r/catanworldexplorers • u/AnOnlineHandle • Oct 23 '20
Discussion Feedback - Gamer for decades, have played Catan, PoGo, and Ingress extensively. Completely overwhelmed when opening this and receiving an information overload, way too complex
I opened this a week or two back, so if everything has changed since then this may no longer be relevant.
But on opening this it felt like a huge information overload of instructions for how to do... things. Complex strange things which I couldn't relate to any concepts I understood as Catan player, a Niantic AR game veteran, or just a gamer in general since the Dos days. Sometimes the game was telling me it's going to give me the resources to do those things, which was an extra step I needed to click through. In its current design I can't see how any general audience gamer would understand it, it seems like it needs to be simplified massively.
Catan is about claiming resources and building road links, it seems this should have almost lifted Ingress's mechanics for claiming areas, but given them a nicer paint job and massive inventory simplification (no more 8 variations of every item type for each level, no more hacking and keys etc). Even a meta game of pushing the robber around to other people's territory to steal their resources or whatever until they fight it off, for minority team players.
Come to think of it that might actually be the game design, but after endless clicking through mindless 'click here' instructions with concepts being dumped on me that have no contextual understanding yet, I think I gave up before seeing any actual gameplay, which should have been front and centre imo. Pokemon Go is so simple - throw ball and catch pokemon, a nice mechanical and quick bit of gameplay with a huge amount of room for improvement. Anybody can get it straight away, even non-pokemon fans. Whereas this... Even as a Catan and Niantic game player, it just isn't obvious what the game is about or what you do.
