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I've completed this game now, but am still playing around with it. I haven't reached a point of frustration, but I have also not reached a point where the game 'felt' complete.

I think that this game is kind of like a major patch for Kingdom. It fixes all the game-breaking flaws from the first one, but doesn't really reach beyond that to do anything really new or exciting.

I don't know what a satisfying end game would be for this, but one example of the philosophical frustration here for me is that you had these builders who made creating buildings easy... but then you never have a building that would be impossible or super-hard without them.

I feel like any building in "world" could have worked in "Kingdom" without much more frustration than anything that was already in it.

As a player, I felt like I was given super-building-powers with the help of the builders... but nothing to really exercise those powers with.

The builders also helped with resource management, and it would have been fun to come up against a single building that took parts from 7 or 8 part-constructing buildings.

As for the keflings themselves, I enjoyed the upgrades that were with them, but it would have been neat if they could do something new. In the first game, they could gather, transport, or man a building. In World, no new abilities have been given to them.

I'm not one bit sorry I paid for this game. I love resource-management games and city builders. I'll probaby buy any DLC you send out this time around... I didn't the first time, because for me, the first game was broken beyond its ability to be fun.

I just wish the series had reached for a some new gameplay mechanics with this iteration, rather than being satisfied with fixing the game-breaking issues from the first game.

Sure, all the new characters are fun, but they become more like cut-scenes in a Halo game. Pretty to watch, but not related to actual gameplay.

Hey, I really appreciate all the carefully considered feedback! I'm going to comment. I hope you don't mind. I would normally say "thanks" and move on, but I see an opportunity here to discuss these things.

Clearly this is YOUR impression of the game, and I can't change your first impression. I just feel like I have to reply to this, since it strikes so close to the heart of what we were trying to do with the game.



I'm really surprised about this.

Our top goal with the new game was for people NOT to say "it's just a sequel." We spent two years on this, adding many legitimately new features and reworking almost every single system in the whole game.

You felt like there was nothing new or exciting? Seriously? What about:
* Cannons
* Builder Brothers
* The kefling upgrade system
* Making potions at the witch's hut for avatar and builder upgrades
* Customizing buildings with collectible pieces
* Sharing collectible pieces with friends
* Cinematics, and character-driven stories with all kinds of new quest mechanics
* Local Multiplayer (with a dynamic split-screen system almost entirely new to video games, let alone Keflings)

It's like you're teasing me, just waiting to see my head explode!

At a bare minimum, whether you were happy with the features or not, I don't think you can fairly call the lack of Cannons and Builders a "flaw" in the first game. Those are big new features in their own right, and I feel the same way about the rest of that list.



OK, I can follow that, though I would argue that building any semi-complicated building (e.g. castle) at any distance from the workshops is difficult without them. In any case, we intentionally avoided big complicated buildings. I feel the real "building" you're working on is the whole kingdom, and the size of one individual building is not as important as exploring the story, the three worlds, and the overall tech tree in each world.



This was also an intentional design decision. I have found that having to visit many workshops for the pieces to a building can be really annoying, when all you really want to do is start building.



Um, except the builders (which are in fact keflings with new abilities), and the princess hiding in a building and traveling to other kingdoms, and keflings interacting with you in weird quests with interesting mechanics and handing you useful stuff, and keflings being able to acrobatically bounce through cannons to play music, and being upgradeable... right? Except for those new abilities?



I think "fixing the game-breaking issues" is a deeply unfair summary of the game, as explained above.



And all the ways you interact with them, in quests with varying mechanics, are not related to gameplay? We must have different definitions of the word "gameplay".


Whew!

Well, again, I sincerely appreciate you having shared all this, and I hope you don't mind me posting my thoughts. Keflings in general and this concept in particular of the new game being new are things I've spent a lot of time contemplating.

I have to also add....

Did you go back and play aKfK?
Personally - while i loved that game and invested a lot time into it, I went back after playing aWoK and to be honest I saw a bunch of "flaws" (call them that to humour me) that were fixed in aWoK. The job assignment system, the auto-detection/determination of what you're trying to do, the colour based system of building, the inclusion of how many building pieces you need to create to build a building, the fact there is now three worlds to build out (did you only build the forest kingdom up?), local multiplayer is amazing (although I have to admit the way ninjabee dev'd it does my head in)... I could go on, but really....

If you really have gone back and compared this game to aKfK then I'm really surprised that you'd see this as an "add-on"/"DLC pack". It runs smoother, has three worlds and includes a lot more than was in the original (and great) game.

Go give the original game a good bash and then see if you feel diffently.. I know it spurred me to go back and look at my old kingdom and I have to say the new features are very positive.

I feel pretty competently shot down by stay here, so I'll just respond to this:



Oh I don't mean this is an add on, but it feels like more of a fix to the game mechanics to me than adding something new to the gameplay. After 30 or 40 hours of the first game, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I don't see that happening with this one.

I will respond to stay's response later.

I appreciate that. I am just putting my thoughts out there, but I do think that careful criticism can lead to better games in the future, just as this game was in many important ways better than the first.




Well, when you put it like that, it does seem like a lot of added features, and I really liked the dynamic-split-screen multiplayer that was like a revolution to my gamer mind at PAX, though I got to use a similar system in "Lego Harry Potter" at home after PAX and before getting Keflings.

As for the Cannons, those are not really integral to the gameplay, though I have begun to compose some music with them. I did like that the quest mechanics worked better this time around, but I'm not really big on cinematics. I want to play my games, not watch them.



I would not call the lack of builders a flaw in the first game. Instead I say there is a flaw inherent to the building system in both games, which was 'patched', in a way, with the introduction of the builders in the second game. The building system itself is the same in both games, but the builders turn it from 'game breaking stupid boring' to 'easy to deal with and fun'.






Builders are hardly Keflings. I know, how dare I disagree with a designer on this... but keflings can be assigned jobs, gather and transport individual resources... builders can do none of the things that a kefling can do. The builders are more like having more players around to help you bulid big things and move loads of stockpiled resources.

The new quest mechanics are good, and the upgrades to the keflings are indeed nice. The cannons thing is fun, but is not required for the game, nor is it played like the rest of the game. Kind of a mini-game added in with no set goals... I have started to compose a masterpiece of cannon music, but it would take a lot of time to really do what I want to with it.



I am sure I wasn't clear enough, that despite these critical thoughts, I love keflings, and I would give World of Keflings a 3 1/2 out of 4 stars on my personal rating system. And on my "Favorite Ninjabee Games" chart it would go to the #2 spot right under "Cloning Clyde" and above the original Keflings. I just wish there had been some features designed for the hardcore players who wanted to run up against a task that was annoying and challenging to start but satisfying to complete. It looks like for that kind of thing, I may need to set my sights on completing a speedrun... in record time!

I feel that issues that I had with AKoK were addressed quite well in AWoK.

- Ability to move buildings
- Very low "Total Piece" capacity increased
- Increased "stockpile" piece from 15 resource units to 25 units
- small playable area was more or less expanded by what seems to be about 4X larger + two very small playable realms added

Disappointments...
- I'd have loved to have realms that were randomly generated maps, not the same map every time.
- You replaced infinite resource spots with "growing" resources. While there are plenty of resources available to complete quests, why'd you have an infinite rock and infinite ore spot... but have growth for everything else?
- Limited number of cannons. I sometimes feel like I was given a demo version only being able to create basic songs
- Total piece count still seems low when you consider the total size of the map. It's like you have to make a choice... choose to decorate your kingdom or make music. I'd like to be able to do both and not be restricted by piece count.
- Builders... nice addition when you don't wanna spend time building the same building again... but they annoy the crap outta me everytime I walk around and they're all over me. Is it really necessary? Can't they just randomly walk around the kingdom until pieces are built? They serve no real purpose until a build is being constructed. They can't even gather resources. Aside from the quests they're involved in, they're useless 90% of the game... at least to me they are. That uselessness can be 100% if I just build my structures near all the piece buildings and push my final structure where I want it to go.
- You give us an airship, and it's only used for one quest. Would've been nice to be able to build more and put keflings in them to fly around the kingdom.
- Resource mining keflings level up, but you really don't see much improvement. They still only mine one resource at a time and the number of chops/strikes doesn't seem to change too much. It would be nice that if you assigned a "mining" kefling to a task and bring resources to a location, they would place a temp pile near them until they gathered the same number of resources as their level in that resource, and then transport it to it's final destination... instead of fractionally increasing their chopping speed and walking one resource at a time to it's destination.

I guess I can understand where Measure is coming from. It's like you tease us with some nice new features... but some of them just seem so "limited" in use.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling

Another disappointment is having my games defaulted to joinable LIVE Multiplayer instead of local only. I hate doing something and leaving my game running, only to find my cannons flooded with keflings and sheep and all the keflings I boxed in at the school released.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling

The way it should work is:

* If you're loading a saved game, it'll default to the Local/Live Private/Public status that it was in when you last saved.

* If you're starting a new game, it'll default to the status of the last game you created (though, maybe this includes the last game you loaded as well?)

If it's not behaving that way, I'd like to know. Is it possible you've been loading a saved game that was set to public?

It's hard to keep up with my games, but I know that I often make my maps private when I save them... then jump into online matches... only to restart a load having it default back to online.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling

Thanks for the additional feedback. I'll try to address the ones that we haven't already discussed elsewhere:



Yeah, I get that. Cannons, as many people have seen, have/cause performance problems, and we were trying to limit that.



I'm with you there, too, but we had to pick *some* limit, and this one was picked empirically from playing with performance and memory limitations. I, too, wish it were a higher limit.



Yeah, they get underfoot. We might try to address this in a title update, but no promises...



I agree, that would have been nice.



Sure, it would be nice if they changed more noticeably and visually, but I like the actual impact of the harvester upgrades on the game. We balanced this pretty carefully.



Similarly it might be nice if a transporter would fill up his capacity before returning to his destination. Kefling AI is a bit complicated. Maybe in a future game.

If a harvester is ever "walking" resources to a destination, as you say, it's not the most efficient use of his time. You're welcome to assign harvesters to deliver, because that's up to you, but it makes sense to me that a harvester who spends his time carrying stuff instead is not much of a harvester.

All good in theory, but when you've got 3 kingdoms and have to start out fresh in each one. I prefer having all my keflings harvesting and taking to buildings to start with, then perhaps add transporters when I have excess keflings. You gotta fill up those buildings to build pieces and if you're starting out for your first time on a kingdom, try to convince me that you actually have transporters with the initial group of keflings you start off with... other than perhaps one taking from a facility like clay to a storage building.

Desert kingdom is actually the perfect example. Sand pits replenish so slowly, that you almost have to set them up to carry what they dig to the facility. Otherwise they'd all just stand around forever doing nothing... and the whole point of adding all these different jobs for keflings was so that you didn't have to manually take resources to buildings.

Oh yeah... one more dislike. The work stoppage when you go idle while you let your keflings harvest. Most annoying thing ever.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling

Now, keep in mind that this is how stay plays, not how stay expects everyone else to have to play. And I don't even claim my way is the most efficient. But...

I never have harvesters deliver. Ever, in any kingdom and stage. I'm too committed to upgrades. If somehow I'm not getting what I need delivered fast enough (or I don't have enough keflings to assign transporters) then I step in and carry stuff myself briefly (and I'm better at it than they are, of course), but I do as little of this as possible.

In the Ice and Forest kingdoms in particular, I always assign exactly half my initial keflings to transport and the others to harvest without delivery.

Keep in mind that one of the key designers on the game, Mike, directly disagrees with me on this point. I can name 6 people who spent more hours playing in the desert kingdom during development than I, so I'm definitely not the definitive expert on this.



I fairly quickly have 4 or 5 sand harvesters dedicated to sand harvesting, and they never stop working. Some of them do eventually have to go to the upper half of the kingdom, but that's good - the bottleneck in the desert kingdom is having enough sand harvested, so maxing out the sand production in the lower half is a good thing.

But I think our approaches are not that far off. Neither of us assigns all our keflings to 100% harvesting. We just differ in which keflings should be doing the transporting part.



I definitely agree with that. I only rarely hand deliver, and only if I really have nothing else to do, and I never hand-harvest, at least in single-player games.



Haha, you slave driver! You're supposed to lead by example. Why should they work if you're not working?

Actually the difference between yours and my playing style is probably that I tend to move my buildings near the resources so I have little need for transporters.

I only tend to use transporters when I'm trying to wipe out an area of resources quickly. I often get annoyed when my transporters stand around and do nothing or grab less than their maximum resources to carry back.

As for our keflings doing work when I'm not... you guys are the ones that set up the game so I don't have to do anything... or do less work, then slapped a restriction on it.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling

Do you (the giant) ever actually run out of things to do?

Well once you reach chapter 8... there really isn't much left to do. Sure there's leveling up your keflings and messing with cannons, but there's really no incentive.
- leveling up keflings requires you to sit through the monotony of having to move to keep your keflings active to level up.
- I lost interest in making cannon music because my ambitious desires to make decent music outside of kids music is limited by not only the limited number of cannons, but by needing multiple tones to play simultaneously at once. So I'd either need two sets of cannons to play simultaneously using twice as many cannons... or I'd need cannons that can play 2-3 tones simultaneously.
- adding onto the kingdom holds little to no incentive to me because of the total piece limitations... so I can't build my own version of Camelot with a rich quarter, poor quarter, castle quarter, and builder quarter. Plus there's no horizontal gate to complete a full castle wall with gates on multiple sides to let workers in and out.

I feel like I've done all that I can do.

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New GamerTag : MaxSterling