Goonhub
09-01-2022, 07:24 AM
some people have already made excellent points with more direct relevancy to the experience of chemistry itself, so i won't give my own two cents on that. but i would like to take this discussion as an opportunity to put my own thoughts on how changes as a whole are handled on goon.
i've recently had this feeling that an increasing amount of gameplay changes are not quite made with the idea of "fun" in mind. in this particular change, for example, i do not see how the extra layer of tedium really helps generate fun for anybody. sure it takes a bit more thinking and time to mass produce chems, but the extra 2 minutes to set up the group isn't gonna stop the mad scientist from mass producing whatever death chem they had in mind. and it certainly won't do much to get in the way of the odds that some innocent spessman is gonna die to it. it's just....more work for the scientist. if anything youre just putting more work on chemistry in general, and having to wait longer as a non-scientist needing a few extra beakers of whatever substances for your job is gonna be less appealing now. the way i see it, it's an overall net loss of fun for everyone involved.
i'm not gonna get into detail with other examples cause i know some people are tired of me talking about them, but i believe my point is clear. i dont think "slapping mindless extra steps onto the op thing" is a wise gameplay design solution for a sandbox game. especially when it doesn't fix the specific problem, it just makes the whole department slowly but surely a more unfun thing to do. now i don't think this particular change is gonna break chemistry or make it unplayable or anything, i just want to point out that i feel like the change was not made with the right mindset, and if changes like these keep being made, slowly but surely, goon ss13 will become a very boring game with over half the game mechanics inaccessible in a 90 minute shift.
i've recently had this feeling that an increasing amount of gameplay changes are not quite made with the idea of "fun" in mind. in this particular change, for example, i do not see how the extra layer of tedium really helps generate fun for anybody. sure it takes a bit more thinking and time to mass produce chems, but the extra 2 minutes to set up the group isn't gonna stop the mad scientist from mass producing whatever death chem they had in mind. and it certainly won't do much to get in the way of the odds that some innocent spessman is gonna die to it. it's just....more work for the scientist. if anything youre just putting more work on chemistry in general, and having to wait longer as a non-scientist needing a few extra beakers of whatever substances for your job is gonna be less appealing now. the way i see it, it's an overall net loss of fun for everyone involved.
i'm not gonna get into detail with other examples cause i know some people are tired of me talking about them, but i believe my point is clear. i dont think "slapping mindless extra steps onto the op thing" is a wise gameplay design solution for a sandbox game. especially when it doesn't fix the specific problem, it just makes the whole department slowly but surely a more unfun thing to do. now i don't think this particular change is gonna break chemistry or make it unplayable or anything, i just want to point out that i feel like the change was not made with the right mindset, and if changes like these keep being made, slowly but surely, goon ss13 will become a very boring game with over half the game mechanics inaccessible in a 90 minute shift.