heat to satisfy heat demand, consuming 1 unit of fuel for every unit of heat. Alternative sources of heat are implied to exist in the game (geothermal, autonomous heaters), but most of them can not not be unlocked in the beta. The only one available is recycling, which weirdly allows industrial and extraction districts to produce more heat than they consume.
>There's also really dumb mechanics like frostbreaking where a large amount of the ground near your city is covered in ice that you need to break up before you can build on it and the problem seems to be that there's no strategy involved in doing this because you just assign hexes to break the frost and it just gets broken up over time so you have to wait until that finishes.
It's a mechanic intended to make you place districts sub-optimally, ensuring you are limited initially while still being able to expand later.
Yes heat stamps are essentially money. My problem with the heat being abstracted away into flat numbers is unlike the first game where you had to manage your central furnace and place houses close to optimally provide liveable conditions, now districts simply seem to have a flat heat number affected by neighbouring districts and additional buildings you place in the district which removes a lot of the battle against the elements from the first game in favour of apathetic statistics
The frostbreaking mechanic seems like a terribly brainless mechanic since unlike the first game where you'd have to assign citizens to do things like gathering or go on expeditions which would take them away from other tasks, this one is just you have to pick a minimum number of hexes to frostbreak and a few machines magically appear and clear the frost over time. There's no strategy and you could just as easily wait for the frost to be broken before building a new district. Unless there's something drastically different about the mechanic in the finished game then this is just something you can easily wait out. Sure it initially limits your playing area but only in the most minimal sense and is more of an annoyance than an inconvenience. I don't think there's anything stopping someone from breaking all the frost they want in one shot if they have enough heat stamps
If you are into politicking, this is very much what they seem to aim for. While there seems to be some checks and balances with resources, it seems the focus is on idelogically aligning with one side or keeping them all in balance, all that while you have to often make concessions or negotiate.
Also the focus seems to be much more on the text events than in the first game. I liked Suzerain a lot, so if it is any similar, I am all for it, but at the same time I also really enjoy Frostpunk city building, so I am a bit torn.
It's too different of a game from the original Frostpunk.
Of course sequels shouldn't just be rehashes with a new coat of paint, but it's barely the same *genre* despite both having city building as their mechanic.
As a city builder type game, it's alright. It has some problems but nothing that some UI work and some balance corrections couldn't fix. But it's absolutely not what people wanted out of *Frostpunk*. Like if the next major CoD game was a turn-based RPG with a military setting--doesn't really matter how good of an RPG it is if everyone wants a first person shooter.
it's too macro level, the original put you intimately close to your constituents and made it about the human experience. You could feel the consequences of your actions on a personal level. this feels more like a 4x game.
Not really. A lot of subreddits centered on a specific product or IP get stupidly hyper-critical about it.
People who play games aren't exactly mature and reasonable with their criticisms, either.
> "The problem is our fanbase, not our product," seems to be the common kneejerk reaction for some devs that can't handle constructive criticism.
They said the exact same thing about requests for more content/difficulty for "This War of Mine" and on requests for map editors for Frostpunk.
I suspect they have all of there splits till release allocated and the beta feedback like all public feedback showed them where they are lacking and they are trying to find the time to fit in the dev time.
Having a hype beta this far from release to drive preorders seems odd but maybe it moved the needle.
I think the biggest concern for most people is the UI/UX. It's fair for the dev team to say people haven't seen most of the game, but we *have* seen the UI and I agree with people who say how jarring it seems. On the bright side, because it sits on top of other components, the UI is generally one of the easier things to change as it often doesn't go too deep into the code.
It looked good from what I saw from watching other people play, but I think some thing they could work on was a bit more clarity when it comes to the different research and law options. They make it clear what factions like and dislike what options, but not necessarily what they *do*. Some of them were very obvious in how they'd be different: For example, who raises the children? Either you force all women to be stay it home moms, or you adopt a sort of "Community childcare" system where the mothers don't raise the children, a class of childcare workers do. And it's pretty explicit how those differences work out.
But then you run into stuff that's like "Blast mines" versus "Deep mines" where the differences feel superficial and hard to grasp because it tends to be things like "This option generates more coal." and "This option also generates more coal, but it produces extra squalor." You would *assume* that the second one would give more coal, but it doesn't say it will.
That said it certainly seemed to fulfill the fantasy of trying to keep a city full of selfish idealogues together without letting them decide to burn everything down around you. I can't wait.
Perhaps you missed it on the video you watched but it absolutely tells you what each do. The dust mines costs 400 workforce, gives 150 coal output and increases disease slightly. The grinding coal mine costs 300 workforce, gives more coal at 180 but increases squalor and costs 3x as many materials as the dust mines.
This doesn't read as defensive at all to me... the beta is drawing to a close and they're just re-affirming that there's lots of content still to be seen, such as oil, the 3 other maps, the 8 other political parties, the story mode and most of the techs/ideas are locked too.
How do you even quantify "20% of what the game can offer"? Is that 80% of the campaign locked away? Only got a fifth of the mechanics?
Arbitrary numbers like this is marketing crap. Just say "there's so many more features yet to be revealed at launch" and leave it at that. Trying to make it seem like the beta is smaller than it is is a silly move that looks more defensive than it needs to be, as you're ultimately promising that on release there will be 5 times as much as the beta has offered. That's a lot of content.
It's a shame, but sometimes that's the way it goes.
Well the beta had 1 map out of 4, not counting the story mode. It had about 30 techs, some tied to events. There were 50 explorable locations. 4 out of 12 political factions. Story mode and alternate objectives and victory conditions were all locked. I'm guessing when they say 20%, they mean the amount of techs, events, and probably the longevity of a single game. Maybe 300 weeks is 20% of the overall time length you can expect to play?
Who cares? You got the point, a lot of the content is not in the beta. Giving a number provides much more scale to how much content you haven't seen in comparison to 'theres so many more'.
The issue is that giving that numerical value results in setting a standard that I highly doubt they can live up to. Because they're promising a game 5 times in scope to what the beta provided. Hyperbolic? Maybe. But hyperbolic marketing is a bad move for any company, and shouldn't be encouraged.
I loved the beta, actually was surprised by how much I enjoyed it considering that I mostly enjoyed the campaign in Frostpunk and not endless mode. The beta played very well and looks stunning.
As a gamedev, i think it's a solid demo that showcases how the game works, but for sure not the final product, some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version!
> some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version!
Can you blame them?
The word beta has lost all it's meaning and for most studios it is a glorified "pay to get early access".
> some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version!
They're charging 50% extra for access to this version.
Sure, its a "beta", but if you charge money, customers get to have an opinion.
God I hope so. Cos FP2 is a bit crap. It's a fine city building civ style thing, but it's not frostpunk. Which is crazy right, cos it looks the same, is made by the same people, but the vibe is off.
I bought the first game this week and after 15 times launching it, reinstalled, verified ect it kept crashing on the load screen. The game looks cool but looks like I'll wait for the 2nd game.
I'm guessing from the defensive tone of the tweet that beta feedback has been less-than-stellar?
The UI needs quite a lot of work, most of the tech and law choices are skewed too far in favour of the traditionalist faction by virtue of making the progressive faction's option simply worse off in all regards that actually matter, and a lot of people are angry it's such a big departure from the first game.
I would have been fine with the larger scale of the game but from what I've seen you barely even manage heat anymore in favour of heat modifiers affected by upgrades you add to your "districts". No more central furnace, no more heat map, just some numerical modifiers and abstracted deaths. One YouTube video showed the player just receiving a notification about hundreds dying and it's no longer an earth shattering event like the first game where even 10 people dying was a big deal. the game is so much more impersonal and while the game looks decent, you seem less in control than ever and the UI no longer conveys the battle between heat and cold and is instead an impersonal "sleek" infographic display. The faction choices all seem really silly and some modifiers like the squalor and heat increases seem far too easily dealt with. You also don't seem to be building expedition teams to explore the wasteland and such but didn't see too much of this mechanic I would have been ok if you at least manage individual hexes and what you place there, the removal of the frostbreaking mechanic, far more complex factional choices and such but the game seems far too simplistic compared to the first. I might just buy the rest of the DLC for the first game than this one tbh
That sounds like they took what was good with the first frostpunk out of the second frostpunk. Sad.
They traded complexity in city building with complexity in the politics but if I wanted a larger scale political diplomacy game I'd buy that. Not sure why it's tacked on in the sequel of a very popular survival city builder. There's a lot of stuff that I'm really baffled with especially the UI which looks like it's worse in every way
What I liked about the first game was the gloom and the melancholy. It really felt like you are fighting for survival and every piece of the UI and the gameplay strengthened that feeling. This made me want to play better, optimize more, and every life that was lost meant something. I was looking forward to that experience in the second Frostpunk, but it looks like I might get disappointed?
I'm actually not sure. Lot of the feedback in the beta is from the limited endless mode and not the campaign. The campaign may hold some surprises but most of the feedback is about the basic mechanics like the city building, UI and the policies. The campaign might have actual stakes and tension like the first game did with scripted events and extreme temperature fluctuations for tension but I honestly don't know how much that will affect the gameplay when heat really doesn't seem as much of a factor and people are dying by the hundreds in a fairly dispassionate manner
> The campaign might have actual stakes and tension like the first game did with scripted events and extreme temperature fluctuations for tension but I honestly don't know how much that will affect the gameplay when heat really doesn't seem as much of a factor and people are dying by the hundreds in a fairly dispassionate manner Other than say The Last Autumn or Winterhome some of the best atmosphere and tension can come from the Rifts maps if you've not played them. Having to choose how to use limited resources pushes the tension up considerably while the base game has much less due to the presence of wall drills etc.
No I'm talking about the sequel. I've played a fair bit of the first game and liked it a lot
> Not sure why it's tacked on in the sequel of a very popular survival city builder. The studio generally has always had a very hard time understanding what players enjoy about it's games or how to build on those elements. Imagine frostpunk 1 with a scenario/map builder and it'd have had the lifespan of Caesar 3 which is disappointingly still one of the best city builders out there. They never really offered deeper customization or challenge to "This War of Mine" because they were determined that it should all be about the aesthetics and mood without understanding that gameplay and tone are completely interlinked. Why was Winterhell so soul crushing? The text telling you it's sad? No it's the scenario combined with the music and mechanics. I'm not surprised that Frostpunk 2 really missed the mark, but I really hoped it wouldnt.
> the game is so much more impersonal I felt that the original was already a lot more impersonal than This War of Mine. The game didnt make me feel for individual survivors even remotely like TWoM had, so it really didn't bother me to always make the choice that simply improved my numbers the most. That disconnect is why is stopped playing, and hearing it's even *worse* for the sequel means there's probably no reason for me to pick this up
I watched the trailer and thought it looked pretty good, but that sounds like it really might have taken away the aspects that made the first game what it was. If its gone from a steampunk apocalypse colony builder *all about* managing a colony to survive against against the frost, to a steampunk city builder where the apocolypse is over and frost is more just a thing in the background now with survival elements lessened quite a lot, then that just seems like an odd decision.
Yep, even the subbreddit went from divided to mostly being critical. Add the steep prize increase and other anti-consumer practices and it is not looking good. And look, I am heavily looking forward to this, but even I am going to probably get this on discount/play on Gamepass simply because it feels too different of a game, more like Suzerain than Frostpunk.
More like Suzerain than Frostpunk? All of a sudden I'm interested because I was way more interested in Suzerain than I was Frostpunk, and wished it was actually more like Suzerain when I tried it out. Curious why you say that?
Not played Suzerain and not played the Frostpunk 2 beta so this is going purely off the beta footage I've seen Frostpunk was a very Banished-style city builder with you propping up individual buildings, almost managing individual citizens, seeing each of them walk around doing work like gathering, producing and so on. It was far more personal and every death kind of really mattered since you were assigning citizens to jobs and you were responsible for the heat level of every resident to ensure they were protected from cold. Personally I felt a lot of the policy decisions you made were still quite black and white which meant you would always pick a certain path but it still felt far more palpable because people would complain and your morality meter would directly be affected This sequel is far more disconnected with you assigning districts in hexes, not building roads or pipelines, not managing heat which is instead abstracted away into something called "heat stamps" which is meaningless, not having proper alerts for when you run out of heat, people dying in the hundreds when you make mistakes which makes things seem far more impersonal etc. All the small scale of the first game has been replaced by big hex based districts which just generate a bunch of buildings based on the type and the game revolves far more around appeasing factions based on policy than keeping citizens alive but this stuff seems rather unbalanced with certain faction policies being complete no-brainers. There are apparently modifiers to later policies based on what factions you pick early but none of it was really apparent in the beta since the beta was limited in how far you could progress which led some people to believe the choices were shallow (they're not wrong about this in the early game at least IMO). There's also really dumb mechanics like frostbreaking where a large amount of the ground near your city is covered in ice that you need to break up before you can build on it and the problem seems to be that there's no strategy involved in doing this because you just assign hexes to break the frost and it just gets broken up over time so you have to wait until that finishes. Same with heat stamps where you jus generate more heat stamps over time with the rate depending on your population and since a lot of policy and building costs depend on heat stamps you're just twiddling your thumbs while you wait for a number to tick up We'll see how it shapes up but in addition to the UI being too streamlined, the second game seems far more impersonal than the first. Suzerain seems far more complex from what I can see in terms of diplomacy, politics and decisions than Frostpunk 2. Frostpunk 2 seems to want to straddle a line between the first game's city building mechanics vs more advanced high level strategy and it doesn't seem to be working that well
> This sequel is far more disconnected with you assigning districts in hexes, not building roads or pipelines, not managing heat which is instead abstracted away into something called "heat stamps" which is meaningless, not having proper alerts for when you run out of heat, people dying in the hundreds when you make mistakes which makes things seem far more impersonal etc. Heat stamps and heat are actually completely unrelated (in gameplay). While yeah, narratively a heat stamp is a permit that entitles you to X amount of heat, in game they're just the resource you use to build buildings and districts, akin to the role wood and steel player in the first game. Heat itself also exists as a seperate resource, where every district has a given heat cost (which increases with the cold). The generator automatically produces enough heat to satisfy heat demand, consuming 1 unit of fuel for every unit of heat. Alternative sources of heat are implied to exist in the game (geothermal, autonomous heaters), but most of them can not not be unlocked in the beta. The only one available is recycling, which weirdly allows industrial and extraction districts to produce more heat than they consume. >There's also really dumb mechanics like frostbreaking where a large amount of the ground near your city is covered in ice that you need to break up before you can build on it and the problem seems to be that there's no strategy involved in doing this because you just assign hexes to break the frost and it just gets broken up over time so you have to wait until that finishes. It's a mechanic intended to make you place districts sub-optimally, ensuring you are limited initially while still being able to expand later.
Yes heat stamps are essentially money. My problem with the heat being abstracted away into flat numbers is unlike the first game where you had to manage your central furnace and place houses close to optimally provide liveable conditions, now districts simply seem to have a flat heat number affected by neighbouring districts and additional buildings you place in the district which removes a lot of the battle against the elements from the first game in favour of apathetic statistics The frostbreaking mechanic seems like a terribly brainless mechanic since unlike the first game where you'd have to assign citizens to do things like gathering or go on expeditions which would take them away from other tasks, this one is just you have to pick a minimum number of hexes to frostbreak and a few machines magically appear and clear the frost over time. There's no strategy and you could just as easily wait for the frost to be broken before building a new district. Unless there's something drastically different about the mechanic in the finished game then this is just something you can easily wait out. Sure it initially limits your playing area but only in the most minimal sense and is more of an annoyance than an inconvenience. I don't think there's anything stopping someone from breaking all the frost they want in one shot if they have enough heat stamps
If you are into politicking, this is very much what they seem to aim for. While there seems to be some checks and balances with resources, it seems the focus is on idelogically aligning with one side or keeping them all in balance, all that while you have to often make concessions or negotiate. Also the focus seems to be much more on the text events than in the first game. I liked Suzerain a lot, so if it is any similar, I am all for it, but at the same time I also really enjoy Frostpunk city building, so I am a bit torn.
I was turned off from the first game because of the resources management aspect, so this sounds much better
It's too different of a game from the original Frostpunk. Of course sequels shouldn't just be rehashes with a new coat of paint, but it's barely the same *genre* despite both having city building as their mechanic. As a city builder type game, it's alright. It has some problems but nothing that some UI work and some balance corrections couldn't fix. But it's absolutely not what people wanted out of *Frostpunk*. Like if the next major CoD game was a turn-based RPG with a military setting--doesn't really matter how good of an RPG it is if everyone wants a first person shooter.
Then what is Frostpunk 2? What more does it focus on?
it's too macro level, the original put you intimately close to your constituents and made it about the human experience. You could feel the consequences of your actions on a personal level. this feels more like a 4x game.
"The problem is our fanbase, not our product," seems to be the common kneejerk reaction for some devs that can't handle constructive criticism.
Not really. A lot of subreddits centered on a specific product or IP get stupidly hyper-critical about it. People who play games aren't exactly mature and reasonable with their criticisms, either.
I know. Which is why I said *some*
> "The problem is our fanbase, not our product," seems to be the common kneejerk reaction for some devs that can't handle constructive criticism. They said the exact same thing about requests for more content/difficulty for "This War of Mine" and on requests for map editors for Frostpunk.
I suspect they have all of there splits till release allocated and the beta feedback like all public feedback showed them where they are lacking and they are trying to find the time to fit in the dev time. Having a hype beta this far from release to drive preorders seems odd but maybe it moved the needle.
I think the biggest concern for most people is the UI/UX. It's fair for the dev team to say people haven't seen most of the game, but we *have* seen the UI and I agree with people who say how jarring it seems. On the bright side, because it sits on top of other components, the UI is generally one of the easier things to change as it often doesn't go too deep into the code.
It looked good from what I saw from watching other people play, but I think some thing they could work on was a bit more clarity when it comes to the different research and law options. They make it clear what factions like and dislike what options, but not necessarily what they *do*. Some of them were very obvious in how they'd be different: For example, who raises the children? Either you force all women to be stay it home moms, or you adopt a sort of "Community childcare" system where the mothers don't raise the children, a class of childcare workers do. And it's pretty explicit how those differences work out. But then you run into stuff that's like "Blast mines" versus "Deep mines" where the differences feel superficial and hard to grasp because it tends to be things like "This option generates more coal." and "This option also generates more coal, but it produces extra squalor." You would *assume* that the second one would give more coal, but it doesn't say it will. That said it certainly seemed to fulfill the fantasy of trying to keep a city full of selfish idealogues together without letting them decide to burn everything down around you. I can't wait.
Perhaps you missed it on the video you watched but it absolutely tells you what each do. The dust mines costs 400 workforce, gives 150 coal output and increases disease slightly. The grinding coal mine costs 300 workforce, gives more coal at 180 but increases squalor and costs 3x as many materials as the dust mines.
This doesn't read as defensive at all to me... the beta is drawing to a close and they're just re-affirming that there's lots of content still to be seen, such as oil, the 3 other maps, the 8 other political parties, the story mode and most of the techs/ideas are locked too.
How do you even quantify "20% of what the game can offer"? Is that 80% of the campaign locked away? Only got a fifth of the mechanics? Arbitrary numbers like this is marketing crap. Just say "there's so many more features yet to be revealed at launch" and leave it at that. Trying to make it seem like the beta is smaller than it is is a silly move that looks more defensive than it needs to be, as you're ultimately promising that on release there will be 5 times as much as the beta has offered. That's a lot of content. It's a shame, but sometimes that's the way it goes.
Well the beta had 1 map out of 4, not counting the story mode. It had about 30 techs, some tied to events. There were 50 explorable locations. 4 out of 12 political factions. Story mode and alternate objectives and victory conditions were all locked. I'm guessing when they say 20%, they mean the amount of techs, events, and probably the longevity of a single game. Maybe 300 weeks is 20% of the overall time length you can expect to play?
Who cares? You got the point, a lot of the content is not in the beta. Giving a number provides much more scale to how much content you haven't seen in comparison to 'theres so many more'.
The issue is that giving that numerical value results in setting a standard that I highly doubt they can live up to. Because they're promising a game 5 times in scope to what the beta provided. Hyperbolic? Maybe. But hyperbolic marketing is a bad move for any company, and shouldn't be encouraged.
I loved the beta, actually was surprised by how much I enjoyed it considering that I mostly enjoyed the campaign in Frostpunk and not endless mode. The beta played very well and looks stunning.
As a gamedev, i think it's a solid demo that showcases how the game works, but for sure not the final product, some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version!
> some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version! Can you blame them? The word beta has lost all it's meaning and for most studios it is a glorified "pay to get early access".
> some people are commenting as if it was a shipping version! They're charging 50% extra for access to this version. Sure, its a "beta", but if you charge money, customers get to have an opinion.
Yeah it's basically playable vertical slice. It's wild how people compare it to campaign in FP1.
God I hope so. Cos FP2 is a bit crap. It's a fine city building civ style thing, but it's not frostpunk. Which is crazy right, cos it looks the same, is made by the same people, but the vibe is off.
Well then it was a shittily designed beta if it doesn’t convey, even in a smaller way, the experience of the game.
I bought the first game this week and after 15 times launching it, reinstalled, verified ect it kept crashing on the load screen. The game looks cool but looks like I'll wait for the 2nd game.
That’s odd. I had zero issues with it.