Parasites

[Lovehandel]

Not a fan of the new affliction as it is.

 

First, it takes wolves and bears right off the menu. The problem with this is; you still have to kill them to allow yourself free movement around your chosen location. I know it's just a game but I still find it mildly disturbing to kill these animals and just leave the corpses to rot. As it is, there is absolutely no reward for harvesting them but still plenty of risk, not to mention, it just feels wrong.

 

The other thing I dislike about it is, the little red cross will not go away. It's like the check engine light in my car. I know it's no big deal but being there is distracting and drives me nuts. Once we are notified of this risk, we should be able to click it off.

 

Aside from this, I love how the game has grown. It looks beautiful. The amount you care about your product is clearly evident in what you put out.

[hauteecolerider]

You can continue to harvest wolves and bears for guts and hides . . .

Given the amount of wolf melees I've been in in pre-update Voyager, I'm desperate for wolf hides to keep my coat up to snuff. 

Maybe it'll be different now . . .

[Fuarian]

It should remain an affliction but just toggleable instead. So you won't have to see the constant first-aid icon.

[Lovehandel]

Once you have the Bow, you only fight wolves by hand if you want to. I think I am at day 60 something in my current voyager run and have about 15 wolf pelts acting as carpet for the hut in CH.

[Lovehandel]

6 minutes ago, Fuarian said:

It should remain an affliction but just toggleable instead. So you won't have to see the constant first-aid icon.

Agreed, and not last forever. I don't mind not eating wolves and bears. In voyager, dear and rabbits are plentiful. seems a shame though to kill the carnivores and not use them

[Morgan le Fay]

Is this even a legit thing? I was under the impression that if meat is cooked well enough parasites are not that big of a concern. To me, this is bothersome because (as someone pointed out above) it takes these two good sources of meat off the menu.

I think this mechanic needs to be adjusted.

[Vhalkyrie]

I haven't had a chance to try the new mechanics yet, but this new affliction has me concerned.  The cumulative effect is giving me pause.  Bears give 30kg of meat, and if you ate the whole thing, that gives you approximately 60% risk of contracting parasites.  Since there doesn't seem to be any kind of degrading timer that eventually resets the clock, you're pretty much guaranteed to get parasites unless you never eat bear or wolf.  I haven't been able to play yet, but this will probably make me never collect wolf or bear meat.  It's not the end of the world for me since I live on Timberwolf and eat primarily fish and rabbit anyway, but it seems odd that it's such a strong deterrent to never collect wolf or bear meat.

I'd like to see a degrading timer on the risk.  Or give us something else to do with the meat, like fish bait.  Most of my wolf kills are defensive, and the wolf meat is worthless.  I don't kill bears often (only 4 times in my current game), but a 60% risk per bear with no reset timer other than getting sick - nope.  Not worth even a single kilogram.

[fearofspam]

5 hours ago, Lovehandel said:

Once you have the Bow, you only fight wolves by hand if you want to. I think I am at day 60 something in my current voyager run and have about 15 wolf pelts acting as carpet for the hut in CH.

Since this new update, my pelts degrade when not in a storage container.  Have you noticed that with your wolf carpet?  I had a wolf pelt at like 97% cured and then went to bed.  When I woke up, the condition was at 99%.  I was not a happy camper.  The only thing I could think was that it happened because it wasn't in a container.

[Ruruwawa]

My biggest issue with parasites is that the risk warning masks active afflictions you need to treat ASAP like food poisoning or burns.  I've stopped eating predator meat entirely just to preserve the alert! value of the first aid icon.

[Lovehandel]

Absolutely stunned by how quickly the devs addressed this issue. The level of customer service provided by Hinterland is second to none.

 

/Applaud

[KD7BCH]

Yeah were this Stardock the owner would come online tell us about how the industry has changed in the last 20 years and all the original game designers have moved on and how his game is so much superior to anything on the market and their dev model is so great, and we should be glad he still does this and/or that we should come back in 6 months and see how it plays then but to review it now and don't be stingy with those 10s and 9s on the review LOL. 

Meanwhile developers at TLD fix the issues in a few hours, drop a hotfix and its on to the next bug and continue to develop. This latest update is absolutely incredible and filled with dozens of improvements and game changers. TLD is a challenge again and a brutal one at that. 

Not embarrassed to admit I have tried games before buying, without paying, and those games with the quality level of The Long Dark, get my money. Those games like Galactic Civilizations 3 and Ashes of the Singularity do not. Some independent developers are worth their salt and my money and some aren't worth either. 

[nicko]

Parasites add it to Pilgrim. why is it not added?

 

[Nicholai]

Actually both carnivore and herbivore meats may contain parasites IRL but cooking should prevent affliction. Nevertheless I liked this mechanic in this way, it creates kinda challenge.

[Tbone555]

well theres a simple way to avoid this, yall. dont harvest the entire animal, just only eat what you absolutely have to in order to survive. and if you do get a parasite, youll just have to deal with it or die with it. adapt and survive.

[wilkinscw]

When they added the parasite risk, I began eating only one piece of wolf or bear per day to stretch my other food sources. Since its introduction, I've had parasites twice. I think it still needs some tweaking, honestly.

[Dirmagnos]

@KD7BCH Stardock ? Mediocre crappy castrated look-at-us-we-use-dx12 Supreme Commander cheap rip-off called Ashes of Singularity, Stardock ? They used to be real developers once, but now seem to try real hard to play like "big boyz" of industry - a lot of talk, even more grand promises, extremely poor imagination and quality, flashy graphics and horrible performance, grand slogans(next gen this or next gen that) and non-existing support.

This decade is most definitely not good for gaming. Greed and stupidity are defining big "development" studios, like EA or Ubisoft, who constantly invent new ways to rip off customers, instead of providing quality product. Unfortunately it also seems that many others, previously solid dev studios, like Bethesda, are trying to jump on the same wagon, producing mediocre generic casual shit and then complaining how expensive and hard it is to make games nowdays.

It seems that actual innovation and quality are left to smaller independent studios, like Hinterland. Ive logged probably 4-5 times more time in TLD compared to mediocre garbage that is Fallout 4(i considered Tactics to be worse in the series for a long time, even tho it wasnt a bad game, but now F4 hold extremely strong lead) and this game is still in early access, and i intend to play more.

I know that im an ass and complain nonstop, rude and annoying, but i will choose TLD any day over Call of Duty, Battlefield, Battlefront(lol, that was an exceptional piece of garbage), Assasins Creed or any other so-called AAA(the only reason why that junk is considered AAA is because of size of their publishers, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality) next-gen(rolfmao) or whatever clones that are pieced together from couple of well worn ideas or mechanics with, usually, zero originality or attention to details, not to mention polish(release some half-baked unoptimized shit and call it next gen since it will lag on literally anything)and sold  for 60 bucks and then use players who bought it on "release" as free beta testers and patch patch patch patch for years to come.

Vented some steam, that felt good. 8)

[KD7BCH]

I didn't want to use forums for evil. I just think The Long Dark is unequivocally the best product for PC gaming in the last 10 years by an independent developer. Funding for the project was uniquely made and community driven. The features of the game are those of the developers & project creators but also their inspiration is derived from the community. In doing so they have created really complete full experiences in the sandbox which far exceed the quality of the titles "supposedly achievable" by today's half-cocked indie developers.  

Thought it noteworthy to anybody who reads my input here, in the RTS community and Space Strategy community and gaming community in the PC gaming community in general to which I have been a member since the DOS 5.0 days in 1992. 

While I agree in part with Stardock's assessment that the industry suffers from a quality deficit the attribution of the lack of a quality because the user base on the PC is too small to front the funding for a quality release is ludicrous. One needs only look and play The Long Dark to understand that projects given time and fierce attention to detail and respect of the community and not repressed dislike/distrust/hatred lead to successful, highly enjoyable, re-playable, and engrossing products, as well as profitable products.  

The other cop out so frequently used by devs "because of piracy". I have already admitted I try before I buy. When I find something quality I absolutely reward those developers and help to support them. Hinterland Studios have already proven they can innovate, create and refine. The Long Dark was a unique experience long before the last update. Even before the Deep Woods update it was good, it went from good to great with that update and with the Tireless Menace update it went from great to Outstanding. 

Just recently with the delay of final release Raph made the right call with the game. There is so much crap on the market today and how can players get excited about unfinished products which don't offer compelling value for the money fronted? The argument that anything released in the DOS or WIN95 days when you couldn't download a 100MB patch are gone and now everybody drops trash so littering the market with unfinished crap is the standard so its ok because of economics is just bogus. 

I don't want to be overly critical of Stardock but the fact is both of the last 2 games of theirs I was interested in, Gal Civ 3 and Ashes of the Singularity are unbuyable. Gal Civ 3 was a bug ridden mess, which ran terrible on a system I built in 2015, 8 core AMD FX-8350 @ 4.8GHZ, with 32GB RAM. Today GC3 plays better but is missing a half dozen systems that exist in Gal Civ 2. Even today Gal Civ 2 is a superior game except in the eyes of Stardock. Well good for them they can keep it. Ashes of Singularity is essentially a bland tech demo missing major features of the last great RTS Forged Alliance. Forged Alliance itself is so popular having been originally put together in the single core era and released in 2006 the game is now run by the community on a community driven server with community driven updates, community driven ladder, 10K unique players in the last month.

Ashes of the Singularity has only 1 thing going for it, which is DX12. While visually appealing for those who can stomach Windows 10 which is a minority, Windows 7, not only has an install base 4 times Win 10, but a majority (51%) of Windows computers use Windows 7. Everywhere else Ashes of the... is a shortcoming monster. Incomplete, bland, tacky, annoying to hear, difficult to execute with UI, and a limited view screen, small maps. None of the tactics or strategy advancements with FA or engine advancements are even present or remotely similar in Ashes. The conclusion after playing a few hours of Ashes and I think it is fair is that Ashes represents the limits of what is possible when your leader does not care about the creativity of their developers or the input or needs of the community beyond what they personally think is achievable.

When you put "consistency" above "excellence" you end up making bland cookies. When you put "excellence" above "consistency" you burn a few batches here and there and some of those are real smokers but when you get it right you end up making a kick ass cookie. Does Stardock churn out PC games? Yes. Are most of them good or average? Yes. Are some of them great? Yes. Are all of them worth it? No. Are any of them worth it at release? Not in my opinion.