HotM:Cozy Or Stressful?

Intro

Q: Honestly, a thing I kinda love about this game (that makes it feel very different from games like this) is the, well, lack of time pressure? It exists in deterrance, but worse comes to worse you just dismantle the thing making the pressure. It gives you time and space to just, think. Experimentation, while quite possibly blowing up in your face (cough the great military base stealing disaster cough), is safe enough that you can feel comfortable taking risks.

I dunno how much that'll stick around in the future of the game, but its nice this early on.

A: A lot of that is meant to remain indefinitely, but is also down to playstyle.

Project Chains To Titrate

In chapter two, you get to choose your own chains of projects, rather than me lining them up for you linearly like in chapter one. Some of these things will have time-sensitive callbacks. Like if you make a key contact, and they're like "I need help now!" that's out of your control, timing-wise.

If you are playing one project chain at a time (serially) in a timeline, then it's pretty low pressure. Sometimes you may have to drop everything to go help a friend, but other times it's "eh, I never liked them that much anyway" or "I was planning on backstabbing them anyway, I guess this is that moment."

On the other hand, if you work on progressing through two or three project chains at once... it's going to be intense. You'll wind up with too many things competing for your attention, and have to drop some things, etc.

Titrating Over Time

Different players overall want a different experience, and while I have focused primarily on contemplations as the way that difficulty varies... the number of simultaneous project chains is actually a really important metric, too.

The idea is that you can kind of "feel it out" as you go.

• If you're feeling like things are nice and cozy, and you enjoy experimenting, great -- continue as you are.
• If you're feeling like you want more challenge, then there's a lot of little extra stuff just sitting there that you could pop open.
  • "I know I'm doing A, but what if I also started dabbling in B while still doing that?"

A lot of games ask you to decide stuff like this way in advance, rather than when you are feeling the feels, and I don't think that is helpful. People then wind up with either way too tame, or way too aggressive, of a situation probably.

My expectation is that, in the main game, players will mostly start out in a more exploratory mode. I expect most people will not go for maximum challenge, because they'll let curiosity dictate, instead.

Maximum Challenge

For those who really hunger for challenge, they will probably open two or three project chains faster than the exploration-minded folks, and they'll see some things go drastically wrong in the project chains they care about less since they can't quite cover all that, and they'll probably find that in itself to be deeply interesting.

From Cozy To Challenging

For the average player, though, who is not inherently challenge-hungry to that extent but is more curious and exploration-focused, I expect they will do a number of runs in a more linear fashion, and treat it more cozy.

And after a certain amount of time, they are on some run and they're like "I know A B C and D already. I'm currently doing E, which is new to me. But from my recollection, if I were to add in some of C, that would be more intense, but I bet I could handle it, and today I feel like I want that."

Everyone's path with be different, and there's no wrong answer, but that's the general spectrum of experiences I expect.