Custom Difficulty

[PleXD]

Hi Guys

First off I love the game been playing for about a month or so now. Good work on making a awesome game! 

Now I started the game on the voyager difficulty level and got to about 45 days and got super bored. I had plenty of food and had made a wolf coat etc so there was not much more I needed. So I was going to give stalker a try but thought what the hell lets try interloper.

I had not looked at a map up until that point but by golly to stay alive you one in interloper... (first time I started on TWM and yeah did not last long cause I had not been there before) 

Anyway I am now up to 30 days on my current game but it has been a high level of frustration to get to this point. I currently am infected with parasites I do however have a pie or 2 left from the 4 days of night which was fairly cool event (even if it did kill my last 27 day interloper game when 2 wolves ambushed me) so I am sure I will survive it but the level of planning each day got to me so I thought I would jump back to stalker and start a more relaxed game. 

When I first started I noticed that the starting items was rather generous. I had wool socks and a wool hat!! wow! I also noticed that the warm bar barely moved even tho the felt like temp was -23C. (not sure what that is in F) Now I am about 7 days in and yeah I can see I am on the path back to boredom.

I have been lurking on the forums for a couple of weeks and have read about how people dislike or like certain features etc and I have been thinking about maybe posting an idea in the Alpha wish list forum about maybe having a custom difficultly option but I thought I would post here first to see what other people think.

So essentially the idea would be to be able to start a custom game and have different options to choose from like a slide bar or drop down menu to pick things like how bad the weather is with Pilgrim type weather at one end and interloper at the other.

Also have other options like what starting items you have or if you can or cannot find items like the knife or hatchet, Being able to turn cabin fever and parasites on and off and Maybe something around how fast clothing and food decays. 

Something I also noticed in interloper is most of the cabins have been burnt down so maybe have an option around how many cabins are available.

So my custom game would look something like this

Weather: interloper

Starting items: interloper

Wolves and bear behaviour: interloper

able to find Gun, knife, Hatchet etc: off

Cabin fever: off

Parasites: On

loot level: something between stalker and interloper if available, if not then stalker.

Cabins available: (this would depend on loot level) all available.

Clothing decay: slow

Food decay: normal  

 

So would this be some thing that people may utilize or am I way of the mark? 

      

[stray_cur]

It's been brought up a lot, with variables like those you mention and more (wildlife abundance and respawn rate, for example).  The devs have been pretty firm in their stance on creating certain 'experiences', so far.  Sounds like you're mostly in favor of interloper settings though.  Just have to live with less cabins (many are redundant anyway).

[togg]

I'm personally against this and I'm glad that the devs will not allow it. An experience is difficult to make and easy to break. Giving broad customization is way more a risk than an opportunity. Videogames work with constraint.

I understand than there are too many tools in stalker, that could be fixed probably with other little things, I would personally not go back to stalker even if I'm not that good in Interloper but I like it a lot. Also an advice is to know the world pretty well before playing interloper!

[PleXD]

6 hours ago, stray_cur said:

It's been brought up a lot, with variables like those you mention and more (wildlife abundance and respawn rate, for example).  The devs have been pretty firm in their stance on creating certain 'experiences', so far.  Sounds like you're mostly in favor of interloper settings though.  Just have to live with less cabins (many are redundant anyway).

 

It might be that the devs are busy with the story to dedicate too many resources into something like this? And that is understandable as something like this would not be easy to do.

Even If there was a cabin next to the DP exit in the CH at least then you could cabin hop and go get extra coal for fires. 

 

[PleXD]

3 hours ago, togg said:

I'm personally against this and I'm glad that the devs will not allow it. An experience is difficult to make and easy to break. Giving broad customization is way more a risk than an opportunity. Videogames work with constraint.

I understand than there are too many tools in stalker, that could be fixed probably with other little things, I would personally not go back to stalker even if I'm not that good in Interloper but I like it a lot. Also an advice is to know the world pretty well before playing interloper!

As mentioned I went straight from voyager to interloper and only recently tried stalker difficulty. I like interloper and have had a ball playing it however it does take planning with very little wriggle room.

I started my current interloper game in the 4 days of darkness event and while dark it had the extra calories from the pies and chocolate and the awesome loot locations you could stumble upon. I found that I enjoyed the experience 10x more then the standard game. It meant I could stay inside and read a book for a couple of hours and wait out a storm instead of having to go out but also knowing that I could not stay too long either and would have to keep moving.

As it stands this will probably be my last interloper game as if I die in my current game I do not think I will have the patience to start again. 

Going back to stalker is like a walk in the park so it will probably mean I leave the game until the story comes out. ☹️

[ridankrad]

13 minutes ago, PleXD said:

 

It might be that the devs are busy with the story to dedicate too many resources into something like this? And that is understandable as something like this would not be easy to do.

Even If there was a cabin next to the DP exit in the CH at least then you could cabin hop and go get extra coal for fires. 

 

Resources aside, I think that the point that stray_cur was making is that the devs have said that they don't plan to implement custom difficulty (even if they had the spare resources to do so) because they want to focus on making each difficulty mode its own particular kind of "experience". When choosing difficulty, TLD even states "Choose Your Experience", so I think it's not really simply a matter of resources but more a design decision by the devs. But with 4 different difficulty modes now with Interloper's introduction, there's a lot to choose from. That said, I agree that certain issues I'd like to see worked on, for example cabin fever, which I think needs more work.

[togg]

12 hours ago, PleXD said:

As mentioned I went straight from voyager to interloper and only recently tried stalker difficulty. I like interloper and have had a ball playing it however it does take planning with very little wriggle room.

I started my current interloper game in the 4 days of darkness event and while dark it had the extra calories from the pies and chocolate and the awesome loot locations you could stumble upon. I found that I enjoyed the experience 10x more then the standard game. It meant I could stay inside and read a book for a couple of hours and wait out a storm instead of having to go out but also knowing that I could not stay too long either and would have to keep moving.

As it stands this will probably be my last interloper game as if I die in my current game I do not think I will have the patience to start again. 

Going back to stalker is like a walk in the park so it will probably mean I leave the game until the story comes out. ☹️

Well, we have a dilemma here. I perfectly understand that stalker is to easy and not fun and interloper is really challenging because of the need of planning that you mention and can be not fun for someone.

The problem: is this game really the right one to have a distinct fun experience that doesn't require planning? I don't think so. Of course exploration, the beauty of everything and nice little things are one of the main cores of it but they work pretty well in Stalker. But gameplay wise there's not much, yet, that can give distinct fun besides the experience that they've refined in interloper. The game is all about those elements.  Even when they will add shelter customizations etc those things will be enjoyable in Stalker but there will not be new gameplay that is satisfying if "less of interloper". Stress is part of this, you can always backup your save, I've done it multiple times. Then after a couple of days of reloading I start fresh becaus it kind of ruins the continuity for me.
I don't think this game can work in another way at the time being. They can still refine a lot in Stalker and maybe little things in Interloper. They will add tons of stuff that you can look up in the timeline. But your dilemma will not be solved I think A custom option will only give a bad illusion to the players, maybe for a small fraction of people it will improve something but it would be like ruining all their work.

[mystifeid]

13 hours ago, PleXD said:

As it stands this will probably be my last interloper game as if I die in my current game I do not think I will have the patience to start again. 

Wish I had a dollar for every time I've said that to myself.

[Dirmagnos]

On 11/8/2016 at 3:29 AM, ridankrad said:

But with 4 different difficulty modes now with Interloper's introduction, there's a lot to choose from.

4 is not "a lot", as it presents only 4 rigidly restricted types of experience. Having 50 options, each with own set of gradations, like Dont Starve have, IS "a lot to choose from", as player can create literally millions of combinations.

And problem with set rules is that they only appeal to person who created them. Everybody else will find some parts of that ruleset to be 2 much or 2 little, 2 narrow or 2 wide, 2 fat or slow, 2 hard or 2 easy.

I like general difficulty of Stalker, but parasites completely kill major portion of positive experience from this mode. Id like to have rough wildlife as it is in Interloper, but im also deeply into scavenging, and in game with loot being scarce as is, being completely locked out of rather major part of it, with nothing to compensate, is not my cup of tea.

[togg]

10 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

4 is not "a lot", as it presents only 4 rigidly restricted types of experience. Having 50 options, each with own set of gradations, like Dont Starve have, IS "a lot to choose from", as player can create literally millions of combinations.

Well, that's just one of the multiple reasons for why Don't Starve is so so bad. You're talking about completelly different games, they have done The Long Dark exactly to break for the kind of things that you're searching!

 

[ridankrad]

12 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

4 is not "a lot", as it presents only 4 rigidly restricted types of experience. Having 50 options, each with own set of gradations, like Dont Starve have, IS "a lot to choose from", as player can create literally millions of combinations.

And problem with set rules is that they only appeal to person who created them. Everybody else will find some parts of that ruleset to be 2 much or 2 little, 2 narrow or 2 wide, 2 fat or slow, 2 hard or 2 easy.

I like general difficulty of Stalker, but parasites completely kill major portion of positive experience from this mode. Id like to have rough wildlife as it is in Interloper, but im also deeply into scavenging, and in game with loot being scarce as is, being completely locked out of rather major part of it, with nothing to compensate, is not my cup of tea.

Yes, allowing for millions of combinations is more than four fixed difficulty levels. But as I said, Hinterland has made it very clear that they don't want to leave it up to the player to figure out which combinations make for a good experience. For what Hinterland is planning, a game with distinct types of experiences depending on the difficulty level, four is a lot. They could always allow for more, and giving the player full access to a series of sliders and checkboxes would be probably giving the most, but that doesn't mean that it would be the best design choice for TLD.

Something to remember is that TLD is a game still intended to have a story mode, not just a sandbox game. It's easy to forget this because the sandbox part of the game is all we have right now, and many people (myself included) have gotten hours and hours of entertainment from sandbox. But all the same, I think Hinterland still very much remains focused on providing a great story mode at the end of all this, and I can see why they wouldn't want millions of difficulty combinations for that.

Edit: One additional thing I thought of is that Feats are arguably an additional level of custom difficulty. It's not as much as you want I'm sure, but there are many Experience + Feat combinations.

[ridankrad]

1 hour ago, togg said:

Well, that's just one of the multiple reasons for why Don't Starve is so so bad. You're talking about completelly different games, they have done The Long Dark exactly to break for the kind of things that you're searching!

 

Not to deviate too much from the OP, but could you elaborate more on why you dislike Don't Starve?

[togg]

11 hours ago, ridankrad said:

Not to deviate too much from the OP, but could you elaborate more on why you dislike Don't Starve?

It encompass everything I hate about survival games. I also didn't try TLD for a long long time because I thought it was the same.

It doesn't respect your time, you have to restart over and over in order to understand small stuff in a big and boring skill tree. When you die in the long dark is different, you've make a mistake that you feel is a part of one world, an experience.

There's a proliferation of elements, clicks, numbers, that really don't seem to mean anything. The Long Dark adds elements when they're needed, that's something that a lot of player that ask for stuff in the wishlist forum don't get, "more" is not "better".

The UI is heavy, I don't like it, TLD is the opposite. Even Age of Empires had a lighter UI than Don't Starve.

It's only about number, I suppose that comes from WoW. Survival games were just about number to me until TLD.

There're a lot of other stuff but I can't elaborate more than this since I've quit Don't Starve pretty soon.

[cekivi]

To each their own as the saying goes. For me, I'm content with the four "experience" modes as they are now but I would in the future like sliders to make my own, custom experience. The downside is it's not practical to have custom difficulties in the game now as it would make balancing, bug fixing and tuning a nightmare.

On the bright side, as long as mod support is eventually included, we will eventually get our wish for "realistic" or "nightmare" experiences

[Dirmagnos]

On 11/10/2016 at 11:33 PM, togg said:

Well, that's just one of the multiple reasons for why Don't Starve is so so bad. You're talking about completelly different games, they have done The Long Dark exactly to break for the kind of things that you're searching!

We are talking about options and what they represent not gameplay or even genre. Nobody is claiming that tLD has to be like DS, at least i dont. But every option in DS is customizable, making every playthru unique. While, on this particular part, tLD is severely lacking - start, clean out everything and restart by day 100 to 150, since there is nothing left to do.

22 hours ago, ridankrad said:

For what Hinterland is planning, a game with distinct types of experiences depending on the difficulty level, four is a lot.

Care to share what it is ?

Quote

They could always allow for more, and giving the player full access to a series of sliders and checkboxes would be probably giving the most, but that doesn't mean that it would be the best design choice for TLD.

Mind to elaborate on this part ? What exactly would make it worse in this case ? Maybe there is something that im not seeing.

Quote

Something to remember is that TLD is a game still intended to have a story mode, not just a sandbox game. It's easy to forget this because the sandbox part of the game is all we have right now, and many people (myself included) have gotten hours and hours of entertainment from sandbox. But all the same, I think Hinterland still very much remains focused on providing a great story mode at the end of all this, and I can see why they wouldn't want millions of difficulty combinations for that.

Customization option is meant for sandbox and only sandbox mode. Story mode is preset by default, with its own specific character and story line.

To be honest i dont really care about story mode at this moment, since there is little to none is known about it. This whole discussion, at this point, revolves around sandbox.

10 hours ago, togg said:

It encompass everything I hate about survival games. I also didn't try TLD for a long long time because I thought it was the same.

It doesn't respect your time, you have to restart over and over in order to understand small stuff in a big and boring skill tree. When you die in the long dark is different, you've make a mistake that you feel is a part of one world, an experience.

There's a proliferation of elements, clicks, numbers, that really don't seem to mean anything. The Long Dark adds elements when they're needed, that's something that a lot of player that ask for stuff in the wishlist forum don't get, "more" is not "better".

The UI is heavy, I don't like it, TLD is the opposite. Even Age of Empires had a lighter UI than Don't Starve.

It's only about number, I suppose that comes from WoW. Survival games were just about number to me until TLD.

There're a lot of other stuff but I can't elaborate more than this since I've quit Don't Starve pretty soon.

tLD and DS are polarly different games, even tho they belong in the same genre. There is hardly any point to compare them in terms of how survival aspect is implemented, since in DS its light, juvenile even, with a lot of liberties taken in terms of realism, keeping only base. While in tLD approach to realism is a bit greater and from a bit different direction.

DS doesnt have skill tree, it has build tree and if youre had trouble understanding(not remembering, that one takes time) it then i feel sorry for you. However, im pretty sure that you had your fair share of deaths in early stages of playing tLD, since it doesnt explain anything at all and many aspects of the game are not intuitive - people were even asking on forums how to make water. Once you learn it you think how easy it is, but for first-timers its not that obvious.

Dont really see what you are referring 2 as "prolifiration of elements, clicks, numbers". As far as i can tell every one of those serve some kind of purpose in DS. The fact that you may not understand it purpose doesnt mean that it has none. Also, "more is not better" is a logical fallacy, it may not be better, but its not always so. In fact, generally speaking, more is usually better if done right. Most games with huge amount of option, if they are properly balanced, succeed. Having small pool of options normally leads to low replayability value, often leaving players unsatisfied. In practically every case where ive seen developers using this "less is more" bs, it turns out they are either 2 lazy to put in additional work to balance it out or are incapable to implement it properly.

As simple example il take my favorite chewing toy, Fallout 4. Among other things player can build bases in the game. However, their size, without mod usage is limited to nothing more than a small shack with a few extras. And if player uses mod to remove those restrictions and build palaces(as far as its possible considering that youre building from junk), then he soon find out that due to Bethesda being cheap(game itself in general is an example of a cash cow, cheap, limited and unimaginative) and using game engine that is almost 15 years old, excessive number of player-generated structures tanks game stability(not that it was that great to begin with) to the point that save files become corrupted. And thats just one of many many shortcuts in this game that devs took. They managed to do less(compared to predecessors) and worse actually, with game as a whole.

Whole UI talk is pretty pointless as far as i can tell. It heavily depends on personal preferences. My DS installation have a mod that increase amount of UI elements by at least 5 times. I like information. You ought to see my FNV UI, there are numbers everywhere about everything. And it always makes me smile when i see yet another "realistic" UI that removes everything from the screen, since calling it realistic is one ridiculous notion, as those numbers/bars replace person senses that he has no access in game, like sense of temperature or health. And while replacing those senses with numbers is a poor replacement(but its best that we have right now), removing them and calling it "realistic" is just pure absurdity(its like calling CIS a norm).

[togg]

Well, I'm glad I don't need to answer this because it would be a long and difficult to manage discussion about what makes a videogame good, what are the conseguences for the player etc.
The developement process for TLD is the one that I like so I'm on the "winning side", I'm sure that when they will add the stuff that's on the roadmap they will do it well AKA as I like


P.S. Also about Don't Starve and similar: the procedural genetared thing... BRRR. Stay away from me!
 

[cekivi]

11 hours ago, togg said:

P.S. Also about Don't Starve and similar: the procedural genetared thing... BRRR. Stay away from me!

While I agree that a completely procedurally generated Long Dark would be bad (the maps would lose a lot of their flavour) a little procedural generation would be nice and is already in the game to a limited extent. For instant, which houses are burned down in the various settlements.

[togg]

Just now, cekivi said:

While I agree that a completely procedurally generated Long Dark would be bad (the maps would lose a lot of their flavour) a little procedural generation would be nice and is already in the game to a limited extent. For instant, which houses are burned down in the various settlements.

That's nice But I wouldn't call it procedurally generated!

[ridankrad]

20 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Care to share what it is ?

Mind to elaborate on this part ? What exactly would make it worse in this case ? Maybe there is something that im not seeing.

Customization option is meant for sandbox and only sandbox mode. Story mode is preset by default, with its own specific character and story line.

To be honest i dont really care about story mode at this moment, since there is little to none is known about it. This whole discussion, at this point, revolves around sandbox.

Sure, I'll just quote Raphael van Lierop:

Thanks for the feedback regarding the various Experience Modes. Although there's certainly a difficulty/challenge component, we try to think of them as different "experiences" of The Long Dark, utilizing the same mechanics but tuned differently. Pilgrim players tend to use it as a meditation of sorts, from what we can see and what we've heard, so many of the mechanics designed to add more challenge (hostile wildlife being more common, resources depleting more quickly, late-game issues like Cabin Fever, etc.) don't really make sense there. 

We've been opposed to the idea of adding sliders because we see ourselves as Experience Creators and not simply system architects. We also find that the solution of providing everything as an optional thing is never a good solution either -- it tends to create a lot of watered-down experiences, it removes the ability for us to talk about the game as a kind of shared experience with reference points in common, and is also a LOT more work for us, both for development and testing.

But, all that being said, we know the game and its community is a living breathing thing and that tastes and needs change over time. We're not ignoring this feedback. Just absorbing it and thinking about what to do, if anything.

[togg]

Boom. Perfect!

[PleXD]

On 11/11/2016 at 7:36 AM, cekivi said:

The downside is it's not practical to have custom difficulties in the game now as it would make balancing, bug fixing and tuning a nightmare.

This I can understand. 

 

On 11/12/2016 at 9:20 AM, ridankrad said:

We've been opposed to the idea of adding sliders because we see ourselves as Experience Creators and not simply system architects. We also find that the solution of providing everything as an optional thing is never a good solution either -- it tends to create a lot of watered-down experiences, it removes the ability for us to talk about the game as a kind of shared experience with reference points in common, and is also a LOT more work for us, both for development and testing.

That is great that they are creating experiences however as previously mentioned they are creating experiences that they like or that they think will be great.

 So while we can all then talk about them and have reference points but how important is that really apart from bug fixing?

This is how I see the experiences thus far Bucket of water where you can get your hands wet, Fountain where you can get your feet wet, Kiddie pool where if you try hard enough you can get yourself all wet and Going over Niagara falls in a barrel.

So the barrel has been fun, going over the edge time and time again has been a thrill but I want to take a step back. But do I want to go back to the kiddie pool?

The only thing I can understand from Raphael's post is that any sort of custom difficulty would come with a lot of development which is the answer I was expecting.

 

 

[PleXD]

On 11/12/2016 at 9:13 PM, togg said:

so I'm on the "winning side",

 

On 11/13/2016 at 0:51 PM, togg said:

Boom. Perfect!

Are you trying to win the thread or something?

What an odd couple of posts...

[Dirmagnos]

On 11/12/2016 at 0:20 AM, ridankrad said:

Sure, I'll just quote Raphael van Lierop:

Nothing in that post really supports your point. Any of them.

There is nothing about number of difficulty levels or how many they intend to add or remove. Nothing about being best of worse design choice, they simply prefer their way. Best of all, he doesnt dismiss option for sliders/customization. They are not fond of it, but they are listening to community.

In other words, if community is vocal enough about customization options, then they may actually do it. Something that i was saying all along. Its all about effort vs reward.

[togg]

6 hours ago, PleXD said:

 

Are you trying to win the thread or something?

What an odd couple of posts...

No, I'm trying to "win" a good game. And I'm joking and chill, since, as I said, I trust the devs and I don't see a real risk on the near future.
It's just a way to make explicit that there's a conflict, that fi you add sliders it's not possible to just ignore them for those that don't want them because at best it will have an impact in the way you think about other people playing etc

[ridankrad]

7 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Nothing in that post really supports your point. Any of them.

There is nothing about number of difficulty levels or how many they intend to add or remove. Nothing about being best of worse design choice, they simply prefer their way. Best of all, he doesnt dismiss option for sliders/customization. They are not fond of it, but they are listening to community.

In other words, if community is vocal enough about customization options, then they may actually do it. Something that i was saying all along. Its all about effort vs reward.

I said that "For what Hinterland is planning, a game with distinct types of experiences depending on the difficulty level, four is a lot." You didn't seem to even read that very closely, because then you asked me what Hinterland is planning, ignoring the part in bold. I then gave you a quote from Raphael where he makes it clear that TLD is intended to be a game with distinct types of experiences depending on the difficulty level.

As for it being "a lot", yes that part is my opinion based on Raphael's statement that Hinterland is creating experiences, and not just various "systems". I'm also mindful of his statement about development and testing. Does that mean more experience modes won't be added? Not necessarily. But for quite some time the game had 3 experience modes and it was only recently and with a great deal of fanfare that a fourth experience mode, Interloper, was added. I could see them perhaps adding others, but I'd be shocked if they suddenly added 10 or 20, let alone sliders.

Obviously you're welcome to be as vocal as you like about customization options. I haven't said anything against offering feedback. My point is offering my own opinion about what I think Hinterland's goals are for TLD, relying on statements they've made previously. Anyway, I guess hope springs eternal as they say, so feel free to keep on hoping that the devs add sliders if you and enough others ask for them. I recognize that Hinterland is keeping their options open about TLD and don't want to ever be dismissive of community feedback, and that's all well and good. But I personally think Raphael's statement about "watered-down experiences" is pretty telling about the likelihood of sliders. I think it also should say a lot that the quote I gave you is from 6 months ago and in that time a new experience mode has been added and sliders have not.