Putting the game aside for now

[Burning Bridges]

I had been looking forward to the update, but I think too many of the many new mechanics are not balanced.

1. wolfes

A wolf attacked me 100m from trappers Homestead while I was browsing through the first container. Another wolf had just killed a deer, minutes after I left the house, right in front of it.

If I extrapolate from this, I will be more concerned with fighting wolves than anything else in the game. I am all for the game becoming harder and more of a struggle for survival, but not a Deathmatch with predators.

2. temperatures

I also noticed that my cold meter was climbing like crazy while it was barely -13C, and I lost condition just from the moment I went outside. Will Mackenzie was already a wimp before the update but this is completely absurd. I can attest you that we often have -10C to -15C here in Germany and it is not life threatening at all. I even walked to school in such temperatures (ca 1h) when I was a kid of 10 and did not suffer a condition loss.

Yes, someone should seriously check the temperature meters. If you want to make the game harder, make the temperatures lower (-50C), but dont turn the protagonist into a wimp. -15C is cold but can still be fun to be outside, -30C is really bad but will not kill you, -50C really life threatening. I am beginning to suspect the game is mixing up Celsius and Farenheit. -14F is -26C so that would make a whole lot more sense.

The coldest temperature ever recorded was -94.7C (-135.8F) on Antarctica. Such a temperature would probably kill a person in minutes. But if you give me 500$ for spending 8h in -15C I would probably win the bet, and have a nice day outside. And I am by no means a superman. Someone from Siberia could probably sleep outside in such temperatures, and still take a cold bath in the morning.

[xnoybis]

So collecting your toys and leaving the sandbox? Just kidding Keep playing and keep giving feedback, I for one, maybe naively so, think that it's all taken under consideration or at least heard, in these forums at least. It's possible that more ad hoc balancing could happen in the next few days rather than in the next big update, although I have no idea really. Long story short, there are issues and somebody needs to point them out.

[Burning Bridges]

That's probably true, I just think that if something is so obviously wrong, it's the job of betatesters to spot it and I don't see why we should all have a hard time because of it.

[Ruhroe]

It's important now to pay attention when you go outside. There are days, or times of the day, where there's very little windchill and you can do whatever you need. Then, there are times where you aren't going to go very far. It's just something that needs to be planned around now, whereas before you could pretty much go out whenever you felt like it. It makes maintaining clothing more important. It also really needs to be this way, to some extent, if they want to add in the ability to create snow shelters, otherwise they would be unnecessary. This change I like so far.

The wolves are in certain areas, and I'm not sure yet if they need to be tuned drastically. It's definitely harder than it was before, and I'm OK with that generally, though we need time to see how it plays out. Overall, there are places you can go with lower or no wolf population. This makes those locations more suitable. I was able to go all over the new zone a couple times so far, and have only been attacked twice.

[CoureurDeBois]

I find the new cold system to be a bit punitive, but I think it works. When I first set foot in the new area I was bewildered by how many houses and other potential bases there were, and I thought that playing here would be ridiculously easy.

Then I realized that you can easily begin freezing to death inbetween those houses, and the increased amount of wolves makes any lost condition dangerous. The cold is even more dangerous in the mountains above the coastline, where many of the useful items are found (I found a rifle in the abandoned lookout and a hatchet in a trailer, but went down to 15% condition in the process)

[elloco999]

So collecting your toys and leaving the sandbox? Just kidding Keep playing and keep giving feedback, I for one, maybe naively so, think that it's all taken under consideration or at least heard, in these forums at least. It's possible that more ad hoc balancing could happen in the next few days rather than in the next big update, although I have no idea really. Long story short, there are issues and somebody needs to point them out.

With most other game developers that would probably be naive, but not so with Hinterland. Just look at the change list for this patch, many of the things on it are things that have been requested here on these forums a lot. So they are listening!

With the previous big update, 2 smaller updates followed it very quickly to fix the biggest issues with the big update. I'm hoping the same will be true with v1.52.

That's probably true, I just think that if something is so obviously wrong, it's the job of betatesters to spot it and I don't see why we should all have a hard time because of it.

Well, the beta testers haven't been hired yet, since we're still in alpha Sorry couldn't resist.

But honestly, right now the devs themselves are probably the only people testing the game before an update is released. And just maybe they don't find it too hard because they already know how to make things work in this new version of the game. We just have to find out. Or maybe it really is just too hard for many people and it needs to get balanced better.

[xnoybis]

And just maybe they don't find it too hard because they already know how to make things work in this new version of the game. We just have to find out. Or maybe it really is just too hard for many people and it needs to get balanced better.

I think a lot of people are not necessarily concerned with the difficulty, but something of a perceived pivot in terms of survival focus, moved significantly from environment and hunger to predators. At least on the new map, as the issue with wolves is not as significant in Mystery Lake (but it's also there to an extent).

I for one was looking for a game focused on survival, crafting, building, but without the PvP silliness and without zombies (I think we've all had enough of that now). But if it turns out that the wolves are taking center stage then that's moving away from what many people expected (especially after playing the previous release for a while). I think it's not really about difficulty, but managing expectations of what the major themes in the game are supposed to be.

[Gremper]

I think that temperature and freezing are balaced quite reasonably now after the last hotfixes, but the shift towards "dealing with wolves" still bothers me.

When .152 came out, I first liked the rapid increase of cold when it was cold outside, because this forces the player to actually take a look at the weather before setting out to a long walk. However, about 80% of the time (at least as I perceived it) the weather is so cold that you start freezing within seconds. This made warm clothes and campfires obsolete, as they would only delay the onset of freezing by some more seconds, which doesn't really make a difference. Also, the almost-instant freeze forces the player to run all the time, because the increased calorie consumption rate is more tolerable than the loss of condition due to freezing- this speeds up the gameplay, but kills the immersion. Now after the hotfixes, this feels a lot better.

I'm still unhappy with the wolves, though: The game now feels like DayZ on an empty server and with rudimentary stealth and combat mechanics. I agree that wolves posing a threat makes sense from a realism point of view, but it feels terribly gamey that sneaking past "enemies" is such a central element, especially because real wild wolves probably don't spend their time patroling around houses so that humans can't get in. This does not mean that wolf population should be reduced, but their behaviour and the wolf avoidance mechanics should feel more natural. Right now, they behave like NPC guards in a stealth game, and force the player to scan the horizon like in ArmA. Sorry that I can't think of a way to implement the "wolf management" aspect in a way that is engaging and challenging without being unfair, but I hope the developers will come up with something better than button mashing.

[Burning Bridges]

What I wrote is moot with the current version. Wolfes are more numerous, a bit too aggressive, but I can get around them if I am careful. They block me from certain places which is nice. I can still shoot them.

It was just off with v152, and they corrected that within 24h

[elloco999]

In my experience, wolves never stay in the same place, they move around. So if they are blocking you from a specific place, come back 4-6 hours later, good chance they are gone.