Hello guys!
I feel like i need to share some thouths about game design of caves- but first i need you to Imagine something. Lets assume you play as Willow and you can go to caves- but you can't go to ruins. What part of caves would you explore? What items would you get from caves?
After you thnik about this a while you can notice that most cave content are actually linked one point of intrest- ruins. I tried to show this in some connection map and graphs, soo here u go (rules in spoiler)
Rules:
-I dont count every single Item or mob as separate feature. It would be too easy to say "look more items are post ruins". Mobs and their drops are same feature, same crafting stations and their craftings.
-No features that there is no reason to use. I know rock lobbsters exist but they are mostly useless
-I count every Boss even it have no usefull loot or fun fight.
Soo as u can see more than half caves content are locked behind ruins- in my opinion it's just bad that most players skip all the caves to just do ruin rush- i dont think endgame rushing is something wrong cause i did it myself, but it would be nice if caves would have something more to offer than being road to ruins, cause not every player (especially new one) want to do that.
Lack of cave identity
There is one more problem with caves- more in terms of art style, in recent updates almost all features added to caves are shadow related- I really dont like that especially after Charlie gate rebuild caves lost most of their identity- caves are no longer caves, they are just "shadow place"(Second graph is about those "vibes"). It's easer to notice if we compare caves to other endgame relited area.
As u can see- most of ocean faetures are actually well.. ocean realted, we have pirates, mangroove biome, salt, fishes. Ocean isn't just "Lunar place" it have their own identity even if lunar island is main point of intrest.
In terms of progress is also nice cause most of it features are not locked behind lunar island. Ocean is also more open to new players- you can notice messege in bottle, try to get and then u got new point of intrest on map- it's simple but design of the ocean encourages new players to explore it.
In my option caves deserve some love, like new cave plants, mobs, more unique biome features, or even new biomes to explore
But maybe i just delusional and nobody else think it's a problem. xP
