Why is this fun?

[JimmyT1]

OK, I've played the game a few days now, for a few hours totally, my longest life in it is three days and some hours and yes I'm starting to get the idea. At this point I am very disappointed, the game seems to be all about math and how to work the game.

If! it were a realistic survival situation I would enjoy it. I would start with sixty pounds of extra body fat like any sensible person living in the arctic would do every year going into winter. I would strive to eat ten thousand calories every day to maintain that weight, and hope to not break a sweat because you can freeze to death that way. Don't run because the heavy breathing will freeze your lungs and you'll suffocate. When it's really cold don't open your mouth because the cold will crack your teeth. If any wolf should attack me, I'd be overjoyed and kill it and eat it. By spring I'd be thin and starving to death but that's normal. In this game I can die in twenty minutes. In real life I'd have to strip naked and drink a quart of vodka and sit down on a park bench in Moscow in the dead of winter to die in twenty minutes under the same circumstances.

So many things I see in this game are just wrong, and yet the people who have designed it strive to make it realistic. My fingertips feel constantly like they are blistered, I get blood blisters that don't inflate, it's because my fingertips have frozen so many times that the next f-ing thing goes wrong with them I get them cut off. If this game was anything close to real I'd feel better.

On a jar of peanut butter I could run for three f-ing days in the f-ing snow. And I'm old. But that's just me.

[Burning Bridges]

Seems this game is not for you, perhaps you are looking for something else?

[JimmyT1]

To me this is just another example of how games go wrong. It's built for somebody with a thirty second attention span and no knowledge of the real world. There's no story here, it's just guys writing code in an office somewhere and probably they've never even been camping. So yeah, I've lost interest already. People with cell phones will probably like it. Maybe I'll go hunting.

[RedNanaki]

It's supposed to be a video game, not only a simulation. Also, it's an alpha. That means it's an extremely early version of the finished game and you should not expect it to be feature complete or the current features to be final.

If it very accurately depicted real life survival then it would just be tedious. If you had to walk everywhere in the game because you'd die otherwise, it would be considered boring to most people. When you make a fun game you don't compromise fun for the sake of realism. Hence why there isn't pooping in the game. Playing games is something you do for fun. But of course, what's fun is highly subjective...

I agree that this game is probably not for you. There are some proper hunting simulation "games" out there that I wouldn't like that you might enjoy. Good luck.

[Burning Bridges]

To me this is just another example of how games go wrong. It's built for somebody with a thirty second attention span and no knowledge of the real world. There's no story here, it's just guys writing code in an office somewhere and probably they've never even been camping. So yeah, I've lost interest already. People with cell phones will probably like it. Maybe I'll go hunting.

It's a game, not a simulation. A survival simulation would be very interesting, but also very risky as a business.

P.S. you come off as just wanting to vent your frustration that you don't like the game.

[Dark]

OK, I've played the game a few days now, for a few hours totally, my longest life in it is three days and some hours and yes I'm starting to get the idea.

For such an expert this is a very short timespan.

If! it were a realistic survival situation I would enjoy it. I would start with sixty pounds of extra body fat like any sensible person living in the arctic would do every year going into winter. I would strive to eat ten thousand calories every day to maintain that weight, and hope to not break a sweat because you can freeze to death that way. Don't run because the heavy breathing will freeze your lungs and you'll suffocate. When it's really cold don't open your mouth because the cold will crack your teeth.

This is a story about a pilot that flys only to the north to deliver mail, and this is not the arctic, because of the vegetation. Temperate coniferous forest and not arctic tundra. It can be British Columbia, because the wolves seem to be Mackenzie-wolves, and there is a ozeanic coast, with many islands. Northen Quebec , Nanuvaut and Newfoundland and Labradour have polar wolfs. Yukon, Alberta, Saskatchewan nearly no coast and Northwest Territories are Tundra in the north.

And one other thing that says that this is no so far in the north: the days are sunny in the winter and the nights are dark.

And the temperatures are not so cold, for the effects you describe. The other good candidates besides British Columbia are Manitoba and Ontario. If it is Northwest Territories then only around the two large lakes.

And yes i have been running and doing army maneuvers at -20°C, and still got my lungs and teeth. The morning (0730) in game temperatures are around -22°C so this is not far off. And normally a good runner breath cold air through the nose, and exhales through the mouth and nose. This keeps his nose and mouth warm, which warms the inhaled air.

[JimmyT1]

Sorry folks, there's no excuse for saying you are making a realistic game and then coming up with something this bad.

Breathing through the nose, pfft. Next Olympics look at the cross country skiers. Mouth open, snot dripping in streams, that's what happens in the cold and it doesn't even have to be very cold. Takes something like 50 below to crack your teeth and freeze you in twenty minutes, I'm just saying the game is very screwed up in practical ways.

Like, don't wolves hunt in packs?

[elloco999]

You know, I had already started to write this long post as to why the game is the way it is, but I realized it's a waste of time anyway. If you don't like the game, that's fine with me. Don't like it.

I do, and so do most of the other people who have bought it. That's also in a nutshell why TLD is the way it is.

[Burning Bridges]

So do I. Any further discussion as to why we like the game would be waste of time. You should play one of the many realistic simulations in the genre and forget this childish arcade game.

[Thor]

I just want a good melee system. Button smashing is just.. bleh

[mentored1]

There are certainly things to be improved and tweaked (hence 'alpha'), but all the stuff about it not being a 'realistic' survival scenario...

...it's a video game. It's played by people sitting at machines, many of whom will never be trying to survive in a frozen wasteland. Whether the systems are 'realistic' or not (which is nonsense because it's a game, right), the question is whether or not it's fun and challenging--the two benchmarks for any game.

Almost every game tries to find a system that presents a 'realistic' environment within the game parameters. Managing oxygen, radiation levels, and hydroponic gardens on a spaceship is beyond the reach of everyday joes, but it can be incredibly realistic within the confines of a video game, provided the system is balanced and comprehensible.

As it stands now, TLD is incredibly promising for an alpha product, and I'm curious to see where Hinterland takes it.

[Nidveg]

Sorry folks, there's no excuse for saying you are making a realistic game and then coming up with something this bad.

Breathing through the nose, pfft. Next Olympics look at the cross country skiers. Mouth open, snot dripping in streams, that's what happens in the cold and it doesn't even have to be very cold. Takes something like 50 below to crack your teeth and freeze you in twenty minutes, I'm just saying the game is very screwed up in practical ways.

Like, don't wolves hunt in packs?

1. 20 minutes playing the game does not translate to 20 minutes in real life; as is common in this kind of game, time is sort of sped up in the game to keep things moving. Playing through 24 hours of in-game time does not require you to play the game for 24 hours. If you really want a 1:1 time rate, that's your preference, but I don't think a lot of people want to play a game where you have to spend three hours in RL waiting for your character's toes to thaw. So, playing the game for 20 minutes simulates your character spending way more time freezing than you do playing.

2. You start the game with little to no proper outdoor clothing, which is why freezing is more of a hazard. -20C won't kill you if you're properly dressed (and if you're really such a outdoorsy no-mobile-phone-badass, you know how to dress for cold weather), but with naught but a pair of jeans, a light jumper and a pair of boots, -20C can be right deadly. I should know, I live in Norway, and every year we have some boozed up partygoers who wind up in a ditch frozen solid on their way home at night in December.

Edit: 3. The wolves don't hunt in packs because the apocalypse scenario in the game is messing with their instincts. Maybe not too scientific, but it's just a game.

[Hyenaz]

Sorry folks, there's no excuse for saying you are making a realistic game and then coming up with something this bad.

Breathing through the nose, pfft. Next Olympics look at the cross country skiers. Mouth open, snot dripping in streams, that's what happens in the cold and it doesn't even have to be very cold. Takes something like 50 below to crack your teeth and freeze you in twenty minutes, I'm just saying the game is very screwed up in practical ways.

Like, don't wolves hunt in packs?

Not gonna agree on most of your points, your wolf point is very valid. Wolves in this game behave in a completely unnatural way.