Suggestions ( Updated )

McNady

I love this game, I played the demo until the point of hitting master rank, getting a prestige 10 outpost and hitting chimera level 50. Its quickly become a great little obsession of mine and id like to give some general suggestions for when the game releases. To confirm if the game releases in the current state I would still buy it and although this list is long that only means ive played this game too much to notice some of these things. With any luck this list will provide useful in some capacity.

QOL:

• the ability to call the crawling bot back with some form of genetic bait, this is just so in larger bases a player isn't incentivised to wait a cycle for it to return.
• An outer ring on bases the crawling bot can navigate but cant be built on, players can force the bot to go the long way round to reach an entrance rendering it useless unless waited for
• more transparent trap range and detection range when building. "range" can be shown but this breakdown would be nice
• replay favouriting and sharing

Balancing:

• if the crossbow cant destroy traps I believe its ammo pool could be vastly increased to counter filling a room with enemies and using lava to stop quick traversal ( possibly two ranged weapons couldn't be used at once to balance )
• claw traps stopping when colliding with lava
• an option for sticky grenades to counter mass trap placement that isn't at floor level/is above lava
• an option for bullets to pierce, this could negate players loosing ammo from bullets getting stuck in corpses that slide too much and could counter mass enemy spam. This could extend to also having them bounce off / fall from lava blocks to stop them from being lost in them.
• fire trap hitbox restrictions, they can shoot infinitely and don't damage other traps, being able to overlap them is a bit much because of this. Also their hitbox could be blocked by other active hitboxes ( pistons for example ). Or their cooldown increased to balance them among other raged traps.
• There needs to be a better way to get cells than just level up, maybe some can be gotten randomly from dead enemies or can be harvested similar to synthite. Parts are incredibly common, i have over 50 of every item to bring with me to raids and I still feel like i have too much
• Some form of item/ability to temporarily negate the lava block damage (could extend to fire traps for balancing ), this could counter covering every inch of a room in them to functionally disable grappling ( yes 1.5 seconds of invincibility technically counts but a massive room filled with flying enemies and a path that cant be quickly navigated is too powerful of a strategy for what little it requires

General:

• change some temporary buffs to either be permanent at levels or to work based on amount of raids. for example buffs to your own prestige points don't feel good if their time based and you don't know if you'll get any raids, changing these to a permanent buff or for the next x raids would work nicer
• Some form of fake player to temporarily distract enemies ( could also trigger traps to cleverly bait enemies into a poorly placed trap? ) this could be used by players to navigate enemy spam
• A more clear reward for outposts, should builders be focussing on creating a fun experience and be rewarded for accolades or for creating an extreme challenge? Maybe both should be rewarded and when raiding players should be able to opt into the preferred type with maybe rank rewards being weighted based on this. I believe different types of raiders would like to try different types of bases and focussing on one or the other in terms of rewards could hinder the player experience. ( prestige points should probably not be the only benefit of accolades too )
• Make some systems more transparent, I never noticed the ability to clear outposts upon building and it took me upsettingly long to notice the trap range preview and that I can see my ranked progress to the next rank. I believe this may be due to the fact some of these systems are very new to give the devs the credit they deserve.
• The Outpost prestige system feels a little off, like I need to farm currency if I ever want to keep them active, and spend time managing multiple to do so. Personally id rather it be if the Outpost has reached the needed amount of points when the timer is up, this is done automatically. Just so it doesn't feel so grindy to keep multiple outposts active for more than a day.
• Many players have said this, but a way to quickly collect all resources from an outpost
• Other more tangible rewards for getting an outpost up to prestige 10. Maybe its because the champion outpost isn't currently a thing but it didn't feel massively rewarding to keep prestiging an outpost for any reason other than to keep it active. I understand the idea of outposts that don't get enough points being disabled but maybe more rewards could be given or an outpost could stay active semi-indefinitely if it reaches max prestige.
• More traps that promote creativity, the best trap in my opinion is the disappearing block. it breaks from the mold of either using a large room of enemies to catch players or winding hallways with semi-obscured traps. It allows for hidden traps to be revealed, enemies to start pathing after the collection of the gen mat and many other creative applications. Anything that gives players this kind of expanded creativity ( in a balanced form ofc ) is a great thing to keep outposts feeling fresh.

Ranking:

• After having reached master rank I feel like the ranking system is a nice incentive to try to minimise deaths on an outpost and get a sense of player progression, however it still seems to be in a primitive state. The devs could use it as more of an official player ranking so players can compete, however this would require also weighting ranking points based on the outpost difficulty ( time to beat, length, average player deaths ) It seems currently the system just requires you to beat outposts in under X deaths ( in my experience Brutal outposts shifted from under 6 to under 3 as I ranked up ) however in some cases less than 3 deaths is trivial while in others less than 10 is a massive achievement.
• Otherwise the devs may go with a similar ranking system in DBD where it isnt meant to be such a rigid ELO system this is fine but then id rather it be more transparent about where the points are coming from and a similar system to prevent too much de ranking like in DBD, this is only as it seems to be a large amount of luck what difficulty of outpost you come across and players shouldn't be punished for playing difficult ones and dying more than 6-3 times.
• Add more ranks? I liked the journey to master and feel it would be nice to have higher places to shoot for, especially once ive unlocked all the general progression items, even it its as simple as the rank points doesn't stop going up above master and it becomes even more difficult to climb.

As much as a lot of this is easier said than done, if any of these ideas become useful in anyway I'll be happy. Thanks again to the Devs for a great game. ❤️