Sorry about being quiet, I have one more big SECRET thing to do and I wanted to clump together the devlog silence rather than start devlogging just to stop again a bit later. The karma system is really prominent though, so let's talk about it a little bit!
The karma system is the solution to a problem we noticed when connecting the entire world. It shows that what was driving player motivation wasn't survival, but exploration - the treat you're looking for is seeing new environments and new creatures (which is natural as humans are curious). This is all good, but it incentivised a pretty destructive play style. Instead of trying to survive, you would throw yourself out into the world as far and quick as you could over and over, not caring if you survived as long as you had the chance to reach new areas. The key problem here was the
not caring if you survived part - that is very contrary to the mood we wanted to create, which should be all about survival. We're making a survival platformer after all, and want to create the feeling of being an animal in an eco system - which should be all about staying alive. Also as James said, players could move very quickly through the world just blazing through the carefully crafted environments and situations. Basically, a way too high movement to survival ratio.
Another problem was that any cycle that you didn't manage to reach a new shelter felt like a complete waste. I actually had one person on a convention floor, that had after much effort managed to make it back to the starting shelter with enough food, ask me "what did I gain from that?"
We needed to skew the main incentive away from movement and towards survival, making survival the main objective and movement the secondary. The solution we came up with was gating movement with survival - if you don't survive, you don't get to see new areas. A nice side effect of this is an automatic smoothing of the difficulty curve - you're only let into the next region when you're able to handle the one you're in, making sure that you don't randomly end up on too deep waters without any way of making it back.
So yeah, each cycle you survive, +1 karma, each cycle you die, -1 karma. Clamped at 1 and 5. Exiting the game or hitting restart counts as a death and takes karma away, keeping you from cheating the system by restarting when in a dire situation - you have to actually play and survive in order to avoid karma depletion.
Region gates have karma requirements - and different requirements in each direction. This means that we can make it so that movement from an easy region to a difficult one has a higher requirement, whereas the other direction has a low or no requirement. That way we can make sure that the player doesn't enter a region they're not ready for, but if they do manage to enter one and find out that they bit off more than they can chew there's the option to opt out back into the easier region they came from and regroup.
The karma system is relative rather than static. By this I mean that collecting 2 karma in an easy region is easy, whereas collecting 2 karma in a tough region is hard. So while the range 1-5 might seem narrow (we might actually extend it depending on how testing/tuning goes) it is actually way wider than it seems, because a 4 in a hard region might represent the difficulty of a 12 or something in the first region.
It also helps build anticipation - instead of finding a gate and immediately going through it, you might find it and think "cool, I wonder what's behind there" and then have to spend a few cycles actually getting there.
One thing we said early on is that we don't want to gate progression like a classical metroidvania, which is effectually more linear than it might look from viewing the map as you have to do tasks in certain orders (get red key to go through red doors, etc). This design principle still basically stands with the karma system. If you're a very good player, you can theoretically farm your karma up to max at the beginning and then move freely through the entire world unless you die. In practice and if you're a beginner you'll die quite a bit though, slowing your progression down and funneling you a bit towards regions that are more on your level.
Addressing Teod's concerns. Yes, we're tuning the regions to be able to infinitely sustain the player on food (although it will get harder as food depletes), or to have a gate without karma requirement that allows you to get out of them. We don't want the player to be able to null their save file by moving into a region that can't support them without a way of getting out.
Yep, the karma system breaks the linear timeline of saving and reverting a bit. Normally in a game when reverting to the last save, the entire game world pretends like everything from that point in time "didn't happen", and at the end of the game you could imagine a timeline stitched together from all the successful sessions that shows the player moving through the entire thing without dying once. With the karma system however, if you die everything is reverted to your last save state
except the karma, which is depleted. The karma counter sort of exists on its own timeline. As for story reasons for this, we do have some ideas but don't want to go into it at depth because it would spoil some very key narrative points. All I'll say for now is that the game narrative touches on the themes of re-birth and cyclical life, and this has to do with that.
Having the gates be tied to total cycles doesn't really create the same result. One reason is that it doesn't dynamically adapt to the player performance in the same way - everyone would be let into the same areas at the same time, regardless of how well they're doing. Some players might find themselves in too deep waters, others might get impatient with the game not letting them into areas which they would actually be able to handle, breaking the design principle of "the whole world open from the start, if you're good enough".
This stuff also plays into the planned New Game+ mechanics - the second time you play the game, you'll likely be muuuch better at it, and want to move much quicker. A system dynamically adapting to the player's skill will adapt to your pace and allow you to move where you want to without frustration from arbitrary obstacles.
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RW plays really well on it too, I was kind of surprised tbh! Sony asked us to use it for media events and I was kind of annoyed at the timing, but turns out It's just a much nicer controller than the usual clunky xbeast ones we've been using.
And jetlagged 
So, back at it! Thanks GDC! 
