General sandbox feedback.

[StringEpsilon]

Overall impression: This is a solid game with a good aesthetic and the potential for a lot of replayability. The sandbox is quite big and even without self-imposed challenges, gives you 10-20 hours worth of exploration. More, if you are not up to the task of survival.

Playtime: Over the course of the early access programm and after the release, I played a total of 200 hours. I played the story mode too, but will not talk about that.

Maps:

The various maps all have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Desolation Point is relatively small with not much to explore and only one main ommuting route. The main value of the map for a sandbox player is the forge and the amount of coal and iron there is to loot. The saving grace for this map is beautifully made whaling station. The old lighthouse is also a lovely location for a base.

Forlorn Muskeg has the most interesting terrain of all the maps, but has only 2 main points of interest. The train wreck in the middle of the map and the abandoned hut at the outskirt. Traversing the dangerous muskeg terrain in the middle of the map is not rewarded with much. Little loot, little to see, little spots to set up camp. Unless you want to explore the full map, you're better off commuting along the railway or the edges of the map.

Timberwolf Mountain is probably my favorite. Different routes, many places to set up camp (the many caves, the hut at the foot of the mountain, the summit) and an incentive to visit the whole map (looting all cargo pods). The rope management to open and close shortcuts is also a nice addition. On TWM, I always have to plan my trips up and down the mountain and where I want to go when.

Pleasant Valley has a lot of interesting places, but commuting is a challenge, as the distances are really long. Unlike TWM, the actual commutes aren't as interesting, so you just end up pressing "forward" for a long time. I think this breaks down to personal preference. Not to mention that the name is quite misleading. The weather is absolutely brutal on this map.

Mystery Lake is packed full with stuff to do. It has many interesting camp opportunities (park office, trappers cabin, carter dam, outpost, ...), a decent size and a nice variety in terrain. If I can say anything bad about the map, it's maybe that it's too tightly packed. But this again is personal preference and I don't mind that.

Coastal Highway comes second to TWM for me. The map suffers from the single commuting route like Desolation Point, but at least gives you some incentive to break of the beaten path. The main attraction is that it's currently the only settlement in the sandbox maps. The main attraction is obviously the gas station, but you can also live outside of the houses and make use of the fishing cabins and the outside workbench.

Interior design & props

TLD's houses and various other scenes are lovely. All places feel like they have (or had) a purpose in the in-game world and feel both lived / worked in and appropriately abandoned. The props that litter these scenes greatly enhance that feeling. Nothing sticks out too much and part of the looting experience is finding that needle in the haystack of litter. Which I always enjoy more than click at containers. Even the clothing items fit that mix.

One downside is that a lot of the houses share one of only a few blueprints. Another small detail that is bothering me personally is the co-existence of both flat screens and floppy drives. The timeline is not officially specified, but this anachronism is easily avoidable.

Personal highlights are the carter hydro dam and the old whaling station at desolation point.

Clothing system

There's not too much to say about the current clothing system. The variety of items is definitely a plus and the different stat types mean that there is no one fits-all set of clothes. However, certain items are basically useless. If Hinterland wants to work on the system, I suggest more differentiation between the various clothes to encourage different play-styles and usage of multiple clothing sets. Some items are essentially the same in their stats. That could be improved as well.

Animals and Combat

In the 1.0 version, the game has deer, wolves, rabbits and bears on the ground and ravens in the sky. As you wonder through the ice and snow of Canada, you can also hear other birds. It's decent variety, but the game could benefit from adding a couple more critters.

Deer and rabbits are probably your source of calories in the late game. Hunting rabbits is actually quite fun. You can either stun them with a stone and then brutally murder them with your bare hands. If you can't bring yourself to break their neck, you can also try to shoot them or set traps. With deer, you also have two options. Either just wait for wolves to hunt them down and steal the kill, or hunt them yourself with the rifle. Or do both and kill the wolf as they eat the deer.

Wolves are an annoyance first and foremost. I am mostly playing the stalker difficulty, and the wolves are basically everywhere. On some maps, you can easily learn their spawn points and routes to avoid them. On others, they patrol the best commuting routes. A lot of players agree that the wolves should be reduced in numbers, but buffed in regards to damage, speed and behavior. That includes freeing them from their static routes and spawn points.

Bears are fine as they are. Hard to kill, but not overly aggressive. My only issue I have with them is that the bear struggle is not skippable. And since you are not supposed to do anything during the struggle, it's just more idle time.

Which brings me to the struggle mechanic in general. It offers very little choice and is just a test on how fast you can mash the mouse button. What weapon you choose has some impact, but I have not yet figured out how exactly that works. And I don't plan to do so either. I don't know how exactly you could make it work, but this system needs an overhaul. If nothing else, quick time events might work.

Time, waiting and idle

This game is best played with a podcast, an audio book or some YouTube videos in the background. Because this game will have you wait a lot. Lighting a fire can take minutes (if you don't have accelerant and fail multiple attempts). Each time you eat and drink, you have to wait a set amount of seconds. Sleeping, crafting and waiting will also let you wait a moment before the game continues. Looting containers and opening doors will only take a second or so, but is made worse by requiring the player to hold down left mouse button. I strongly suggest disabling that in the options before you start playing.

Each little waiting time on their own is not an issue, but the total idle time accumulates quickly. I'd estimate that more than 5 hours of my 200 hours playtime is nothing more than staring at a black screen or progress bar. Add loading times and uneventful traveling and you need another distraction to keep you playing.

Another big contributor to waiting is the fact that the game sometimes forces you into doing nothing with bad weather conditions, health afflictions and limited indoor activities.

Afflictions

I like the affliction system, with one exception: Cabin fever is... poorly designed. Cabin fever will kick in after the player spends to many hours of a sliding time-frame indoors. I don't know the numbers, but something like 36 of the last 48 hours. The affliction prevents the player from sleeping indoors for 24 hours.

What you can do as a player to heal the affliction:

• Just wait and don't sleep for 24 hours.
• Go to the next best cave and sleep in there (which is a bit counter intuitive for me)
• Make a snow shelter outside and sleep in there (see above)
• Die in a blizzard.

This affliction punishes the player for rational behavior and - in rare cases - the only option in consecutive days of bad weather. You have to be insane to take a walk in the games blizzards. And even more insane to refuse sleeping indoors if the weather outdoors would kill you in minutes.

This isn't a complain about realism. It's about dissonance. I feel punished for doing the right thing and forced into sub-optimal and potentially deadly play.

Stability

Other sources have covered this better. And the situation is improving rapidly. However: If you do play on Linux, you might needs this to avoid common bugs:

LD_PRELOAD=~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL2-2.0.so.0 ./tld.x86 -screen-fullscreen 0  

Also: The 64bit version is completely broken. If you don't have a windows machine or don't want to fiddle with workarounds, I do not recommend buying the game right now.

[alunasmoon]

i like everything you stated and agree with most of it i do feel to much time is wasted on waiting on things like drinking ans eating but i think fires is on point i say this because in rl you would get the same nervous omg why didn't my fire start like you do in the game its frustrating in a good way. i like bears however wonder why we dont have bear kills wolf, wolf kill deer. and so on id like to see more wild life in the future maybe a way to farm indoors or find more wild foods. clothing is more touchy for me i agree how the game is now that the rarer craftables should be the best unless you can find some really op clothing i feel the layer system is nice but its to damn heavy and unnecessarily so with some things. i feel like the creators sometimes need to get a scale and weigh things cause its a lil over dramatic at times. and not just with clothing with water and food as well. id like to see more maps i love the ones out there already my list goes top 3 CH ML DP . i dont like PV cause its to open for me to much space not enough to explore. have fun and good luck survivieing

 

[Thrasador]

20 minutes ago, alunasmoon said:

 i like bears however wonder why we dont have bear kills wolf, wolf kill deer. and so on 

 

If a bear catches a wolf, it will fight and kill it. Typically wolves run if a bear gets too close though. Wolves WILL kill deer, and you can frighten deer/rabbits twords wolves so they will kill it instead of you. You can then frighten the wolf with fire and harvest the deer for yourself.  This is actually an early Interloper tactic to get food since there are no rifles in Interloper and a bow takes time for the wood and gut to cure....and you need to find a hacksaw or forge an axe before you can even harvest saplings on Interloper anyway. Rabbits hunted by wolves are unrecoverable, they eat the whole thing instantly, even though they may leave behind a visible carcass....

[Prestermatt]

17 minutes ago, Thrasador said:

Rabbits hunted by wolves are unrecoverable, they eat the whole thing instantly, even though they may leave behind a visible carcass....

Are you sure about this?

I'm pretty sure I remember scaring a wolf who had just killed a rabbit (it was a Pilgrim game), and I was able to harvest the carcass.  There wasn't much meat left, but there was some, and the pelt and guts were there too.

[JAFO]

6 hours ago, Prestermatt said:

I'm pretty sure I remember scaring a wolf who had just killed a rabbit (it was a Pilgrim game), and I was able to harvest the carcass.  There wasn't much meat left, but there was some, and the pelt and guts were there too.

You do have to be very quick, but yes, you can get something from it.. but if you waste any time scaring the wolf away, there won't be anything to harvest.

[Thrasador]

15 minutes ago, JAFO said:

You do have to be very quick, but yes, you can get something from it.. but if you waste any time scaring the wolf away, there won't be anything to harvest.

Well, that's cool....guess I'm too slow. I really really hope they actually did patch the wolf in Milton like the patch notes claim. Last time he ate all the damn bunnies across from grandma's house...

[JAFO]

6 minutes ago, Thrasador said:

I really really hope they actually did patch the wolf in Milton like the patch notes claim. Last time he ate all the damn bunnies across from grandma's house...

• Fixed endlessly feeding Wolf in Milton.

I think that was actually referring to the forever-feeding-sounds by the Church.. not the bunny slasher wolf in Milton. 

Actually, I think it refers to the wolf that likes eating that deer near GM's place, for hours/days at a time.

[Thrasador]

43 minutes ago, JAFO said:

• Fixed endlessly feeding Wolf in Milton.

I think that was actually referring to the forever-feeding-sounds by the Church.. not the bunny slasher wolf in Milton. 

Actually, I think it refers to the wolf that likes eating that deer near GM's place, for hours/days at a time.

Oh, I had never seen him do that. That deer never had a wolf on it in my game....you mean the one directly in front of the post office right, next to grandma's ?

There is a roaming wolf in Milton, that likes to eat all the bunnies across the street from grandma's....and then wander around out front for like a day.

I'd just kill him, if I was positive he'd stay dead for any length of time. I haven't read anything in the notes about making animals despawn and respawn at a similar duration to the sandbox....

Like if you kill all the wolves outside the Quonset (sp?) gas station in CH and leave a gut on each carcass you know you'll at least get 3-5 days of peace from wolves. That wasn't my experience in the story....but I haven't killed a wolf in the story in over a week....

[JAFO]

9 hours ago, Thrasador said:

Oh, I had never seen him do that. That deer never had a wolf on it in my game....you mean the one directly in front of the post office right, next to grandma's ?

yep.. that's the one.