Talk:Pikmin Forever/Metal Index

Demand
I decided to hold off on this critique until I saw how much most of the items were worth, so I could be sure that what I'm about to say is true. From a gameplay perspective, there is way too much demand for metal. Players will have to collect an approximate average of 20 metal objects every day (less than half of collectibles provide more than 50 metal, and logically those ones will be rarer and harder to collect) to avoid getting a Game Over for most of the game. Unless you have metal objects stuffed into every nook and cranny, players will likely spend most of their time scrambling to make it out of the day alive, as opposed to enjoying the scenery or any of the other fun aspects of Pikmin. Compare to Pikmin 3, where only  of fruit in the game provide less than a whole day of juice, and combined they're only 10% of what is collectible.

The wells would quickly run dry as well, because even with how expansive your areas and caves are going to be, I can't see one having more than 150 objects, which is about 8 days with generous rounding, and only if they empty the entire area. That means that players have at most 32 days' worth of metal until they repair the KHA Lander, which both occurs near the end of the game and costs 10 days' worth of metal to repair; so in reality, there's only 22 days. 22 days to collect 600-ish objects is absolutely insane, seeing as  is already seen as time-restrictive and you have 8 more days to collect 5% of that load in ship parts, and in a much smaller world.

The game's basically unbeatable for a casual player, and it certainly wouldn't be fun regardless. I think halving the metal requirements would be a huge step in the right direction, and I thank you if you read that whole thing.


 * P.S. The objects themselves are very well named, though. The Nucleic Vault is the only strange one, as I can't see how a shovel head can correlate to a vault (other than its door) or to a nucleus of either a cell or an atom. Maybe something like Fortress Hatch would be appropriate. -- En  Passant  20:39, 3 September 2015 (EDT)


 * You are a genius, En Passant. I kept having the slightly nagging feeling that, in order to satisfy a debt of 1000 metal units each day, there would have to be metal to excess. I'm very appreciative someone was able to give me feedback (and that users actually care about this game!). Cutting the requirement in half is a great idea, now that you mention it; I think I'll actually make it 250. I also thought that some metal could be regenerative: for example gold nugget piles would exist that could regenerate overnight (in different parts of the area each day). The Pedestrian Series especially will be ubiquitous; most enemies will drop little items like that. I'd say in one day you would probably find at least 15 Pedestrian objects, making 75 units. Finding an average 2 groups of nuggets (25-50 each) would make another 50-100 units, for a total of 125-175 units. The rest would be filled in by non-regenerating metal objects (about 2-5 each day), and metal would carry over between days. This way you'd have to do some exploring to find enough metal, but you don't have to scour the whole area to complete a day. And this makes the non-regenerative metal more valuable as objects, and the challenges to get them more fitting. I'll add plenty more items to the list, and I'll increase some of their values to make them fairer. Thank you again so much for your feedback; you have an impeccable eye for detail and game design.


 * Also thank you about the names; it's fun to look at the objects from Olimar's perspective. I realize the Nucleic Vault is strange; I was going for "nucleic" in the sense of "central," and "vault" as in an arched church roof, since the Industrial Idols series is about tools with a spiritual connotation; but those two are pretty far-flung senses of the words. But I could easily whip out a new name for it; I like Fortress Hatch, I'll keep working on it.

Kudos to you one more time! it was really helpful to think of all that! Scruffy 00:45, 4 September 2015 (EDT)


 * Yes, that looks much better. You even included an explanation as to why it runs on metal! -- En  Passant  14:49, 5 September 2015 (EDT)