Disappointing new Milton/Mountain Town map (SPOILERS)

[White_SnowTree]

Great job with the Redux! But was it necessary to re-do the map?

 

I find the direct connection between the plane crash and the town to be a bit disappointing- I enjoyed the voyage through the cave in the initial map. Not only that, but there was a secret path, available only in Survival Mode, that you would take before the bridge, that would allow a short route between the plane and the Signal Tower. It made the map interesting and made Survival Mode in Mountain Town a lot more unique (it forced you to explore more then what you only found in Story Mode)

 

I find the new map to be unfortunately too streamlined- it might be nice in Story Mode when you want to cut straight through the Story, but in Survival Mode Mountain Town has become a lot less interesting. It's too bad because you probably could have kept the old map, while still improving on the experience in Episode 1....

 

Thoughts? 

[Serenity]

In my Interloper game I had just killed the bear at the bridge, but had to leave before harvesting it. Now I can't get there quickly anymore. And I can't carry stuff from there to the house while encumbered.

[White_SnowTree]

4 minutes ago, Serenity said:

In my Interloper game I had just killed the bear at the bridge, but had to leave before harvesting it. Now I can't get there quickly anymore. And I can't carry stuff from there to the house while encumbered.

Yea- the change is definitely an unwelcome change. The region is a lot less Survival Mode friendly then it was previously: at least then it was balanced for Survival Mode AND Story Mode and the path made the map more interesting 

[RossBondReturns]

The new well fed buff will make carrying everything easier.

Also I always felt the entrance to Milton was a bit random in the first game...I feel that the new Milton is much more direct...and you're coming in from a slightly different angle.

Surprisingly I found it just as difficult healthwise to get into town!

Also why do areas have to be easy for survival mode? I personally found Milton to be too easy to navigate before and find this to be a welcome change.

But to each their own.

[White_SnowTree]

27 minutes ago, RossBondReturns said:

Also why do areas have to be easy for survival mode? I personally found Milton to be too easy to navigate before and find this to be a welcome change.

Never said that it had to be easy... I'm saying that it's a lot easier now for Story Mode, and a lot less interesting for Survival Mode gameplay. I'm not sure you understood my initial point.

 

How is the new Milton harder then it was before? You now go straight from the plane to the town- it used to be that you would have to go on the highway and go past the church. The initial Story Mode was hard for beginners who had to get past the wolves on the highway and next to the church, but now all you do is climb up and down, the only danger being how cold it is (which is intentional of course for the sake of Story)

[RossBondReturns]

1 minute ago, White_SnowTree said:

Never said that it had to be easy... I'm saying that it's a lot easier now for Story Mode, and a lot less interesting for Survival Mode gameplay. I'm not sure you understood my initial point.

 

How is the new Milton harder then it was before? You now go straight from the plane to the town- it used to be that you would have to go on the highway and go past the church. The initial Story Mode was hard for beginners who had to get past the wolves on the highway and next to the church, but now all you do is climb up and down, the only danger being how cold it is (which is intentional of course for the sake of Story)

That's my point.

Not only is it colder but you can get mystery sprains and flat out die before you make it to Grey Mother's because of both!

It's actually showing how dangerous the cold can be in that it's showing the cold is just as dangerous as the wildlife!

The start is surprisingly difficult even with good planning. (I played the start over and over to test different ways of doing it) and died in half of the attempts!

While the path and it's intensity has been listened...it's dangerousness has actually stayed the same...and perhaps even become more difficult for some players. The path is simple...but the effects of the cold are much more than capable of making up for it.

Imagine if they had made the boxed clothes frozen like in the original start...people would be dropping like flies!

BUt your jacket, the socks, gloves, vest you find are all not frozen and you can use them right away.

Yet the extreme coldness still can oush you right into the 10's in condition by Grey Mother's house or worse.

 

[White_SnowTree]

1 hour ago, RossBondReturns said:

Yet the extreme coldness still can oush you right into the 10's in condition by Grey Mother's house or worse.

What they could have done is just simply keep the map the way it was, and added the automatic snow storm at the beginning of Episode 1, until you reached Grey Mother's House.

 

Again, just because they wanted to change the difficulty around doesn't mean that they should have removed what had made the map so interesting in the first place. Now when playing in Survival Mode, you won't ever want to go on the highway past the cave that leads to Hushed River Valley, because it won't bring you to the plane.

 

Such an unnecessary change that's transformed Milton into a beginner's village. No point in exploring the area in Survival Mode.

[RossBondReturns]

55 minutes ago, White_SnowTree said:

What they could have done is just simply keep the map the way it was, and added the automatic snow storm at the beginning of Episode 1, until you reached Grey Mother's House.

 

Again, just because they wanted to change the difficulty around doesn't mean that they should have removed what had made the map so interesting in the first place. Now when playing in Survival Mode, you won't ever want to go on the highway past the cave that leads to Hushed River Valley, because it won't bring you to the plane.

 

Such an unnecessary change that's transformed Milton into a beginner's village. No point in exploring the area in Survival Mode.

Beginners village you say? Hardly. The Redesign makes the Town and especially the Hush River Bridge and it's Bear much more dangerous. And some great loot is on that bridge always. So people will for sure venture there...I know I will!

Mystery Lake will by far be the Beginners Village for a very long time.

Also automatic stuff until Grey Mothers....thanks but no thanks...I'm playing a game not a interactive movie.

[hozz1235]

55 minutes ago, RossBondReturns said:

Mystery Lake will by far be the Beginners Village for a very long time.

I'm of the opinion that Milton and ML are comparable with regards to "Beginner's area".  Both have bears, wolves and lots of loot.  Milton's loot is more concentrated in town (similar to the Dam at ML) but even more so, so I would lean towards Milton as being easier than ML.

Just out of habit, I will usually start at ML in custom games.

[Fuarian]

4 hours ago, RossBondReturns said:

The new well fed buff will make carrying everything easier.

Also I always felt the entrance to Milton was a bit random in the first game...I feel that the new Milton is much more direct...and you're coming in from a slightly different angle.

Surprisingly I found it just as difficult healthwise to get into town!

Also why do areas have to be easy for survival mode? I personally found Milton to be too easy to navigate before and find this to be a welcome change.

But to each their own.

The harder the game is, the better. Easy is boring. And boring isn't fun.

[hozz1235]

And that is why you have Custom mode, my friend.

1 minute ago, Fuarian said:

The harder the game is, the better. Easy is boring. And boring isn't fun.

 

[Fuarian]

3 minutes ago, hozz1235 said:

And that is why you have Custom mode, my friend.

 

To an extent, yes. But I want even more customization. Let me choose which buildings spawn or are burned down. Let me choose individual item rarity with a selection of every item in the game and then save that loot spawn rate preset. Let me choose the rarity of each weather type. Let me choose which regions are blocked off or not. That kind of advanced customization (that could likely come about in the future with mod support) is what would put the icing on the cake for me.

[melcantspell]

If you get to choose every little detail, there are no surprises anymore. 

[Ice Hole]

Well this is embarrassing.  This new route that goes direct to the radio tower was something I wanted to make a video showing.  As a Professional Long Dark Rocky Mount Goat (LDRMG) this was a path I was developing to enable a clean an opening move, the Milton Crash gambit.  Now I am looking foolish cause the video was put off and now I updated the game file.

The wolf that used to terrorize the area just past the hanging  DHC- 2 Beaver is barricaded now and the plane wing creates a ramp to get across.   On interloper it was an intriguing puzzle and the Dead Man's Challenge it was just a meat grinder.   The wolf would spawn and reduce progress to a crawl then frostbite would always set in before arriving at grandma's house.  At least in my attempts.  The plan I devised was to climb the fallen tree.  Climbing a tree used to scare wolves away.  Then after the cave a spot allowed a LDRMG to access a route direct to the tower.  Ah well.  We now can carry more loot!

[Serenity]

Oh boy, the rope behind the house is gone too. And that entire cliff is closed off with rocks. Didn't even notice that when I played story mode. So now you really need to walk the long way around. I'm on Day 80 in Interloper, so it's doable but pretty annoying

[MarrowStone]

I wouldve liked to see those climbable rocks still present at that little rabbit pond where you find the campfire. 

That way you can have two choices in directions to go.

[ProsPex]

I think the new map will be much more exciting for a new player to explore. Once they get to Milton they will have options to head towards Milton Park, Paradise Meadows Farm, Milton Basin, the Crashed Plane and out towards Spruce Falls Bridge and eventually the cave out there... with a one-way connection back to the new Crashed Plane route. The whole northern route will be something new to a first time player instead of being something they breezed by on their original route when they left  the plane site and  headed off towards  Milton.

[Ape88]

On 12/18/2018 at 6:06 PM, Serenity said:

In my Interloper game I had just killed the bear at the bridge, but had to leave before harvesting it. Now I can't get there quickly anymore. And I can't carry stuff from there to the house while encumbered.

You could go the other way through the cavern system and then hop down the short bit that blocks you from taking the cave initially and go that way... I did this on the way back from getting the cache from the spot mentioned in story mode. 

[ProsPex]

2 hours ago, Ape88 said:

You could go the other way through the cavern system and then hop down the short bit that blocks you from taking the cave initially and go that way... I did this on the way back from getting the cache from the spot mentioned in story mode. 

That route is very close to being the same distance and takes just about as long as OP 's route.

[Ape88]

1 hour ago, DaveO said:

That route is very close to being the same distance and takes just about as long as OP 's route.

It's safer, and if need be the cave can be slept in and the OP can resume the trek back in the morning.

[Demetrious]

I griped about this exact thing at length in the update thread. 

On 12/19/2018 at 11:04 AM, RossBondReturns said:

Also why do areas have to be easy for survival mode? I personally found Milton to be too easy to navigate before and find this to be a welcome change.

They don't! My primary complaint about the map change is that Milton was fairly well balanced difficulty-wise before. Like Coastal Highway, it offers a ton of loot in a fairly concentrated area, offset by being absolutely lousy with wolves. Milton is easier to get around safely because the cover is a lot closer together and there's cars well-distributed through all of Milton to use as bolt-holes - this is counterbalanced by the two rope climbs that are mandatory to get in and out, which makes packing your loot out to a safehouse in a more hospitable map pretty difficult. 

What made Milton worth a trip for me - aside from the loot - was the hunting opportunities. You had the moose spawn near the rope that was just behind Grey Mother's house, with a rock outcropping that you could perch on to shoot the moose while staying pretty safe from stomping. Likewise, all the cars on the bridge make it one of the easiest bear hunts in the game - shoot bear, dive into car, wait for him to bleed out. Not only did both locations offer great "safe" hunting opportunities, they also had relatively direct paths back to one of the few safehouses in the game with an excellent six slot stove to cook up that massive haul of meat with! 

Several things counterbalanced that, however. One, Milton is still lousy with wolves and coming home smelly easily pulls them in on you - I had at least two cannonball into me only steps away from the safety of my own front door. Two, the routes were direct in that they let you get most of the way home without dodging tons of wolves while smelly; but they were stamina taxing enough that if you overloaded yourself with meat and tired yourself out hauling it back, by the time you reached your own back porch that wolf cannonball would last a lot longer than you'd want (which was your own fault.) And third, actually using the hide from your kills was difficult, as the trailer's indoor crafting table wasn't far away, but doesn't have much wood around, and the closest rabbit areas (behind the church and pond over the waterfall where the moose tends to spawn) also host wolf spawns on or near them, so you're carrying your crafting materiel, food and water... up a rope. Or hiking there the long way 'round, which requires dodging the wolves near the bridge, then near the church, then the one on the road, etc. The table at the farm is much easier to reach (the wide-open farm lets you watch the wolves from a distance and time your dash, at least,) but its outdoors, so the wolves require you stock up many hours of firewood to craft, even if the cold doesn't.  

Or you could just pack the hides out, but then you're leaving that huge haul of meat behind, untapped. 

It also makes Milton less attractive as a long-term location in Survival games because it further constrains what is a fairly constrained map already. I often evaluate Survival mode in terms of "safe paths" versus "unsafe paths;" alternate routes and distances are very important due to heat loss (early game, or bad weather in difficult regions late game) and due to wolf spawns (always.) A lot of opportunity cost and choices are wrapped up in where you go that day - if a wolf is between you and your planned activities, you have to decide if you can risk sneaking around him, expend some resources to mitigate risk getting around him (using a torch, flare, etc.,) expend more resources to guarantee passage (shoot him with an arrow,) or just change your plans for that day because no wolf spawned on the lake, so it's a great day to go fishing instead. (For a concrete example: I think we've all done the Desperate One-Legged Hobble towards the pickup truck in front of the dam because we hiked along the hills parallel to the tracks to dodge the wolves, only to sprain an ankle just before reaching that final dash past the two spawns near the gate!)

Mountain Town is pretty constrained (because of the Mountains, naturally;) about a third of the map (Milton Basin, depression between ML exit and Milton's plateau) is difficult to access due to rope climbs and/or distance (with two climbs counterbalancing the Farmhouse's relative proximity to the Basin, etc.) Thus the alternate routes up to the ridge-line above Mountain Town were pretty important in giving you options in the morning as of where to go, as well as access to fairly wolf-safe resource areas (rabbit groves/deer spawns + cattails.) The old map gave you rope-climb access to a rabbit/deer/cattail area with a wolf spawn pretty close (they'll patrol right onto the ice sometimes) and two deer/rabbit areas with no wolf threat, at the cost of one of them being a fair hike (the one under the bridge; it's far enough that I had to use that little cave on the ravine path's midpoint to warm up if the weather soured on me.) With the new map, you have one rabbit/deer/cattail area that's about the same distance but even safer (because it's walled in from wolf spawns on both ends by vine climbs) and one that's more dangerous (the rabbit/deer/cattail area up by Mackenzie's crash-site has a wolf spawn close enough that it'll definitely be pulled down onto you by scent, and might catch you by surprise coming over that crest, but the terrain does offer some vantages to climb on to avoid it.) Even if you consider that a wash, it branches off on its own little isolated path now, further fracturing the map. You can no longer leave via the bridge to the church, do a "circuit" and return home via the rope or ravine; even if you're not hauling any kind of meat, there's six possible wolf spawns between you and Grey Mother's house heading from the bridge - and you'll have to dodge them twice to get up there and back. Which means that once you visit the bridge to check the trunks, you're probably never going back... nor are you visiting the river below, either. They're effectively dead space, now, that players are unlikely to see but once. Mountain Town is definitely more constrained than other maps, by design even, (again, Mountain town is Mountainous,) but compared to the design visible in all the rest of the game, and the previous iteration of the map, it's pretty clearly crimped now.

On 12/19/2018 at 11:44 AM, RossBondReturns said:

That's my point.

Not only is it colder but you can get mystery sprains and flat out die before you make it to Grey Mother's because of both!

It's actually showing how dangerous the cold can be in that it's showing the cold is just as dangerous as the wildlife!

The start is surprisingly difficult even with good planning. (I played the start over and over to test different ways of doing it) and died in half of the attempts!

While the path and it's intensity has been listened...it's dangerousness has actually stayed the same...and perhaps even become more difficult for some players. The path is simple...but the effects of the cold are much more than capable of making up for it.

Imagine if they had made the boxed clothes frozen like in the original start...people would be dropping like flies!

BUt your jacket, the socks, gloves, vest you find are all not frozen and you can use them right away.

Yet the extreme coldness still can oush you right into the 10's in condition by Grey Mother's house or worse.

 

You hit the nail right on the head, here. The introduction of any creative work - from novels to games - really has to stick the landing, (literally, in the case of Mackenzie's plane and the tree durrhurrhurr) and you have to introduce a lot of mechanics to the player in a relatively short time while not strapping them to a chair for an excruciating cutscene ride, if at all possible, but still keeping them constrained enough to guarantee they'll encounter your very carefully paced experience - until you can turn them loose with relative safety.

That pretty much requires a constrained pathway in the opening... but in the case of Milton, the map also serves as a survival sandbox map, where dead-end single-use paths are The Sin Thou Shalt Not Put On Your Maps. Which kind of puts Hinterland in a bind, here. Ideally they'd simply use a different version of the map for Story Mode - which I'm sure was mentioned at a conference table somewhere before being dragged down and mauled to death by Design Considerations or Code Problems or something. So they had to balance out this fairly linear, dead-end path for Survival mode; in terms of resource accessibility, safety, distance, etc. 

And of course, there's the laws of unintended consequences and the sheer unfathomable vastness of individual player experience. For instance, that rocky outcropping over the icy rabbit area at one end of the possible Moose spawn area - did Hinterland know wildlife can't path to you if you stand on the very edge of that outcropping? Did they figure that convenience was a fair trade given the many drawbacks that attend a hunting trip to Mountain Town? Or did any of the drawbacks and advantages I listed above apply to many other players at all? Because it's quite possible that everything I just outlined above is absolutely alien to the vast majority of players, and none of it factored into the balancing decisions or was reported by their playtesters or whatever. I definitely know that it's far from a given that my experience is widespread, and even if it is the first chance Hinterland might have had to actually hear about it. Sometimes you just have to ship the product to find out who cares about what and how much before you can change it. It's not 1995 anymore; the next opportunity to tweak the game isn't a year and a $20 expansion distant. 

So even though I was able to write that massive textwall griping about how they changed Milton so it's terrible now bah humbug I'm definitely aware that my experience is subjective and even if I'm some sort of psychic savant who thinks exactly like the devs, that map has to optimally juggle mutually contradictory requirements for Survival and Story mode for the vast majority of players, and I've no idea how representative of that my take is.

Given all that, I'm intensely curious as to how other people play Mountain Town's map and what they think of it in Survival Mode. Especially the bear/moose hunting - I've barely scratched the surface of that aspect of the game yet, so for all I know everyone knows about a great spot in CH or something and I'm off on a wild Canadian goose chase or something. Do tell!

[RossBondReturns]

For what it's worth I generally do not usually play to survive in Milton for too long.

I use it as a staging area for HRV....I love surviving in HRV...in my long term games I spend as much time in HRV as possible and then move to Milton to recover.

IF I were to stay long term in Milton I would stay at Paradise Meadows Farm  probably. But I have based out of Grey Mother's as well.

When it comes to wolves...I just tend to decoy kill them...in my current Long Game I have level 5 Archery which comes in very handy right now.

Just drop a gut or meat crouch and wait and bye bye wolf. Rinse and repeat...also you can set up 2 fires in the cave to HRV...and pretty quickly process any bear you might slaughter near the bridge...on a good day you can do the two fire thing just about anywhere round the bridge actually. 4 burners are not the same as 6 but it processes pretty quickly.

Will it be harder to move around...sure...but for me that just adds to the challenge.

[Ice Hole]

2 hours ago, RossBondReturns said:

Just drop a gut or meat crouch and wait and bye bye wolf. Rinse and repeat.

This should change.  First time I saw this on a live stream made me think how cheesy.  Wolves dropping like flies.  The wolf eats the bait and makes such an easy target.  

An easy fix could have the wolf snatch and run away with the bait.  Or run at player until the player is pushed away from the bait.  Then wolf runs back snatches bait and books it out of there.  Until there is wolf pack mechanic this might alleviate the issue.  Maybe these reactions are not always the response but it would keep interlopers on there toes.
 

 

Could not find "The Ledge" scene with Robert Hays, so just use your imagination.

 

[Serenity]

5 hours ago, Ice Hole said:

An easy fix could have the wolf snatch and run away with the bait

That's how it works now. They no longer happily munch on the bait. But it's still pretty easy to shoot them when they approach the bait. Or a bit from the side. Or also the back

[RossBondReturns]

1 hour ago, Serenity said:

That's how it works now. They no longer happily munch on the bait. But it's still pretty easy to shoot them when they approach the bait. Or a bit from the side. Or also the back

Indeed...it's not like they stay and munch like they used to.

You have to be quick now and fire earlier then in the past. And hitting is no longer assured by any stretch.