@Auspice said in General Video Game Thread:
In general, Wizards Unite is a better game than I expected (Pokémon Go with a HP skin did not appeal to me at all originally), but this energy thing is a huge problem.
There's no passive energy regen. You can only get more by buying it or visiting Inns. But not all locations are Inns. Some are fortresses or greenhouses. And those don't give energy.
My work has a bunch of locations around it....not one is an inn.
My apartment has nothing nearby.
And I live in an urban area. I feel bad for people who live in more remote areas. I can't/don't play while driving and I work second shift (meaning my ability to just go somewhere and hang out is v limited).
There's just no point to me playing. As intriguing as the game is.
So, not an official thing or anything, but a friend at Niantic who works on the project mentioned they are examining whether they need to rebalance to add at least some passive energy regen.
From what I gather, the fact that the algorithm for which POIs are handled as greenhouses combined with the one to pick which are fortresses (or gyms in PoGo) could result in areas with only those and no inns to speak of apparently did not come up until after release; the places where their external playtesters tended to be did have a lot of inns. So I gather they figured people would only need to buy energy if they were in a rush to do something; buying energy is evidently meant to be an expediting mechanic, not one that's required to play. Hence a bit of, "hm, do we need to change the algorithm so some of the greenhouses are still inns and thus encourage folks to still get out and walk around, but maybe lose greenhouses in areas that don't have a lot, or do we need to just add passive energy regen?"
(Side note: greenhouses actually will give energy. Not every time, but when they do, it's usually a decent chunk in my experience. Like 6-10 energy. And if your ingredients vault is full, it seems to start giving you energy a lot more often.)
ETA: And yes, I'd hope they expected to encounter some sort of balance issue like this, given they saw something similar at PoGo's launch, where the paltry number of Pokéballs you'd get from Pokéstops meant that anyone who wasn't in an area all but carpeted with Pokéstops would run out of Pokéballs to actually catch anything with, so they upped the number of balls Pokéstops would give you to address that. Initial design rarely survives first contact with end users unscathed, and that goes double for the balance of multiplayer game mechanics.
(tho I began in SC)
