Was Hinterlands decision wrong?


Adam12341

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22 hours ago, Pillock said:

I think it's fair to say that the first year of TLD's full release hasn't been as successful as Hinterland would have hoped, in terms of the story mode's progress and overall form. But perhaps releasing it when they did was positive in that it allowed them to get a lot of player feedback about the mission structure and narrative flow, which they are now using to make improvements and effectively re-release the game a year (or so) later. Overall, the shaky start to its existence may well end up meaning Wintermute is a better game as a result.

To me, a big problem with Wintermute was that it sidelined the survival elements of the game so much: I've played through Wintermute 4 or 5 times now, and even on the hardest difficulty setting that we now get I never do any hunting or trapping or fishing or crafting. You don't need to, because of the amount of resources available to loot in the story's locations. For me, a major part of the reason that story mode gets a little dull is that there is too much story! (If that makes sense). All you do is follow the narrative, the cutscenes and the missions - there is no imperative to actually survive in the world (other than avoiding wolf attacks), and so the thing can get a bit mind-numbing after a while. If lootable resources were much more limited (especially in the harder difficulty setting), it would force the player to take breaks from the intensity of the mission narrative in order to build up supplies for the next stage of the journey, and that would provide some relief, I think. There seems to be no time-restraint on finding Astrid, on getting to the next stage of the story, or even on completing individual missions, so I see no reason why giving the survival aspects a more prominent role in the story mode and giving the players something else to concentrate on as a diversion would cause any damage to it; indeed I think it would improve it a lot - it would provide a logical link between the freedom of the open world and the more structured linearity of the narrative, even after they have changed the mission structure to be more flexible.

I agree with you 100%

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My Perspective:
I picked TLD up on Steam a few weeks ago, when it was stupid-cheap, figuring I had little to lose. I had no idea how much time it was going to consume. I jumped right in to the story mode, not even pausing to consider the option of playing survival mode. I loved it. The story is engaging, but linear enough that my primary focus was on survival and game mechanics. At the end of the current Wintermute content, I felt well prepared to jump into the sandbox. I was wrong, of course; the sandbox is far more difficult, but I knew enough to figure out the rest. I tried two Stalker sandboxes (too many Zombie Wolves), then settled in on Interloper as more difficult (DP start until I figured out where to find matches...argh), but less annoyingly wolf-y. My best run on Interloper so far is 13 days (Eaten by a wolf by Jackrabbit Island as I went to cut a sapling for my first bow. That darn critter ran away from a well-aimed torch, but came back and killed me before I could even pick it up). I love playing without knowing where everything is on every map. I'm starting to know a few places after dying 15 times, but exploration and discovery are still very much a part of my experience.

My Opinion:
I'd love to see more story, but I think the story we have now serves as a solid tutorial for the real game, which I think is the sandbox. I could even see being ditched in the wilderness after the end of the current Wintermute content as a transition into the sandbox. Then, later, when another episode is ready, we could discover a clue that leads to a new region, where the story picks up. This would allow the first two episodes to serve as a linear tutorial, and subsequent episodes to be more dynamic and less theme-park. Given the choice, I'd take procedurally generated regions over more story content.

(tl;dr) I think the decision to start with linear story was solid, but the mistake may be trying to polish and re-polish the first two episodes of the story, instead of refining the sandbox, exploring the option of generated regions, and moving forward with new episodes that are less linear.

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@Erutor, it was similar for me. I bought this on release day, knowing little about it, played the story, which taught me loads about how the game works (it's mechanically a pretty dense simulation, and I think it'd have a steep curve without the story tutorial). Then I jumped into sand box and fell in love. I also like Interloper a lot more than Stalker and was somewhat non-plussed by the super numerous wolves in Stalker. I've been on a break for a while now from games, but have come back to TLD, trying to reach 100 days in each zone on Interloper (I'm ~600 days in now) but will restart with the next patch I think.

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On 2018-05-02 at 5:23 PM, Erutor said:


(tl;dr) I think the decision to start with linear story was solid, but the mistake may be trying to polish and re-polish the first two episodes of the story, instead of refining the sandbox, exploring the option of generated regions, and moving forward with new episodes that are less linear.

While re-doing Episodes 1&2 has caused a lot of delay, delay that I think is too long for what it is, I still think that it was necessary to re-do the dialogue and remove some unecessary missions from the main story line. The current story mode lacks the “how far will you go to survive” factor, and I feel these improvements might finally do justice to the game. 

 

Raph has stated that Jeremiah’s plant and bear missions will be optional, which means that we can finally make choices as players; the current gameplay offers little to no choice, therefore the story gets boring and the player is left wondering why they cannot make any meaningful decisions. It would be interesting to see how they decide to re-do Episode 1, and how we can continue on without Grey Mother. 

 

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Yes I totally agree on that EricTheGreat12.

The game that originally got my attention was mainly the surviving and decision making. Just as presented in this trailer:

The current Story is very nice, but it's literally a Story, there's no influence (yet) on the Storyline due to previous made decisions. I'm glad they're doing a redux of the first 2 episodes now and looking on how to continue from there.

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6 hours ago, Blinkin said:

Yes I totally agree on that EricTheGreat12.

The game that originally got my attention was mainly the surviving and decision making. Just as presented in this trailer:

The current Story is very nice, but it's literally a Story, there's no influence (yet) on the Storyline due to previous made decisions. I'm glad they're doing a redux of the first 2 episodes now and looking on how to continue from there.

Thanks for posting that video! The bit where you can hear people being attacked behind a closed door is the defining thing that got me excited for story mode throughout development. That's what I was expecting to see in Wintermute: meaningful decisions, moral choices. They wouldn't have had to drastically affect the progress or outcome of the story as a whole (maybe you get some bonus information or item from 'intervening' rather than walking on by; maybe you just get injured or robbed), but it would make a huge difference to how you feel about the characters and your connection with the narrative. There should be a reason for deciding to complete a mission (other than "I can't get to the next bit otherwise"), and an option and a genuine reason not to.

I wonder what happened to all this?

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1 hour ago, Pillock said:

Thanks for posting that video! The bit where you can hear people being attacked behind a closed door is the defining thing that got me excited for story mode throughout development. That's what I was expecting to see in Wintermute: meaningful decisions, moral choices. They wouldn't have had to drastically affect the progress or outcome of the story as a whole (maybe you get some bonus information or item from 'intervening' rather than walking on by; maybe you just get injured or robbed), but it would make a huge difference to how you feel about the characters and your connection with the narrative. There should be a reason for deciding to complete a mission (other than "I can't get to the next bit otherwise"), and an option and a genuine reason not to.

I wonder what happened to all this?

They probably realized the limitations of animating NPCs; looking at them now, they have very little to no animation besides for the cutscenes

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 I may be off-base here, but there seems to be two types of players and thus points of view: those who were around before Wintermute's release and those that came after. People who played TLD prior to WM seem to have a different attitude toward WM, (generalizing here) with claims of too much linearity, not enough survival, too much story and too much boring fetch questing. Those who came after WM and jumped into story mode first seem to have a (again generally) more positive take on WM; fewer complaints of linearity, ease of survival and fetching, which would be seen as 'learning the ropes' from their perspective, something of which the early birds did enough.

 I don't doubt that HL would have done things a bit differently but I also doubt they have regret and for me, I wouldn't say the missteps were game breakers or even that serious at all. They're a young, small studio who are creating something quite unique, so some hiccups are to be expected. As I have said before, there is something about this studio that truly endears itself to it's player base and overall I would call the community very supportive, forgiving and encouraging. It's quite clear that HL have been taking notes and I strongly suspect that moving forward things will be smoother, more coherent and refined.

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