The 1.0 release for Mars Attracts arrives on September 24, and with that big day only a week away, we’re taking a look back at some of the recent changes we’ve made following feedback we received during Early Access.
Balancing a game like Mars Attracts is a little more complicated than making sure all the numbers add up.
During Early Access, we have had plenty of opportunities to see how players actually behave in the park, where they get stuck, and where the game is not delivering the kind of chaos we intended.
Here are some of the biggest balancing challenges we have tackled on the road to 1.0.
One of the biggest problems we saw with guests was that players simply could not keep them happy, no matter how hard they tried.
At first, it looked like players just needed to build better parks. More toilets, more benches, more food stalls, more amenities. But on closer inspection, even the most efficiently designed parks were facing the same problem.
The issue was that every guest has a range of needs they want to fulfil during their visit, and there was almost always at least one need that was going unmet. We have since reworked this balance so that guests have a much more reasonable chance of keeping themselves happy. Building a well-designed park still matters, but players should now feel that good planning and investment are actually being rewarded.
Humans had almost exactly the opposite problem: It was too easy to keep them happy.
In Mars Attracts, unhappy humans are where some of the most interesting things start to happen. Angry humans throw tantrums. They fight. They cause trouble. Eventually, they might escape and turn your carefully managed theme park into a disaster zone.
Players who were managing their humans particularly well were missing out on a big part of the game. And this wasn’t the gameplay experience we were looking for.
Over the course of Early Access, we’ve made a number of tweaks to our human’s behaviour. Experiments now have a greater impact on their mood, we added more traits that make individual humans a little more difficult to deal with, and we introduced missions that deliberately require you to torment your humans almost to breaking point in order to succeed.
It might not be the most humane management strategy, but it is considerably more entertaining.
Just when we thought humans had all figured out, we realised that making humans more difficult to manage had created another balancing problem of its own.
After we beefed up the human trait system, we started hearing that some of the traits were having too much of a negative impact. Some humans could arrive with combinations of traits that made them so troublesome that players simply did not want to put them in their park at all.
The whole point of the trait system is to give players interesting choices. If a troublesome human is so difficult that there is no reason to take the risk, then there is no choice.
Getting this balance right has been one of the trickier parts of our work during Early Access.
For the 1.0 version, we have adjusted the strength and frequency of traits so that even the more troublesome humans should only cause serious problems some of the time. That means taking one of these humans into your park is a genuine risk, but also one that might be worth taking.
That is (hopefully) much more interesting than simply deciding that they are not worth having.
The final big balancing challenge has been mission difficulty.
A lot of players told us that the later stages of the game, particularly the optional missions, were too difficult. The ultimate goal of reaching a five-star park rating was particularly troublesome, with some players finding it difficult to the point of feeling almost impossible.
Some of that was down to bugs — there were a few particularly pesky ones making certain challenges considerably harder than intended — but even after fixing those, we still needed to rethink the underlying balance.
Previously, some challenges were simply too rigid. They effectively required players to execute everything perfectly, with very little room for things to go wrong.
But, this is a game about running an alien theme park full of unpredictable humans, unruly guests and Martian staff who are not always completely reliable. Things are supposed to go wrong.
So we have introduced a little more wiggle room into many of the game's challenges. Players can now afford to have things go badly in one or two areas and still recover enough to complete their objectives.
The result is a game that is a little less about playing perfectly and a little more about embracing the chaos.
And actually, this is much closer to the intended gameplay we had imagined right from the start.
Our 1.0 release is coming on September 24, and we are looking forward to showing you everything we have been working on!
To join the conversation around Mars Attracts around our 1.0 release and beyond, you can join us over on our Discord. We want to hear all about what you think of our game and see what kind of crazy parks you’ve built!
Love,
Bernard & the Outlier team