Harder difficulty

Rifleman

By Rifleman
in Wish List

Recommended Posts

Pillock Pathfinder

Pillock

Posted
Posted

Reduce the amount of tools and guns and bullets in Stalker by about half.

Increase number of possible locations for tools and weapons to spawn so you have to look harder.

Make harvesting take longer according to tool condition.

Make the amount of meat you can harvest vary according to the tool (or not) you're using, and its condition.

Reduce calorie intake from lower-condition food.

Make everything take longer when you're cold.

Make everything take longer when you're tired. Hungry, thirsty. (and less success chance for crafting and repairs and firemaking according to these statuses)

Adjust animal AI so they run away farther when you scare them, and don't come back. (improved tracking would be good, too.)

Reduce chances of successful rabbit snaring... by a LOT! Same goes for fishing.

Allow for over-harvesting of wildlife so that if you intensively hunt, trap or fish one same area, the stocks run out for a while.

Increase range and randomising of animal movement/locations so you don't always reliably know where to find/avoid them.

Water storage! Magic water bottles need to go - there needs to be some way of limiting how much we can store and carry.

Generally limiting carrying capacity by bulk as well as weight would also be good - the backpack seems to have tardis qualities sometimes.

I could probably think of more - these are all (I think) just adjustments to existing mechanics, rather than new ones. I'd hope they wouldn't be too hard to implement.  I#'ve got no truck with people saying that it would be 'too hard'. Stalker is supposed to be punishingly difficult - it says so in the description. But it just isn't. There's not a big enough jump from Voyageur, and with only 3 experience modes, the gaps probably need to be wider to accommodate the player base now. (or else spread them over more modes). Raph did say - and I agree with this - that they didn't want custom settings, because it would make it impossible to talk about the gameplay as a shared/common experience between players, and would make balancing the mechanics much harder for the developers. But Stalker mode isn't hard enough for seasoned players.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
cekivi Pathfinder

cekivi

Posted
Posted
48 minutes ago, Pillock said:

Generally limiting carrying capacity by bulk as well as weight would also be good - the backpack seems to have tardis qualities sometimes

True. Too bad you can't climb in and come out on a nice sunny beach with a hammock and BBQ nearby ^_^

Link to comment
Share on other sites
cekivi Pathfinder

cekivi

Posted
Posted
50 minutes ago, Pillock said:

But Stalker mode isn't hard enough for seasoned players

Speaking personally I don't want a harder Stalker mode. I want a more challenging Stalker mode if that makes sense?

Most of the things you outlined @Pillock would all make Stalker more challenging without increasing the absolute difficulty. If you also add reduced condition recovery for Stalker and allowed sleeping when not tired at a really reduced condition recovery (say 10% of base?) then that'd be my definition of Stalker. Challenging, knife's edge, but not hard if you can think outside the box and innovate.

I wouldn't want the game to just be "harder". Harder is easy. Reduce all food calories by half and make all wolf struggles autofail. That'd definitely be "hard" but it would be more punishing than fun and so arbitrary that it wouldn't be challenging.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Hiemalis Pathfinder

Hiemalis

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Pillock said:

Raph did say - and I agree with this - that they didn't want custom settings, because it would make it impossible to talk about the gameplay as a shared/common experience between players, and would make balancing the mechanics much harder for the developers.

I see where @Raphael van Lierop is coming from, but I beg to differ; the pros of a custom difficulty -- exclusively for the sandbox mode, of course -- would overwhelm any of its cons.

Someone already said this: custom difficulties are exactly about unbalancing the game towards the scenario the player wishes to experience, adapting it to his/her own proficiencies. And what about the players who simply don't want to share a common experience? Unless they're planning to implement (reimplement?, I've got the impression that there used to be) leaderboards, I don't understand why they'd want to lock us down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
cekivi Pathfinder

cekivi

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Hiemalis said:

Unless they're planning to implement (reimplement?, I've got the impression that there used to be) leaderboards, I don't understand why they'd want to lock us down.

There were leaderboards. However, they were solely for the number of days survived and since they were running before some well known exploits began getting patched the leaderboards were rather misleading. Given the direction the game is going total days survived became less of an achievement and since the "scores" were already suspect the leaderboards were retired.

 

2 hours ago, Hiemalis said:

Someone already said this: custom difficulties are exactly about unbalancing the game towards the scenario the player wishes to experience, adapting it to his/her own proficiencies.

To answer your other question, I would speculate that is has to do with story mode. Since story mode will be a more directed experience (i.e. there is a story) you have to have a better idea of what most players will experience. If story mode launches with difficulty modes then Hinterlands needs to know how those modes will perform. A custom difficulty or sliders wouldn't help with that. Now, that is pure speculation on my part but until the story launches I highly doubt custom difficulty modes will be high on the priority list especially since Hinterlands has put on their road map mod support.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ohbal Pathfinder

Ohbal

Posted
Posted
On 21/8/2016 at 7:33 AM, cekivi said:

I don't recall that actually. I remember them mentioning that they want to remain within a set number of difficulty modes in order to make balancing possible. It is hard to test new mechanics once there are too many difficulty permutations.

Hmmm, Hinterland has every right to do what they please, but the balancing reasoning is not solid. No "custom" mode is balanced... they are tailored by each player to satisfy their own wishes.  

When allowing for "Custom" difficulty HT wouldn't have to worry about balance. Balance would be subjective, since that is for the player to test: how would I make my experience better for me?

Hinterland only needs to worry about balancing out the three standard difficilty settings they already have. Tons of great suggestions in this thread about how to make stalker hader or more challenging... and I still don't undestand why we would need another difficulty setting. The Realistic idea is nice, I won't deny it, but then again, I don't think a lot of the player base is going to benefit from that effort.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Patrick Carlson Pathfinder

Patrick Carlson

Posted
Posted

Thanks for all your feedback on this topic everyone. One aspect we always like to make sure gets enough daylight is the fact that we call them Experience Modes for a reason. They aren't simply about the perceived "difficulty" of Stalker versus Pilgrim, although that can be one way many players differentiate them. We know "difficulty modes" is a shorthand that can get tossed around, but we're also interested in how players feel when they play each Mode.

Think about the descriptions that go with each Mode. Each one carries a different approach to the world of The Long Dark that we hope gives insight into what you might experience. The "harshness" of that experience plays a role, sure, but there are other differences as well. Just a thought. :coffee:

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ohbal Pathfinder

Ohbal

Posted
Posted
22 minutes ago, Patrick Carlson said:

Each one carries a different approach to the world of The Long Dark that we hope gives insight into what you might experience. The "harshness" of that experience plays a role, sure, but there are other differences as well. Just a thought. :coffee:

Which is a great clarification Patrick, and explains pretty well your approach for the game. I'm eager to see what you have in the boxes for us!

Just for the sake of discussion though, as I've read in this thread that there was a statement about not ever releasing a custom sandbox that I had somewhat missed. Could this be something subject to change in the future or are we talking about a written on stone design rule?

I'm being selfish here and now, since while I really enjoy TLD, I would personally like to custom my experience a little further: a way harsher weather, and reduced wildlife number and respawn rate among other tweaks come to mind instantly if I think about how to improve the game in my direction... but since every player has a different approach, getting closer to this "tailored experience" would be almost impossible if the "experiences" are locked down. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
dbldrew Pathfinder

dbldrew

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Patrick Carlson said:

Thanks for all your feedback on this topic everyone. One aspect we always like to make sure gets enough daylight is the fact that we call them Experience Modes for a reason. They aren't simply about the perceived "difficulty" of Stalker versus Pilgrim, although that can be one way many players differentiate them. We know "difficulty modes" is a shorthand that can get tossed around, but we're also interested in how players feel when they play each Mode.

Think about the descriptions that go with each Mode. Each one carries a different approach to the world of The Long Dark that we hope gives insight into what you might experience. The "harshness" of that experience plays a role, sure, but there are other differences as well. Just a thought. :coffee:

the main problem is re-playability so yes each "difficulty" has its own unique experience, the problem is once you play the map over and over on each difficulty the game gets stale. Having another option for me to create a custom experience would create longevity and much needed variety.     

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Rifleman Pathfinder

Rifleman

Posted
  • Author
Posted
14 minutes ago, Patrick Carlson said:

There's good feedback worth preserving in here! If you are up for it, I can simply lock it instead. You could even post a link to the new thread. :winky:

Ok here is the link.

It's strange that I can delete the topic but I can't lock it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing