How hard would you want "Stalker Mode" to be if you had a choice

[ChillPlayer]

You get a pretty good idea about the amount of (succesful) Stalker players if you check the Steam Achievements, or rather about serious TLD players in general:

You survived 50 days in a single Sandbox mode game. 4.6%

You survived for 100 days in a single Sandbox mode game. 1.6%

You survived for 200 days in a single Sandbox mode game. 0.7%

I think it's fair to assume that every Stalker player has at least once survived for more than 100 days in any mode with a few exceptions maybe for speedrunners and the like. But it does not make sense to go for Stalker if you can't manage to survive for 100 days in any mode.

The reality is that most players don't play TLD for too long, they installed it, tried it out and never came back. Maybe Story Mode will bring some people back but those numbers put everything into sort of perspective: Only 4.6% of the players care enough about the game to even play it for more than a few hours to survive for 50 days (note: Pilgrim counts too) but some are afraid that increasing difficulty will scare people away. I think it's the other way around, for most players TLD is and always was already too hard because you cannot bang-bang your way through it, you have to actually think.

What decreasing difficulty does is not bringing more players back, on the contrary, it makes the more experienced players who are passioned about the game and try to participate and help the community lose interest in the game. There's a middleground between being too easy and way to hard, I tried to give possible ideas some posts earlier which I think are reasonable enough for experienced Stalker players without making it impossible. So increasing Stalker difficulty might actually raise the 0.7% from the 200d achievement because I myself became tired of the "clock simulator" the game became around day 100, when you are all set with everything crafted and enough ammo to hunt down every wolf.

But as I also said in this thread and in the update announcement thread, I think it is harder now than 3 months ago and that's why I for example play it again  And don't forget, every Stalker player I know who's asking in the forum for harder difficulty only wishes this for Stalker. Not Pilgrim, not Voyageur, only Stalker, to satisfy the ~0.7% of players who actually care enough about the game to play it for more than 200d.

 

[cekivi]

So, two things from personal experience:

1. I had a hard time transitioning from Voyager to Stalker. The more aggressive (and numerous!) wolves were a huge surprise and I was eaten within 5 min for my first three playthroughs. Given that one time I spawned within view of a pack didn't help my odds. I found it a little alarming and did go back to playing Voyager until I was comfortable enough to attempt Stalker again. Now that I've been playing Stalker the game is much better (my decisions have consequences again!) but it is a bit of a jump for Voyager players.
2. I don't play past 100 days. I normally get bored around day 50-60 and start over. I played to 200 days once for the achievement and that's all. My favourite aspect of the Long Dark is exploring. Once all the maps are explored I normally just start a new game so I can try it again with no equipment. Making the game harder, reintroducing risks and giving more to explore would all be good for me personally since it would cater to my play style.

In short, Stalker should be brutal but fair and designed for hard core players. That being said, it seems increasingly necessary from what I read on the forums (and my own experience) that what kills you in Stalker should be your choices, not the wildlife. Fewer wolves that do more damage as opposed to packs for instance may make the transition from Stalker to Voyager easier. Many people after all request Stalker weather and loot with Voyager wolf behaviours. Why not the middle ground?

[ChillPlayer]

We all went through that transition, many players still active in the forum 2 years ago when reaching 50 days in Stalker was something to brag about in the forums because it was so tough.

For me, Stalker right now is the middle ground you are asking for. What's missing is the high ground

[Patrick Carlson]

Thanks everyone for this fascinating discussion. We haven't released numbers on this for a while now, but historically the majority of players spend their time in Voyageur, followed by Pilgrim, and then Stalker Mode. But keep in mind we're interested in having each Experience Mode deliver a unique experience and therefore feedback on each of them is very important to us. 

We should also remember that no matter where players spend their time in the game, that doesn't tell us too much about how "hard" a player might perceive a particular Experience Mode to be. One thing that The Long Dark's community has made very clear over the last year, is that many players approach the game for different reasons, which is fantastic. The perception of survival difficulty might just be one factor they are considering. I know sometimes I'm in the mood for very short, but intense, surprising, and challenging 10-20 day runs in Stalker. Usually it's my decisions about strategy that allow some of these moments to surface for me. In any case your feedback here is appreciated! 

[ChillPlayer]

6 minutes ago, Patrick Carlson said:

 I know sometimes I'm in the mood for very short, but intense, surprising, and challenging 10-20 day runs in Stalker. Usually it's my decisions about strategy that allow some of these moments to surface for me.

This is exactly the reason why I really like the new Challenges very much, doing "The Hunted" without knowing what to expect and without realizing that I am literally hunted gave me some of the most thrilling moments ever in TLD. I agree that TLD isn't only about difficulty or surviving the longest anymore, it started with the Forum Challenges and continues ingame. When prepping for a speed run I even enjoy exploring in Pilgrim and finding the fastest route without much worries about survival or animal attacks, once you liberate yourself from the thought that TLD is only about days on the counter a whole new spectrum of Fun opens up

But this thread asked specifically about Stalker difficulty and this per se has some room until it hits the ceiling

[piddy3825]

Sometimes, I think we all forget to look at the bigger picture.  There's a business aspect behind the game, the development of a product that hopefully will appeal to many potential game buyers.   I would be willing to make a bet that new players to the game, find Stalker mode to be more than sufficiently difficult.  I for one buy games for the story and entertainment value and typically will play those games thru the story line in "normal" mode.    If the story is good, I tend to play through a second time, that's when I select the most difficult mode.  Everybody here has literally hundreds of hours in the sandbox making you guys the elite "Stalker" mode players.  I think you most of you guys might just have to wait til modding is supported. 

[cekivi]

Well, not that elite

I can't play the Long Dark anywhere near as much as I'd like so I'm only at ~100 hours

It's a very good point though that you can't build a game for 1% of the player base. Like I said above, you need a middle ground

[ChillPlayer]

I can only repeat myself: we are talking about Stalker, the supposedly hardest mode. Why would someone beginning a new game that's known to be not easy in the first place want to try it on the hardest mode and then be not satisfied with the game because it's too hard?

Voyageur is the most played mode and no one I guess wants to touch that. There were talks about "SuperStalker" for the players @piddy3825 calls elite (which we aren't we just play alot), this would be fine by me too. But if you tailor the hardest mode for new players only, you will lose the part of the player base that puts the most effort into the game and helps spreading the word. There is really no shame in playing Voyageur or Pilgrim, there are players in the forum who do this for years and know the game as well as anyone, they just don't want to deal with some of the stress in Stalker. Other players got lured into Stalker because it's supposed to be a really hard challenge that will require everything of you (paraphrazing the description) and get disappointed once they get pass day 100 into clock simulator mode.

If you go back to the achievement statistics I posted, the whole active player base consists of maybe 4% of all who own TLD, so 1% is actually alot, TLD players are already a small group so why not try to satisfy all of us? According to Steam Charts, on average only 700 players per day play TLD , the question is how to you increase this:
http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=the+long+dark

Making a harder Stalker mode would be a good way for players like most who posted in this thread, but also more Challenges and surely the introduction of Story Mode. But I fail to see why a game that's advertised as being tough should draw more players by making it more easy, if this would be the case then Dark Souls wouldn't be the huge success it is, probably one of the toughest games ever especially for new players. I strongly believe that it'd be possible within the TLD Sandbox to satisfy all customers, new and longtime players with appropriate difficulty settings.

But, as I also said before I am optimistic, hinterland has done and announced many changes recently that make me feel that they finally address the issue of longtime motivation for experienced players

[Tbone555]

i think that hinterland has done an exceptional job with the current difficulties. the only thing i would change, is what i voted for - less loot, slower cond. recovery, and colder interiors. besides that, i believe its perfect as is

[cekivi]

Don't forget that not every active player is always gaming either. The stats are probably higher on evenings and weekends. Plus we have a sizeable international player base that plays in different time zones than North America

[piddy3825]

1 hour ago, ChillPlayer said:

I can only repeat myself: we are talking about Stalker, the supposedly hardest mode. Why would someone beginning a new game that's known to be not easy in the first place want to try it on the hardest mode and then be not satisfied with the game because it's too hard?

Voyageur is the most played mode and no one I guess wants to touch that. There were talks about "SuperStalker" for the players @piddy3825 calls elite (which we aren't we just play alot), this would be fine by me too. But if you tailor the hardest mode for new players only, you will lose the part of the player base that puts the most effort into the game and helps spreading the word. There is really no shame in playing Voyageur or Pilgrim, there are players in the forum who do this for years and know the game as well as anyone, they just don't want to deal with some of the stress in Stalker. Other players got lured into Stalker because it's supposed to be a really hard challenge that will require everything of you (paraphrazing the description) and get disappointed once they get pass day 100 into clock simulator mode.

If you go back to the achievement statistics I posted, the whole active player base consists of maybe 4% of all who own TLD, so 1% is actually alot, TLD players are already a small group so why not try to satisfy all of us? According to Steam Charts, on average only 700 players per day play TLD , the question is how to you increase this:
http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=the+long+dark

Making a harder Stalker mode would be a good way for players like most who posted in this thread, but also more Challenges and surely the introduction of Story Mode. But I fail to see why a game that's advertised as being tough should draw more players by making it more easy, if this would be the case then Dark Souls wouldn't be the huge success it is, probably one of the toughest games ever especially for new players. I strongly believe that it'd be possible within the TLD Sandbox to satisfy all customers, new and longtime players with appropriate difficulty settings.

But, as I also said before I am optimistic, hinterland has done and announced many changes recently that make me feel that they finally address the issue of longtime motivation for experienced players

Maybe I could have phrased that better, but to clarify what I was trying to say is, that, for those new players who like a hard and challenging game play mode, imho, I dont think they would be disappointed with the current Stalker mode difficulty level. As you pointed it, it's after you've played hundreds of hours or have surpassed a certain number of days, survived that you begin to be "under challenged" by the current game play mechanics.  I for one am not advocating an easier game... but I do understand the complexity of trying to balance the developers vision of the game vs. player expectations/ideas vs. market viability.  I agree with your position that TLD should be able to "... satisfy all customers, new and longtime players with appropriate difficulty settings," and I too am optimistic about Hinterland's announcements, but that all being said, you know the devs are under a lot of pressure and that's got to be a difficult juggling act considering that nowadays everything gets "dumbed down" in order to appeal to the widest possible audience.  

[selfless]

The game currently has one challenge and it is the same difficulty on day 1 as it is on day 1001.  Except its not.  Cuz by day 4 you've started to kill animals to feed and clothe yourself.  So: challenge exceeded.  Next 996 days do not get more difficult, they are only easier as you gather the more-than-abundant-yet-scattered materials together and craft and mend even-better clothes and weapons to answer the still-same-as-first-day level of cold and as-aggressive-as-always wolves.  

No one should be able to conquer this world faster than they can walk across it.

[cekivi]

14 minutes ago, selfless said:

The game currently has one challenge and it is the same difficulty on day 1 as it is on day 1001.  Except its not.  Cuz by day 4 you've started to kill animals to feed and clothe yourself.  So: challenge exceeded.  Next 996 days do not get more difficult, they are only easier as you gather the more-than-abundant-yet-scattered materials together and craft and mend even-better clothes and weapons to answer the still-same-as-first-day level of cold and as-aggressive-as-always wolves.  

No one should be able to conquer this world faster than they can walk across it.

Good point. How would you fix it?

[MueckE]

Although it makes no sense to make Stalker harder and harder only for a few people, @selfless pointed out a thing that has been there for ages. The game is hard at the beginning and becomes easier as time goes by.

This is acutally something that could be changed to the opposite (for all difficulties). I think, that's the point of all suggestions making it harder. That's the real idea behind reducing loot or limit days of survival. I bet, if we manage to create a good concept that changes the game from

hard->easy to easy->hard, Hinterland would implement it. This way, all players could be satisfyed and even the few hardcore players wont have to ask to make the game harder after every patch.

Therefor, we should first look what is already in the game, which suggestions do not work and so on. For example is an important aspect of TLD to explore. If there is no reason to explore, you dont do it. So if there is no loot, why should you go there anyway? (just an example).

To change the game like that, it will need a well thought through concept and will not work by easy one or two tweakings. So in my opinion, thats the only way to make the game reasonable harder, without destroying what the game is now.

 

[Scyzara]

30 minutes ago, MueckE said:

 I bet, if we manage to create a good concept that changes the game from hard->easy to easy->hard, Hinterland would implement it. This way, all players could be satisfyed and even the few hardcore players wont have to ask to make the game harder after every patch.

Well, we've had various suggestions pointing into this direction in the past.

Just to name some:

- outdoor temperatures gradually decreasing over time, e.g. -5°C every 50days

- indoor temperatures gradually decreasing over time, e.g. -3°C every 50days

- wildlife (inculding rabbits and fish) becoming scarcer as time goes by, e.g. -20% every 50 days

- indoor shelter getting destroyed by fires or blizzards over time

- predators getting more aggressive over time

I personally am all for an increasing difficulty level during the course of a Stalker game. It may start with the current conditions and get more difficult every 50 days or so. Like this, inexperienced players are not going to see the more difficult stages anyway (for they usually die prior to day 50, I guess) while experienced players get the chance to deal with increasingly challenging conditions and find out how long they can last. I for one would love such a difficulty system for Stalker. 

The problem with this approach is that the difficulty increase either needs to be capped at some point (e.g. max. -20°C colder than currently outdoors) or that survival becomes impossible at some point. And to make things even more complicated, said point extremely depends on the individual player. For some, even -10°C colder than currently might mean inevitable death while others might still thrive at temperatures -25°C colder than atm.

I personally wouldn't mind inevitable death at all, but other Stalker players want infinite survival to be possible, hence difficulty can't be increased without limits. And finding these limits without killing the less "talented" players (sorry for the word, I lack a better one unfortunately) accidentally is probably extremely difficult at best and impossible at worst.

 

[ChillPlayer]

6 hours ago, selfless said:

The game currently has one challenge and it is the same difficulty on day 1 as it is on day 1001.  Except its not.  Cuz by day 4 you've started to kill animals to feed and clothe yourself.  So: challenge exceeded.  Next 996 days do not get more difficult, they are only easier as you gather the more-than-abundant-yet-scattered materials together and craft and mend even-better clothes and weapons to answer the still-same-as-first-day level of cold and as-aggressive-as-always wolves.  

Yes that's exatly right and let me tell you, this wasn't always the case. Pre-v190 you had a "sweet spot" between day 5-50ish where you could relax but then the struggle would continue again because you ran out of stuff, you didn't find new cloths and you had to search both maps for just a single sewingkit, you had a rifle but no more bullets, there were no bows and the only means to get some meat was to either trap rabbits like crazy or go after a wolf with your knife or flare. Just watch this video of mine from v183 and in what kind of predicament the game has put me in around day 145 already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjyfFSDYXTk

That's what some of the long time players are longing for to get back. Difficulty wise things went south when bears began to respawn, in v190 there were only 4 bears and once you hunted them down, there were no more. But some updates later the bears would respawn every week IIRC and all you had to do is camp in the Farmstead, take a shot and fill your fridge with bear meat, then sleep again for a week. This is why I very much welcome the addition of parasits in bear/wolf meat and the new rest mechanic, it addresses exactly this point.

With the addition of new maps - which I love of course - it also became more difficult to balance loot, it's just too much of everything if you know how to get quickly from one map to the other, especially bullets. Even on day 300 I have so many bullets that instead of trying to sneak my way into the gaz station I would just fire a shot into the air to scare all wolves away and walk into the building. But I like how the devs approach to fix the bullet issue too. Most places that where famous farming spots for deer/wolf combos now don't have a single wolf near by the deers (frozen sea in CH, outside Trapper's) for days and hunting down a deer is much more difficult than scare it into a wolf and kill the wolf when it begins devouring the deer.

Although some adjustment is needed here too, I've shot two deers recently outside Trappers, both only wounded but not dead and they ran away. I thought I will have to track them down and decided to go for some sleep first into the house. I was quite surprised to find them 2 hours later dead right where I shot them, no tracking needed. Hopefully this will get fixed too, I think it would add to difficulty if wounded animals would run away in a direction and newer come back to die where you wounded them, forcing you to track them down or even beat a wolf pack to it

[KD7BCH]

On 5/13/2016 at 3:48 AM, Scyzara said:

I generally like the idea of having water (and soda) frozen at temperatures below 0°C (or -5°C, respectively), but I agree that a rework of the current fire mechanics (heat output and especially duration of coals from burnt-out fires) would be necessary. I also like the idea of keeping water liquid with your body heat, but I think this should definitely be a bit more complex than just a temperature drain by default.

I'm not so sure about that. If I were in a TLD-like situation and wanted to keep e.g. 2l of water liquid, I would boil the water, wait until it has cooled down to a somehow pleasant temperature (e.g. 50°C), fill it into a 2l bottle and place the warm bottle between my sweater and my coat. This way, the water bottle should rather give you a heat bonus for several hours and not deplete any heat at all. The latter would of course be the case if you decide to heat up a frozen water bottle under your coat.

Guess you could theoretically use a scarf wrapped around your waist to fix the bottle (more or less like a baby sling, just that you're not trying to fix a baby but a bottle). Or you might simply carry the bottle in front of your belly (and under your coat) inside a bag with a shoulder belt.

TL, DR:

I'm all for frozen water, but please combined with water having a certain (ofc. variable) temperature and the option to store not only cold, but also warm water below your clothes. 

Certainly would keep you warm but I think several hours is vastly overestimated. Water hold a lot of heat however if the bottle is not insulated it would rapidly become cold. Also how do you plan to heat a 2l of plastic? While possible it isn't practical for two reasons, plastic is a poor conductor with a low melting point so while you can heat water in a plastic bottle you run the risk of melting it if you use conduction heat to do so which would be the fastest way. Best way is to use a metal pan, at this point we don't have a metal pan used this way. The plastic bottle is another abstract which could become a real difficulty in that we have to search it out or use a pan and not be able to carry the water. (More difficulty)

You'd really only ever need to carry a few liters of water because of weight but you could store up to your full supply, again leveraging a resource and stockpiling in order to free up time and energy to acquire other resources. Keeping your supply liquid would be another thing "to do indoors" and exactly the type of thinking problem that belongs in the long dark. 

https://blog.doingsciencetostuff.com/2013/03/11/a-hot-cup-of-tea/

Regarding how fast water cools, the below chart is semi-scientific, the above link is where it is from, and shows that the slopes are largely similar for water/tea bearing vessels. The teacup is arguably the least insulated while the kettles and pots more so. I also think it would be interesting to carry a bottle of water for warmth, however, if it is in un-insulated plastic, starting at say 50C it would take less than an hour in any vessel to before it lost its heat and dropped to zero C if the ambient temperature of the environment was -20C. Forgoing the math the key take-a-ways are that the greatest heat loss rates are in the first time period after the vessel is removed from the heat source. This is why you can eat a burger 5 minutes off the grill but not 5 seconds, but even 20 minutes off it will still be warm. Were the ambient temperature -20C and we starting with a 50C bottle of water the temperature would quickly drop to 0C, stay there while the water undergoes a phase change and then freezes. Water at any temp below 36C  doesn't benefit us because body temp is 36C. So even a 2 liter bottle against your body would only give you less than an hour of benefit. 

 

[Pillock]

To my way of thinking, Stalker mode is not for new players or players who only put a handful of hours into any game before shelving it and moving on to something else. There are two other difficulty modes for those people, and the designers shouldn't be trying to cater to them when it comes to Stalker settings. If someone installs the game for the first time, jumps straight into Stalker and then complains that it's too difficult, then they are an idiot - they should shut up and go away.

The game needs to retain long-term difficulty in order to retain long-term appeal. The reason it doesn't quite achieve this at the moment is not because the game does not contain difficult gameplay elements, it's because those elements can be wholly avoided by players, once they figure out the maps and the mechanics.

You can stay in one place, pretty much forever, farming regularly and infinitely respawning rabbits, deer and fish for food and materials, while using regularly and infinitely respawning firewood from the forest floor for fuel, and never having to expose yourself to danger. The game does become difficult again when - usually by choice in my experience - you travel out into the wilder places where these resources do not exist in such convenient combinations, where you have to sleep outdoors, and where dangerous beasties live alongside you.

Depletion of local resources is the key thing, I believe. To force people out of their comfort zones and into the dangerous environment that is already there.

[cekivi]

To echo what is quickly becoming a theme on this thread I'd be happy if the loot system was returned to how it was in the early updates in 2014. I remember being super overjoyed to find a can opener let alone something vital like a knife or a rifle. Stalker doesn't need to have -50C outdoor temperatures to be hard. It just needs for the resources in it to be super precious. Exploring an entire map to find a single knife is something I'd really like to experience again 

[Scyzara]

3 hours ago, cekivi said:

Stalker doesn't need to have -50C outdoor temperatures to be hard. It just needs for the resources in it to be super precious. Exploring an entire map to find a single knife is something I'd really like to experience again 

Haha, just wait until I've finished my Stalker stocktaking world trip. You'll have plenty of chances to ask for less loot once you've seen these numbers. 

I've already (mostly) reached the item numbers I once guesstimated to be present on all maps together and I've yet to loot CH.

[ChillPlayer]

5 hours ago, cekivi said:

I remember being super overjoyed to find a can opener let alone something vital like a knife or a rifle.

This! I want the feeling of happiness back after finally finding the one sewingkit I so desperatelly needed

[Tbone555]

then again, in stalker mode, anything can happen at any time. like last night. i had a very good supply of venison, water, warm clothes, a rifle, knife and hatchet, bla bla bla etc etc you get the point.
preparing to make the climb into timberwolf mtn from pleasant valley, i stopped to cook some venison in the stove. well a lone wolf caught a whiff i suppose, jumped me from behind while i was cooking. i have had that character since the new update, but that ended him pretty quicky. (he was already at 50 percent, i was guilty of flirting with freezing at the time )
there was no warning, no way to prepare. all it was, was "POOF, HAVE A WOLF AND DIE NOW, K THX"
and i think its the stuff like that which keeps stalker fun and interesting in its current state. maybe not long term, but immediately

[Rusty_Old_F250]

Stalker needs to be harder longer term, I agree, but I think we need some new difficulty settings too. The first few days in stalker has a satisfying level of difficulty (especially after the latest update) but for all out punishment, I present for your consideration: "Reaper" (as in the grim reaper) with extremely few supplies, insane weather setting in after a few days, wildlife that attacks on sight, etc.

And then for the next level, "The Grave" all the difficulty of "Reaper," but no condition recovery, NONE.

Sam

[cekivi]

You wouldn't want zero condition recovery though. The game would become very short since freezing would make you very dead very quickly. For instance, it's not uncommon to lose a few percentage points due to cold when exploring a map, collecting firewood, etc. If that loss is permanent than you can never really leave your shelter.

[Tbone555]

LOVE the idea of a harder difficulty setting! and i would personally like an easier difficulty setting, too. where youre just god of this world and you can roam around and explore to your heart's content without ANY negative effects, aggressive wildlife, or stats dropping. i say this because i very often broadcast this game on Twitch. sometimes i do challenges and survival runs on stalker, but sometimes i just want to walk around and show off the game in all its beauty. so having a mode where you can continuously stay outdoors forever would be cool if you just want to look around.

anyway, to my next point. i agree completely with cekivi's post above, aswell. having NO condition recovery would just be unfair. even the most elite players of this game wouldnt be able to make it very far. having a much slower condition recovery rate, i think would be cool. just not a completely obsolete one.