Recent Changes
You might have realised lots of updates in the last few days. Taking the feedback to heart we changed some approaches in the Crash DLC. I would urge everyone, who didn't like it so much at first, to play the first loop again. One of the main problems was, how unrewarding collecting bones felt. That should be much much better now.
To everyone whose playthrough got interrupted by updates: I'm sorry for the post-release changes. They can cause confusion in sessions that were started in an older version, but they make newly begun sessions much better.
Postmortem
**You should not read this article if you have not played at least halfway through the Crash DLC**
We spent the past week discussing what the differences between the base game and Crash are, and what exactly is making it less fun for a part of the player base.
For Crash I decided to do a lot of things differently that are common in the main game, because I am not fully sure about the effects of some of the established conventions. So I wanted to shake things up a little to experience and learn what it's like if done differently.
I dunno how you feel about this, but to me Crash lacks the feeling of "going out on an adventure and returning home sometimes" which "anchored" the experience in the maingame. The ingredients missing are: a home, an environment that feels huge, the feeling of no place but home being completely safe. How did you feel about that?
The origin
The basic idea of Crash was the loop structure. It originated in an Unreal level that I built in 1999, which was also called Crash. The level is the worst! I had just started with level design months before that. I had zero skills but tons of enthusiasm. I couldn't find a video of the first half but there is a video of part 2. It's bad in every way, don't watch it! https://www.unrealsp.org/viewtopic.php?t=3595&p=68912
In essence, you crash with your ship on an alien planet. You sneak into an alien base by putting on an alien costume and take their ship to fly away.
The end joke was that once you take off with your spaceship, you just crash again in the same place and it restarts the level. There was no reason to play it again, because it was just the same thing.
Loops
I liked that basic idea because it's unexpected and funny and I thought it would make sense in a Metroidvania style with you having new abilities every time. So the game chases you down the same route over and over again, but you can do different things every round; which is what Metroidvania's do anyway.
I think during development my basic idea got a bit lost because the whole thing became too huge. It was supposed to be much smaller and more linear. Now there are so many side regions and things that lead away from the main path and every loop takes too long.
It was supposed to be quick 15 minute loops maybe with a much more linear path. So now it's something else than I had in mind and it's hard for me to tell if my basic idea still gets through, because I just cannot experience it the way other players do. Maybe later when I have more distance from it.
Repetition
But thinking about it now: a lot of the fun in such a game comes from the mystery of what you're going to find next.
In Crash that mystery doesn't exist so much. It's great in Loop1, but not so much after that because there are no big changes. We did the thing with the Church for example, but it was much bigger and impactful in the script but in the game it's barely noticable, because it has no impact on the gameplay itself.
A core problem obviously is that we barely have new abilities, but the main game lived from not knowing what abilities you will get later. The float buckle recontextualizing the world is a magic moment and that is impossible if you know this stuff in advance.
Originally you were finding scrap everywhere in the map to build the rocket. But since you get a new ability in the outskirts and in Orangeburg I could not let you get back to the outskirts within a loop because you could solve the entire game in one loop. But because you cannot return, the scrap economy was very hard to balance. You could leave a lot of scrap in the outskirts behind that would then be inaccessible, so we made the decision to have bones in one region and scrap in the other. That way the economy was very clean again. But that brings me to one of the main problems:
Secrets and Combat
Before the recent update, the anticipation for secrets was nearly gone, because you only got the same objects over and over. In the main game it would always be a surprise what you get, now it was obviously just bones and scrap, so ... meh. It should feel much better now tho.
It's the problem you automatically get when you remove combat from the equation. All the fun of finding secrets feeds into making your life easier with enemies. Without enemies the game will feel a bit hollow. You might say, we have enemies and combat, but to be honest, the enemies are just decoration in Crash and you will probably never come close to dying. They are neither annoying nor challenging, which has the implications I just described.
To be able to make upgrades exciting you need them to solve problems/annoyances that the player has.
In the future I want to have much tougher enemies and also have them be gates in the world. You cannot die your way through them, you have to beat them in one go. The idea is that you can beat them without any upgrades, but it's very hard. And finding all the secrets will make it easier and easier. So secrets are optional, but only if you're very skilled.
Regarding secrets the big lesson learned from Crash is, that secrets have to be 100% optional. The moment they become mandatory, everything sort of falls apart.
Combat-wise the feedback often heard on the base game was that it could be better without. Now we hear much more often, that Crash needs way more combat.
Puzzles
I don't know how you feel about them. We kept on using the same abilities you already knew, but we couldn't just repeat puzzles, so we had to make puzzles that are sometimes a bit "too much", some of them are too convoluted.
The strenght of the maingame puzzles was that they were always centered around one very simple but creative idea. There are many cool puzzles in Crash that I love, but for many I feel a bit like the best ideas had already been done before so the Crash puzzles are not standing out so much.
I am not worried about this point for the future, because we'll have a great new set of abilities for SL2 that will make it all fresh.
In the image above you see one of my favourites. But I think it's being held back by the fact that it's not mandatory. Maybe more linear passages are better for the game?
Plot
We hear a lot that the plot in the maingame is much better than in Crash. At first it really sounded strange, because the main game barely has any plot and has just hint giving no-name NPCs standing around everywhere. The writing and plot densitity in Crash is much higher.
Then we realised a crucial difference. In Crash all the plot is happening around you and has not much to do with you. In the maingame, as little plot as there is, it always hinges on you. You're the one driving the plot forward. That makes it a lot more enganging. And in general when watching people play the games, I notice, that people pretty much don't care about story at all. When a cutscene starts, they only think about the next corner they wanna check out for a secret.
Early access testers
I would say the closed pre-release testing was too much focused on bugs, but the general vibe of "Crash is not as good as the main game", that we see in the reviews now, did not come across to us at all during these months of testing. So in the future, please tell us those things if they are apparent to you. Being friendly to us is of no value. Tell us your real feelings. It's fine!
DLC2
Most of the issues mentioned won't affect DLC2. Structure wise it's way more like the maingame. But nothing will ever be like DLC1 again, because the loop structure is definitely unique.
Summary
Reading through the steam reviews, the main criticism points of Crash are the following:
1. Too expensive
It's fixable, but the problem is, that the base game is criminally underpriced and everyone always just compares the DLC price to the length and price of the main game. What do you think is the right approach here? I don't wanna join the race to the bottom.
2. Too repetitive
Not fixable. Everything in the game revolves around the loop structure. Nothing we can do about it now. It will stay what it is.
3. Too grindy and unrewarding in regards to bones and scrap
Partly fixed. We cannot fully fix this, but I'm confident, it's already much better than in the original release version.
4. Not enough Combat
Is barely fixable. Space and plot wise it would hardly fit in. What are your thoughts?
5. Brings not much new to the table
Not fixable. Putting in new abilities at this point would throw the entire game off the rails. It is as it is.
The good
The postmortem was mainly about finding the negative things. There were also good things.
- The build quality of the world is higher. Mostly noticible when I tried to take pretty screenshots, which is way easier than in the base game, where many areas now look much worse in retrospect.
- The characters have more depth and lore instead of being nameless hint givers.
- There are tons of surprising and funny moments. Be it the first fake credits, the door knocker, the church thing, the throw, the body swapper machine, the shady stick, the guy analysing the crowd clapping, the non-secret behind the waterfall and way more... down to details like the awesome usb-stick animation when you insert it.
- The jokes in the dialogues also seem to land really well, from the reactions I've watched.
- The production value is higher with way more animations, new assets, our own background musics and more.
- Not visible to you, but the code quality improved a lot, which makes it much easier to produce quality content.
- I recruited 5/6 people since the released of the base game plus 3-5 other people who do little jobs here and there. It's a big step from working alone to collaborating on the same code. The project helped us get to know each other more and we did pretty good working together without major technical issues, thanks for perforce. It can only get better from here on.
Please let us know your thoughts and what you think we should be careful with in our next adventures.
-David