Gameplay Suggestions

[yoamloco]

I've been playing interloper ever since I bought the game a few months ago and boy and I enjoy the hell of it! During the time of my playthrough there were a few things that bother me a little that didn't make sense or realistic. These are a few things that will be a great addition to the gameplay.

 

1. Fishing: There isn't a good explanation as to why you lose your fishing tackle when you are fishing. You could be at 100% condition and your stat bars all the way up but on some random ass chance, you will end up losing your tackle because of rng. It will be better if you could lose the tackle based on how tired you are and will increase the chance of losing it as time goes on.

2. Sleeping(snow shelters in the next explanation): There should be an option to sleep anywhere at anytime. There are time when you are outside or inside an area during a blizzard, when you complete some work, you need to recover an affliction like cabin fever or rest for your injuries. Sleeping on the floor should have penalties like receiving half the sleep from a normal bed( more if you sleep on top of the snow) as well as taking double time to heal wounds like sprain ankles.

3. Snow Shelters: In my opinion snow shelters are too strong if not the best get out of jail free cards. The static -5c is easily overcome (even in interloper) by the new clothing system and a person can easily rest during a winter storm to avoid losing their overall condition (I know that you can be attacked by wolfs and bears but if you put in a place where you know that they will never be in like in a ledge or in a inaccessible area). I know that resources like the cloth need to be used to make it but if the person is smart to put in strategic locations around the map (as well as to maintain it with sticks), they are next best thing then an open shelter. These are options that may come to mind like increasing the resources needed to make the snow shelter, increasing the time to make it or require a tool like a snow shovel to make the base to put the snow shelter but it won't matter as long as the static -5c is still there.The only thing I can say that it will be balance it if there's an option to use the animal fur as the shelter hut (from worst = rabbit fur but still better than cloth to best = bear fur) and depending on the weather, will lower or increase celius like snow storms will lower to -10c. I know igloos keep warm inside but I know that will never be implemented in game so a worth of mention.

4. progression: The thing that bothers me the most is that there isn't a progress bar when you are doing certain activities like chopping wood, boiling water, or reading a book and it's either you complete the hour it requires you to complete or not and makes you reset right from the beginning even you were at 99% (logic...). To balance this, I recommend increasing the time on activities.

5. New Skill: A new skill called ( whatever name you want it to be) to make weapons from Gods given earth. Things include like pitfalls, snares, that trap from a tree, and spears (a range weapon not a melee weapon). The bow and arrow should receive a rework if this skill is ever made instead of using the saplings to make it, now it's with tree trunks that only falls when a blizzard hits a certain amount of times like 5 times or more. The saplings can be used as to ward off wolfs that become aggressive but now it takes even more energy to use compared to a torch. 

 

Exploits: I think that the saves in game are THE MOST OVERPOWERED thing in game and I'll explain why. A person can go inside a house and get their conditions and stats up before they leave. Now the person can do some things like scouting an area to see if there's any deer carcasses, cheat the weather ( I tested it and there is a random chance that there will be a snowstorm or no snowstorm when you wait it out a bit like passing the time with the cards and not let it finish the hour and cancel it before it saves and continue doing so until a weather change hits), or avoid confrontation with an animal like a bear or wolf by either turning off the console, alt f4 or control alt delete and go to task manager and quit the game. The other is that a person can go fish for about an hour and if they don't like what they caught then they can be near a house like in the coastal highway and load up a save to retry again until they get a coho per hour.

Thank you for reading this and may the nature who gives no fucks be merciful on your soul.

[Troxism]

To be honest it's almost impossible to prevent all forms save scumming. Why? Because saves do slow down the game (esp on non top of the line computers) for a few seconds, so if every action saved, it would cause a lot of slowdown. It's one of those things where you just kind of have to not cheat.

Something like auto saving every 1-2 hours might combat some of it, but it would create some performance problems (esp if occuring during a critical moment), and create cases where you are permanently stuck and then the game saves just as you realise it, which would annoy a lot of people (I don't personally get stuck like this but I know some players test this sort of stuff on purpose) as then their save would be permanently ruined.

Now obviously I haven't covered every possible solution to the problem, but to summarise, every single one that has been brought up before has trade offs that would hurt 'legitimate' players far more then it's worth to prevent a few people who want to cheat in a single player game.

As for snow shelters, well AFAIK it's only +15C on Interloper (but it won't go above -5C, so if it's above -20C outside, it will just be -5C inside the shelter). So it's not exactly a solution to all your problems when outdoor temps can be as low as -50C late game even without a blizzard or any wind at all in some cases.

Fishing Tackle: it's not that you lose the fishing tackle, it's that it breaks (and isn't really useful anymore). Also tbh if you want to talk about realism, realise you are fishing without bait

Sleeping: Yeah this is asked for a lot, although to be honest you would likely die IRL if you tried to sleep in the snow even if you were warm just walking around because it would leech heat into the ground from your body at a much faster rate then the cold air does when walking around. But some form of sleeping on the ground, at least indoors, and at a temperature penalty outdoors (because honestly sticking 100% to realism makes for a very poor game) might make sense.

Crafting Weapons: Well I would say good luck making a bow from a parts of a tree trunk  esp as a non expert fletcher. As for the other stuff, it's possible it might be added. One of the problems is if you added all the spears and traps it would kind of make animals easy to deal with which would hurt the intended experience of 'feeling vulnerable' to put it one way. But it's possible this stuff will make it into the game at some point. Problem is if you want to add 'realistic' spears and traps then you also have to make the animal AI realistic to compensate (currently all animals AI is ridiculously abusable in various ways) to make it harder or like I said, animals would become even less of a threat.

Progress Bars: Yeah that is kind of a silly limitation. Problem is it would take a bunch of UI work to add '% done' to stuff like chopping up limbs ect. I assume it will happen at some point but probably not a priority ATM as it doesn't REALLY matter too much.

 

[yoamloco]

I know there isn't much they can do about the saves for being exploited in the game like this. Maybe in activities where it's required to spend hours to complete but even so that won't do much. If they add the save every hour or so then it will cause huge problems if a person can't get out of an area because of a bug or how the terrain is set up (I've been stuck inside crevices a good amount of time when I jump from the hill to the bottom).

I know that the fishing tackle doesn't even use bait (so much for the realism lol) but even we somehow get bait into the game, it doesn't really explain why would you lose the tackle from rng instead of basing off a mechanic in game like how tired you are the more likely you gonna lose the tackle instead of breaking it.

Crafting Weapons: That's why it's the last thing on my list, There could only be one thing added but that there has be someway to be able to kill the wolves or the bear in late game when you run out of resources to kill them with. Fletching a tree trunk or a tree log could take days to even a week but it could be possible if a person gradually works on it each passing day.

Progress Bar:I wouldn't imagine how long it will take to write up the ui for every single thing in the game but it isn't a priority I agree but it's something that should be in the game before early access is completed.

[Troxism]

To be honest, you can easily make it to 1000+ days (and even up to 2000-3000 days if you aren't excessively wasteful) and not 'run out of resources to kill wolves and bears with', as there are a LOT of effective bow shots you can take with all the birch on all the maps combined. And you will be sick of the run far before that point as if you make it that far it's not like the next 100 days are going to be any different then the last 100. 

Edit: Actually now that I think about it that 2000-3000 day estimate is if you don't starve and actually hunt all your food (no fishing/trapping/using wolves for free deer kills). If you starve and abuse things like 'let wolf kill deer for you then lead wolf away for a free kill' or trap/fish a lot and only spend arrows on bears, you can easily make it 10000+ or even 20000 days before you ran out of ammo or even in theory an infinite amount of time. Basically such absurd time periods nobody will ever actually play that long. So literally no point even worrying about it.

Plus this ignores beachcombing which can give birch saplings occasionally, so in theory no resource can really run out anymore as long as you are conservative. 

It's kind of a joke among experienced players that you will get bored with your run before you actually die or even run out of any resource, but it's kind of true in most cases even on Interloper unless you play the most ridiculously restricted challenges (which are never intended to last long by design).

[yoamloco]

I've searched beachcombing, and that solves the issue for the weapon part :). I never knew there was such a thing in the game ( I have seen fish sometimes on the lake but I thought that they were just put in when you start a new game). Thank you for telling me that.

[CalNieDaGtarGuy]

Troxism is mostly correct about sleeping on the ground. You might as well stick the end of the rifle in your mouth and pull the trigger. That's why when you are tired in game your character says "I'm so tired I could lay down right here if i thought I'd ever wake up again." Essentially, you would contract hypothermia, and weaken, and die as you sleep. This explains some of the corpses propped up against rocks or snowy banks. They decided they'd take a little snooze and ended up fading into the long dark. Even a bedroll out in the snow is inaccurate, because your body heat alone is enough to melt the snow underneath you and would soak your bedroll and in turn would die. Now, I'm not saying this should change, necessarily, but I'm just saying that sleeping in the snow option is nil unless you want to die painlessly. 

[yoamloco]

When you sleep on the ground, you should be near something or in something that's warm to help prevent you from sleeping to your death. It will be stupid that you will die just by sleeping on the ground if you have no heat during your slumber. 

[CalNieDaGtarGuy]

That's true, but regardless, you would get wet, which isn't good even if you're near a heat source.