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I find it really interesting how even if a game is pretty buggy but overall the design of the gameplay is good you can overlook a lot of things. However if the design is just bad and it plays bad, it makes everything so much more frustrating to deal with.

@lethn very many indie games bank on this to an even greater degree, unfortunately.
Often, only the concept is novel and good, not even the design.
I don't have the vocabulary to give this a good name.

Examples include Raft, Rimworld and whichever failed early access indie game that made millions on the idea before not delivering a good final product.

I think it's mostly to do with the dearth of novelty in AA and AAA.
Which game did you have in mind?
I was just thinking generally, Fallout New Vegas is a great example of this. It's a completely buggy piece of shit, everybody acknowledges that, but because the gameplay loop is so satisfying it's easier to overlook the flaws.

Baldur's Gate 3 should be a game I somewhat like, but the games' design flaws piss me off every time and make it very frustrating to play through. Meanwhile by comparison Baldur's Gate 2 feels like I'm enjoying fine caviar.

You know what's funny? I know what you're posting about with Rimworld but I didn't struggle anything like as much with the RNG and shooting mechanics. I've pretty much figured out how to exploit the fuck out of them. The game doesn't run like shit either because it's 2D so save scumming isn't difficult to do lol.

@lethn >doesn't run like shit
you should try it modded, it absolutely does!

I wouldn't say I struggle with them. I play naked brutality most of the time. I just find that it lacks quite a bit of convenience for things you often do. manually setting everyone to the "indoors" area and queuing equipment changes undrafted (if you draft them, they will stand there for hours until the raiders finally come) gets old pretty quick. As does micromanaging your doctor because he feels like eating instead of stopping the blood loss of your favorite colonist.
It's definitely all doable, just a lot of tedium, I find.

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@lethn of course I do! I played with a mod that splits doctor and nurse too. Vanilla forgot about that.
Feeding slaves, prisoners, wounded colonists, wounded prisoners, wounded slaves, gets unwieldy quite quick. Not that one couldn't manage. I just don't want to.

>there were so many better ways to handle it than how the dev did.
True. The game clearly lacks a "yellow alert" button.
I think if hunters had more polish put into scheduling, they would not have permanent "ate without table" penalty
You could have a doctor that starts his shift fed and will not leave until all patients are taken care of, even if it takes longer. You could even have him anticipate arriving patients and go to the medbay as soon as someone is on the way to a sick bed.
And what is the point of doctors using glitterworld medicine for a colonist with the flu? There is none, Tynan just didn't polish it.

As you can tell, I've thought about this quite a bit, lol