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Erkki

Best Robinsonade games?

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Anyway, I'm now kind of curious about Sub-nautica, and sad to hear that wolves ruin The Long Dark :(

 

It's not so much that the wolves ruin it, it's that resources are too plentiful for survival to be any kind of challenge and there's nothing to do once you're flush with resources. The wolves are certainly not great, but the game's core problem is one of balance. Oh well, that's what Early Access is for, they've got plenty of beta testers to recognize the problem and time to fix it.

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I've gone back to The Long Dark today and I actually kind of like where it is going. The lowest difficulty setting now actually makes the wolves not attack you (unless provoked) so that helps with focusing on the slow descent as you run out of resources. Which are still plentiful, especially on that setting, to the point where I decided to roleplay as a vegetarian and forgo hunting/drop any cans of meat products. But they did add a lot of things that make the world feel more complete, like how firewood collection is no longer just a menu where you invest time and end up with resources, but actually about finding and breaking down wood in the world. And there's a bit of crafting now, apparently, most of which involves animal parts, so I might miss out on that I guess.

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And there's a bit of crafting now, apparently, most of which involves animal parts, so I might miss out on that I guess.

 

You can still find and harvest deer carcasses for their fur. Rabbits too I suppose, but I've never seen a wolf catch a rabbit.

I found that by far the most important thing when playing The Long Dark is not skill, but knowledge. After a couple hours with the game I had a decent idea of the layout of Mystery Lake and I could shift from aimless wandering to straight line paths between scavengable buildings. I've also learned some extremely useful things about managing my resources: sprinting uses way more calories and fatigue, carrying 10 kg causes less fatigue than carrying 20, and you can leave your hunger/thirst at zero for a while to get more mileage out of your food because those bars don't go negative (you just take health damage, which will regenerate once you eat).

From talking to other people and reading reviews, I've been surprised to find that other people seem to have a lot more difficulty with the game than I do. On medium I'm swimming in resources and wolves are no problem (I only see the occasional wolf, and from far enough away that I can just walk in the other direction to avoid danger). On hard, it feels like danger is simply the harshness of the game's level generation. I'm threatened only at the beginning by things like "running out of resources because I can't find any #*&! tools" or "freezing to death because the game started with a snowstorm and the path to the house I wanted is blocked by wolves".

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Does the stuff in the houses regenerate after a while? I figured maybe a bit of difficulty comes in once the scavenging opportunites dry up, but then again I got to a small town yesterday and just the stuff from there would carry me through a week or so and if those houses fill up again that's just easy living. I made my way to one of the new areas for now, but I plan to be back to that place.

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Does the stuff in the houses regenerate after a while? I figured maybe a bit of difficulty comes in once the scavenging opportunites dry up, but then again I got to a small town yesterday and just the stuff from there would carry me through a week or so and if those houses fill up again that's just easy living. I made my way to one of the new areas for now, but I plan to be back to that place.

No, nothing respawns (except possibly animals, I'm not sure about them). However, a single deer carcass will yield three days worth of food, a few branches worth of firewood will let you boil a week's water, and running out of cloth/metal to repair your equipment is a "heat death of the universe" sort of scenario.

I think the game badly needs story mode. The first hour or two of a playthrough is interesting because you're trying to establish yourself so that you're not one meal away from death. Once you're sitting on a big pile of food, the goal becomes an indefinite "keep doing what you're doing so that the pile doesn't shrink". Unlike, say, Don't Starve, there's no mechanism where more systems are naturally introduced over time, so gameplay stagnates.

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Yeah, it's super weird to think that they'd just be so far off in balancing. Maybe they are just going for something completely different than what I want out of the game, but I keep getting frustrated with it not because it's difficult but because it really wants me to succeed.

 

Right now I've stockpiled enough supplies to last me through about a week even if I twiddle my thumbs and do nothing, and I could go on exploring and add to the pile, but that's kind of not very appealing when you're not pushed to do it.

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Yeah, it's super weird to think that they'd just be so far off in balancing. Maybe they are just going for something completely different than what I want out of the game, but I keep getting frustrated with it not because it's difficult but because it really wants me to succeed.

 

Right now I've stockpiled enough supplies to last me through about a week even if I twiddle my thumbs and do nothing, and I could go on exploring and add to the pile, but that's kind of not very appealing when you're not pushed to do it.

 

I experienced the exact same apathy about growing my one-week food pile into a two-week pile. Assuming it's deliberate, my only explanation for the balancing is that perhaps this is a game you're only supposed to play once or twice. When you don't know anything about how to play effectively, medium can actually threaten you, and easy doesn't feel downright insulting. Building for inexperienced players would explain why there's so many medical supplies in the game despite how difficult it is to get injured (once you know what you're doing).

 

Then again, that's probably not it because there's systems like the bow which no inexperienced player will ever put together: harvest maple saplings which only spawn in two places per map, harvest animal guts, spend five days drying them to make a bow, then harvest a different kind of saplings that only grow in a few places and spend five days drying them to make arrow shafts, scavenge scrap metal, coal and a hammer, take them to the one forge in the game to make arrowheads...

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I keep getting frustrated with it not because it's difficult but because it really wants me to succeed.

 

I thought more about this, I think this feeling is because your trajectory in the game is only upwards. You start out with in the middle of nowhere with only the clothes on your back. From there you will find shelter, acquire tools and build up a stockpile of food. There is no increasing difficulty, so unless you're bad enough at the game to immediately contract hypothermia or get mauled by a wolf, player power will only increase over time, making the world feel accommodating rather than hostile.

 

Compare it to Don't Starve. On day 1 you're threatened by hunger and darkness. By day 5 or 10, you'll be feeling the effects of your gradually lowering sanity bar and you'll have to do something about that. After weeks, winter sets in and you have to be prepared to deal with the cold plus the fact that things have stopped growing. Throughout that, the game will be spawning increasingly large groups of hounds, and the spider ecology will be growing. You can't just sit on your big pile of food and develop a routine because you have to prepare for the next threat.

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Was watching the trailer for Boundless ("announced" at the Sony event yesterday) and was thinking "this looks like what I hope Oort Online turns out to be".

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/28/boundless-announcement/

 

http://playboundless.com/

 

 

Welp. It IS Oort Online, rebranded, and now with help from Sony. This? This excites me.

 

Also end of the trailer has grappling hooks so it's immediately the greatest game ever.

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LOL, I saw Boundless and thought it was a straight rip-off of Oort. Looks great, though! I've been keeping my eye on that because the graphical style is so freaking cool, and the idea of linking Minecraft-y worlds through portals is really neat. Having that many portals in one place must really make your processor work overtime though, right?

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Haha yeah I imagine so. I'm looking forward to ittttt.

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