Feedback after 100 hours of play

[AfterShock]

My play history: I've largely played challenges. I played a bit of interloper on sandbox (and am now trying some self-imposed challenges in interloper) but I prefer to have a goal set by the game itself (I like to know when i've won).

Firstly, when I played the nomad challenge, thats the most fun I've had in the long dark. Largely because I didn't know where anything was, I was very scared of wolves (i'm not any more), and I was holding onto my bases for a lot longer than I do now.

What I really enjoyed, was building up my base, working towards getting food from animals (using the bow, and chasing deer after they've been shot, etc), using the rabbit snares, waiting long enough for deerskin and rabbitskin clothing to be useful. I would go on outings in the day, go look around in certain directions, explore whats there, and I would get scared of going too far or getting lost, and having to sleep outdoors in the cold.

However, now I'm more experienced as a player, I don't need to do any of that. I can usually just outrun wolves. I can travel from place to place without needing an 'expedition' or preparation.

When I play on interloper, you are really forced to constantly move places, everything is empty, and you aren't given enough materials to bunker down and create a base. You don't have a bow or arrow to collect wildlife, and even collecting a rabbit snare takes quite a long time, so instead it becomes a game of click on every empty cupboard in the whole of the map. I think I ransacked the major areas in pleasant valley and coastal highway in the space of 3 in-game days (When playing nomad as a beginner, that took me more like 60 in-game days).

From my POV, it would be great to tweak the mechanics so that when you get to a new place, you dont simply collect the items and move on, instead you assess what you've got and hunker down for a while to work with what that place has. I think it would be great if each location had something beneficial that you couldnt simply remove and take away. Maybe certain locations have their own built-in rabbit snares that can be used 3-4 times. I would like it so that constantly moving from place to place was discouraged by the mechanics of the game

In summary, the harder difficulties (and maybe the game in general) should:

a) Be more focused on allowing the player to collect his own food using strategy in the wild, rather than just ransacking cupboards for hours

b) Encourage the player to spend a bit of time in each location, by either punishing the player for moving constantly, or giving short term benefits for new locations (that can't be taken away from the place)

 

The other thing that strikes me as weird is that eating food when you are hungry is kind of a waste when you play on a hard difficulty. Like to play optimally its actually a bad idea to fill up your hunger bar, and its better to run around on 0%, saving your food and just losing condition that you can regain when you go to sleep. That's not very intuitive, it doesnt feel good on 0% hunger (starving) running around with food in my backpack..

One last thing, personally I'd like some more challenging challenges. I finished Hunted part 1 in a handful of days without barely even seeing the bear. And part 2 was really easy, i finished it in 2? days i think. Whiteout would be a really great challenge if you could tweak the difficulty, maybe have a few levels of difficulty for that one - even just upping the number of resources would be interesting, but also things like requiring a bearskin pelt bedroll. Nomad was the most fun personally, but I think the locations should also be tagged with the region. I spent quite a while in timberwolf mountain before finally looking up the regions of each location and realising only 1 location in TWM was required! (It's really hard to find that information without over-spoiling everything, by the way - an ingame map that you populate yourself would be great.)

Maybe even allow player-generated challenges, I would be happy to design a few. (I used to be a game designer myself)

Anyway thanks for making an awesome game