Let's have a chat about the Deep Caverns. (wall of text, and OBVIOUS SPOILERS)

[Toast]

They are awful. Here's why.

This is the endgame section and I understand wanting to make changes in difficulty and even in tone. But the Deep Caverns tries to make too many simultaneous changes that when combined only increase tedium and frustration instead of being a pleasing and natural challenge. Here is everything it throws at us at once:

1. Vastly harder enemies. Makes sense for an endgame area, yes. But the resistances on some of these things are simply absurd. 75% Mechanical resist, trap immunity, stun immunity, worms that regen. Strategies that served you for the entirety of the game will now be useless in many fights, and there are fights everywhere, because

2. Endless respawns. Bots inside the power plant, Burrowers outside it, regrowing spore turrets, Tchortlings forever, and god forbid you're hostile to the Faceless. The enemies are endless, and your ability to kill them is not, because

3. Limited supplies. Regular ammo is plentiful, but regular ammo is not a sufficient match for what's thrown at you, because of enemy resistances. If you didn't bring your own armor-piercing rounds, batteries, high-end explosives, traps, special bolts, and chemical ammo, the warehouses will not help you. You can have all the regular bullets in the world and it won't do you any good against most of the enemies down here. It is entirely possible to find yourself in a situation where you cannot trade with either the Tchortists or the Faceless, and god help you trying to buy what you need from Leo. Speaking of allies,

4. You are blind, lost, and alone. Six gives you the worst "directions" in the world, and then you're dropped in the middle of a maze with no clear idea of where to go or what to do. This would ordinarily be an exciting opportunity for exploration! Except now...

5. You are punished for exploration instead of rewarded. Eye of Tchort punishes you for taking your time to explore and find out what you need to do and where you need to go. This is possibly the worst of all, because *exploration* is the heart and soul of the game up to this point. Now, you are forced to do it and punished for it at the same time. You will constantly need to backtrack and retrace your steps, whether it's to reroute the power or simply because you're lost, but every time you do, you meet more respawning enemies stealing your precious, dwindling, non-renewable resources from you. Exploration is now a tedious and frustrating chore instead of a joy. It feels like a slap in the face.

You can do any one or two of these things in an endgame area, maybe you can even do three of them. But you cannot do ALL of them at once and expect the player to enjoy herself.

***

The game is finished, and I doubt we will be seeing MAJOR changes to the Deep Caverns. But there have to be some small things that can be done to make this area less tedious, frustrating, and generally awful. Here are my suggestions.

--MAKE SIX HINT ABOUT LEO. Leo is the only guaranteed source of information the player has available, but he's hidden away in a corner behind a bunch of enemies, far from where the player starts, and hidden inside a locker. You might never find him on your own. Right now Six only tells the player to check out the Faceless and the mushroom forest. I get that you don't want Six to be Mr. Exposition, but adding the ability to simply ask "are there any other people down here?" and having him say he's seen an old man around to the northeast, or something like that, would be a tremendously bigger help than telling the player to go get lost in the mushroom forest.

--STOP LEO FROM LYING ABOUT THE MUSHROOM FOREST. He specifically tells you NOT to stand around in the spores, when that is EXACTLY what you need to do to progress! He also mentions he "ended up somewhere else," but unless you already know what needs to happen here, that is NOT what the player will focus on; they will focus on avoiding the danger he warned them about. Have him say something like "Those spores do strange things" instead of explicitly "Don't stand in the spores," and/or have him say MORE about the strange place he ended up, if you want his advice to helpful instead of misleading.

--STOP THE POWER PLANT BURROWERS FROM RESPAWNING. Burrowers are trash mobs. They are neither interesting nor challenging to fight like they were at level 6. The player will need to revisit the power plant probably numerous times as they figure out what the hell they are doing. Do not make us waste precious resources on trash mobs to do it. This is ridiculous: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=593815743

--or: JUST LET ME REROUTE POWER TO EVERYTHING AT ONCE. No more boring, annoying backtracking in the first place. Problem solved. Having to return here to reroute power adds nothing but frustration.

--SERIOUSLY RECONSIDER ENEMY RESISTANCES. 75-90% mechanical resist is simply absurd and makes fights into a tedious slog when you have limited resources. When you are without the ability to shop for things to adapt to new combat strategies, and you don't even really know where you're going or how much more combat you have to plan and ration for, this is not a fun challenge, it is just torture. You've suddenly taken us from an RPG to a survival horror game. That's not a fun surprise. You can either give us a better and more reliable ability to buy things, or you can give us enemies that don't eat bullets for breakfast lunch and dinner. Since I doubt you want to change interactions with the Deep Cavern factions too much, I suggest you make the enemies more reasonable.

--CONSIDERABLY REDUCE THE DURATION OF EYE OF TCHORT. Hiding in a hole is not compelling gameplay. Making me do it for fifty seconds while this debuff wears off is simply insulting.

--LET ME READ THE DAMN MUTAGEN SCANNER WITHOUT STACKING EYE OF TCHORT. I think someone else already suggested this. Allow me to repeat their request to stop the counter while the player is reading. Constantly having to stop reading to go hide in a hole adds nothing but tedium and annoyance.

I think these suggestions are reasonably simple and they would go a long way to removing the joyless slog from the Deep Caverns without removing legitimate challenge. Please consider it, Styg; this horrible place is currently not a fitting end to this wonderful game, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks so.

[Coaxl]

I agree with every one of these suggestions except weakening the enemies. It's good that there are finally some enemies in the endgame that need new strategies to fight, it's just that everything else combines with it for a load of frustration. I don't get why Eye of Tchort was made 50 seconds, either: technically, it could just as well be reduced to 15 seconds, with 5 to 10 seconds passing between the debuff stacking depending on where you are. But really, the whole Eye of Tchort mechanic does not work as it should. Initially it seems like a very impressive feature, until it turns out that even 5 seconds of wandering around in the warehouses and residential blocks with it means an hour of frustration later trying to clear out those monsters (someone said they naturally despawn if you don't have the debuff - well, that was not my experience). So, basically, the player realizes that Eye of Tchort HAS to be avoided - and it can easily be avoided. A player who knows where to hide from the debuff can avoid fighting a single Tchortling in the outside areas, which kind of defeats the point of the entire mechanic. (Indeed, after that little disaster which caused a lot of Tchortlings to spawn, I never saw another Tchortling again before staring down the eye in the final area.)

I think it'd actually be a better mechanic if Creeping Dread/Eye of Tchort couldn't be lost by jumping into hatches and buildings (i.e. it ticks upwards even if in those areas), BUT the spawning of monsters was slowed down to such a slow rate that the player could plausibly kill the spawning monsters faster than they spawn. This would mean that a quick exploration trip to loot some containers and then zip back into a safe area still wouldn't have you meet any Tchortlings, but you couldn't, for example, explore the mutagen buildings or create the biomass-destruction grenades (or anything which requires a lengthy stay) without receiving the Eye of Tchort debuff and consequently being forced to deal with some spawns (at least in buildings). Once again, the spawn rate must be slowed down enormously so that this wouldn't just be even more frustrating - like 2-3 random Tchortlings at a time, but only when the debuff strikes and every few minutes after that, I feel that would be slow enough. (The doppelganger building should still be a safe house, though, because dealing with doppelgangers and Tchortlings at the same time would be impossible.)

[Toast]

Believe me, it does not thrill me to be asking for enemy nerfs! I just don't see any other way out of the problem created by the toxic mixture of Unlimited Respawns + Limited Resources + Blind Player. You cannot enjoy the difficulty posed by these foes when you have no guaranteed way to refresh your supplies AND you don't know precisely where you're going, so you can't appropriately plan how to avoid/reduce combat, or pick your battles. All you know is that you have to explore every single nook and cranny to find all of the door parts you need, and there is a *literally endless* supply of enemies in your way. When those enemies also chew up your not-endless supplies at the rate they currently do, it's a guaranteed recipe for frustration. I don't know how else to address this problem without significantly restructuring the Deep Caverns, something I don't think it's possible to do at this point. I mean, *maybe* just adding more non-standard ammo to the warehouses would help (armor-piercing rounds, batteries, chemical vials, etc.), but I don't think it would be enough.

As for the Creeping Dread, I agree with you that it's a cool idea, creepy and wonderfully atmospheric, but it just interacts incredibly badly with all the other mechanics you have to deal with down here. And I cannot endorse making Tchortling spawns unavoidable. Much as I hate hiding in holes, at least there is SOMETHING down here I don't HAVE to spend my bullets on. It is a weird and unfortunate side effect that the closer you get to Tchort, the safer you are, because you can just hide from his minions, whereas you have no such safe haven in the mushroom forest, the worm maze, or even the vent shafts in the power plant (I think that first cryogas took five years off my life).

[Tolstoi]

I think that the biggest problem I had with the area was the respawning enemies. Or more accurately, the fact that they can respawn on the map while you're still there. At one point, I had the misfortune of bumping into a tchortling in an office and being trapped in there while more and more continued to pour in through the only exit. There were probably about a half dozen devourers dead by the time I finally got out and managed to slip back into stealth.

The high resistances of said devourers partially played into how I got stuck in that chain. I think the enemies are where they need to be in terms of toughness, but they can get exhausting and irksome to have to slog through ad infinitum. Like the OP said, it's only a problem because of how all the other design dynamics interact with each other.

I'm at a loss as to how a build that relies on ammo, or worse, lacks stealth, would make it through this area. I understand the idea of avoiding the Eye debuff, but that is a huge hassle considering how fast it builds up and how long it takes to burn off. Sneaking made it a million times more bearable, luckily.

Just my opinion, anyway. I didn't find the backtracking particularly annoying, but a few more hints on where to go would have been useful. The parts for the door felt very needle-in-a-haystack considering all the time it takes to search the area, while sneaking or avoiding the Eye of course.

[nerdz]

I second all of these suggestions, and want to add a few more:

- Make it crystal clear (even OOC with a warning dialog) that when finishing the institute of tchort quest you'll be entering a point of no return. Also the checkpoint save AFTER you enter the deep caverns is useless. It should be right after the tremors start.

- Make tchort viable for more class types, and maybe even add a non-combat solution to it. Some builds, like most melee ones simply can't hurt tchort enough and you need excessive crowd control there. Maybe add more mechanics/electronics/biology/persuasion/etc checks that weaken tchort even further. You can take on Tchort without any of them if you wanted the added challenge, but you shouldn't be gimped by speccing into a build that does not prioritize combat (or prioritize low ap cost/ low damage attacks that will be all absorbed with tchort's ridiculous damage reduction).

[swampzero]

I agree with everything.

As for the POV of a Psionics character:


The enemies themselves are HP sponges, but not impossible. I enjoyed the difficulty of fighting them, and since it didn't cost me resources to do so, I could explore at a decent pace ( i didn't even realize eye of tchort and tchortlings were connected, because i was just killing stuff as it came). But then again, I went into DC way overleveled, most likely

however, the sense of limited luxury resources (hypos for health instead of relying on my regen armor) really broke my exploration experience.  An RPG with such a big section where you can't buy/sell/restock is like trying to hold your breath for 2 hours. I can't imagine how bad it must be for ammo classes either.

Add to that the frustration of vague directions, no zone names, and respawning trash mobs (Burrower respawns? really?) and yeah.



Deep Caverns is a good zone imo. All it needs to be fun is a good vendor hub so we can restock.  If we have vendors and resources, we could explore at our own pace, have fun with it, and maybe use the 30.000 charons we stocked up just for the endgame.  If you're gonna change it, don't change too much about it. I really think the difficulty and respawning enemies and maze-like structure would be fine if we had resources to explore (well maybe not the respawning burrowers, fuck those)

[swampzero]

I understand why you didn't want a hub down there thematically and instead had warehouses. It's supposed to be a cut-off hellzone, and shipments can't come down to it.  But from a gameplay perspective, the zone is too big to be done without a hub.

[chimaera]

I am a lazy person, so this is a copy&paste from other forums, but:


LONG VERSION:
My major complaint is that the HP (and resistances) bloat takes away the fun from combat encounters. A good comparison is the tchort institute (my mage fought her way through it). The placement of the guards is done very well in certain areas: you have strong melee fighters with hammers standing at the entrance, psi users with thought control somewhere in the middle, and further back gunslingers, crossbowmen and snipers. And of course there are no convenient vents upstairs. Now depending on your build, the threat level is different; my mage could resist those metal spells reasonably well and a shield took care of guns, but a single shot from a crossbow usually took her out and so did a few hits from a hammer. Therefore, upon entering an area (and loosing the initiative roll most of the time) it was important to identify the biggest threat level and take them out first, while disabling the others. But that was possible because the enemies are no HP sponges. They can one-hit you, but so can you, resulting in interesting - and fun - combat encounters. And then you move forward from that - to shooting shrooms again and again.


SHORT VERSION: if I compare the deep caverns encounters to the tchort institute, the latter is an example of good encounter design, where the difficulty comes from enemy placement and variety. Deep caverns is the opposite; hit points bloat and over-the-top resistances result in combat that may be difficult, but ultimately is repetitive and a chore.

[Zetor]

I've posted lengthy reviews / notes about Deep Caverns on the 'dex, but I'll repost them here for consolidation and whatnot. This is from a stealthy crossbowman perspective, though much of it is universal. I'll put this as a tldr: Crossbow/trap builds are perfectly fine for everything up to the Deep Caverns, but they're very much NOT fine once inside. I'm not sure high-mechanical resistance enemy spam is a good design decision.

- Shrooms: pretty much what's in the OP. It's not only counterintuitive (why would I want to keep getting stacks of a debuff that decreases my max HP?), but you're being mislead by the only "helper" NPC in the entire area.

- Lack of certain items after the point of no return: There are some specific items - not found within the Deep Caverns themselves - that make things significantly easier and allow weaker builds to prevail against some of the HP sponge enemies. The ones relevant for my build were a biohazard suit (the heavy one, not the 2-weight thing that you can find everywhere) and gizzards. Why gizzards? Well... Deep Worms seem to be the only source, but they're borderline-unkillable for crossbowmen (see last  bullet point), so if the player wants any of the high-end meds, they'd better butcher a ton of the little worms at Foundry and gather their gizzards in advance.

- Limited resources: Crossbows are hit particularly hard here, since you need a lot of bolts to kill the super-resistent enemies in the Caverns. The supply of bolts is limited, and - worse yet - the supply of bolt triggers is almost nonexistent, ditto for syringes. With how useless normal bolts get in the endgame, it is necessary to turn as many of them into elemental / poison bolts as possible. NB, I'm not sure what the Tchort quartermaster has since I allied with the faceless and they attacked me on sight (disguise with a robe probably works, but my saves are too far back).

- Extremely resistant enemies: This is a problem for many builds, but especially for crossbows and (to some extent) knives due to the increased threshold. Crossbowmen are probably the worst off here, since knife users can at least bleed and electrocute their enemies with regular attacks plus they don't run the risk of running out of bolts. I'll go from least bad to worst here:

• Most critters including tchort mobs and cuttlesnails are fine. They either die relatively quickly or are vulnerable to attrition (cuttlesnails are basically bladelings v2.0).
• Industrial bots can be barely damaged by bolts, but at least they will eventually die and there's only a limited number of them. They're also not crit/trap immune and don't regenerate, so acid traps and tazers can save the day. The one exception is the IRIS core fight, which is absolutely brutal with the two industrial bots you're forced to kill (I'm lucky I had 5+ acid blob traps with me, is all I'm saying).
• Tchort is a pain... and not just in the 'challenging' or 'hard' way, but also in the 'annoying' and 'tedious' way. Now that the mutagen puzzle is fixed, he's at least theoretically doable by a crossbowman, but it's still obnoxious that normal attacks may as well do nothing against him so that most of the fight will be spent on using and refilling quickslots. HP regen on Tchort himself is a bad idea (it's ok on the tentacles). I'll say that weapon durability actually becomes a major issue here, which may be a problem for non-crafters (tbh I don't think anyone plays a crossbow build without at least Mechanics, though)
• Shroomlings are the definition of tedium. You're immune to everything they do (other than melee, which is easily prevented with control abilities and traps) in a biohazard suit, but they're massive blobs of HP, have high resistances, are immune to crits (!), and in-combat respawns are no fun. Worse yet, the one map you are required to fight them has no way to break LOS on the spitters, so even though they're not immune to traps, it doesn't help you much. At least they aren't immune to crowd control.
• Deep Worms. Holy crap, how are you supposed to kill these as a crossbowman? Of course I know they're sorta vulnerable to fire and can be stunned, even... but the 'right' way to deal with them is just stealth past and never fight them at ll. The problem isn't their offense, acid is nothing new at this point, though constant free teleporting isn't particularly fun to fight against. But the almost-impregnable armor compared with insane HP regen means that killing one of these as a crossbowman either requires a LOT of special bolts (as in, possibly half of the player's stock), or a whole lot of grenades. Ironically, they drop the one item that crossbowmen need to dent the armor of other tough DC enemies (corrosive acid). I'd suggest giving these an attackable weak point they expose after a few turns, maybe... like psi beetles opening their wings.

- Endgame-only immunites without possibility to adapt: Most of the enemies listed above are immune to traps (bots and shroomlings excepted). Quite a few are immune to crits. Some builds depend on this stuff, but there are no pre-DC enemies where this is an issue (spider immunity to bear traps excepted, but that's marginal), so they'll be hitting the player out of nowhere, and if the player's already max level (normal mode) or arrived with only 1-2 xp into the next level (oddity mode) they will not have the necessary level-ups to adapt their build. I have no problems with cuttlesnails because they're basically bladelings++. I DO have a problem with the teleporting regenerating impervious HP buckets known as Deep Worms, the crit-immune unavoidable debuff-stacking enemies known as Shroomling Spitters, and a bit even with the super-tanky Industrial Bots. I'm not saying "put deep worms into lower underrail", but having an optional encounter against an industrial bot at one point in or around the Tchort Institute would be helpful.


BTW, I think the Deep Caverns - as an area - is very well done... my problem is just with some numbers. But yea, those numbers could use a bit of adjusting!

edit: a systemic change I'd make is to have the bleed from Serrated Bolts scale from crossbow skill instead of from damage done. As it is they're not very useful except in a few large-scale fights against soft targets, and this would make them a fine attrition tool against everything except industrial bots (and there's not too many of them in the first place, so having them be a huge pain is OK)

[phobos2077]

I haven't reached this stage yet, but something should definitely be done to Deep Caverns. Almost every reviewer mentions it as the weakest point of the game and mood spoiler.

I should probably stop playing for a month or two, maybe some frustration stuff will be fixed at that point

[player1]

Ok, here are some early impressions of Deep Caverns.

Did mushroom forest. No major issues there, exempt not getting any kind of clue how to progress. Solved after getting hint from the wiki/forums.

This needs to be better telegraphed in the game. Getting an debuff stacked X times is really weird prerequisite to progress, with no clues given.

Regarding Creeping Dread/Eye of Tchorch debuff mechanic...

I do not like it at all. And this is mainly due to the methodical style I play the game.

I usually explore slowly, loot slowly and inspect any looted item slowly. That is pretty much how I play RPGs. Methodically.

But this mechanic pretty much forces me to do thus:
1) Rush through the area looting everything
2) Find bunker
3) Slow down and actually look what was looted
4) Throw away heavy stuff you do not need in container
5) Exit the bunker
6) Repeat

It really harms my game enjoyment to rush everything all the time.

I think this could have been easily prevented, if inventory and dialogue screens would pause the game, including the Tchort debuff.

[Manator]

I absolutely loved this game up to faceless invasion into University, but I must say I'm disappointed with DC.
Mushroom forest. Empty and pointless area with constantly respawning mobs, which have tons of hp and resists with no point to kill them, because at this moment your character is already max or almost max lvl. Same thing for those earth worms. Empty area with just one thing to acquire. Thank God I had enough stealth just to skip them all and just get what I need. I liked power station despite fact I had to spent entire evening there trying to figure, what the hell I'm doing here etc. etc.  I think difficulty is a bit over the roof compared with previous game areas.
Oh and if someone could enlighten me what the hell is with fishing quest? You can catch your last fish and turn in quest only when you almost beaten game? What's the point?

[player1]

After spending more time in Deep Caverns, I must say I enjoyed areas I visited that do not have Creeping Dread.

That being Warehouse (as Faceless ally), Ark Station and Residential Complex (with restored power).

Still need to get to other places...

[Sanger]

I actually ended up kind of liking some parts of DC taken independently; I think the changes made to it in the past few hotfixes made a big difference. Even having to deal with Eye of Tchort wasn't too bad, I never had to fight more than a single Scanner or Devourer because of it.

I'm not a huge fan of the Tchort gate fetch quest, and I really think the final boss fight could benefit from some kind of alternate solution to a straight-up slugfest - even giving the player the option to fight Tchort with a few Faceless allies would help mitigate the "oops, my character that had no issues all the way up to this point has suddenly reached an impasse" problem.

[hilf]

% reduction of damage is simply terrible mechanic and Deep Caverns show you why, especially if you have armor gimped weapon like crossbows, throwing knives or fists. Well, fists/knives at least can use one of the best designed (imho) feats called Expose Weakness but because of it's cooldown it's not exactly like 'middle finger bullets' a.k.a. W2C.

I expected to face high resistances in later stages of the game and that's why i made scientist/trapper with access to all possible damage types except mind (Neural Overload is not really electrical because it bypasses resistance). As a last resort i can use 'middle finger bullets', fortunately i didn't have to.

For my character cuttlesnails were nothing like bladelings - they resist energy, burn well and are prone to crits.

I enjoyed hunting Tchortlings for their brains so i could made some badass meds out of them. But it wouldn't be that enjoyable without stealth.