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[leiavoia]

<light spoilerage follows>

First, thanks again for this wonderful game. I've put more than 100+ hours into it. Its been very entertaining. I look forward to whatever happens in the future.

Now I have one big constructive criticism. Please hear me out:

I have no idea why things are happening.

This is a consistent issue throughout the game. There's guys bursting out of walls, allies from nowhere, allies from somewhere, backstabbing traitors, ambushes, assaults, and machines that do... stuff? While all of this interesting and entertaining, I don't understand it. When i don't understand cause and effect, i can't act on it. I am powerless to influence events.

I understand that revealing lore is a big part of the game, but many events that should have obvious cause and effect are not obvious. I frequently find myself googling game stuff after the fact to figure out what any of it is. Examples:

I got A7 to the Cetus Mainframe and we did the G-00 code. And it does... what? What is it supposed to do? What was the point of that? I got a Steam achievement but i don't understand what i achieved.

I'm in [C] and allied dudes start coming out of the room next door and fighting for me. Cool! Why is this happening? Was this my doing or is this a random event?

There's a giant bore-bot running amok in Research for ... reasons. Is this the thing i saw in Warlord? I don't know.

R17 ... have met him several times. I have talked with him, killed him, ignored him... I still have no idea what any of that did, does, or will do. Should I?

On a winning run, I nuke 0b10 from orbit, because ... yeah

In places where it is appropriate, I would like to have the dialog or narration give me a more on-the-nose explanation of events. A7 needs to tell me what G-00 does and what i should expect. Dudes from Zion need to thank me for doing <action> in [C]. Warlord needs to tell me what he will do for me if i do whatever for him. I need to be told that Mr Alien Man here knows how to up-blow stuff from space and that is why it is blowing up. Etc.

Again, this is meant to be constructive criticism, and i look forward to continued cogmind stuff down the road.

Thanks for reading!

[Kyzrati]

Hi leiavoia, thanks for sharing your recent wins, by the way

And yeah I know what you mean here, but sorry that's just not how the world is designed or meant to be experienced.

The idea is to explore deeper and deeper as you gradually figure out more and more of what's going on and why, piecing together parts of the puzzle as you go. This reinforces a number of important themes, most importantly that you as Cogmind are not that important here in the world--yeah sometimes you play a role in things, and do affect outcomes based on your actions, but other than those occasional instances you may or may not participate in, everything is happening regardless of you. It's not like most other games where you are the focus, here you're but a small part of a big world.

Sometimes you get exposition or extra details where convenient and logical, but no one's ready to explain everything to you--that is a very artificial form of storytelling not suitable for Cogmind. It's not a novel, and you're not the main character, it's a living, breathing world to explore and extract whatever information you can manage. Some things you might not understand at first, some things you may incorrectly assume are working in one manner and then later (surprise!) discover there are other forces at work, and some things you may simply never find answers to. You'll also discover there is actually a lot of misinformation in the game as well, because NPCs talk about things/lore from their own point of view.

In the end though, the story is both optional and something to be digested over a very (very) long play time, in the many hundreds of hours. I guarantee you still won't know everything that's going on after playing for 500 hours, and that's intentional

This certainly may not be the type of presentation everyone can get into and enjoy equally, but some players do enjoy the deduction and investigative aspect, and it's built with purpose, so it's definitely not going to change (there will only be more new lore added, off in different directions ).

Perhaps one day someone will write a sort of "lore guide" that covers a lot of the things that are going on, and that would help satisfy you to read it more as a book, but in place of that, there are always answers to be had on the Discord where many players are always sharing their lore discoveries and theories, and almost everything that can be discovered has been discussed and analyzed. (You can find a few such threads on the forums here as well, though to a lesser extent.)