List of things people don't like [From Reddit thread]
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 9:13 pm
Theres a thread on FTL here on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ ... _thoughts/
I wanted to paste over here parts of some of the most upvoted posts detailing what seems to be the top things people don't like about the game. I'm doing this because I want to do as much as I can to bring attention to these comments in hopes that the devs of FTL can take things into consideration and make the game better in future patches.
Someone in the thread mentioned how one of the devs doesn't seem to really care much about what people say should be changed in the game, and seems to be giving off the "Hey it's a roguelike, your opinions dont matter much because it doesnt fit with our vision of the game".
If that's really the case, i want to say something to the dev in question. There's a phrase in the world of writing that goes something like "Don't be afraid to kill your babies". In other words, you may think your script is the best thing since sliced bread, and negative feedback from people reading it means they're stupid and can't see your genius. Not the case. You need to take your audience into account. If the majority of your audience is saying something should be changed, whether you believe it doesn't fit your holy vision is moot; you need to change it to please your market. You don't tell them to deal with it, that's not how you find success. If I wrote a script for a war movie set int he Civil War, and I pitched it to my agent who passed it to some producers who then thought the screenplay would work better as a sci-fi/drama, guess what i'm spending the better part of the next month doing? Rewriting my script as a sci-fi/drama. I'm not telling them to keep their millions they want to send me to purchase the script because I refuse to turn it into anything other than a war movie.
Anyway, here goes:
"My biggest complaint is just how luck based it is, enemies scale too quickly compared to your own ship, so you generally need a really lucky game to make it anywhere."
"The game is too short for its roguelike focus.
Real roguelikes let you play a single character for hours and hours and explicitly reward very conservative play. FTL's theme of course discourages this, but I'm not sure it's to the benefit of the game itself.
Having an infinite Universe to explore with goals added in and maybe an ultimate game ending goal (such as Nethack's ascension) would make the game a lot more worth putting time into.
As it is, it feels like you can play for 30 minutes and maybe have a lucky streak in terms of which systems you jump into, but then end up fucked because all the dice roll go against you and there is no way to draw back ever.
Don't get me wrong, I like it a whole bunch, I'm still gonna play it, but I feel like it's slightly off and that prevents it from being a classic."
"There was so much potential in the game. It comes so close to being space Binding of Isaac. But it falls short for a few simple reasons.
There is no sure way to actually find necessary upgrades of any kind. In one game I went from sector 1 to sector 6 checking every shop available for a weapon upgrade because the zoltan ship's default weapon hits a brick wall sector 5/6. Every shop. Not a single one had weapons of any description and none were found in events. I constantly had 120+ to buy any possible weapon. But the run was ended then and there. This applies to every aspect of customization too. From crew or modules to drones or the criteria for unlocking other ships.
The final boss is nothing more than a frustrating "gear check". In Binding of Isaac you can kill mom with no items, extremely difficult, but possible. In most games a player who knows what to do can overcome challenges vastly undergeared or even naked. This is... very unlikely to ever happen for this game. You purchased from shops or found in events the pieces of a ship that can win the game, or you die. This style of boss greatly exacerbates the first point.
No useful keybinds. 1-4 for weapons works great, but is nothing else bound? You could trivially use rows on the keyboard for crew, system power and activating the ships abilities.
The events where it is possible to lose a crew member. All of them are FAR too risky to use lategame when you could lose the pilot or even worse your weapons officer. Early game you can give them a shot for the rewards but if they fail you have just screwed yourself and are better off restarting unless you have a surplus of crew already."
"they may need to cut down the randomness of weapon sales. I made it all the way to the boss on easy with my starting weapons, because I never had a chance to get any new ones. The only weapon I found through all the sectors was a Heal Bomb, which doesn't do damage.
As for 2, the boss is obviously impossible to beat with the starting weapons, so since I never had the chance to get any better weapons, I had a 0% chance of winning.
Otherwise, I find the game really fun. Found more weapons on my next playthrough but lost to mass fires in sector 3."
"I have 37 hours in the game, and people have already pointed out most of its flaws. But here are the main ones, in my opinion:
The time limit. This adds a bit of strategy to the game, because you have to constantly planning what route to take as well as trying to get information about the map. It also means that you can't really play it at your own pace or explore, which makes sense when you consider..
.. that the game isn't that deep. Roguelikes generally tell their stories by being random and having the sheer amount of content to make them feel like they aren't. There's usually new stuff to find even for veteran players, and everything in the world interacts based on the same defined rules. FTL, when compared to other roguelikes, doesn't.
But on its own, and at the $10 price point, it definitely has as much as you'd expect it to.
My ship is more or less always more powerful than the enemy's, so all these interesting ways that you can take out a ship really only applies to you. You'll never be killing an enemy ship by cutting off their air supplies or by making them burn to death unless you go out of your way to do so. It's mostly about targeting their shields with missiles and then shooting their weapon systems with your lasers, or just teleporting onto their ship and taking out their crew.
Not even the final boss is much of a exception to this, because when you take out their crew the game just throws some excuse about an AI running the ship, so it continues to function just fine."
"I like the game but I feel it suffers from the same thing Dead Rising suffered from. Why is there a time limit when all I want to do is play at my own pace? They should offer a separate game mode with no time limit."
"It has interesting ideas and its fun for a little bit. However, it has some deep flaws which kill its longevity. I don't think most people with get $10 worth of gaming out of it.
The randomness works against it instead of working for it. The game is very luck based, you need to get a few good events to stand a chance and the bad events are utterly devastating. The very tight fuel constraints and the unforgiving timer don't give you enough time to explore. As a result you don't have enough rolls of the dice to get the few good things you need to stand a chance in many games.
Good roguelikes tends to give you a fair chance and use the randomness to create a unique game experience each time. This game uses the randomness as the gameplay while the experience is mostly the same each time.
I don't see this game lasting most people more than a week. It just lacks depth, the game is all about the random luck and that becomes uninteresting quickly."
"Feels like the demo to a great game.
Lots of interesting mechanics and cool ideas, some fun weapons, and really interesting resource balancing. Multiple ways to play and win and it really captured the feel of something like Battlestar Gallactica. Being able to defend your weapons by pointless upgrading them is a pretty funny mechanic.
But way too short, enemies aren't really diverse, even on hard modes the AI seems kind of random (it seems to rarely link fire and will often fire things like missles at empty rooms). Constant time makes end games in fights completely boring. Autofire but no ability to link fire between weapons is frustrating. (and makes the autofire option basically useless past sector 1). The game could use more story types/options and controls.
Random chance seems way more important than skill. The chase mechanic moves way too fast and reeks of poor game design. (Inserting a frustrating mechanic to force balance is always a bad idea). The difficulty of the final fight is very item based.
Basically, it's an okay game. I played it for a while and I'll probably pick it up once in a while. I think it could be a much better game and I hope dev updates+mods make it into the amazing game it could be."
"It could be a great game with some changes.
The randomness is way too brutal, far beyond a normal roguelike
Boarding parties are so powerful you must build your whole defense around them, while no other weapon or event in the game has this much power on your choices.
The time limit on each zone is a little too short.
Finding weapons can be totally random causing you to get to very late zones with the same crud weapons you started with.
If modders pick this game up it could become a real gem."
I wanted to paste over here parts of some of the most upvoted posts detailing what seems to be the top things people don't like about the game. I'm doing this because I want to do as much as I can to bring attention to these comments in hopes that the devs of FTL can take things into consideration and make the game better in future patches.
Someone in the thread mentioned how one of the devs doesn't seem to really care much about what people say should be changed in the game, and seems to be giving off the "Hey it's a roguelike, your opinions dont matter much because it doesnt fit with our vision of the game".
If that's really the case, i want to say something to the dev in question. There's a phrase in the world of writing that goes something like "Don't be afraid to kill your babies". In other words, you may think your script is the best thing since sliced bread, and negative feedback from people reading it means they're stupid and can't see your genius. Not the case. You need to take your audience into account. If the majority of your audience is saying something should be changed, whether you believe it doesn't fit your holy vision is moot; you need to change it to please your market. You don't tell them to deal with it, that's not how you find success. If I wrote a script for a war movie set int he Civil War, and I pitched it to my agent who passed it to some producers who then thought the screenplay would work better as a sci-fi/drama, guess what i'm spending the better part of the next month doing? Rewriting my script as a sci-fi/drama. I'm not telling them to keep their millions they want to send me to purchase the script because I refuse to turn it into anything other than a war movie.
Anyway, here goes:
"My biggest complaint is just how luck based it is, enemies scale too quickly compared to your own ship, so you generally need a really lucky game to make it anywhere."
"The game is too short for its roguelike focus.
Real roguelikes let you play a single character for hours and hours and explicitly reward very conservative play. FTL's theme of course discourages this, but I'm not sure it's to the benefit of the game itself.
Having an infinite Universe to explore with goals added in and maybe an ultimate game ending goal (such as Nethack's ascension) would make the game a lot more worth putting time into.
As it is, it feels like you can play for 30 minutes and maybe have a lucky streak in terms of which systems you jump into, but then end up fucked because all the dice roll go against you and there is no way to draw back ever.
Don't get me wrong, I like it a whole bunch, I'm still gonna play it, but I feel like it's slightly off and that prevents it from being a classic."
"There was so much potential in the game. It comes so close to being space Binding of Isaac. But it falls short for a few simple reasons.
There is no sure way to actually find necessary upgrades of any kind. In one game I went from sector 1 to sector 6 checking every shop available for a weapon upgrade because the zoltan ship's default weapon hits a brick wall sector 5/6. Every shop. Not a single one had weapons of any description and none were found in events. I constantly had 120+ to buy any possible weapon. But the run was ended then and there. This applies to every aspect of customization too. From crew or modules to drones or the criteria for unlocking other ships.
The final boss is nothing more than a frustrating "gear check". In Binding of Isaac you can kill mom with no items, extremely difficult, but possible. In most games a player who knows what to do can overcome challenges vastly undergeared or even naked. This is... very unlikely to ever happen for this game. You purchased from shops or found in events the pieces of a ship that can win the game, or you die. This style of boss greatly exacerbates the first point.
No useful keybinds. 1-4 for weapons works great, but is nothing else bound? You could trivially use rows on the keyboard for crew, system power and activating the ships abilities.
The events where it is possible to lose a crew member. All of them are FAR too risky to use lategame when you could lose the pilot or even worse your weapons officer. Early game you can give them a shot for the rewards but if they fail you have just screwed yourself and are better off restarting unless you have a surplus of crew already."
"they may need to cut down the randomness of weapon sales. I made it all the way to the boss on easy with my starting weapons, because I never had a chance to get any new ones. The only weapon I found through all the sectors was a Heal Bomb, which doesn't do damage.
As for 2, the boss is obviously impossible to beat with the starting weapons, so since I never had the chance to get any better weapons, I had a 0% chance of winning.
Otherwise, I find the game really fun. Found more weapons on my next playthrough but lost to mass fires in sector 3."
"I have 37 hours in the game, and people have already pointed out most of its flaws. But here are the main ones, in my opinion:
The time limit. This adds a bit of strategy to the game, because you have to constantly planning what route to take as well as trying to get information about the map. It also means that you can't really play it at your own pace or explore, which makes sense when you consider..
.. that the game isn't that deep. Roguelikes generally tell their stories by being random and having the sheer amount of content to make them feel like they aren't. There's usually new stuff to find even for veteran players, and everything in the world interacts based on the same defined rules. FTL, when compared to other roguelikes, doesn't.
But on its own, and at the $10 price point, it definitely has as much as you'd expect it to.
My ship is more or less always more powerful than the enemy's, so all these interesting ways that you can take out a ship really only applies to you. You'll never be killing an enemy ship by cutting off their air supplies or by making them burn to death unless you go out of your way to do so. It's mostly about targeting their shields with missiles and then shooting their weapon systems with your lasers, or just teleporting onto their ship and taking out their crew.
Not even the final boss is much of a exception to this, because when you take out their crew the game just throws some excuse about an AI running the ship, so it continues to function just fine."
"I like the game but I feel it suffers from the same thing Dead Rising suffered from. Why is there a time limit when all I want to do is play at my own pace? They should offer a separate game mode with no time limit."
"It has interesting ideas and its fun for a little bit. However, it has some deep flaws which kill its longevity. I don't think most people with get $10 worth of gaming out of it.
The randomness works against it instead of working for it. The game is very luck based, you need to get a few good events to stand a chance and the bad events are utterly devastating. The very tight fuel constraints and the unforgiving timer don't give you enough time to explore. As a result you don't have enough rolls of the dice to get the few good things you need to stand a chance in many games.
Good roguelikes tends to give you a fair chance and use the randomness to create a unique game experience each time. This game uses the randomness as the gameplay while the experience is mostly the same each time.
I don't see this game lasting most people more than a week. It just lacks depth, the game is all about the random luck and that becomes uninteresting quickly."
"Feels like the demo to a great game.
Lots of interesting mechanics and cool ideas, some fun weapons, and really interesting resource balancing. Multiple ways to play and win and it really captured the feel of something like Battlestar Gallactica. Being able to defend your weapons by pointless upgrading them is a pretty funny mechanic.
But way too short, enemies aren't really diverse, even on hard modes the AI seems kind of random (it seems to rarely link fire and will often fire things like missles at empty rooms). Constant time makes end games in fights completely boring. Autofire but no ability to link fire between weapons is frustrating. (and makes the autofire option basically useless past sector 1). The game could use more story types/options and controls.
Random chance seems way more important than skill. The chase mechanic moves way too fast and reeks of poor game design. (Inserting a frustrating mechanic to force balance is always a bad idea). The difficulty of the final fight is very item based.
Basically, it's an okay game. I played it for a while and I'll probably pick it up once in a while. I think it could be a much better game and I hope dev updates+mods make it into the amazing game it could be."
"It could be a great game with some changes.
The randomness is way too brutal, far beyond a normal roguelike
Boarding parties are so powerful you must build your whole defense around them, while no other weapon or event in the game has this much power on your choices.
The time limit on each zone is a little too short.
Finding weapons can be totally random causing you to get to very late zones with the same crud weapons you started with.
If modders pick this game up it could become a real gem."
