More 'interactive' tasks.

[Mikhail_Reign]

Making a fire - select stuff and watch a 15 second video. You have no input on if it fails or not (other then materials selected), and you are locked into watching a video. The fire WILLNOT start before the video has ended.

 

This is how most interactions work in this (and any) walking/tree punching sim. Me getting better at the game has no impact on how well it works.

 

Another example in (other) games is cutting down a tree - equip item and hit the tree 10 times. There is nothing you can do to improve the time. Each swing = 1 second = 10 second to tell a tree.

 

What I am suggesting is some user input during these actions that can improve (or worsen) the time it takes the player to complete an action.

 

An example of this is gathering coconuts in Stranded Deep. To do so you have to climb a tree. The player can chose a smaller tree to get it faster. They can jump up the tree from a nearby rock. They can even choose to use the horrible physics engine to throw things at the coconuts to knock them down without climbing at all.

 

to bring this back to The Long Dark, I suggest some 'input' while making fire (and possibly other actions). This would come across ingame as 'blowing on the fire', 'cupping ya hands around it' - stuff like that. Normally things like this are done via mini games (like opening the safe). For the fire I suggest a '2 variable' mini game. The safe, for example, has one variable - where the dial is - a '2 variable' version of this would be moving the dial with the keys while also 'applying pressure' with mouse movement. Basically it requires 2 user inputs to be correct, instead of just one, to achieve affect.

 

starting a fire without this would be basically the same, but you could also choose to 'blow on the fire' possible helping or hindering its chances, depending on how well you do it.

 

i just don't like 'do something 1000 times, now it always happens' systems. It encourages grinding, and I can never 'get it wrong'. I prefer 'actually learn how to do it better your self, and then do it better yourself' systems.

[Dirmagnos]

Could be interesting, as long as its optional. Long interactive scenes tend to become boring after a while and if they cannot be avoided and have to be repeated periodically they tend to piss off people a lot. 10 seconds is long enough to become tedious by just sitting there waiting but not long enough to go to the fridge and make oneself a sandwich.

[Mikhail_Reign]

Wa? I'm saying the scenes are long and not interactable NOW. I'm suggesting a way that you can shorten that time BY interacting.

[Dirmagnos]

Ahh, my bad.

[MarrowStone]

Ive done some thinking about this before and I beleive some extra interactability with firemaking would make sense but as for short actions like chopping saplings or seaching containers its best to keep those the same

I cant remember if its still on the roadmap but there was something suggesting fireblowing was going to be a thing. 

I also think the ability to light another match if the fire looks like its going to fail would be great too.

[Mikhail_Reign]

Yeah I was think how I VERY much don't want another game in which I punch trees, so I would veto any additional input in the cutting part as well. I just feel like certain tasks are sort of the 'highlight' of this game. Making a fire can be such desperate act, and I feel it looses some of its impact if every time I am just waiting for a bar to fill or fail. It makes starting a fire in the barn, to prepare some food, play out very similar to desperately making a fire to survive, on sheltered side of a tree in a snowstorm.

 

I think the thread heading might be misleading. I meant to make tasks more interactive, not to make more interactive tasks. I was trying to think of other things I would like some impact in, and I was coming up with a bit of a blank. Maybe fishing?

 

[MarrowStone]

Good idea, problem with fishing is that I dont want to actually do it in real time unless i can stop what Im doing to catch the fish If Im repairing clothing or just passing time, without resetting my progress on the clothing, I dont want to miss the fish If I wasnt staring at a hole for an hour XD,

Maybe for fishing it passes time until you get a bite, and then activates a minigame? 

[Wastelander]

If there ever is a fishing minigame, please, PLEASE don't let it be the horribly broken mess that it is in Stardew Valley. Seriously, I hate the fishing-minigame in Stardew Valley with a brightly burning passion. My hatred could possibly power a small home.

Well, to expand on that, I hate minigames that exist for no reason with a passion - they're what made me quit GTA5, because if I wanted to do yoga, I'd sign up for a yoga course, I bought the game to blow up cars and rob banks, things which I cannot do (without consequences) in real life.

Now in TLD, a fishing minigame could be done right - but it'll probably be very hard to pull off, especially since some people on these forums are quite experienced on fishing, including me. Now, here's the thing: overall, fishing is easy. You sit and do other stuff while you wait for fish to bite. If a fish bites, you reel it in, stun it and kill it. Now, I don't know about various types of fishing - ice fishing, fly fishing and so on - but I guess the underlying principle - bait, hook, line etc. doesn't change.

Once a fish has the hook embedded into it, it has very very slim chances of escape, because every motion against the hook is a painful injury.

Here's another thing: Fish are dumb. They are unable to grasp even the concept of a hook. To them, it seems "Oh, something hurts if I go this way, so I'll go another way.". Some will try to seek refuge in the mud, and all of them will struggle but in the overwhelming majority of cases, they won't manage to struggle free because they try to not get injured, without knowing that they're going to get killed.

If a fish does manage to struggle free, the hook was either in a place where it could get loose without immediately killing the fish, or the line tore, which is a failure of equipment, not a failure of skill.

It does require some skill to know when some fish have bitten (some are more active than others) and it does take a bit of skill to successfully reel in a fish, but in my opinion that's not enough to warrant a mini-game. I may be biased on the matter, by the way.

[togg]

23 hours ago, Wastelander said:

Once a fish has the hook embedded into it, it has very very slim chances of escape, because every motion against the hook is a painful injury.

Here's another thing: Fish are dumb. They are unable to grasp even the concept of a hook. To them, it seems "Oh, something hurts if I go this way, so I'll go another way.". Some will try to seek refuge in the mud, and all of them will struggle but in the overwhelming majority of cases, they won't manage to struggle free because they try to not get injured, without knowing that they're going to get killed.

That's really disturbing to read. Just to let you know.

[Wastelander]

Just now, togg said:

That's really disturbing to read. Just to let you know.

Remember it the next time you eat fish  

[togg]

2 minutes ago, Wastelander said:

Remember it the next time you eat fish  

Guess what.

[Wastelander]

Just now, togg said:

Guess what.

Guessing - you're vegan?

[Ohbal]

The roadmap contains a change for the fire making that could go in the direction you are aiming:

Quote

• Improved firemaking (blowing mechanic; first-person presence)

And I'm really looking forward to it. I'm all in for anything that can reduce the time I'm looking at a progress bar. Good thing about TDL is that it doesn't have many of this.**

Harvesting: the current system works great; something more complex would get boring after doing it 30 times. 

Cooking: is planned to become something different as well:

Quote

• Improved Cooking; more of the cooking action happens in-game (vs. in menus); cooking happens in game-time (i.e. not accelerated time), so you can multi-task.

Fishing: either make it fun, or let me do other stuff while I'm fishing: like reading a book, crafting whatever I can with what I have at hand, fix my clothes... whatever. Its like loosing 4 hours boiling water... staring at the thing, as if I were completely stoned... waiting for the bubbles .

Crafting: would it be worth the effort to make each of the craftable items to have its own crafting minigame? probably not, so the current system also makes sense.

Chopping wood: While it could be cool to have like several dozens of log models, each which its own "weak-spot" that could reduce the cut-time and item degradation, it would also get old I think.   

Riffle cleaning / Tool sharpening: same old song. It would most likely get old after you've done it 30 times. 

Am I missing any activity? Main issue here (I think)  is that we repeat these activities too often, and it would take a fantastic design to keep the gameplay feeling unique and enjoyable for a long time if they were changed into interactive sequences... The current design leads the game to the survival itself. Time being one valuable resource, activities basically act as time-sinkers. 

TL:DR

Fire-making, cooking (both planned) & maybe fishing could work as interactive activities. The rest are fine as they are. 

Edit:

**the progress bar for looting... oh man, I'm starting to feel this one. How can it take sooo much time to find NOTHING inside a small metal box?

[Mikhail_Reign]

I think you summed up my original idea perfectly with 'make it fun, or let me do something else'. I agree that not every activity needs to be improved - crafting doesn't need any mini games added to it. I focused on fire because it is such a focus in the game, and at the moment it's such a drag. If you assume your going to fall a few times when you're starting (say 4 or 5 60% fails in a row), it can quickly turn into some pretty dull stretches of watching that loading bar.

While I don't really know how to fix it, I have a bit of a problem with the 'fades to black and time passes'. It works fine for things inside where the environment isn't going to change, but outside it seems ridiculous when you start doing something and when you stop the weather is horrible. Sure the character might be so single minded that they would continue to chop wood for 45 minutes and only notice that a blizzard had blow up when they stopped, but more likely 20 minutes into it you would have noticed the weather start to change and reevaluated your situation. I've noticed that you can see bad weather approaching before it happens if you look for the right signs (the tops of trees help) and all that nice work is defeated if the game just want to 'MEANWHILE...!' me with stuff.

 

 

[Dirmagnos]

Minigames for various actions could be a thing, but they also should be optional in this case. Basically, if player let them go automatic, then it depends on luck and player skill(as numerical value). While doing those actions manually would depend mainly on player reaction time, observation skills and, to a lesser degree, skill value(how fast things move, how much time player have to take action, etc).

So if youre doing good, then you can let actions to be automated, while when in a pinch, then getting close and personal might be a better idea if you know what you are doing. Extra effort for extra result.

[Wastelander]

12 hours ago, Ohbal said:

**the progress bar for looting... oh man, I'm starting to feel this one. How can it take sooo much time to find NOTHING inside a small metal box?

I always tried to explain this away to me that there's a lot of unusable clutter inside of it - trash, dead batteries, CDs, little plastic toys, raisins - which takes the time to sort through. You're right, however.

[Dirmagnos]

4 hours ago, Wastelander said:

I always tried to explain this away to me that there's a lot of unusable clutter inside of it - trash, dead batteries, CDs, little plastic toys, raisins - which takes the time to sort through. You're right, however.

Explanation is simple: protagonist opens a box, sees nothing of interest inside, meditates on that issues(as he was tough in anger management class; thats why you see that bar, its not search progress, its anger dissipation rate), gradually lowers his expectations and actually find something of use. Its not as good as what he expected, but its still something. Plus, there is always another house, another shelf, another corpse to search and any one of the can be IT... a case of booze, a pound of coke, a carton of smokes, or even a jackpot, a companion. "Maybe, yes Wilson, im sure of it, tomorrow..."

[alone sniper]

7 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Minigames for various actions could be a thing, but they also should be optional in this case. Basically, if player let them go automatic, then it depends on luck and player skill(as numerical value).

I saw this thing in "Dead but alive " game 

 

[RCCross]

I agree with the fire "video" LOL not to mention the "Come on little fire" voice over.

Blowing air in the tinder and other mini-games, thumbs up!

As for the cutting the tree... maybe a little improvement.

But it's not like the first time takes 1 hour to chop a tree down and then after 1 year of experience it takes seconds.

[cekivi]

Welcome to the forums @RCCross 

For fire lighting blowing would be the only mechanic you really need to use in a stove. If you're lighting a fire outside maybe allow you to position your hands to shield the flame as it catches? But I agree with @Dirmagnos: it should be an optional mini-game. If I have level 5 fire starting skill I shouldn't need to worry about my hand positions and blowing on the fire.

[Timber Wolf]

On 10/24/2016 at 5:56 PM, Ohbal said:

**the progress bar for looting... oh man, I'm starting to feel this one. How can it take sooo much time to find NOTHING inside a small metal box?

I always figured they meant it to take longer in order to always include some suspense to the opening of each container.

It reminds me of opening a wax pack of baseball cards and sifting through the names to see if any of them were worth something.

[Ohbal]

11 hours ago, Timber Wolf said:

I always figured they meant it to take longer in order to always include some suspense to the opening of each container.

It reminds me of opening a wax pack of baseball cards and sifting through the names to see if any of them were worth something.

Yeah, I understand that. It has taken me 370 days of gameplay to be bothered by it!  However, after a few hundreds hours in game, I feel it's getting too long. Should we add a "container search" skill? 

[cekivi]

2 hours ago, Ohbal said:

Yeah, I understand that. It has taken me 370 days of gameplay to be bothered by it!  However, after a few hundreds hours in game, I feel it's getting too long. Should we add a "container search" skill? 

That's probably overkill

I've never felt particularly bothered by the container search time. It's short enough that I don't even have time to sip my tea before it finishes.

[Ohbal]

I didn't had an issue with it until I started playing stalker and interloper, when you spend a lot of time looking into empty drawers. I just think that, for empty containers, the searching time should be quicker. There are cabins in CH that would make you take 10 sips of tea!  

PS: Obviously kidding with the container search skill

[cekivi]

Very true. It's especially disappointing to open a safe on Interloper and find it empty! Hopefully there will just be fewer containers (or more broken containers) in Interloper (and a lesser extent Stalker) so that searching usually finds you something.