I’ll do my best not to give the dead horse another beating, but since I couldn’t find anything recent about this subject, I’ll have to try asking.
There are almost 10 years old discussions about adding a variety of end states. Points where the game would internally recognize that you have met the goal of the run and allowed you to declare victory and retire. I do remember the developers have chosen to make the world unsaveable on principle. I can appreciate that. It’s quite all right to start with the premise there is no real hope. That’s probably true IRL too. But that’s not really what I’m asking about.
I find it uncomfortable having to be responsible for setting and tracking the goals of my runs myself. I’d much rather have the game explisitely tell me when I’m done with whatever I was supposed to do that time, as most games tend to do - have some kind of endings.
Is anything like this in plans or already implemented?
Probably we could tell the player that there are ending and what those endings are by throwing in some visible achievement that you can get upon their completion. It would be up for the player to figure out how to achieve those endings. Things something like:
-Garden of eden: Transport your faction to a feral demention free from blob taint.
-Doomed garden: Transport your faction to a feral demention with blob taint.
-Doom bringer: Doom another world to the cataclysm.
We have (pretty neglected) faction epilogues on game end, and some scenarios start with missions I guess you could see as an end goal - Real Foodperson comes to mind. Adding some more opt-in missions like that would be certainly doable, but I don’t know of anybody cooking up somethig like that.
Something like that would be really welcome. I hate the moment when I realize I have nothing meaningful left and have to choose to stop playing. It just always leaves me feeling empty and unfulfilled. My OCD can’t handle the lack of closure
One thing that just came into my mind is a campaign mode -style of thing. Like there could be separate goals that are intended to be carried out by different people. The mission on one run could be to obtain some critical information and broadcast it around the world. In other, maybe nuking some critical enemy target.
When you completed more of these sub-goals on separate runs, you could maybe affect the game world on broader level, unlock features and even advance some kind of habitability percentage eventually allowing sustainable human recolonization.
