Broken game mechanic (mods to blame? not sure...)

Hello,

I’ve been playing recently with the suggested mods from the list.
Expansion packs and blabla.
Just to say, it’s my 10th company or so and I’ve succeded in ending the game and test all features.

What happens is that the game seems a lot harder since I play with the mods. But are the mods really the problem?

Well, at first, difficulty seems nice because it’s fun to struggle. But… there is no logic in it.

The same pattern occurs every single game since the 1.5
The first 5/6 first games have 6/7/8 scores which leads to having enough money to make a correct first game engine.
The 5/6 following games make huge success. At least a 100k+ sales for at least one of them.
With the millions, you pass the second stage and hire an employee. When he is ready you almost double the points for your games and make 8+ games.
Meanwhile, you unlock tons of features but have not enough research points to do it. So, you make more games.
A few games later, scoring is sinking slowly.
7/8 scoring leading to barely sustain with one employee. And slowly, you lose money.
And then, it’s too late to do something because without money, no research, no game engine, no games.
Which is btw completely stupid. What do you have to pay except from salaries when you’re doing R&D?
And it looks like you gain R&D from making games and not making games from the R&D. Which is the opposite way of reality.

There is clearly a lot to do in Game Dev Tycoon’s gameplay.
If I had to sum up the game: Suceed early or die.
You have one way to find and mimic each game if you want to succeed. You can’t be a small studio forever, you can’t stay on little games with 100% of gameplay design as 80% of game industry does as I’m writing. You must grow and grow fast and never rest.

The gameplay makes you believe that it’s rich because you have all these parameters and topics, but it’s not.
Mod topics are really broken with some perspective. And if not broken, insanely stupid and redondant:
Athletics/Biathlon/Sports
Military/War
History/Medieval/Cavemen
City/Construction
Skiing/Bobsleigh

Why not add Curling guys?

Sliders seem broken too. They are not really logical because they only depend on the type of game. Which is broken too, because you miss so many types of games. Hundred of useless topics and 7 types? It’s facepalming, really.

The gameplay does not match reality at all.
Graphics not important in strategy games?
Gameplay, level design and sound not important in adventure games?
Consoles, same thing. Action, not very good on NES? You’re joking right?

I’ve been playing a lot because the topic of Game Dev is a lot of fun. But i’m really disappointed because I spent a lot of time to try to understand the game mechanics to conclude in the end that they seem all broken.

As I’m no going to play anymore, now maybe you can tell me in private: Why would you hide from players the algorithm of scoring? I can’t wait to see the answer.

I will try to respond to some of the points you made but I don’t think we can get to a conclusion, simply because you are using mods.

Mods, quite obviously, change the vanilla game and by doing so introduce a different difficulty curve and balance. Depending on your play-preferences it might well be the case that using mods destroys the balance you were expecting, especially if those mods add a ton of engine features and unbalanced topics. This will make the game much harder. Many like this type of challenge, others don’t and while we are happy to give recommendations to modders, we don’t police or approve mods.

Bottom line is: If you play with mods, you can’t blame the game itself.


This is really a comment you should put to the modders in question and has nothing to do with the game. The game does allow for special topics where slider-priorities are not predetermined by the genre and this is used in the vanilla game (the Music topic for example). Modders are free to use the same mechanisms.

All of these features are relative to one another. Are graphics the most important area in a Strategy game? No, gameplay, level design and AI are more important. It’s not that graphics are not important, it’s just less important than some of the other areas. That’s why the game says that graphics for strategy games is ‘not very important (±)’ which is far from the more negative ‘not important (–)’ or ‘not at all important(—)’. Same with adventures.

It’s also not true that the game says that ‘Action is not very good on the NES’, Action is ‘okay’ (+) on the TES, as are most other genres on early consoles because the larger difference in genre success on platforms only comes with later platforms.

We don’t hide the way reviews work, we expose that through the in-game hints, game reports, tutorials, and to a smaller degree, the review messages.

Well, you missed my points about the mods.
They bring nothing to the gameplay, they just highlight the broken mechanics of the vanilla game.
As you have only 6 or 7 genres, you have 6/7 ways to build your game.
Maybe you think you solved that issue by allowing to make multiple genre games but it does not match differences in games in the real world.

It’s the topic / genre which does not work I guess. Do you want me to list all the combinations of the vanilla game that does not match the hints?

Then, the game points bugs / design / tech are sometimes so random that you screw yourself for later because of your weird algorithm of scoring. I felt the same with 68h of gaming as the first hour. Lost.

Plus, many other behaviours are really weird, even in the vanilla game. MMO suck, you can only have one console on the market, using research you found costs money, research can only be accomplished by making games or invite students for 3M a month.

All of that suming-up to thinking: the concept is fucking cool, but the design of the game seems lazy. It looks like you got out of inspiration and set up weird mechanics to make the game playable.

blame the modders for that.

No, I will not, because I just highlighted that the core game prevents mods from being realistic and meaningful.