itch.io

I finally have  formed an idea that I want to convey - LonaRPG is a large and very complex and hardcore game. It's not meant to be played like a roguelike, but in its current form it wants to be played that way - it has a ton of features that take a long time to get to, and are very easy to lose if you make a mistake. But this is not Crypt of the Necrodancer, where the player loses everything upon death, but the races last 15-20 minutes maximum. Nor Dead Cells, where you can gain an advantage for future runs and accumulate progress even if you lose. Here you accumulate experience and prepare for a long time, and you can easily lose everything. This is extremely tedious and will turn off many players after a couple of attempts, who will get tired of losing everything and constantly starting from scratch.

If this game was intended to be that way - a purely hardcore game, purely for hardcore players who don’t need anything other than hardcore for the sake of hardcore, then fine. But if we consider LonaRPG specifically as *a game for players, not hardcore players*, then it has serious problems - it requires a lot of time and effort, but gives practically nothing in return. Game does nothing to motivate the player to explore her world. Game doesn't encourage player to try to figure it out. Game doesn't reward risk in any way. Game does not in any way encourage the player to go somewhere or do anything (unless they are complete masochists). *Why should I, as a player (not a hardcore player) play it, go somewhere if I know for sure that if I fail, I will lose everything, and then I will spend many tens of hours trying to restore it all, only to then lose everything the same way?*

 At the moment, all that the game can offer to smooth out this moment is to constantly save and load, when you save before some action, do it, then load if you don’t like the result (on Doom difficulty there is no such thing). And also giving birth to a child to have 1 (one!) chance of error, and this process can realistically last more than a week (unless you have a huge pile of money to buy keys at the hotel and just skip the time... but this pile of money I still need to get it somewhere). Or take advantage of other opportunities that you still need to find out about. Without a smooth system for saving and accumulating progress, this game does nothing to keep the average player engaged.

As a result, the game will turn into a huge sandbox with a huge range of possibilities, but only a few will be able to play it; the rest will simply get tired of standing still, even if they are doing something, because the game simply cannot retain players who want their efforts to be somehow rewarded. Play for a couple (tens) of hours to see how Lona is constantly raped in all positions - yes. But to try to understand the game mechanics deeper, the game simply does not give players the motivation to do this.

Well, it's all of i want to say. Good luck with this project.

P.S. Players say that Dark Souls 1 is a *hardcore game*. I will say that Dark Souls 1 is not a *hardcore game*, unlike Dark Souls 3, but a *game with bad game design*.