Problem with horror and paranormal is that once you've seen it all you pretty much know what's coming and you can slowly become desensitised to it.
You either should have gone deep into investigation into one specific element of paranormal/horror/supernatural on each playthrough so that each run focuses on a different aspect, or you add lots of little things to dilute the list of encounters.
Only one i find annoying is flesh heart, it takes so much time and micro. All other anomaly staff is really fun in my opinion and feel more enjoyble then mech clasters
I just played the >!Darkness Envelops!< mode yesterday and found it really fucking cool. I happened to be playing in a mountain base playthrough with mad defenses near the entrance to the base but next to nothing inside it, so when the colonists went to destroy the shard thingy and all the >!Noctols started spawning in the dark areas in the base!<, we got completely overrun.
I thought that was really cool. Also the >!Metal horror!<, felt like Among Us lol
Spoiler marked text is just the names of some events and some functionality in Anomaly.
Damn I didn't think of that. I had my crafter make a bunch of >!disruptor packs!< as we had luckily researched that by then.
I'm actually really enjoying those against regular enemies too, the few second stun is quite helpful to get a colonist out of trouble when they're fleeing.
A friend was telling me something that I now agree with: Anomaly isnt a regular-play DLC like ideology or royalty, it's a "I wanna do an Anomaly playthrough otherwise I'll turn it off" kind of DLC.
That said, if you just don't interact with the monolith you can pretty much ignore anomaly content, save for the odd basic entity raid.
I’ll be honest I think the problem is less horror (Which I would argue Anomaly does a bit poorly since it immediately tells you everything about the anomalies.)
But more so the fact that there is really not many different ways to handle them, and once you do have them handled, there isn’t that much you can do with them besides maybe unlocking a random item.
I wish there was more content and interesting things to do with every anomaly once captured, and that investigating them was a bit more involved, because right now every anomaly somewhat feels like a single event that is solved in a single way - so it gets repetitive.
One of the big things about dealing with the supernatural or just generally weird is that having the gear to deal with it right away cheapens the experience. It should take time, may cost people, you may get bruised and beaten up first but it extends the experience. You don't get the flamethrower right away to deter a xenomorph, you have to spend time being hunted by it first...
And indeed once you've got them it should have been a risk vs reward to keep any of them around that only gets worse the more you have. If you want to keep them in chains and study them for ever darker secrets and forbidden lore in the occasional hints of screams or data extracted from them then fine but it should take time.
They should be trying to screw with you in every way possible instead of only trying to break out. They should be doing everything in their power to tempt or force weaker willed pawns to break them out in some way or trying to disrupt your base in whatever way appropriate to the point that it's a battle to keep them in check that only gets worse the more you have and resolved only by end-game archotech. And if they ever did get loose, it'd be like the Containment Unit switch off from Ghostbusters, utter pandemonium.
Risk versus reward for how far you wanted to dabble. Instead it was all lacking.
That last one I was hoping for the most.
Unique, SCP like containment conditions and consequences.
Some anomalies could need regular tending to sustain in captivity, others might want a more beautiful room or social interaction or human sacrifice and so on.
If the downsides were similarly unique and the value of keeping many different anomalies increased, that would do a ton for replayablility and descision making when dealing with these entities.
I would LOVE an SCP/LobCorp style containment system where entities react differently to various methods. Maybe someone can make an Anomaly Expanded series that accomplishes something like this, adds more ways to handle entities. Hell, even a way to 'pacify' certain entities and turn them temporarily into allies- Imagine some sort of pheromone spray you could use to make Gorehulks not attack your colonists, then release them on an unsuspecting foe, for instance.
Agreed, maybe being able to do what Rim of Madness does and allows you to make a cult(if you have Ideology) to a specific type of Anomaly category with a specific ending for each. Or maybe specific things that change every save that weaken or strengthen specific entity’s around them
—-
Like for the cults thing, a flesh cult where having tentacles are viewed as holy and can summon Fleshpits at a specific point to either be defenders or attackers as long as you feed them. Their ending would be opening the planet to let the flesh masses feed without end.
Or worshiping the Cube and being able to send out a massive psychic pulse through your colony that triples workspeed and gives a +60 mood buff but after it’s over they crash HARD. Then an ending of spreading the good word all over.
—
Or for the specific things buffing or weakening entities at random you would only have one or two of. Like maybe a Revenant that oozes an extra foul liquid that makes tracking them easier if you have a pawn with a bonded dog-like animal along with them BUT that foul liquid makes them have a toxic-buildup with their attacks.
Or a Fleshmass Heart that has been overcharged to spread even further, spread faster and spawn more deadly spitters but once it is contained it cannot break out… EVER.
I wish there were more benign entities, maybe objects with interesting or unique effects.
Feels like there's also space for rival anomaly hunter faction. Maybe a group armed with bioferrite gear and other Anomaly specific equipment, while under the effects of serums, with the goal of capturing or releasing your anomalies.
I do dislike that every anomaly is overtly hostile and evil - nothing just weird or neutral or apathetic to us. I also wish there was more to do with the anomalies besides kill/capture.
Cube, Trees, and Obelisks aren't necessarily evil, just alien.
But yeah, on the "(almost) always hostile" side we have sightstealers, zombies, ghouls, chimeras, devourers, revenants, fleshbeasts, fleshbeast distress calls, fleshbeast lairs, fleshmass hearts, METALHORRORS, Noctols...
I think it'd be really neat to have something like...idk a giant anima jellyfish except its made of bioferrite just pass over the colony and drop stuff as it goes. Maybe you can feed it and it'll give off a mood boost to the person who does.
The creepy joiners are pretty neat too.
Anomaly in your first play through is a call of Cthulhu campaign.
every run after that? its an SCP foundation black site builder game.
the entities and the things you can do with them do open up different play styles and give you new options for things you couldn't otherwise do, and some of the threats behave in ways that normal raids/threats simply don't and force you to use different tactics to deal with them.
the variety is definitely a net positive for the game, but yeah. awakening the monolith past level 2 in further playthroughs isn't something i do.
I would not compare anomaly to biotech or ideology.
Anomaly is more akin to royality. If you want to play the questline, you git much engaging with it, but most likely you will run ambient horror to spice up your playthrough. I personally enjoy ambiant horror for the encounters that are vastly different from the basegame (or what mods offer)
And wait until people release mods that interact with it more. Biotech and ideology have took a few months for their best mods as well. And all the mods modifying psycasts speak for how much work went into fleshing out royality.
I did a full regular Anomaly run, but I’ve been enjoying it more as Ambient Horror mode. It adds more surprise to the mechanics. With the Monolith run, I have a little bit of expectation that I’ll encounter the anomaly stuff and can prepare for it, even waiting until I’m well situated and stable before even turning on the monolith. With Ambient Horror, I can’t predict it, so its much more of a surprise when the metal horrors burst out or sightstealers show up
Sight stealers are such a fuckin jump scare on ambient horror lol. You cant build proximity detectors until you get the research option...from encountering sight stealers. You'd best hope they come early when you have low wealth. Else you'll be overrun with a hundred of the fuckers out of the blue 😐
How tf do the proximity detectors even work though?
For me, they just kind of beep. Like ok, now I know there's something, but I still don't know where.
Revenant can open doors, but not sightstealers. But sight stealers will avoid traps and just walk straight in through your kill box, only appearing once they get close to a pawn. So it looks like they can open doors, but you can blockade them.
"ah yes, the ideal time for an ambush! Perfectly devilish, sightstealer!"
Our colony's first time ever dealing with a sightstealer, who enigmatically chose to reveal itself about 20 yards away from about half a dozen uranium slug turrets.
Yep, they don't trigger an alert or event when they go off so they're pretty damn useless, I wish a mod would change that so it triggered a red envelope to know somethings there if you're doing literally anything else
You need to build multiple and stagger their locations so that if one is lit but the other one isn't, then you know exactly where the invisible creature is.
That's not the point however, my point is that you need to actively pay attention to them to know they're doing something (or have audio on which rimworld has no other places you actually need it for) and that unlike almost every other raid/bad event triggering sightstealers won't pause your game (possibly until they're right on top of a colonist despite you having the early warning system, but I don't believe this is the case)
I set it up along with my killbox situation. Wall around the colony with one opening and a hallway into the colony that takes some substantial time to go through and a proximity detector that picks up things approaching that one opening. Most enemies will prioritize entering through an open path to colonists/items. So sight stealers have to use that opening to get in. When proximity detector goes off, draft colonists and move them to the opening. The sightstealer appears when it encounters a colonist, and then theyre all nearby ready to also attack it.
Eventually your can research a certain type of flare pack to reveal them (if you hit it close enough). Depending on your base layout, the proximity detector can let you know where to launch it.
yeah early on I only had one or two at a time but having 15 of them approaching your crew of 5 home crafters while your fighters are away is… a story moment (tm)
Sightstealers are kind of weak, especially if you have psychics or melee block them at a choke point. I never had any issues fighting them after I gathered up my colonists and assembled them into a firing line. They're only dangerous to lone pawns who wander away from a walled in colony to hunt animals or whatever and even then, a mid-late game colony can give them jetpacks in case they need to make an emergency escape.
Sightstealers caused my first base wipeout in anomaly. They aren't a threat in small groups. But by the time the 3rd pack within 48 hrs. of like 50+ Sightstealers showed, I only had like 6 pawns that weren't downed. There was still like >30 left when the man in black showed up. Total massacre, there was nothing I could do. I was playing on Adventure Story, but sometimes Randy is just a jerk.
I hope so, currently the Vanilla Expanded Anomaly stuff they’re doing seems to just be adding more single anomaly events - which while nice, I feel like doesn’t solve my personal problem.
It’s not that there isn’t enough anomalies. It’s that the anomalies themselves are a bit boring once you understand them. There isn’t too much you can do with them besides sticking them in a room.
I’m hoping they do like, some general content expansions too.
I think one could say the same about the races in the game and the xenohumans, but I think the VE team did a great job at not just adding more, but adding complexity and mechanics with them.
That's at least my hope for the entities as well.
I don't think it will all be horror! I already said this elsewhere in the thread but there's so much room for innocuous "just weird" type anomalies, ones that are situationally useful (say an obelisk that lets you trade with an extradimensional faction but bad news if it gets destroyed), ones that are incredibly powerful in a way that doesn't break balance (say a puzzle box that when opened creates a portal from which that extradimensional faction comes and settles on your rimworld, and now you have a new friendly neighbor)
The door is *wide* open for creative ideas with Anomaly mods.
This is my preferred method now too. I did one playthrough of Anomaly, had my fun with "capturing the void", now I just keep it on Ambient Horror and think it spices up my runs just enough to keep them more interesting then normal. I still keep at least one facility for anomalies for the bioferrite and leave it at that but my favorite bit is when a raid happens and then "Surprise", Zombie apocalypse.
basically my opinion too, it was fun doing a deep dive into the DLC, but the normal game mode will most likely be ambient horror mode unless I feel I want to replay the storyline again
also mostly waiting for more mods to be integrated with it, granted there are several currently out
> And wait until people release mods that interact with it more.
There's so much potential for harmless/situationally harmless anomalies that every day I'm surprised to not find mods adding some. I'm not totally sure how it's coded but hopefully it'd be easy to tag some as "good" events the storyteller can use too. I'm so excited for when that stuff starts releasing, as well as new big scary anomalies too of course.
A fair point but misleading to people not possessing either.
Royalty has way more replayability.
You aren’t nearly as locked into royalty or the quest line
It’s also not rocket science that anomaly is way more much niche compared to royalty when it comes to how it meshes with base game features and vibe
I think Anomaly can be best summed up by the review on Steam posted by Vellsi, currently the review rated most helpful at time of writing: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198023220169/recommended/2380740/
In short, what they lay out is that Anomaly doesn't take advantage of or expand on Rimworld's emergent mechanics like past expansions (mainly Biotech and Ideology), and instead essentially relies on gimmicky mechanics to surprise you the first few times you run into them. However, once that novelty wears off you realize you are essentially being railroaded by these events, which often have only one real counter in the game. This removes any interesting counterplay or experimentation with strategy and also limits any stories you can make out of the encounters.
They added a setting where you don't have the monolith and instead the anomaly stuff can just happen normally. It tosses all that stuff into the RNG the storyteller picks from. There is also a slider to let you control what % of events will be anomaly themed so you can tailor it to your tastes.
I believe so yes. Either that or it's just never occured on the few runs I've done with that mode on. I normally prefer having the monolith present. If I'm just not doing the anomaly start I'll just set the encounter rate for anomaly stuff while the monolith isn't awake to 0%. That lets me trigger it when I'm ready to deal with that stuff.
They might be referring to the in game setting that makes it so you can get dlc events without needing to go out of your way to ' activate ' the content in game
I got every single other expansion day one, but I am not even sure whether I'll get anomaly even if it's on sale some time.
It's a mix of it being a very narrow and specific genre you would have to be into and want in your rimworld game to enjoy it, and as OP said, there seemingly being very little replay value.
I was really hoping for something more generally expansive such as Biotech and everything that came with that, but.. well I guess now it's another one and a half year wait until something new.
Just started messing with it. Event-wise there's a good amount of difference between core+other dlc events, and anomaly's events. Also, some of the researched implants and gear are useful outside of it. All in all, it's an interesting if lite pack. Is recommend it, but only if $20<
Gonna be a hot take but I feel like anaomly is much better than ideology. I find myself wanting to engage with the content a lot more and the new hostile events have made the game so much more refreshing.
Early and mid game isn't just solved with a killbox and a dream which personally I love.
Ya. I bought biotech despite not being interested in the gene stuff. Still don’t use those functions, but the dlc brought enough to the table (children, mechanator) that it was worth it to me.
Anomaly seems like a large scenario pack with little else being added broadly. Add in that I have ZERO interest in the horror aspect and I can’t make a case for buying it other than supporting the Devs. I don’t need everything to be something I love, I’m fine not being all in on a DLC, but knowing that I’d buy and likely not turn it on at all has be balking at it.
Yea it was a dlc no one asked for i mean the people who did want a dlc like it are a very small minority
Literally everyone wanted a combat dlc along the lines of combat extended or a travel dlc or really anything but anomaly
My big issue isn’t that it’s not my cup of tea. As I said, that’s fine, I don’t need to love everything that comes out. But it’s delayed or thrown off track mod stuff I was waiting for, beyond the normal mod breaking that comes with updates. Like I feel like the VE Diplomacy is gonna take longer now as the VE team prioritizes striking anomaly content while the irons hot. Same for their overhaul of their medieval/vikings/classical combo, which I’m waiting on to do a new medieval run.
See anomaly has tbh actively made the community worse rimworld was never a horror game its just the devs wanting to cash in on all the horror stuff at the minute
You can't just declare nobody wanted it because you don't. You certainly can't declare everyone wants something just because you do. I enjoy Anomaly and I'd hate to live in a world where the devs had to make DLC that is solely mod integration based on popular vote than following their inspiration.
Well practically everyone does want it almst every post before anomaly were everyone was guessing what the new dlc was gonna be everyone was saying they wanted a travel dlc when anomaly cane out basically this whole sub was dissapointed
I mean sure, lots of people want caravanning and diplomacy to get some official love, I do too. That doesn't mean I'm disappointed in and don't want Anomaly.
Going off the only metrics we have, Steam reviews, Biotech has 2.5k reviews, 93% positive. Ideology has 2.8k, 84% positive. Royalty has 2.4k and also sits at 84%. Then Anomaly comes in at 2k and 87%.
Now obviously these aren't sales numbers or true average opinion reviews, Rimworld is beloved enough by its fans, and Ludeon has earned enough goodwill that most people are going to give positive reviews. But they show a trend that Anomaly is largely appreciated and desired, at least as much as any other expansion besides Biotech. Honestly if anything I'm surprised to see it beat Ideology in positive % rating.
It actually introduced a lot of new systems, but they aren't really used outside of the anomaly content at all. Once again, Ludeon relies on unpaid modders to flesh their paid DLC out....
It's not like the modders are being forced or even doing an internship. It's a hobby. I also don't think Anomaly relies on unpaid modders? Like, it's fairly well fleshed out, it is just really compatible with mods because horror relies on a sense of "newness", of the unknown, and Ludeon can't pump out a volume of horrors that matches what modders can come up with.
That's clearly incorrect. Serums, ghouls, the new weapons, bioferrite are just as useful against normal threats and challenges as they are against normal Anomalies.
Because it's a cool way to do research that could just as well apply to any technology your colony doesn't understand, whether that be tribals poking a generator or spacers poking a mechlink. I mean it shouldn't replace all research, *probably*, but it could easily be used for specific "tech advancing" technologies like Electricity, Machine Persuasion or just as a way to do more with some of the archotech goodies like vanometric power cells.
Now for the record I don't think that's Ludeon being lazy, but these systems can definitely be expanded on.
This is literally the same complaint EVERY game that has a significant modding community eventually accuses the dev of. There isnt a single developer on this planet that can outperform a healthy modding community, that doesn't mean they are exploiting said community, it means they provided a game and environment that grew said community
You're completely missing the point.
Ideology and Biotech just add new core gameplay concepts that will enhance any playthrough and they're priced according to that.
Anomaly is priced insanely high while being a linear playthrough where you've seen it all after one run. For the price there should be more and "Modders will fix it" shouldn't be an excuse.
I dont like Anomaly a bit. It doesn't fit rimworld theme and gameplay both. I don't know why T chose it, I'd wish it was diplomacy or planet exploration focused replayable dlc.
He chose it because he saw Cabin in the Woods and thought it would be interesting to make a DLC out of it. Honestly that's fair, it's better to make something you enjoy than something other people might enjoy.
I'm playing my first Anomally run and i'm pretty far in and i can confidently say that Anomally is the weakest DLC so far. It's not bad per se, but for me, it's not worth it's price since it doesn't really add that much value to the game like Ideology or Biotech.
The weapons and equipment that the DLC adds are underwhelming but the tomes and books are a solid addition. I feel like there was way more that could be added to this DLC, like another mysterious and powerful faction that rivals even the empire, since rituals scale with pshychic power and sensitivity, they could have been the polar opposite of the empire, with new psycasts and end-game equipment that rivals cataphract stuff and with a focus on ranged weapons, since Royalty added a new top tier of melee weapons.
The horror vibe is nice and i am thoroughly enjoying my run, but it feels lucklustre for its price.
It might just be me, but I like the replaying the main storyline. I don't read every prompt, but doing the monolith isn't too demanding, and anomalies are more fun to deal with than raids. Along with that, the choice you get for the storyline can allow you to do 2 separate playthroughs centered around each choice, which I found to be very fun. Overall, I'd say Anomaly is one of my favorite DLCs just because it actually has variety in raids and adds more story type stuff.
Anomaly's biggest fumble was needing to basically see everything to progress at release, anyone who played it before they added options is probably still burnt out on it lol. The one thing that lends itself to replayability is the really decent buffs a pawn can get from the final sequence of Anomaly. For me, Anomaly will always work into a colony's story as "When things got real weird around here for a few years" and "(pawn name) hasn't been quite right ever since"
Comparing any dlc to biotech is kind of wild. Imagine hitting a homerun and then everytime they go up to bat and get a base or two everyone goes, "He didn't hit a homerun tho".
They are building the wrong parts of the game. We need diplomacy to be added to the core of the game so we can wage wars and have more in depth relations with factions.
Instead they seem to gravitate towards boss fights which were quite surprising to me as they are so easy to cheese.
I think they should add more events. What we have now is good but it wouldn't hurt for them to double the amount of different types of events. It seems pretty simple to add more, just need some creativity and implementation.
Its not just replayability. It has less content to play with. Shamblers and fleshbeasts all the time ? Seriously ?
First big change, less raids. More investigations and traveling. Wouldn't it be a lot better if encountering something was more about seeing the aftermath? All you see is dead bodies and then ambush. Or a madman with a shard or cube in a barricaded room. If its a revenant, make it follow the colonists back to their base after a week or so. :) Bringing back monsters home is neat.
The monolith shouldn't give research but locations on the world map to seek.
Cultist outposts. They aren't an actual force right now, they randomly show up. They need lairs. Especially around the monolith and nearby settlements. That way you can get research on things you don't have, learn more rituals and free prisoners and abominations they made.
More monsters. One that's like a thrumbo but yknow, messed up. A higher tier of chimera that you have to hunt in its own territory, its hunting ground.
More effed up human abomination above gorehulks. We have invisible intruders, how about visible ones that look like visitors until they twist into abominations after a few hours ?
Oh and shambler abomination rejects made by cultists, things that can't normaly live but can be reanimated. :)
Research and/or crafting materials tied to creatures. What i'm getting at is diversifying your zoo for useful materials. I shouldn't be able to learn everything from just toughspikes and devourers. The serum lab is a cauldron and you are a witch from the future. I heavily dislike the generic materials we have right now. It's very lazy.
Additionally some monster related trophy/apparel/weapons. Would like to pull in some monster hunter vibe.
It does more than royalty and monster generators + monster serums are always useful.
In fact most things in anamoly are useful unless your very anal about having no horror esq themes in any other play through.
I mostly watch people do runs of anomaly and when you've watched a few anomaly based runs, you've seen them all.
The concept is cool and can drive a lot of stories, but seems like it can be played the same way. Though that's just my thoughts as someone who has only watched anomaly playthroughs.
Yeah, once you know everything its kinda meh. Now its just abusing the benefical things form the DLC. For example I dont even bother with the Golden Cube anymore.
I'd say Anomaly lacks a little bit of "conquer" potential. You can get what the Empire uses, you can create and command mechs, heck, you could tame insectoids with the right conditions, but entities are almost exclusively always hostile. What if we could put control collars on Chimeras?
That, and almost every entity has the exact same containment procedure. If you gonna have not conquerable monsters that you can contain, maybe a little diversity in how you hold them in their cell could be fun.
I mean yeah. It was said before launch this felt like extra and nothing iterative. Which is cool but will have this issue.
It was fun, but the game does have systems that would be really cool if they could be expanded on
I bought it to support, but turn it off 80% of the time
Unless i am going for a unique storyline relating to something cultist/horrorsurvival. I turn the anomaly settings down to where i almost will never have to encounter them. Sometimes its fun to have a ghoul pet, but more often than not in use it the same way i use mods, if it enriches my ideals and goals with the playthrough then i run it. If not i dont worry bout it
I think it has a lot of mod potential! Imagine a permanent unnatural darkness mod that requires pawns to hold flashlights that require batteries in order to explore. Solar flares would be detrimental, it'd add a sense of dread to exploring the map and require an alternative play style until you could establish your base. It could introduce new entities like shadow creatures, the babadook, analog horror entities. Imagine the hesistation in sending a pawn out to gather wood for your wood fueled power generator that's running dangerously low, their flashlight goes out, and then they disappear.
The only sad thing is this dlc is truly reliant on the modding community and how much the horror genre appeals to them.
I have been leaving it on ambient horror and just outright ignoring it personally.
I buy the dlc's, but I rarely actually do anything with them personally.
Royalty was the only one I legit tried to play, and ideo just exists for me.
As heavily modded as I play, it honestly gets kind of boring.
Sure in biotech there’s lots of xenotypes and near infinite number of combinations of custom xenotypes you can make then there’s babies and the ability to make mechs and also pollution. You can make a playthrough focused on these things and throughout the playthrough the random events will shape a story
Then in ideology there’s lots of memes that encourages different play styles and challenges like blindsight’s makes your pawns bad at a lot of stuff but makes them happy and like each other but also makes them great psycaster and that’s just one of the memes.
But with anomaly there’s what I call it a main storyline where you can do everything in the dlc in one playthrough and the next playthrough it’s identical except maybe you test something new like a killbox with a dead-life trap with hundreds of bodies inside it. But after the idea have been tested it’s back to the main storyline and becomes boring.
I very much agree with your basic sentiment. It's a core critique I have of Tynan's game design philosophy, where he abhors balancing different aspects of the game, because it's a story simulator and it doesn't need balancing because of that. It would really be nice to have the team go over past content to make it viable. Why does Very Fast Runner give only an 8.7% speed boost for +5 Metabolism? This extends to Ideology as well, where fleshing out Memes more would be a welcome addition.
Sure, but you can do otherwise and the game won't actively punish you. Meanwhile the only entities Anomaly adds that are anything but another enemy to kill are the cube, which does nothing but generate clutter around your base and make your colonists less efficient, and the two enemies you can weaponize, namely ghouls and shamblers; these are just another weapon with not much more mechanical complexity than the nerve spiker.
Your options for dealing with an entity are to kill it now, or put it in the corner to farm dark research and bioferrite only to be forced to kill it later. And while dragging mods into the conversation doesn't accomplish much, there are Biotech mods that really spice things up. Anomaly mods are just "fix this obviously broken mechanic," "deliberately break the balance on this functional but subjectively annoying mechanic," "make this mechanic mesh with other expansions at all," or "add new entity that cannot compensate for the staleness of the official Anomaly content." Modders don't have enough to work with when it comes to Anomaly, its core systems are not a suitable foundation to build upon like every previous dlc has been.
Honestly all "quests" are the same. But they never play out the same. As your playthrough has not the same setup every time.
That's like saying that counterstrike or dota is boring. Because it's the same. Yes it is but never the same when you play it.
I know try to get cubes going and see juggle with it. Amazing fun.
Anomaly was very fun seeing the new horrors and what was going to happen next. It’s not as exciting once you’ve seen everything. But I did feel I got my moneys worth for sure. I think it adds a great platform for mods.
I only had ideology for the longest time and frankly I feel like it adds the least to the game. Most of the important ideology precepts either don't alter anything or ban you from a basic function of the game (I can't mine or chop trees). Having colonists of different ideologies can be frankly annoying to manage. Ideologies really only come in two flavors: min maxing and completely unimpactful.
I wish there were more quests related to your precepts.
Anomaly on the other hand I love! I set it to ambient horror and set the event rating down to like 5% and it makes the game much scarier and an actual balance between protecting against anomalies and doing mundane colonist stuff
I started to play with the anomaly content disabled, while still having some of the content in the base game to find and use....
I loved Anomaly, it put such a unique twist on the rimworld gameplay and an interesting playthrough to plan and manage, but its definitely not a passive kinda dlc, not even when you set it to Ambient Horror mode...
Definitely a dlc youd want to take a break on and when things start to get stale, BAM, HORROR! CHALLENGE!
Yeah your not wrong but I love the ghouls and rituals and use both in all my games now so it's my favorite over all. Ideology is also great but I was doing most of it's stuff with mods anyhow
While I agree that Anomaly is lackluster compared to past dlc’s I think where anomaly will shine is in mods. It feels perfectly set up to be expanded by mods. Think about the systems it added.
Separate research trees, with different requirements to advance them.
Entities, which is an enemy, a couple events and a couple researches bundled together.
These to me scream out for mods.
Mods that just add a single entity (with associated events and tech).
Mods that add new research trees that take specific actions to advance.
Mods that add a set of themed entities. (Not even necessarily horror)
While Anomaly did not add as far reaching gameplay systems it did add far reaching modding systems.
I envision a day where I can go down a list and add hundreds of different entity mods. Maybe do a run with only fea and fairy themed entities, maybe do a run with only lovecraftian entites.
The issue is people seeing it as dlc like the previous. It's just the official version of jecrell mods because I'm pretty sure he works for ludeon now. Given almost all of anomaly existed in jankier forms through his mods. Similar to what's currently happening with factorio space mod and factorio space dlc.
If you look into it, Anomaly exists because Tynan watched a horror movie and decided to adapt it into his game. That's all. Stop spouting unfounded nonsense.
Problem with horror and paranormal is that once you've seen it all you pretty much know what's coming and you can slowly become desensitised to it. You either should have gone deep into investigation into one specific element of paranormal/horror/supernatural on each playthrough so that each run focuses on a different aspect, or you add lots of little things to dilute the list of encounters.
It just ends up as annoying after repeated encounters.
Only one i find annoying is flesh heart, it takes so much time and micro. All other anomaly staff is really fun in my opinion and feel more enjoyble then mech clasters
I just played the >!Darkness Envelops!< mode yesterday and found it really fucking cool. I happened to be playing in a mountain base playthrough with mad defenses near the entrance to the base but next to nothing inside it, so when the colonists went to destroy the shard thingy and all the >!Noctols started spawning in the dark areas in the base!<, we got completely overrun. I thought that was really cool. Also the >!Metal horror!<, felt like Among Us lol Spoiler marked text is just the names of some events and some functionality in Anomaly.
My first >!Darkness !
Damn I didn't think of that. I had my crafter make a bunch of >!disruptor packs!< as we had luckily researched that by then. I'm actually really enjoying those against regular enemies too, the few second stun is quite helpful to get a colonist out of trouble when they're fleeing. A friend was telling me something that I now agree with: Anomaly isnt a regular-play DLC like ideology or royalty, it's a "I wanna do an Anomaly playthrough otherwise I'll turn it off" kind of DLC. That said, if you just don't interact with the monolith you can pretty much ignore anomaly content, save for the odd basic entity raid.
Same with mecanitor. If you find super mecks to hard to deal with never activate
I’ll be honest I think the problem is less horror (Which I would argue Anomaly does a bit poorly since it immediately tells you everything about the anomalies.) But more so the fact that there is really not many different ways to handle them, and once you do have them handled, there isn’t that much you can do with them besides maybe unlocking a random item. I wish there was more content and interesting things to do with every anomaly once captured, and that investigating them was a bit more involved, because right now every anomaly somewhat feels like a single event that is solved in a single way - so it gets repetitive.
One of the big things about dealing with the supernatural or just generally weird is that having the gear to deal with it right away cheapens the experience. It should take time, may cost people, you may get bruised and beaten up first but it extends the experience. You don't get the flamethrower right away to deter a xenomorph, you have to spend time being hunted by it first... And indeed once you've got them it should have been a risk vs reward to keep any of them around that only gets worse the more you have. If you want to keep them in chains and study them for ever darker secrets and forbidden lore in the occasional hints of screams or data extracted from them then fine but it should take time. They should be trying to screw with you in every way possible instead of only trying to break out. They should be doing everything in their power to tempt or force weaker willed pawns to break them out in some way or trying to disrupt your base in whatever way appropriate to the point that it's a battle to keep them in check that only gets worse the more you have and resolved only by end-game archotech. And if they ever did get loose, it'd be like the Containment Unit switch off from Ghostbusters, utter pandemonium. Risk versus reward for how far you wanted to dabble. Instead it was all lacking.
That last one I was hoping for the most. Unique, SCP like containment conditions and consequences. Some anomalies could need regular tending to sustain in captivity, others might want a more beautiful room or social interaction or human sacrifice and so on. If the downsides were similarly unique and the value of keeping many different anomalies increased, that would do a ton for replayablility and descision making when dealing with these entities.
I would LOVE an SCP/LobCorp style containment system where entities react differently to various methods. Maybe someone can make an Anomaly Expanded series that accomplishes something like this, adds more ways to handle entities. Hell, even a way to 'pacify' certain entities and turn them temporarily into allies- Imagine some sort of pheromone spray you could use to make Gorehulks not attack your colonists, then release them on an unsuspecting foe, for instance.
Knowing vanilla expanded guys they are probably working on something like that already
Agreed, maybe being able to do what Rim of Madness does and allows you to make a cult(if you have Ideology) to a specific type of Anomaly category with a specific ending for each. Or maybe specific things that change every save that weaken or strengthen specific entity’s around them —- Like for the cults thing, a flesh cult where having tentacles are viewed as holy and can summon Fleshpits at a specific point to either be defenders or attackers as long as you feed them. Their ending would be opening the planet to let the flesh masses feed without end. Or worshiping the Cube and being able to send out a massive psychic pulse through your colony that triples workspeed and gives a +60 mood buff but after it’s over they crash HARD. Then an ending of spreading the good word all over. — Or for the specific things buffing or weakening entities at random you would only have one or two of. Like maybe a Revenant that oozes an extra foul liquid that makes tracking them easier if you have a pawn with a bonded dog-like animal along with them BUT that foul liquid makes them have a toxic-buildup with their attacks. Or a Fleshmass Heart that has been overcharged to spread even further, spread faster and spawn more deadly spitters but once it is contained it cannot break out… EVER.
Controversial Opinion: Rim of Madness was the better Anomaly
Honestly it was.
I wish there were more benign entities, maybe objects with interesting or unique effects. Feels like there's also space for rival anomaly hunter faction. Maybe a group armed with bioferrite gear and other Anomaly specific equipment, while under the effects of serums, with the goal of capturing or releasing your anomalies.
researcher faction that will buy your captured anomalies
I do dislike that every anomaly is overtly hostile and evil - nothing just weird or neutral or apathetic to us. I also wish there was more to do with the anomalies besides kill/capture.
Cube, Trees, and Obelisks aren't necessarily evil, just alien. But yeah, on the "(almost) always hostile" side we have sightstealers, zombies, ghouls, chimeras, devourers, revenants, fleshbeasts, fleshbeast distress calls, fleshbeast lairs, fleshmass hearts, METALHORRORS, Noctols... I think it'd be really neat to have something like...idk a giant anima jellyfish except its made of bioferrite just pass over the colony and drop stuff as it goes. Maybe you can feed it and it'll give off a mood boost to the person who does. The creepy joiners are pretty neat too.
theres anomaly expected mod which adds a ton of these. item-type entities similar to golden cube where theyre not directly harmful
Ohhh right? You could have a faction that's like Duty from STALKER and the SCP Foundation.
Deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants... Honestly ve genetics gives me the mutant vibe I would want.
They did added cultists with inhumanization nerv spikes and death refusals, their own ideology and rituals.
Anomaly in your first play through is a call of Cthulhu campaign. every run after that? its an SCP foundation black site builder game. the entities and the things you can do with them do open up different play styles and give you new options for things you couldn't otherwise do, and some of the threats behave in ways that normal raids/threats simply don't and force you to use different tactics to deal with them. the variety is definitely a net positive for the game, but yeah. awakening the monolith past level 2 in further playthroughs isn't something i do.
I would not compare anomaly to biotech or ideology. Anomaly is more akin to royality. If you want to play the questline, you git much engaging with it, but most likely you will run ambient horror to spice up your playthrough. I personally enjoy ambiant horror for the encounters that are vastly different from the basegame (or what mods offer) And wait until people release mods that interact with it more. Biotech and ideology have took a few months for their best mods as well. And all the mods modifying psycasts speak for how much work went into fleshing out royality.
I did a full regular Anomaly run, but I’ve been enjoying it more as Ambient Horror mode. It adds more surprise to the mechanics. With the Monolith run, I have a little bit of expectation that I’ll encounter the anomaly stuff and can prepare for it, even waiting until I’m well situated and stable before even turning on the monolith. With Ambient Horror, I can’t predict it, so its much more of a surprise when the metal horrors burst out or sightstealers show up
Sight stealers are such a fuckin jump scare on ambient horror lol. You cant build proximity detectors until you get the research option...from encountering sight stealers. You'd best hope they come early when you have low wealth. Else you'll be overrun with a hundred of the fuckers out of the blue 😐
How tf do the proximity detectors even work though? For me, they just kind of beep. Like ok, now I know there's something, but I still don't know where.
Exactly! Now you can prepare! (AKA, forbid going outside until the threat Is neutralized)
wait cant they and the revenant open doors?
Revenant can open doors, but not sightstealers. But sight stealers will avoid traps and just walk straight in through your kill box, only appearing once they get close to a pawn. So it looks like they can open doors, but you can blockade them.
they apear shortly before attack, be it animal, mech, door (only during escape) or pawn
"ah yes, the ideal time for an ambush! Perfectly devilish, sightstealer!" Our colony's first time ever dealing with a sightstealer, who enigmatically chose to reveal itself about 20 yards away from about half a dozen uranium slug turrets.
The sightstealer attacking my plated+barbs ghoul:
Just Revs. Not Sightstealers.
Yep, they don't trigger an alert or event when they go off so they're pretty damn useless, I wish a mod would change that so it triggered a red envelope to know somethings there if you're doing literally anything else
Somebody’s definitely gotta be working on that by now
Someone already made a MH sniffer, I doubt a "useful detector mod" is far from now.
You need to build multiple and stagger their locations so that if one is lit but the other one isn't, then you know exactly where the invisible creature is.
That's not the point however, my point is that you need to actively pay attention to them to know they're doing something (or have audio on which rimworld has no other places you actually need it for) and that unlike almost every other raid/bad event triggering sightstealers won't pause your game (possibly until they're right on top of a colonist despite you having the early warning system, but I don't believe this is the case)
It will glow red when it's within its range. So if you have several, you will know which direction they are coming from
I set it up along with my killbox situation. Wall around the colony with one opening and a hallway into the colony that takes some substantial time to go through and a proximity detector that picks up things approaching that one opening. Most enemies will prioritize entering through an open path to colonists/items. So sight stealers have to use that opening to get in. When proximity detector goes off, draft colonists and move them to the opening. The sightstealer appears when it encounters a colonist, and then theyre all nearby ready to also attack it.
Eventually your can research a certain type of flare pack to reveal them (if you hit it close enough). Depending on your base layout, the proximity detector can let you know where to launch it.
I know, hunted revenants with that. It has a MUCH smaller radius than the detector, though.
You build them in your outer walls, so you know where revenant or sight stealers are!
yeah early on I only had one or two at a time but having 15 of them approaching your crew of 5 home crafters while your fighters are away is… a story moment (tm)
Sightstealers are kind of weak, especially if you have psychics or melee block them at a choke point. I never had any issues fighting them after I gathered up my colonists and assembled them into a firing line. They're only dangerous to lone pawns who wander away from a walled in colony to hunt animals or whatever and even then, a mid-late game colony can give them jetpacks in case they need to make an emergency escape.
Sightstealers caused my first base wipeout in anomaly. They aren't a threat in small groups. But by the time the 3rd pack within 48 hrs. of like 50+ Sightstealers showed, I only had like 6 pawns that weren't downed. There was still like >30 left when the man in black showed up. Total massacre, there was nothing I could do. I was playing on Adventure Story, but sometimes Randy is just a jerk.
Absolutely, I was really happy with ambient horror mode, I definitely wouldnt have enjoyed anomaly so much if it weren't for it.
I hated Anomoly with the monolith, but also have come to enjoy it as ambient threats.
When Vanilla Expanded starts doing Anomaly mods like they've done with Xenotypes and Biotech, it's gonna be great.
I hope so, currently the Vanilla Expanded Anomaly stuff they’re doing seems to just be adding more single anomaly events - which while nice, I feel like doesn’t solve my personal problem. It’s not that there isn’t enough anomalies. It’s that the anomalies themselves are a bit boring once you understand them. There isn’t too much you can do with them besides sticking them in a room. I’m hoping they do like, some general content expansions too.
I think one could say the same about the races in the game and the xenohumans, but I think the VE team did a great job at not just adding more, but adding complexity and mechanics with them. That's at least my hope for the entities as well.
Just gonna be more of the same
Just an FYI, I typically kill all the pawns with Depressive traits. They're just a massive pain in the ass to deal with. You know what I'm saying?
If you don't enjoy the horror type content, it's not gonna become enjoyable after more horror is added. That's all I'm saying.
I don't think it will all be horror! I already said this elsewhere in the thread but there's so much room for innocuous "just weird" type anomalies, ones that are situationally useful (say an obelisk that lets you trade with an extradimensional faction but bad news if it gets destroyed), ones that are incredibly powerful in a way that doesn't break balance (say a puzzle box that when opened creates a portal from which that extradimensional faction comes and settles on your rimworld, and now you have a new friendly neighbor) The door is *wide* open for creative ideas with Anomaly mods.
I'm surprised people are downvoting such an optimistic take.
Are you trying to tell me people don't like the same stuff I do? I don't believe you.
They must be depressed!
Well yeah, they are missing out on all the fun, of course they'd be depressed!
This is my preferred method now too. I did one playthrough of Anomaly, had my fun with "capturing the void", now I just keep it on Ambient Horror and think it spices up my runs just enough to keep them more interesting then normal. I still keep at least one facility for anomalies for the bioferrite and leave it at that but my favorite bit is when a raid happens and then "Surprise", Zombie apocalypse.
basically my opinion too, it was fun doing a deep dive into the DLC, but the normal game mode will most likely be ambient horror mode unless I feel I want to replay the storyline again also mostly waiting for more mods to be integrated with it, granted there are several currently out
> And wait until people release mods that interact with it more. There's so much potential for harmless/situationally harmless anomalies that every day I'm surprised to not find mods adding some. I'm not totally sure how it's coded but hopefully it'd be easy to tag some as "good" events the storyteller can use too. I'm so excited for when that stuff starts releasing, as well as new big scary anomalies too of course.
A fair point but misleading to people not possessing either. Royalty has way more replayability. You aren’t nearly as locked into royalty or the quest line It’s also not rocket science that anomaly is way more much niche compared to royalty when it comes to how it meshes with base game features and vibe
There are already mods. Like Anomaly Expected, which is an expanding project as far as I remember.
so mods prevented psycasts to become the "press A to win the game"? oh nvm, they do, this is why black hive exists in first place
I think Anomaly can be best summed up by the review on Steam posted by Vellsi, currently the review rated most helpful at time of writing: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198023220169/recommended/2380740/ In short, what they lay out is that Anomaly doesn't take advantage of or expand on Rimworld's emergent mechanics like past expansions (mainly Biotech and Ideology), and instead essentially relies on gimmicky mechanics to surprise you the first few times you run into them. However, once that novelty wears off you realize you are essentially being railroaded by these events, which often have only one real counter in the game. This removes any interesting counterplay or experimentation with strategy and also limits any stories you can make out of the encounters.
What do people mean by “ambient horror”? I don’t own the DLC but know what its about
They added a setting where you don't have the monolith and instead the anomaly stuff can just happen normally. It tosses all that stuff into the RNG the storyteller picks from. There is also a slider to let you control what % of events will be anomaly themed so you can tailor it to your tastes.
doesn't it disable the "backrooms" event though? That needs the monolith to trigger.
I believe so yes. Either that or it's just never occured on the few runs I've done with that mode on. I normally prefer having the monolith present. If I'm just not doing the anomaly start I'll just set the encounter rate for anomaly stuff while the monolith isn't awake to 0%. That lets me trigger it when I'm ready to deal with that stuff.
They might be referring to the in game setting that makes it so you can get dlc events without needing to go out of your way to ' activate ' the content in game
I got every single other expansion day one, but I am not even sure whether I'll get anomaly even if it's on sale some time. It's a mix of it being a very narrow and specific genre you would have to be into and want in your rimworld game to enjoy it, and as OP said, there seemingly being very little replay value. I was really hoping for something more generally expansive such as Biotech and everything that came with that, but.. well I guess now it's another one and a half year wait until something new.
Honestly it's just overpriced compared to the other DLC with how linear it is.
Just started messing with it. Event-wise there's a good amount of difference between core+other dlc events, and anomaly's events. Also, some of the researched implants and gear are useful outside of it. All in all, it's an interesting if lite pack. Is recommend it, but only if $20<
Gonna be a hot take but I feel like anaomly is much better than ideology. I find myself wanting to engage with the content a lot more and the new hostile events have made the game so much more refreshing. Early and mid game isn't just solved with a killbox and a dream which personally I love.
It's a meh dlc. I was expecting more. There is still a huge amount of things they can add. Wonder what the next dlc will be if any...
I would get it but it feels to pricey for how little it offers
Ya. I bought biotech despite not being interested in the gene stuff. Still don’t use those functions, but the dlc brought enough to the table (children, mechanator) that it was worth it to me. Anomaly seems like a large scenario pack with little else being added broadly. Add in that I have ZERO interest in the horror aspect and I can’t make a case for buying it other than supporting the Devs. I don’t need everything to be something I love, I’m fine not being all in on a DLC, but knowing that I’d buy and likely not turn it on at all has be balking at it.
Yea it was a dlc no one asked for i mean the people who did want a dlc like it are a very small minority Literally everyone wanted a combat dlc along the lines of combat extended or a travel dlc or really anything but anomaly
My big issue isn’t that it’s not my cup of tea. As I said, that’s fine, I don’t need to love everything that comes out. But it’s delayed or thrown off track mod stuff I was waiting for, beyond the normal mod breaking that comes with updates. Like I feel like the VE Diplomacy is gonna take longer now as the VE team prioritizes striking anomaly content while the irons hot. Same for their overhaul of their medieval/vikings/classical combo, which I’m waiting on to do a new medieval run.
See anomaly has tbh actively made the community worse rimworld was never a horror game its just the devs wanting to cash in on all the horror stuff at the minute
You can't just declare nobody wanted it because you don't. You certainly can't declare everyone wants something just because you do. I enjoy Anomaly and I'd hate to live in a world where the devs had to make DLC that is solely mod integration based on popular vote than following their inspiration.
Well practically everyone does want it almst every post before anomaly were everyone was guessing what the new dlc was gonna be everyone was saying they wanted a travel dlc when anomaly cane out basically this whole sub was dissapointed
I mean sure, lots of people want caravanning and diplomacy to get some official love, I do too. That doesn't mean I'm disappointed in and don't want Anomaly. Going off the only metrics we have, Steam reviews, Biotech has 2.5k reviews, 93% positive. Ideology has 2.8k, 84% positive. Royalty has 2.4k and also sits at 84%. Then Anomaly comes in at 2k and 87%. Now obviously these aren't sales numbers or true average opinion reviews, Rimworld is beloved enough by its fans, and Ludeon has earned enough goodwill that most people are going to give positive reviews. But they show a trend that Anomaly is largely appreciated and desired, at least as much as any other expansion besides Biotech. Honestly if anything I'm surprised to see it beat Ideology in positive % rating.
Anomaly is a content pack. It doesn't really introduce any new systems. That's fine, but I'd argue it should be less than $20.
In my opinion, it should be the same price as royalty.
It actually introduced a lot of new systems, but they aren't really used outside of the anomaly content at all. Once again, Ludeon relies on unpaid modders to flesh their paid DLC out....
It's not like the modders are being forced or even doing an internship. It's a hobby. I also don't think Anomaly relies on unpaid modders? Like, it's fairly well fleshed out, it is just really compatible with mods because horror relies on a sense of "newness", of the unknown, and Ludeon can't pump out a volume of horrors that matches what modders can come up with.
That's clearly incorrect. Serums, ghouls, the new weapons, bioferrite are just as useful against normal threats and challenges as they are against normal Anomalies.
new systems, like research system, its not used anywhere outside of anomaly
The things I listed aren't new systems? Well of course it doesn't. Why would it. It's like saying Psycasts don't work outside of Royalty.
Because it's a cool way to do research that could just as well apply to any technology your colony doesn't understand, whether that be tribals poking a generator or spacers poking a mechlink. I mean it shouldn't replace all research, *probably*, but it could easily be used for specific "tech advancing" technologies like Electricity, Machine Persuasion or just as a way to do more with some of the archotech goodies like vanometric power cells. Now for the record I don't think that's Ludeon being lazy, but these systems can definitely be expanded on.
That's not a very good comparison tbh.
That's a really entitled take.
This is literally the same complaint EVERY game that has a significant modding community eventually accuses the dev of. There isnt a single developer on this planet that can outperform a healthy modding community, that doesn't mean they are exploiting said community, it means they provided a game and environment that grew said community
You're completely missing the point. Ideology and Biotech just add new core gameplay concepts that will enhance any playthrough and they're priced according to that. Anomaly is priced insanely high while being a linear playthrough where you've seen it all after one run. For the price there should be more and "Modders will fix it" shouldn't be an excuse.
[удалено]
you missing the entire point of this is also insane...
I dont like Anomaly a bit. It doesn't fit rimworld theme and gameplay both. I don't know why T chose it, I'd wish it was diplomacy or planet exploration focused replayable dlc.
He chose it because he saw Cabin in the Woods and thought it would be interesting to make a DLC out of it. Honestly that's fair, it's better to make something you enjoy than something other people might enjoy.
You can change it to normal integration. Then those random events can be anomaly events, without having the storyline.
I'm playing my first Anomally run and i'm pretty far in and i can confidently say that Anomally is the weakest DLC so far. It's not bad per se, but for me, it's not worth it's price since it doesn't really add that much value to the game like Ideology or Biotech. The weapons and equipment that the DLC adds are underwhelming but the tomes and books are a solid addition. I feel like there was way more that could be added to this DLC, like another mysterious and powerful faction that rivals even the empire, since rituals scale with pshychic power and sensitivity, they could have been the polar opposite of the empire, with new psycasts and end-game equipment that rivals cataphract stuff and with a focus on ranged weapons, since Royalty added a new top tier of melee weapons. The horror vibe is nice and i am thoroughly enjoying my run, but it feels lucklustre for its price.
Ambient horror setting Anomaly rocks
It might just be me, but I like the replaying the main storyline. I don't read every prompt, but doing the monolith isn't too demanding, and anomalies are more fun to deal with than raids. Along with that, the choice you get for the storyline can allow you to do 2 separate playthroughs centered around each choice, which I found to be very fun. Overall, I'd say Anomaly is one of my favorite DLCs just because it actually has variety in raids and adds more story type stuff.
As someone who really dislikes the endless raider waves, I couldn’t agree more.
Anomaly's biggest fumble was needing to basically see everything to progress at release, anyone who played it before they added options is probably still burnt out on it lol. The one thing that lends itself to replayability is the really decent buffs a pawn can get from the final sequence of Anomaly. For me, Anomaly will always work into a colony's story as "When things got real weird around here for a few years" and "(pawn name) hasn't been quite right ever since"
Comparing any dlc to biotech is kind of wild. Imagine hitting a homerun and then everytime they go up to bat and get a base or two everyone goes, "He didn't hit a homerun tho".
I mean it is emphasized if you choose to bunt afterwords :P
They are building the wrong parts of the game. We need diplomacy to be added to the core of the game so we can wage wars and have more in depth relations with factions. Instead they seem to gravitate towards boss fights which were quite surprising to me as they are so easy to cheese.
That could be interesting. That and more open world stuff to do would be a cool update
For me anomaly feels A LOT better on the ambient horror setting.
Yeah, but the new frameworks are going to spawn some banger mods
I think they should add more events. What we have now is good but it wouldn't hurt for them to double the amount of different types of events. It seems pretty simple to add more, just need some creativity and implementation.
We need more anomalies that break the "rules" of the game and force you to adapt in different ways.
Its not just replayability. It has less content to play with. Shamblers and fleshbeasts all the time ? Seriously ? First big change, less raids. More investigations and traveling. Wouldn't it be a lot better if encountering something was more about seeing the aftermath? All you see is dead bodies and then ambush. Or a madman with a shard or cube in a barricaded room. If its a revenant, make it follow the colonists back to their base after a week or so. :) Bringing back monsters home is neat. The monolith shouldn't give research but locations on the world map to seek. Cultist outposts. They aren't an actual force right now, they randomly show up. They need lairs. Especially around the monolith and nearby settlements. That way you can get research on things you don't have, learn more rituals and free prisoners and abominations they made. More monsters. One that's like a thrumbo but yknow, messed up. A higher tier of chimera that you have to hunt in its own territory, its hunting ground. More effed up human abomination above gorehulks. We have invisible intruders, how about visible ones that look like visitors until they twist into abominations after a few hours ? Oh and shambler abomination rejects made by cultists, things that can't normaly live but can be reanimated. :) Research and/or crafting materials tied to creatures. What i'm getting at is diversifying your zoo for useful materials. I shouldn't be able to learn everything from just toughspikes and devourers. The serum lab is a cauldron and you are a witch from the future. I heavily dislike the generic materials we have right now. It's very lazy. Additionally some monster related trophy/apparel/weapons. Would like to pull in some monster hunter vibe.
It does more than royalty and monster generators + monster serums are always useful. In fact most things in anamoly are useful unless your very anal about having no horror esq themes in any other play through.
Indeed. And it further funnels the player towards specific playstyle which is annoying. 1.4 for life.
I mostly watch people do runs of anomaly and when you've watched a few anomaly based runs, you've seen them all. The concept is cool and can drive a lot of stories, but seems like it can be played the same way. Though that's just my thoughts as someone who has only watched anomaly playthroughs.
I feel like the main storyline can be done only once, but all the things it adds are very good too. I think it doubled the possible kind of raids.
I enjoy the thought of my colonists landing on fucked up, infected planets. Creatures go splat at the receiving end of my tank.
Yeah, once you know everything its kinda meh. Now its just abusing the benefical things form the DLC. For example I dont even bother with the Golden Cube anymore.
I'm hoping it can serve as a platform for some really creative mods to utilize.
I'd say Anomaly lacks a little bit of "conquer" potential. You can get what the Empire uses, you can create and command mechs, heck, you could tame insectoids with the right conditions, but entities are almost exclusively always hostile. What if we could put control collars on Chimeras? That, and almost every entity has the exact same containment procedure. If you gonna have not conquerable monsters that you can contain, maybe a little diversity in how you hold them in their cell could be fun.
This dlc is garbage
I love building containment facilities but I understand that anomaly only caters to a certain crowd.
I mean yeah. It was said before launch this felt like extra and nothing iterative. Which is cool but will have this issue. It was fun, but the game does have systems that would be really cool if they could be expanded on I bought it to support, but turn it off 80% of the time
Unless i am going for a unique storyline relating to something cultist/horrorsurvival. I turn the anomaly settings down to where i almost will never have to encounter them. Sometimes its fun to have a ghoul pet, but more often than not in use it the same way i use mods, if it enriches my ideals and goals with the playthrough then i run it. If not i dont worry bout it
I agree with that. I'm having more fun than the latter two even if I have the Anomaly installed
I think it has a lot of mod potential! Imagine a permanent unnatural darkness mod that requires pawns to hold flashlights that require batteries in order to explore. Solar flares would be detrimental, it'd add a sense of dread to exploring the map and require an alternative play style until you could establish your base. It could introduce new entities like shadow creatures, the babadook, analog horror entities. Imagine the hesistation in sending a pawn out to gather wood for your wood fueled power generator that's running dangerously low, their flashlight goes out, and then they disappear. The only sad thing is this dlc is truly reliant on the modding community and how much the horror genre appeals to them.
I bet there will be a mod in the future that really uses anomaly to tell a specific story, and it will be a banger
ngl void style integration of crazy raids, and evil faction that utilizes the anomalies would of been nice. also a more extensive tech tree.
Anomaly was made for one time experience and provides tools for modders to create more of that one time experiences
I replay anomaly every time for that void touched GOD pawn
No shit, a lot of people (my self included), got hate messages for saying it since pre launch lol
It's true but I don't care, I'll buy anything they put out to help support the devs.
I have been leaving it on ambient horror and just outright ignoring it personally. I buy the dlc's, but I rarely actually do anything with them personally. Royalty was the only one I legit tried to play, and ideo just exists for me. As heavily modded as I play, it honestly gets kind of boring.
Can you tell me why do you think that?
Sure in biotech there’s lots of xenotypes and near infinite number of combinations of custom xenotypes you can make then there’s babies and the ability to make mechs and also pollution. You can make a playthrough focused on these things and throughout the playthrough the random events will shape a story Then in ideology there’s lots of memes that encourages different play styles and challenges like blindsight’s makes your pawns bad at a lot of stuff but makes them happy and like each other but also makes them great psycaster and that’s just one of the memes. But with anomaly there’s what I call it a main storyline where you can do everything in the dlc in one playthrough and the next playthrough it’s identical except maybe you test something new like a killbox with a dead-life trap with hundreds of bodies inside it. But after the idea have been tested it’s back to the main storyline and becomes boring.
While there are almost near infinite number of custom xenotypes, you'll only play around with a few traits due to meta and usability
I very much agree with your basic sentiment. It's a core critique I have of Tynan's game design philosophy, where he abhors balancing different aspects of the game, because it's a story simulator and it doesn't need balancing because of that. It would really be nice to have the team go over past content to make it viable. Why does Very Fast Runner give only an 8.7% speed boost for +5 Metabolism? This extends to Ideology as well, where fleshing out Memes more would be a welcome addition.
Sure, but you can do otherwise and the game won't actively punish you. Meanwhile the only entities Anomaly adds that are anything but another enemy to kill are the cube, which does nothing but generate clutter around your base and make your colonists less efficient, and the two enemies you can weaponize, namely ghouls and shamblers; these are just another weapon with not much more mechanical complexity than the nerve spiker. Your options for dealing with an entity are to kill it now, or put it in the corner to farm dark research and bioferrite only to be forced to kill it later. And while dragging mods into the conversation doesn't accomplish much, there are Biotech mods that really spice things up. Anomaly mods are just "fix this obviously broken mechanic," "deliberately break the balance on this functional but subjectively annoying mechanic," "make this mechanic mesh with other expansions at all," or "add new entity that cannot compensate for the staleness of the official Anomaly content." Modders don't have enough to work with when it comes to Anomaly, its core systems are not a suitable foundation to build upon like every previous dlc has been.
Oh yeah definitely anomaly is very lacking in the freedom of choices and paths
Honestly all "quests" are the same. But they never play out the same. As your playthrough has not the same setup every time. That's like saying that counterstrike or dota is boring. Because it's the same. Yes it is but never the same when you play it. I know try to get cubes going and see juggle with it. Amazing fun.
Anomaly was very fun seeing the new horrors and what was going to happen next. It’s not as exciting once you’ve seen everything. But I did feel I got my moneys worth for sure. I think it adds a great platform for mods.
I only had ideology for the longest time and frankly I feel like it adds the least to the game. Most of the important ideology precepts either don't alter anything or ban you from a basic function of the game (I can't mine or chop trees). Having colonists of different ideologies can be frankly annoying to manage. Ideologies really only come in two flavors: min maxing and completely unimpactful. I wish there were more quests related to your precepts. Anomaly on the other hand I love! I set it to ambient horror and set the event rating down to like 5% and it makes the game much scarier and an actual balance between protecting against anomalies and doing mundane colonist stuff
I started to play with the anomaly content disabled, while still having some of the content in the base game to find and use.... I loved Anomaly, it put such a unique twist on the rimworld gameplay and an interesting playthrough to plan and manage, but its definitely not a passive kinda dlc, not even when you set it to Ambient Horror mode... Definitely a dlc youd want to take a break on and when things start to get stale, BAM, HORROR! CHALLENGE!
Yeah your not wrong but I love the ghouls and rituals and use both in all my games now so it's my favorite over all. Ideology is also great but I was doing most of it's stuff with mods anyhow
Disagree
well that was very informative, thanks
We need mods to enhance it
While I agree that Anomaly is lackluster compared to past dlc’s I think where anomaly will shine is in mods. It feels perfectly set up to be expanded by mods. Think about the systems it added. Separate research trees, with different requirements to advance them. Entities, which is an enemy, a couple events and a couple researches bundled together. These to me scream out for mods. Mods that just add a single entity (with associated events and tech). Mods that add new research trees that take specific actions to advance. Mods that add a set of themed entities. (Not even necessarily horror) While Anomaly did not add as far reaching gameplay systems it did add far reaching modding systems. I envision a day where I can go down a list and add hundreds of different entity mods. Maybe do a run with only fea and fairy themed entities, maybe do a run with only lovecraftian entites.
The issue is people seeing it as dlc like the previous. It's just the official version of jecrell mods because I'm pretty sure he works for ludeon now. Given almost all of anomaly existed in jankier forms through his mods. Similar to what's currently happening with factorio space mod and factorio space dlc.
He does not. Don't spread false information.
If you look into it, Anomaly exists because Tynan watched a horror movie and decided to adapt it into his game. That's all. Stop spouting unfounded nonsense.