How do you like it so far?


randomsurvivor

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This 9 hour fire thing seems like a bad idea to me as far as attracting new players. I haven't played this game in a long time but really enjoyed survival mode for a while a long time ago. But requiring players to sit there and stare at a fire (if they can figure out that's what they're supposed to do, i only know because I logged in here and read a bit) for what...2 hours or something real time? Doesn't seem like a great way to start a game....

 

I loved the 1 hour demo because it let you explore right off the bat, and I got hooked and payed for the game way back when because I was so intrigued. But I don't see this way of starting the game as being something new people will like, I'm not liking it myself to be honest but I'm going to try to persevere because I think it will get better and I'll soon be able to explore. 

I hate that I'm complaining though because it's a really interesting and unique experience, I'm just worried the way the start is set up is really hard for new players to figure out and the 9 hour fire is the opposite of fun and unnecessary. 

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6 hours ago, June said:

You guys are giving up fast. I can see the problem here, but why so angry and whiney? If the gamepad doesn´t work, try the keyboard and vise versa? Disable Steam updates. Fiddle with options. Etc. There´ll sure be a solution soon, no need to blame anyone? Good night for now, I can see your frustration, but I´m sure it´ll be fine by tomorrow. o7

The only way changes can really occur is they positive and. Negative critique. A person who can't mash a button for instance should be able to say hey I can't play vs wolves with this mashing style without people saying it's whining. What is needed is this kind of info not some blanket defence by someone being slightly insulting 

as a new player of only a few months story mode is provo g insanely hard and very railroad. The first wolf I come across runs on circles not away. I've died several times to just see ignorant I can get him to run away properly.  That's inadequate. 

People being frustrated should be able to say so without fans blindly defending. 

I feel for the person with arthritis and understand that complaint. It's a poor mechanic to force people to mash 

 

just an example. 

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6 hours ago, Thrasador said:

You don't have to defend yourself m8. @June is a troll. It's his  job to call people names when they are already upset. It's what he lives for. Just ignore him.

@Karma dilemmaThat isn´t productive criticism either, is it. I did not understand it this way that "mashing speed" was the problem here, but that it wasn´t working at all. And with "whining" I meant that as soon as the game comes out, some people say "revert it to the way it was before or I won´t play it". I understand the frustration too, which I wrorte in my post. No need for insulting me.   

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23 minutes ago, Zer0beaT said:

This 9 hour fire thing seems like a bad idea to me as far as attracting new players. I haven't played this game in a long time but really enjoyed survival mode for a while a long time ago. But requiring players to sit there and stare at a fire (if they can figure out that's what they're supposed to do, i only know because I logged in here and read a bit) for what...2 hours or something real time? Doesn't seem like a great way to start a game....

The game actually skips to the next day, as soon as you get nine hours piled up on the fire. But you need nine full hours ahead of you - you don't get credit for what you burned while gathering more wood. 

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7 minutes ago, cullam said:

The game actually skips to the next day, as soon as you get nine hours piled up on the fire. But you need nine full hours ahead of you - you don't get credit for what you burned while gathering more wood. 

How will anyone know this stuff without coming here and asking? 

I mean I'm a returning player who understands some of the game, but a lot has changed but that doesn't even matter. Why such a barrier to get the story mode started? So many people will just not even get started with stuff like that.

I've literally been sitting in a cave staring at a fire for hours now, while I surf the net, wishing I had not checked this game out again. 

So I need to start over and build a 9 hours worth fire pit in one go, collectively it won't work?

 

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I haven't tried it yet.

Went into Survival Mode to take a wander over to the Camp Office, Lake Cabins and Carter Dam, to see what had been changed. Nice. I like it.

Then came here to the forums. Did some reading around and found that the expected bugs have already surfaced.. (I found a minor one during my wander, relating to images of repaired socks not updating correctly, which I'll report.) And I also see a number of complaints about the usual Hinterland signature style of badly thought out, badly implemented mechanics cropping up.

Makes me think I'll just give Story Mode a big miss until the next hotfix arrives.

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I've got to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by story mode (and I was really hyped).

Intro

The part from the plane crash until being able to climb was a good introduction to the survival system for beginners, and a fresh-up for veterans. I personally thought it might have lasted a bit too long, but then again, I already knew the mechanics beforehand. I personally would've liked a bit more info about the new tea-making-mechanic and the fire-duration, but I've seen lots of people saying the same thing. If you don't intend on showing this text outside of the journal, you can show an occasional hint telling the player to check his journal (at least in the beginning). Also, after each day, the transition to going to sleep was a bit too sudden and felt a bit jarring, I would've liked an option to just sleep whenever I wanted.

Bridge

I liked how when getting to the bridge, the path became less linear, you could take multiple routes and the environment felt more open. Great transition to the open world. My encounter with the bridge wolf was not really pleasant. I needed multiple attempts to get rid of him, everytime I left the car he immediately did a 180 and walked back in my direction, he ignored decoys and torches (both holding and tossing). One time the game even 'froze' after he attacked (I've already reported it).

Soon after the bridge the survival instinct kicked in again, it had to. It was getting dark and I needed a place to sleep, so I slept in a car.

Church

Church.thumb.png.0e8f865419bdec68b9c474ce67339d6b.png

I loved the interior of the church, it all felt incredibly fresh and vibrant. I quite liked the bump in lighting as well, it just looked right. I slept for 10 hours and in the morning the wolf in front of the church was still munching on the dead deer, that just doesn't seem right. Had the same problem with the other stalking wolf as I had with the bridge wolf and didn't want to use up any flares. Still managed to get past him though. Wolf behavior seems to be off.

Milton

Finally arrived in the town, loved the interior of the bank, the bank notes were a nice addition as well. Went into the house to encounter my first NPC, I liked the cutscene but suddenly there were no voices anymore. That was quite immersion breaking for me, at first I even thought my game fucked up. Slept in a nearby house and that's where I ended my playing session.

Overall, liking story mode. It's given me a purpose but hasn't messd up the survival gameplay. It has left me eager to play more. Well done Hinterland.

EDIT: I almost forgot about the great atmospheric soundtrack, really fitting!

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2 hours ago, Zer0beaT said:

I've literally been sitting in a cave staring at a fire for hours now, while I surf the net, wishing I had not checked this game out again. 

I had the same issue, really bad design here, lots of people are going to get stuck. I hope they are going to fix this in a hotfix soon. The worse is this is during a tutorial period, where you are supposed to learn the good practices, and there they are teaching a clearly bad one,  wasting wood without using the fire to make other things like melt/boil/cook. But besides this flaw the game is awesome, things get better when the tutorial is over. Again, we'd need a way to skip it, start at the last day of the tutorial with decent set of resources around and climb the ravine (or better, start at top!). I am sure some will want to do the story mode in a full go without dying once, so retrying often and we don't want the tutorial at every restart.

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4 minutes ago, UpUrBeaver said:

@Thrasador you seem to feel very strongly about the new controls, granted they may have changed, but you seem to be coming on a bit strong with all the negativity. I did have to get used to the new controls, but the new story mode give you time to adjust and learn how things work in the beginning.

I did find it really strange that the voice acting and facial animation stops when meeting the Grey Mother, I hope they work through voice acting and animating all the dialogue, kinda did lose interest in the conversation with her when I had to read all text. Guess I'm just a lazy reader.

It would be easier to digest if there was patch notes or a change log anywhere with the list of changes and why changes were made. It's been 24 hours and still no patch notes.

Also, they could easily have offered multiple loadouts for the gamepads where you choose if you want the old controller setup, or the new one. Why do arbitrary changes like this need to be FORCED onto players. 

Like I said if the changes were necessary, where is the change log?

Navigating inventory was easier and faster the old way, the new way is cumbersome, slower, counter-intuitive, and unnecessary....

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12 minutes ago, Korsy said:

Dear fellas, i've got ay problem... i am not able to find the distress pistol.. Grey mother gave me a tip where it should be... but its not there... does anybody know where it is ? 

It's not at the bottom of the ravine anymore?

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1 hour ago, VinceCgto said:

Milton

Finally arrived in the town, loved the interior of the bank, the bank notes were a nice addition as well. Went into the house to encounter my first NPC, I liked the cutscene but suddenly there were no voices anymore. That was quite immersion breaking for me, at first I even thought my game fucked up. Slept in a nearby house and that's where I ended my playing session.

Overall, liking story mode. It's given me a purpose but hasn't messd up the survival gameplay. It has left me eager to play more. Well done Hinterland.

EDIT: I almost forgot about the great atmospheric soundtrack, really fitting!

Yeah isn't the new soundtrack just the best! Would love to own it if they release it on iTunes.

Also yeah the no voice conversation was a bit jarring, I was playing TLD with my BF watching as we always play/watch story games together, and he was like "WTF happened to the sound?". And yeah, I'm a lazy reader and it did break the immersion. Maybe Hinterland want TLD to be distanced from being compared to a TellTale game when it comes to interactive story, but I do wish everything was voice acted. 

 

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Although I am enjoying story mode I agree with @Scyzara that the environment is very easy and forgiving compared to Interloper and I had expected story mode to offer a choice of difficulty.

Also I was surprised when, after shooting the bear the game exited to the main menu. I thought that was it but tried resuming anyway. Ok, I got credits and the story continues...

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As a brand new player who picked up the game half-randomly yesterday on PS4 and had an hour to play, I must say that I am not impressed.

Now obviously this comment won't apply for those of you who have been playing other modes for months, but as with any other game I would have expected some kind of tutorial to help me get settled in and learn the basics.

I find it somewhat ridiculous that I had to spend the first 30 minutes basically just restarting the game and watching the opening scene simply because it took me some time to figure out the controls and the menu, see what kind of options there are, etc. All the while already bleeding to death and getting cold, so having very little time to explore this before dying. So I died. Plenty of time. And reloading to save point or checkpoint would log me back on with about 45 seconds before dying again, so I'd have to actually restart the game completely just to have a little bit more time to try things out.

So after an hour of playing, I made it to not dying from bleeding out. Yay! Now I get to die from cold!

It is very unforgiving, for the first 5 minutes of gameplay, to a new player, and it makes me very wary of investing more time in the game. There is always a fine line between making a game difficult enough that players have a challenge and too difficult that your game ends up being enjoyed only by a few hardcore gamer. And it feels to me like, so far, you've missed the boat.

It is just very unfortunate that I already feel the need to go through forums and online guides/wikis just to learn the basics of the game and manage to get through the opening scene.

I will keep at it and try to figure things out, but my advice for the developers would be to keep in mind that your game will be picked up by new players that have absolutely no knowledge of the gameplay, and that even a basic tutorial should always be provided. The best way I've seen games do that is to provide it at the start of their story mode while also allowing the option to skip the tutorial part for more experienced players.

 

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5 minutes ago, Sciencepol said:

As a brand new player who picked up the game half-randomly yesterday on PS4 and had an hour to play, I must say that I am not impressed.

Now obviously this comment won't apply for those of you who have been playing other modes for months, but as with any other game I would have expected some kind of tutorial to help me get settled in and learn the basics.

I find it somewhat ridiculous that I had to spend the first 30 minutes basically just restarting the game and watching the opening scene simply because it took me some time to figure out the controls and the menu, see what kind of options there are, etc. All the while already bleeding to death and getting cold, so having very little time to explore this before dying. So I died. Plenty of time. And reloading to save point or checkpoint would log me back on with about 45 seconds before dying again, so I'd have to actually restart the game completely just to have a little bit more time to try things out.

So after an hour of playing, I made it to not dying from bleeding out. Yay! Now I get to die from cold!

It is very unforgiving, for the first 5 minutes of gameplay, to a new player, and it makes me very wary of investing more time in the game. There is always a fine line between making a game difficult enough that players have a challenge and too difficult that your game ends up being enjoyed only by a few hardcore gamer. And it feels to me like, so far, you've missed the boat.

It is just very unfortunate that I already feel the need to go through forums and online guides/wikis just to learn the basics of the game and manage to get through the opening scene.

I will keep at it and try to figure things out, but my advice for the developers would be to keep in mind that your game will be picked up by new players that have absolutely no knowledge of the gameplay, and that even a basic tutorial should always be provided. The best way I've seen games do that is to provide it at the start of their story mode while also allowing the option to skip the tutorial part for more experienced players.

 

I agree with what you are saying, but the initial quests ARE what I believe the devs feel is a tutorial.

Those of us playing the sandbox know that when you are bleeding you need to apply a bandage. They put bandages in the red medical kit in the snow. A prompt to now bandage yourself would be useful, but they probably considered it hand holding.

Next they have you make a fire....something you will need to know how to do regularly in the game.

Next they have you make a new fire when you wake up, to melt snow and boil water. This was something most new players regularly died from in the Sandbox. Having NO idea how to make water.

So this IS kind of like a tutorial...

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So after seeing the old man himself I don't think I'll ever sleep in the Old Trapper's cabin again. I was sort of dreading trudging through ML but so much has changed - particularly Carter Hydro - that I have been pleasantly surprised although I am unsure how many of these changes were implemented in the sandbox prior to the release of story mode.

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I pretty much agree with everything  @Ruruwawa said... it also took me about 12 hours. Getting to Milton was HARD, I'm not sure I would have been able to do it without having to re-start if i wasn't already familiar with the sandbox.  That really is a huge advantage.

People in Milton really ought to have more pants stored in their dressers. :/ 

The ! on the distress pistol task never left my map, maybe a bug.

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