So, the game currently outstays its welcome [SPOILERS REDACTED]

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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To coin a phrase from Julian Gollop himself: two weeks ago, I lost and I didn’t even know it.

Now that’s partly my fault: I’ve been deliberately taking my time, exploring different builds and strategic options - generally enjoying the game. I also didn’t invest in enough Research Labs early on, which is really biting me in the bum now that I’m at the endgame.

But the biggest problem is, from the Antarctica Mission onwards, the game just drags!

[THIS NEXT SECTION CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS]

From the very first cutscene in the game, the story sets you up to expect the solution to the Pandoravirus to be in Antarctica. So when you trigger the Antarctica Mission, you think: “OK, gotta get to Antarctica to finish this thing - makes sense.”

Only turns out this isn’t the final mission - far from it. There’s some thing called the ‘Yuggothian Entity’ that you have to research. O-K… I’ve heard about this beasty from various less-than-unSpoiled forum posts and unredacted references in certain threads (Seriously people! Just because you’ve got all the time in the world to race through this game, doesn’t mean everyone can finish it in record time. Have some consideration and blur your plot spoilers rather than ambushing the rest of us with them in the middle of a thread). So you research that… and it isn’t over yet.

To give you some idea of my trajectory in this playthrough, when I triggered the Antarctica Mission my reaction was: “Hmm, Antarctica. Makes sense. Gonna be tough to get to, but it’s an interesting challenge. Nice one Snapshot.”
When I completed the Yuggothian Recepticle, my response was: “Oh for F!*£’s sake!”
Says it all :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

So as I say, I’m at 98% ODI, and as far as I can see, there is no end in sight. I lost 2 weeks ago, and I didn’t even know it. I thought this game was supposedly designed to avoid that kind of pitfall.

SUGGESTION: It would really help if you shaved at least a day off each of the final plot research times. Sitting around waiting for them to mature gets old really quickly (with apologies to the player who I challenged over this a few weeks ago - I had no idea I hadn’t actually got to the endgame yet).

https://phoenixpoint.canny.io/feedback/p/reduce-endgame-research-times

Please don’t respond with Spoilers about what to do next. I want to find out what mistakes I made by myself, and hopefully learn from them - and I want the final mission to be at least some sort of a surprise: rather than ‘Oh, well I clearly have to go into this with a Squad that’s Willed up to the max and doing a lot of long-range damage-dealing, cos from what I haven’t been able to avoid on the forums, it looks like Mr Yuggoth does MC on a grand scale.’

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“Oh you lost so much time to learn and you are not pissed off? Really don’t want a spoiler or two? Come on! Let us spoil it and make it one time experience!” ← as some of the players would say. :slight_smile:

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To take the sting out of that, I don’t think anyone deliberately sets out to spoil someone else’s experience - it’s just that some people forget that others don’t have enough time to complete a game like this in a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months in my case.

Certain posts on these forums just assume that everyone must have completed the game by now, so it doesn’t matter if they blithely talk about the Yuggothian Entity, or refer to the Moon Mission in a post’s title.

But some of us are slower than others, and there are new players coming onto these forums all the time. If they’re looking for help, they will ask for it, and if they want to know more, they can click on the blurs to see what’s underneath.

Just let the rest of us preserve the mystery, eh? :shushing_face:

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I just finished my own “post patch” play-through.

I sorta have to agree, at a certain point I basically explored the globe and all I had to do was waiting for timers to finish. and the research timers get insanely long by endgame…note that most of the long researches are “project XXX” stuff needed for either global buffs or for story reasons.

you still get the occasional haven defense…but other then that its sitting on ones backend and letting the tech (and ODI) tick up.

relative to 2 major patches ago (aka the release build of december-jan) ODI is either going up faster…or down a lot slower. in my first run I could keep ODI at 10-15% or something…now its well into the 30’s before I got to the finish…and this time I was better prepared as I wasn’t playing the game blind. I have to stress that I generally don’t like timers…at least not ones that I cannot somewhat control by resetting them (aka doing missions), so even 30% annoys me if I have no missions on the board that I can do to smash it.

also the new recruit system, A team is swimming in points, B team that did okay…C team well lets just say getting to level 7 in the training center makes you a poor substitute for even a B team member…also note that B team that was set up relatively early but was never trained in a center, didn’t manage to get max level by endgame…they still got a huge amount of points from missions…leveling was just slow.

enemies: bombs everywhere…well maybe its just me…but when fighting pandorans, 9/10 I had a grenade crab or bomb chiron …be it acid or explosive. I like a good shootout…I hate having to alpha strike everything “because they have nades”

TLDR:
-endgame research takes too long.
-give me missions to smash down the timer.
-change training center ratio’s again.
-less bombs/explosives please

1 Like
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And give us a better final mission.
For me it was just like ‘so, they just went with the lots of enemies and difficult cover etc…’…

Could have been so much better, instead of leaving me with a feeling of actually having achieved something, it left me with the feeling of beating something that was just really designed to be hard (and mean as I had the two explosive things in the first part).