A better hunting system

[leaf522]

I pretty much play interloper only and I gotta say that though I love the early challenge of it, I absolutely lose interest when it comes to the inconsistencies of hunting. I had a wolf near Carter Dam that was limping very slowly after I hit it with an arrow and tracked it to the dam. I turned away for 2 seconds to grab some twigs, turned back, and he was just gone. I combed the whole area and double checked for tracks and nothing. He had seemingly just disappeared! Waited a night in a nearby trailer to see if I could just look for crows and that maybe I had just barely missed him the day before. Nope. No crows around. There were crows nearby on a corpse across the bridge, but nothing around me whatsoever on my kill. Kind of tilting when you spend an hour and a half making the arrow, go through the whole bait and shoot process, track the wolf, and then just as it's about to die it literally disappears or bugs out; couldn't tell which. That was the final moment that made me just walk away from my game, despite how well it was going. Two previous times in the same game I had tried the bait and kill tactic, which worked flawlessly, only to be screwed over by the ridiculous animal pathing while they are fleeing. Holy what. Both times I shot a wolf with an arrow only to result in that wolf just running for the mountain sides, which are steep as hell and a guaranteed sprain. They will just run around these highly steep slopes to the point where following them isn't an option and you are better waiting them out. Problem is, they often die on a very hard to reach part of the mountain so again, guaranteed sprain to get to them. I don't mind the reworked sprain system, and I really like the change to make it more apparent when you will get a strain, but with that system you cannot have such crazy animal pathing AI. Can't you folks make it so that they prefer to flee on more level or downhill terrain? I just don't get why they flee up mountains. It's not realistic and it's very immersion breaking with the sprain system. Nearly all or most of my limbs are actually sprained by the time I get to the corpse of my hunt. That's just silly. 

 

Also I don't know if it was a bug or not, but I was tracking a wolf that was at the point where it was barely moving it was so near death. I got a little too close and the wolf attacked me, which is expected. What wasn't expected was that after I fought it off, he ran away at full speed for quite some time. Just weird. Like his healthbar reset or something. Everytime I come back to this interloper game I get really excited just up to the point that I start hunting wolves; then I just encounter some game design that is just so frustrating that I usually exit the game. I really cannot stress enough that the rest of the game is just soooo well designed but that this particular aspect of the game is just super frustrating. Idk maybe I am the only one that gets frustrated by this but it's such a game ruiner for me that I just wanted to say something about it.

[JujuBear]

Definitely could use an improvement on Wildlife path-finding in my opinion. I mentioned this on a recent post about better wildlife A.I. to avoid mishaps like this. Sometimes I think if the randomness is part of the challenge or if it's really just a bad case of awkward programming on wildlife A.I.

Totally get your frustration especially animals bleeding out on hard/impossible to reach spots or simply disappearing. It's really about A.I. behavior in my opinion, bleed-out time isn't even the problem it's just how the A.I. behaves. A simple fix could be something similar to the predictability of bleeding-out bears I suppose. In their case, bears have dens so it gives the player an idea where they could find the carcass if they aren't finding it on the terrain around, and a good 50% chance to find it there too. Since wolves and deer don't have dens (although I proposed wolves have their own, in my recent post) maybe they could behave in a way similar to the bear - retreat to the forest maybe? Regardless where the struggle happened their behavior would be like secluding and hiding themselves on a spot somewhere on a nearby forest but somewhere within reach of the player. And when I mean hide themselves I really mean hide themselves as a wounded/dying animal would to keep the challenge. Crows are still your friend here. At least we won't be expecting them to drop dead on a mountain (how does a bleeding, dying wolf make it up there?) More visible blood trails is also a fair improvement methinks.

I think it's too random too. Tracking ain't a problem for me, but when you have an awkward A.I. taking your bleeding deer and killing it on a weak ice spot, well, that's just a tad bit annoying.