With the plan of gear degrading over time and only having a limited number of repairs until it is no longer usable, how would you ensure this game does not become a maintenance simulator?
TL;DRDegradation is meant to be a long-term mechanic that keeps the economy moving rather than annoy players, with slower wear through care and some repair options; the rough, unsigned example is over a week of play for a power plant.
So it's something that I think we brought up in different conversations several times at this point. We talked about that when we talked about engineering. I think we talked about that even last time, when I think Elliot and I were sitting here. So degradation, or every system that we do, is never meant to annoy people. We want players to enjoy playing our game, and that also means that we have to be very conscious about some decisions that we take. Degradation is one of those decisions where we are very conscious that if we do it wrong, it can be very impactful in your everyday gaming life. So what we do here is that we still want degradation to play a big part in our game, because it's a way of us having you exchange components, taking care of components, taking care of your equipment so that they degrade slower and the functionality is reduced at a slower rate than normally it would be. But we also want to make sure that there is a floating economy, and like in real life, at some point the laptop that you own will not be as performant anymore as it is right now. Thanks to capitalism, you want to buy a new one because you need a faster PC. And we need a similar system in our game, because we need a thriving economy, and a thriving economy you get by people buying things. And in our case, one of the levers that we have there is actually the degradation, because the degradation impacts the functionality. So the older your item gets, the less functionality it will have. As stated, if you treat it well, the degradation process is slower, so the functionality will remain longer. We will also give you ways to sometimes, on rare occasions, be able to restore some of the functionality of the item. We will make use, for example, of the crafters that you have, where you basically can repair, which might be more sustainable for the component than putting your multi-tool onto it and repairing it. So it might be a good choice to use the crafting repair functionality over the hand tool repair functionality. But overall, at some point everything has to go, and you have to replace it, because that then introduces you to crafting new components, maybe even better components. So there's some interesting mechanics behind that. But we are also very, very aware that sometimes you have this one item that you don't want to lose. So we also want to make sure that we tailor towards those things, that you will not lose it.
You do all that work to earn Ashbringer. You don't want it to break.
And just to give a very, very concrete example, because we have been working on that actually for quite some time now: it's the degradation cycle, because we have been very vague with all the numbers, but it's more like we are talking about game sessions. Concrete example — it's not signed off, it's just me giving you a sneak peek of what we have been discussing — we are talking, for a power plant, about a week, maybe one week and a half of usage, full usage. That means the time you are using it until it reaches zero functionality, so you basically have to replace it.
Are you saying a week of game time, or a week of real-life time with you not logged in?
No, no, it's play time. So you playing, actively using the component, so the component is not resting, the component is not turned off; the component is in an average use case throughout a week and a half. So more than 150 hours before you have to...
Let's not give exact numbers.
That's my point. The high-level intent is that it's not something that you're going to have to deal with every play session. It's a long-term mechanic.
Ibn Crux, first-time chatter, said, "Just don't do it like this other game that I'm not gonna slag off. I can't do more than two hours of gaming without repairing all my gear 20 times." That's what you're talking about.
Exactly. And like I said, the number that I gave is just a very, very rough number. It hasn't gone through any iterations yet. But also, this is the extreme, right? We are talking about 100% functionality versus 0% functionality. Degradation bits in between that we hope actually increase interest in the game.