The most central flaw of SOR2 for now: pacing doesn't match the gameplay loop.

[twilit crane]

So this is not a feedback over a specific feature but some general thoughts about the overall experience I had with the demo compared to SOR1.

SOR1 has an incredibly fast pace. There is little to no time outs between action pieces. You always have something to do, a way to get quickly to the relevant place, and emergent gameplay and behaviors just happen all around you.
This roller coaster gameplay loop fits perfectly with the straightforward structure of the game and is dopamin inducing. That imo explains most of the success of the first game.

Why does it fall flat now?
SOR2, as an open world game, is designed around much slower pace : you actually have to find the quest giver, travel through long distances, sometimes in cities with a lot of unused space which doesn't support the game's elements to interact much with each other like they did in confined spaces in SOR1. When you have done a quest, you have to travel back to the quest giver to finish.
In short, you spend much more time getting from point A to point B (and then backward from B to A) without engaging as much with the fun parts of the loop, and with less emergent situations.

This lengthiness coupled with very isolated gauntlets is OK in some open world games like Skyrim, Zelda BOTW or sandbox survival games, but not here. These games works well for different reasons tho:

• Skyrim is about immersion and roleplay (something you don't have much of in SOR2, a more arcade game with NPCs not even having a name and your character being unidimensional).
• BOTW has an engaging map to explore, as you have to plan where you climb, how to bypass this overpowered monster without being seen, what to cook not to freeze to death, etc. In SOR2 you walk (with no sprint) or get in a car that won't do well in tight spaces like forests (and on top of it, you have to find the right entrance to cities with walls).

[the rest in comments]

• In survival games, having to gather food and protect yourself at night is necessary and means you can't travel in a straight line without engaging with smaller gameplay loops of crafting before accomplishing quests and progress towards the end. SOR2 in that regard is very casual (not a problem by itself, mind you).

But SOR doesn't work like that. You are less roleplaying than you are making quick progress (numbers go up, dopamin increases!). You are not navigating the map, as the map is a canvas on which the game spawns buildings, trees and roaming NPCs. The world is not and enemy you have to overcome, just a place you pass by.

What do I suggest, then? Here are some ideas:

• Add the possibility to teleport back to the quest giver upon completing a task (if they are not in the city the player currently is) or remove the need to go back to them entirely (phones and reward teleportations are thing).
• Quests involving escorting NPCs should make the player escort them in different places randomly picked upon accepting the quest. Otherwise, character trades whose gameplay involves many of such quests (like the cop if you keep it as he is) require a lot of backtracking all the time.
• Tinker the city-making algorithm so that buildings are as densely spawned as in SOR1 (beside roads of course) so interactions can occur and finding our way in the streets is a challenge by itself. Cars going by should spawn at the right moment and drive fast to become a danger like trains in the first game. This prevents the roadway from being a safe zone and increases the possibilities of "stuff" happening.

• Make the woods and overall wilderness more dangerous, perhaps with surprise attacks from bushes (like SOR1 cannibals) or animals getting very territorial. Living far from roads and towns in a cabin should be risky, especially if you don't have four walls to protect yourself at night.
• NPC targets should rarely be just hanging around in the middle of nowhere waiting to be beaten up. This makes it trivial to deal with them without starting a chain reaction that you have to escape or remove any necessary planification and use of gadgets/syringes. In SOR1, the Mayor is usually visiting a lively building or hiding in a well guarded fortress when not walking from one place to another in very crowded streets.
• Add a bit of roleplay elements. Not as far as giving NPCs specific names and traits, but just enough to make the player want to take the time to engage with non minmaxing parts of the game, thus making playing at a slower pace more enjoyable.

I am thinking of the reputation system in cities for example. In SOR1, you gain reputation by leaving a floor with friendly NPCs behind and lose it when they hate you, but now you gain reputation by simply shooting people. You could revert to a system based on persistent NPCs' opinions in towns/sectors of the map but with more ways to befriend NPCs, and make afraid runaway hostiles submissive if they are humans, and contrariwise losing reputation with annoyed, imprisoned or hostile NPCs.
Another light RPG element would be making more casual objects interactable. Sit in a bar and a neighboring NPC might become friendly after a few seconds (you can actually meet friends in bars! even if it's less effective than paying a round, it's free!). Look for clues on bodies and destroyed objects to get a hint at where the culprit went. Sit in a church and you improve relations with the cultists. Smell flowers or take a shower to get a temporary buff. Watch TV and get a clue about where in the world a disaster is currently happening. Light on & off lamps. Interact with sinks to hear a funny gulp gulp sound. Make it possible to clean the mess on the floor yourself. Hell, talk to persistent NPCs to ask them where they work and generate a temporary mark on your map!

Okay, this was long (sorry) but hopefully helpful. Good luck for the EA release! 😄

[surreal furnace]

I agree with a lot of what you said. I thought of the same thing but couldn't quite put it into words

[severe mural]

Make mobsters

In game

Also:
#1299546291914805350

[neon bramble]

I really love those small interactions you noted; it's always good to have more ways to interact with the world.

[stiff cape]

Totally agreed, good job

[spare juniper]

Great post, and similar to what I was asking in the "What Kind of Open World" post. I think the pace this game is going for is much slower, and that's going to be a problem for people coming from SOR1.

But that's just the beginning of the issues. The SOR formula inherited fully from SOR1 inhibits some open world concepts. Having so many completely different characters with completely different approaches means that there is no strong story that can be formed. And there's only so much people are going to want to hang out in a completely generic open world where NPCs can be killed permanently in a few seconds (not much attachment there, right?). The mechanics were designed for the very quick pace of SOR1, where death of NPCs meant nothing unless a policeman or an ally sees you. In fact, almost all the mechanics of SOR were designed around creating rapid chaos. All of this rapid chaos doesn't mean much when you can just run away to a new area, or becomes frustrating when you've messed up an area too much long-term.

[twilit crane]

The generic-ness of the world is another issue altogether that needs to be tackled during EA, in my opinion, by adding more biomes, building templates, events, subclasses, powers & gadgets and above all improving the procgen to make maps that are not all variations of a giant grass square with some square city dots.
However the pacing issue has to be adressed before EA release or the game will not recover (something I would be sick of, given how I like the concept of SOR1-but-it's-persistent-and-you-can-RP-living-in-this-world).
As SOR2 is built from SOR1, I think it's more realistic to expect changes to go in the "conform the world to a fast paced gameplay" direction rather than the "tinker every axioms of the SOR formula to conform to the open world" direction.

[twilit crane]

Though, when I think about it, "more content" to feed the procgen will not entirely solve the generic-ness issue by itself as countless "randomly generated" games have proven. The world will only surprise us if it comes to life via emergent situations. More complex behavior from NPCs (idk maybe having parties being organized, some people talking nonsense to each other in pubs, bank robberies, animals being curious...) and events (random fires breaking out by themselves, earthquakes destroying structures thus bringing new opportunities to sneak in... I think @runic hearth actually asked people at some point to give ideas?) and systems like what already exists with air vents and syringes or drinks.
But again, this comes after the pacing issue.

[runic hearth]

Yup yup, much of this can be attributed to the fact that the game was literally not balanced at all for the demo, and much of this is already planned and will be addressed in the roadmap that I'm gradually getting done. Also of note I'll probably be making use of a cell phone (suggested elsewhere in this forum) to speed up the process of getting and completing quests.

[twilit crane]

This is excellent news and a personal relief. It really was a good decision to release a demo/playtest and to postpone the EA, even if it was a bit frustrating for players (it would have been worse to discover a game full of empty spaces and non interactable world elements). Wishing you good luck 🤞

[winter wigeon]

i feel like adding the teleport function from the first game back would solve a lot of these problems and maybe making vehicle focused missions so there's still need to using cars in the game, i played up until there was no content left to explore in the demo and the back and forth was definitely the worst part of it all

[spare juniper]

I think the hardest part is figuring out what the average experience should be like. SOR1 had a really tight design, with smallish areas full of interaction between characters, and the danger levels every 3 levels really heightened the tension. The small levels meant that you could keep track of all the funky interactions and see their effects over time, even if you couldn't follow everything.

Having those interactions take place in large areas, or areas where you can just leave, mean there's going to be a lot less awareness of these systems' effects. And long term gameplay means you're not going to want to do extreme things that could affect you badly in the long run.

[twilit crane]

Time limited missions could be interesting to push towards a more extreme approach.

[spare juniper]

That would be interesting.

[spare juniper]

Could work well

[spare juniper]

Putting it a different way, immersive sim + open world kind of cancel each other out, as any systems whose effect you cannot observe might as well not exist. This is why open world games like Pirates! had you affect the strategic level rather than having small immersive-sim level effects. You can attack a town to make it poor, or help a new governor arrive there to make it rich. You could convice Indians to raid a town, which would then weaken it so it could be conquered by another nation.
Even with these systems in place, it was hard to notice your impact - most of the world operated like clockwork (which is also a fun thing).

[twilit crane]

They don't necessarily cancel each other out but it's difficult to balance. The strategy layer is already in the game with factions and price of goods being affected by factory destructions. This could tie well with the immersive SIM elements if it also affects physical stuff like butler bot factory destroyed > less technical maintenance > things are easier to hack. Or make scientists faction more powerful > unlock rare gadgets to be sold by regular NPCs, etc

[spare juniper]

Faction relationships to you are tracked, but is faction strength tracked?

[twilit crane]

I think it is. Iirc the devlogs

[spare juniper]

And what can happen if a faction is weak or strong? How does that express itself in the game world?