Sandbox endgame ideas to solve monotony


Eames

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Once I'm fully equipped and not in any danger anymore I catch myself thinking "what I'm playing for?". This starts pretty soon – from about a week or two in (on Stalker).

For comparison in Minecraft you can continue playing indefinitely because of construction. In another survival game, This War Of Mine there's an ending after a semi-random set of days which you look forward to, even if you're safe and stocked.

I have some ideas for what happens as the time goes on:

  1. Temperatures get lower and lower. It still fluctuates as it is now, except there's an ever-increasing handicap of -C° which get's added to the random day-by-day temperatures.
  2. Days get shorter and shorter. A la polar night.
  3. Animal numbers start decreasing. Less fun than the rest, but still worth considering.
  4. All of the above.

The goal would be to still leave infinite survival possible, but ever-increasingly difficult.

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The problem is that means you last longest if you create a hug stockpile and sleep the last few months.

I would like to see a chance to actually win. Like, if you build a huge signal fire you have a small chance of rejoining the remains of civilization. It would have to be something that took a lot of resources and skill.

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Easy... Wait for the story mode and "win" the game, since without a goal, it would be quite easy to simply survive in the environment as presented. (honestly, in the dead of winter, why would you move from an area that has comfortable shelter, supplies, etc?)

All of these survival games have exactly the same "problem": as your character gathers resources and explores, the environment is no longer that much of a challenge. DayZ, Rust, Minecraft, etc. are all the same, the first few hours are a challenge for survival, but as you "level-up", the environmental challenges become trivial.

"Fudging" the environment to match your growing abilities would be kind of forced and would feel very arbitrary and unrealistic.

This, and all survival games, need some kind of motivation to keep you moving and unbalanced. It will be hard to come up with a plausible reason to keep you moving (and never turning back to "re-stock"), but that is what is needed if the game is to remain fresh and interesting as a sandbox experience.

The other significant issue with TLD is the extremely limited map sizes. Once you have inevitably conquered the environmental challenges, the next human desire will be to explore. The perimeter of the current maps in TLD can be covered in about 30 minutes, which is ridiculously small, even with varied terrain. To offer exploration and orienteering challenges, the maps need to increase in area by an order of magnitude or more, and the "loot" sites need to be dramatically further apart. (Minecraft is unlimited, DayZ/ArmA can be 200km2+, Rust about 60km2 in area)

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I like the idea of "loot" sites being further apart, but to implement that a lot of other things would have to change. The rates of calorie and water usage, for instance. There's no point in ferreting out 300 calorie candy bars if you spent 2000 calories traveling to the site.

Also, there'd have to be some way to survive a blizzard. Otherwise no matter how skillful you are you'd eventually get caught by bad weather too far from shelter and freeze to death.

And they'd have to be pretty careful. Just trudging along a trail is pretty boring if it goes on too long.

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And they'd have to be pretty careful. Just trudging along a trail is pretty boring if it goes on too long.

I agree on this; I had two coworkers watching me play earlier today as I was just running along to where I knew a shelter was, and they were like "So...can your character learn to sprint?" and I responded "This is sprint..." and let go of the shift key and they both replied "oh..." - even though I was the one playing it was very unengaged gameplay...at one point I simply held W+Shift and checked my email on my other PC...

If they want to make things further apart there needs to be a form of "fast travel"...snowmobile...wrangling a buck (ha!)...

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If they want to make things further apart there needs to be a form of "fast travel"...snowmobile...wrangling a buck (ha!)...

Travel speed is already way faster than early versions -- you can already run from the Trapper's Homestead in the ML map all the way to the far corner of the Coastal Highway map near the Third Island in under 4 in-game hours... and that includes marathon running through deep snow, carrying a weighted pack, in freezing conditions. There would be pretty much no weather danger or challenge if you speed it up much more, plus it would kind of defeat the idea of challenge for exploring if you could simply travel wherever you want without worrying about it.

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I didn't play the earlier versions, so this was simply an observation and reaction.

And I noted that 'if they want to make things further apart'...I didn't suggest just throwing a snowmobile at every player like it was the Oprah Winfrey show. I also didn't suggest this would be the only solution nor a viable one should the maps increase by X-fold. :)

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