Recently we've been getting long awaited Quality of Life changes added to the game,
but the game still has a lot of room for improvement.
So to commemorate the start of Season 5,
I'll be throwing out some changes we might see in the future,
ones that I can't stop thinking about.
Quick rundown on how this video will go:
First, I'll briefly explain the Quality of Life change,
then after that I'll be summing up my thoughts into:
- how much the change will add to the game
I'll shorten the label to Game+ because it's too long.
- how much effort will be required
with the huge caveat that I don't have access to the code base or the development pipeline,
so there's no way I can be accurate unless I get my hands on a Singularity,
and even then I'd probably still won't be able to do it.
and wrapping it up with some final thoughts,
usually around the lines of “should they do this?”
In the previous video, I listed the major pain points with the game's system,
so that's where we'll start.
We'll skip the UI for now and head straight to the Onboarding changes.
The first change is something I also mentioned in that video,
an in-game manual.
Like I said there, the game uses a combat system alien to most gamers,
with lots of new concepts.
An in-game manual, preferably one with animated examples and a search feature
would go a long way to help new players get the hang of things.
This is gonna be a huge improvement to the game,
but will require a LOT of effort.
So, should they do this?
On mobile, probably not.
The game's already big enough as it is,
and the high res videos would take even more space.
On Steam, space isn't that big of a deal,
but it's still gonna take a huge chunk of the development time for new features
Thankfully there's an alternative.
An external manual.
No, I'm not talking about directing players to the Fandom Wiki, Reddit, or Discord.
With no way to guarantee their accuracy, that's just asking players to take a gamble.
Oddly enough, I'd also include YouTube
as another place where you can't fully trust the info,
even my videos.
What I'm suggesting instead is to again, take a cue from Factorio
and setup a self-hosted wiki.
The community contributions would then be carefully curated to ensure their accuracy.
Not as convenient as an in-game manual,
but still a good resource for new players.
Overall, an easier alternative thanks to community input,
though I'm still on the fence here.
Setup and admin can be outsourced,
but the overall moderation process could take way more effort than it looks on the surface.
Next one's a low-hanging fruit that I expect to happen soon:
Updated Combat Tips
By now the devs should have enough player info to know which tips are really useful,
and what needs to be added to the list.
For example, tapping and holding the screen to speed up the E.G.O animation,
or how Offsetting cancels Evade skills.
This one can also be crowdsourced.
Small change, minimal effort,
this might even arrive without any fanfare.
Last thing for onboarding, updating the tutorial.
The tutorial from Day 1 and what we have right now are mostly the same
with one major upgrade:
a bit about explaining Coins were added,
which results in the next part about Clashing make much more sense.
But yeah, same tutorial.
I could nitpick some parts that could be fixed,
but for this one I'd rather look at the bigger picture.
If they're gonna overhaul it, I'd like to see:
- before explaining Resonance, talk about the Auto-Battler aspect of the game,
for example, by default the Sinners will choose the targets by themselves.
Heck, maybe even break the 4th wall and
let Faust warn the player that this isn't your usual Turn-Based RPG combat.
But ultimately, a tutorial update should only come after the official manual,
either in-game or external
so the new players have a way to clear up
any concepts that weren't clearly explained by the tutorial, updated or not.
This change won't affect the majority of players,
but could greatly increase the retention in case there's a surge in new players.
Effort wise is similar: the framework is there,
they just need to make sure that they don't break it -
crashes or soft locks are surefire ways for a new player to drop the game.
Overall, something they should consider,
though as I said, this works best when timed correctly.
On to the UI changes…
I'll preface this section by repeating what I said in the previous video -
a combat system that combines wildly different genres means
the UI will always be cluttered and busy.
So I won't bother talking about a UI overhaul.
I also won't be talking about Area-of-Effect
and how to help players make sense of the complicated sub-target rules.
Maybe by next season I could think of ways to simplify it in the UI side.
But now, not yet.
Alright, first change, a Turn Order Display.
Veteran players with over a thousand hours of Ruina and Limbus Company combined
don't really need this,
but for new players, a UI element showing the predicted order of attacks
would be a great way to ease them in to the combat system.
Sure there will be instances where the order won't play out as predicted,
but that's just how it is.
And yeah, the UI's already full so it's got to be a popup.
Overall, another big deal for new players with a high dev cost.
As for whether the should they do this, well,
they already tried before.
So it all depends on why they removed it -
if it's just because they had other important stuff to do, maybe we'll see it added.
But if they realized it just wasn't worth the effort...
Speaking of popups showing info,
how about a Battle Log?
In the past year and a half, the game has evolved
to add a ton of new interactions between effects.
Problem is, it can be a bit overwhelming to understand what just happened.
So a log showing a list of what just happened,
like which effect dealt damage, or which attack applied a status,
would clearly explain how things work.
Again, no space in the UI so this has to be a popup.
Not sure if it's a huge upgrade to the game experience,
so I'll just say it's Medium to High.
In terms of effort, I'm fairly sure that there's already a log,
at least for the combat part.
That's the simplest way to pull off the pseudo- simultaneous combat in Regular Encounters.
Turning that into a popup, and logging the other stuff like the Start of Turn effects
might be a more complicated than expected.
They should absolutely do this,
but then again I'm biased as this feature would make writing guides a lot easier.
No more going through the footage frame by frame.
Next one's another low-hanging fruit,
display skill numbers on the dashboard.
You don't need this for heavily used Identities.
But for new or underused IDs, having a visual indicator on the dashboard
telling you which is the weak Skill 1
or the strong Skill 3
will save you a couple of seconds from double-checking it.
Could be a number, could be something like dots or lines.
And of course, it has to be togglable in the options.
Not a big change, so simple that they could've thought about it already.
Next would be a Search function
to help you find Identities that synergize with each other.
But after thinking about it, the UI's just not suited for it yet.
So let's go for an easier alternative:
add some Effect icons on the Skill display alongside the Damage Type and Sin.
Nothing much to say here.
If they can do it without much effort,
it's a good stopgap until they can build better team building UIs.
And last on the UI changes -
the Cycle Clashes button.
Still not in the game, and I find myself in situations where it's more useful here
than it was in Ruina.
At this point, however,
players got used to the Last-In-First-Out style
so this really isn't that necessary.
Also like the Turn Order bar,
I'm sure they've thought about adding this in
so there's probably a good reason why it still isn't.
For this last part, I'll be listing changes that don't quite fit in the previous two.
Spread out extra attacks on Focused Encounter Win-Rate button.
Right now most of the extra attacks go to the slowest enemy unit.
Maybe add a toggle option
to spread out the attack using the Regular Encounter scheme?
Not a big change, saves you a couple of seconds on mob encounters.
A good addition if it's not too hard to implement.
Turn the Event Skip button to Skip All.
While the current skip does speed things up a bit,
the extra prompts and its distance from the edge for Mobile mean that
spamming tap anywhere else can be more convenient.
Changing the behavior to skip all pages and prompts might make it more useful.
Minimal change, maybe?
Go to Mission buttons.
Maybe you weren't paying attention
and went straight to the daily missions before completing a Luxcavation.
A small button sending you directly to the screen will save a second or two.
Also a minimal change, might have to squeeze it in a bit.
Also expected by many gacha gamers.
Streamer mode.
Friend requests aren't that big of a deal, but
maybe you just don't want your viewers
to comment on your elevated Lunacy count pre-Walpurgis Night.
Or maybe you're one of those people streaming on Mobile
and don't want to show your e-mail address.
Don't know if it's worth adding though.
And last for this video,
fix the Project Moon Steam Curator page.
There's a reason why I used SteamDB in my previous video for this bit -
and that's because you can't do the same in Steam
as Limbus Company is missing.
While they're at it, they should think about doing what ConcernedApe did
and convert the page to a combo Publisher and Developer page.
Doesn't help improve the game per se,
though it should help with discoverability,
say, for announcements.
Alright, that's it for this quick, lower-effort video.
I'll return to this next season to see what got in.
Thanks for watching and see you in the next one.