curious as to how you feel about slime rancher's gameplay as a whole, if you wanna talk about it
oh boy.
slime rancher has a unique chaos-focused gameplay design unlike any other game ive played while also going for a chill farming vibe. after years of playing the first game, and just a handful of hours in the second.. i believe the gameplay loop and level design to be the reason I havent played the series in recent years.
everything in slime rancher is random.
crop yield, crop grow time, slime spawns, slimes feeding themselves, everything. and this is the core, foundational game design philosophy they’ve dedicated themselves to. and they’ve doubled down on the randomness in sr2.
shop stock is random every day. unlocking blueprints come unpredictably. resource nodes are randomly scattered about. weather, which can dictate slime AND material spawning, is 100% random. not even to what weather happens, but what DEGREE the weather is.
this much random chance has made the series appeal to me less and less with time. i love to strategize beyond all else in a farming game, and slime rancher’s “chill chaos” just doesnt accommodate my style of gameplay anymore. i want resource extractors. i want to have a reliable income in terms of resources so i can do all the incredible decorating they’ve added.. but i dont think anything could get me to play hundreds of hours of sr2 to collect resources by hand at the mercy of rng. i did this with gilded gingers for fun. i never wanted to do that for EVERYTHING.
now, to look at sr2’s gameplay and design decisions more closely..
slimes live in corrals. boxes. this is one thing i thought could have always been expanded on. enclosures are as simple as ever, essentially what they always were right from sr1 beta. slimes being fed are still dictated by the chance of food hitting their mouths at the right angle, right time, with the slime in the right mood. it just doesnt work reliably, leading to slime chaos despite any player’s best efforts. the devs seem to see this as part of the game, and not something that could be revolutionized or improved upon. the ranch expansions are as simple as ever. we can decorate them though…! i guess…! i wish there was more thought and love put into the ranching. more involved slime care. i had a lot of ideas i never drew down for how things could change..
moving on to the level design itself, the areas in sr2 feel more confusing than ever for me to navigate. and ive stubbornly believed that is not on me. the islands are focused on experiencing beauty and wonder, but not really designed with normal gameplay quirks that can help players navigate without even knowing they’re being helped. like landmarks. sr2 has the volcano, split tree and the conservatory. these three things are actually pretty difficult to spot in most locations, which really fucking sucks. if you’re lost on the sr2 map, they really just want you to open the map or wander. another thing that has always bugged me a TON, is in the rainbow fields there is a fucking death drop into water that looks like youre walking home. like…. LIKE???? another thing that feels especially controversial to point out is how the super-saturated aesthetic of every area can make an area feel samey, confusing even. rainbow fields have rainbows everywhere. imo, you could have gone for that idea while having brightly coloured trees, rocks, grass, that are DIFFERENT COLOURS. FOR CONTRAST. pick bright colours that complement eachother and sculpt the world with it. when i think of rainbow fields, i honestly can only imagine the purply blue grass and moss on grey stones…
it feels as though sr2 was all about pushing the teams creative and aesthetic abilities with a huge sacrifice to regular gameplay design. a slime rancher sequel was an opportunity to build anew from the ground up and address huge issues with 1’s unreliability due to physics and loading zones, etc. the full game isnt out yet so i cant speak on whether they’ll ever take these kinds of issues into consideration in future patches.
anyway at the end of the day, for a game so focused on aesthetic, slime rancher 2 doesnt even have properly textured tangle largos. I wont bother to look or photograph them all myself because tangles are only from rare weather. but next time you’re in game, check out that flat batty tangle flower for yourself. until that flower gets a proper texture patch i dont really have much else to say.
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There are many Saints Row fans that only like the first 2 games, and I can see why, it became a bit of a circus from 3 on but, honestly, I enjoy playing the circus that is Saints Row The Third, IV and Gat out of Hell. But... I do hate what happened after that... Agents of Mayhem and especially that fucking Saints Row reboot... idc about em, and it's sad cause Gat out of Hell had 5 endings, it's fun and all that they made the "rebuild the planet" ending canon but, first of all, they could have done that better... they could have remade the original SR1 with changes, making it just different enough to be worth playing instead of the original SR1 which is almost lost now as it was Xbox only (*cough* play it on an emulator *cough*) but from the "find a new home planet" and "let Johnny Gat be the new leader of Hell" they could have made games too. On the new home planet ending Kinzie said it'll be our toughest fight yet... I wanna play that. And Johnny as the new leader of Hell? I loved Gat out of Hell, even tho it is really short... I would have loved more of that... they really did the worst possible thing with that reboot... give me Johnny as the new Satan or let me take over a new planet with the crew 😭
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