How to make game to hard

[Jrod7405]

The long dark can get pretty easy after the initial 50- 100 days because you can hunker down and get kilo's upon kilo's of meat and especially when you get cooking level 5 when you can eat anything you kill. To combat this I think that any meat you leave out can be eaten by wolves making it much harder to stock up a bunch if meat that basically never degrades if you play your cards right.

[Guest jeffpeng]

I think it would be mostly sufficient if 0% meat and other food was just that - 0%. Inedible and uncookable.

You also really have to look at the difficult you're playing at. If you're playing Voyageur where you can overload your character with ammunition alone you might find yourself in an excessive supply of food rather quick. On the other hand: means to actively hunt are rather hard to come by on Interloper in the first place, and even then are hard to maintain - and eventually even things to kill become scarce, including predators. That's why I would be rather cautious when it comes to implement some miracle "wolf ate your breakfast" chance.

I mean I can see how the late game can become a rather boring thing. You've been (mostly) everywhere, you have all the gear you could realistically want, the only skills you can still advance are mending and maybe fishing. Outside lie a 500 kilograms of venison which you will never finish on your 700 calorie a day diet. Yes, I know the woes of being a successful citizen of Great Bear Island. But being at this point in the game on like Stalker or even Interloper means you've achieved pretty much mastery of the game - and you've also been pretty lucky.

Now think of yourself hanging on by a thread, just barely surviving, and the next morning a wolf has eaten half of your stash which you desperately need to recover from that moose running a red light and over your face 3 days ago. That would be pretty damn unfair, wouldn't it?

[Serenity]

9 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

means to actively hunt are rather hard to come by on Interloper in the first place, and even then are hard to maintain - and eventually even things to kill become scarce, including predators.

Even after 300-400 days there is little sign of that. It's easy enough to hunt bears and live for weeks just one a single one. Which isn't unrealistic, but it's not hard.

Fishing and trapping rabbits also give you plenty of meat. You can put then more snares than there are visible rabbits. Not all of will get one, but there are lots of them. I thought rabbit coves depleted over time, but they never stop. Or if they do it's way too late.

Edited June 14, 2021 by Serenity

[stratvox]

Yeah, I mean... there's a part of this where if you've made it to say a year in the real world you've got the survival thing down. I think that's actually an understated aspect of the deep game (hundreds of days in); the challenge isn't surviving on Great Bear, it's figuring out how to live on Great Bear, which is not quite the same thing.

[odizzido]

The difficulty curve in this game is the inverse of a typical game. The longer the game goes on the easier it is, at least until you run out of things like sticks for arrows/bows which is probably much longer than most people would want to play a game for. There are several reasons for this but yeah, that's the issue I have.

Also I just want to say, the meat shouldn't be decaying at all. It's frozen. I don't mind if the wolf eats your outside meat though, that at least makes sense. As long as the wolves actually have to get it instead of it just vanishing for no reason. Then you could leave meat outside and watch the wolves swarm in as you shoot them in the face, increasing the meat pile which attracts more wolves which increases the meat pile further. The wolves could be heaped each upon the other until at last you're rid of them.

anyways you could mitigate the wolf meat theft by camping the meat pile as described above, bringing the meat inside, or by storing it in an outside container. A trunk, rock cache(yay for a reason to make one?) or whatever is available.

[Mistral]

On 6/14/2021 at 4:42 PM, Serenity said:

Even after 300-400 days there is little sign of that. It's easy enough to hunt bears and live for weeks just one a single one. Which isn't unrealistic, but it's not hard

This, 1000 times this. Interloper animal spawn rate is still way too generous, especially when paired up with Cooking 5 + Starvation tech. There's not _that_ much of a difference from day 5 to day 500, despite what the difficulty menu promises

And even the temperature maxes out at day 50, as we know... so there's a difficulty curve, but only up til there or maybe a little bit afterwards if you weren't done with your crafting by that point

Edited June 17, 2021 by Mistral

[MarrowStone]

On 6/13/2021 at 11:33 PM, jeffpeng said:

That would be pretty damn unfair, wouldn't it?

Actually it'd be fine if they implemented it with a way to prevent such a thing from happening as well.

Perhaps bear proof containers etc. It'd just mean early game the player would be storing thier food inside and in trunks of vehicles in early game and then once they get a bear proof container they can store it outside safely. 

The player would probably have the container set up before they reallly lost much food to spoilage. 

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 6/17/2021 at 8:45 AM, Mistral said:

Starvation tech

That's the real problem here imho. Not animal spawn is way too generous - starvation is. Which might be the reason why my opinion on that is rather skewed since I just don't do that anymore.

Edited June 21, 2021 by jeffpeng

[odizzido]

If you disable sleep Regen it essentially forces you to keep your hunger filled most of the time unless you take no damage. I still wish you could turn animal spawns way down though to like 10% of the current minimum or even less.

[Mistral]

9 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

That's the real problem here imho. Not animal spawn is way too generous - starvation is. Which might be the reason why my opinion on that is rather skewed since I just don't do that anymore.

Perhaps, but at least starvation (or rather = saving food for later) is realistic for the scenario

Deadman mode obviously has no starvation possible as you will immediately start getting permanent damage. But it's also a bit silly how you could die in a day or two without eating... when in reality you would last for weeks

Anyway, even without starvation you could last for years and years with forever spawning rabbit snaring alone. Throw in a deer once in a while...

Edited June 22, 2021 by Mistral

[peteloud]

How to make game to hard

The simplest way is to play a standard game without using spoiler websites to give maps, mods, loot tables,  etc. etc. that make the game easy.  Play the game as Hinterland designed it to be played.

[Guest jeffpeng]

I'm not really sure what the goal here is. Eventually totally depriving the game of things to hunt would effectively put you in a deserted place with nothing to do. Do you actually want the game to make you eventually die of boredom? Because all you effectively would achieve with this is make the game about stockpiling as much food as you can and then wait for it to run out. I really don't see this being interesting, compelling or even "hard" in the actual sense of the word.

12 hours ago, odizzido said:

If you disable sleep Regen it essentially forces you to keep your hunger filled most of the time unless you take no damage. I still wish you could turn animal spawns way down though to like 10% of the current minimum or even less.

Point taken: if I really don't want starvation to be viable there are ways around it, but if you really want to live in a world that eventually become empty you cannot. Not that I think that it would be any fun, but fair enough.

7 hours ago, Mistral said:

Anyway, even without starvation you could last for years and years with forever spawning rabbit snaring alone. Throw in a deer once in a while...

Snaring is broken, agreed. But that's not really the issue here, right?

7 hours ago, peteloud said:

The simplest way is to play a standard game without using spoiler websites to give maps, mods, loot tables,  etc. etc. that make the game easy.  Play the game as Hinterland designed it to be played.

Many players do use some form of help playing the game, mostly because for most people The Long Dark is actually a pretty hard game, especially if they haven't sunk >100 hours into it. But I don't think that the few members of this overwhelmingly genuine community which actually "complain" about it being too easy in some regard generally fall in this category. Thereby, in my most humble opinion, constantly implying that everyone feeling the game could use some additional challenge just uses some "unfair" advantages is pretty damn presumptuous.

On 6/17/2021 at 2:21 AM, odizzido said:

The difficulty curve in this game is the inverse of a typical game.

I wouldn't say that. A lot of games, especially those that have a survival element, become "easier" once you are established and play "ahead of the curve", meaning through early success you've found yourself in a spot where you can better prepare for future challenges because the current challenges are easier for you than they would otherwise be. It's a feedback loop. If you are ahead you have an easier time getting ahead even more. If you are behind catching up becomes increasingly hard the more you are behind. Thinking about it.... that's a lot like life, eh? 

Just from the top of my head two other games I really like, Frostpunk and Factorio, have this exact same "problem". If you do well in the beginning the "enemy" can never really catch up with you. If you f'up too much early you don't have the tools to recover. The only way to actively combat this would be to dynamically adapt difficulty according to your progress. The problem with that, however, is that it punishes playing the game well, and, counter-intuitively, actually rewards gaming the system into believing you are not as successful as you are. So ... I see no good solution for this problem.

[Mistral]

4 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I'm not really sure what the goal here is. Eventually totally depriving the game of things to hunt would effectively put you in a deserted place with nothing to do. Do you actually want the game to make you eventually die of boredom? Because all you effectively would achieve with this is make the game about stockpiling as much food as you can and then wait for it to run out. I really don't see this being interesting, compelling or even "hard" in the actual sense of the word.

No-one's saying that the game world should be totally "empty" (like the "Deadworld" custom game which disables wildlife), this ultimately leads to boredom just as quickly. But instead the animal population should be reduced to such degree where you would have to really, really, really work for it. Ie, instead of just sitting around in one base and snaring/stoning endless rabbits and shooting respawning deer or wolf once a week & respawning bear every 3 weeks, instead you would have to actively roam around the Island for your prey. Similarly to many people now when they're on day 1500 or whatever and circulate between the beachcombing spots. But instead of doing this trek more out of luxury (and boredom...) it would actually be out of necessity. Like actual survival hunting. 

So how this works is, a deer or two may be in ML this week, but for the next few weeks there likely will be nothing, short of some faint rabbit footprints. You find absolute nothing in FM too, at least not for the moment, but hey there's a wolf pack in Milton Basin. A bear in HRV. As you would never be completely sure when you see an animal (just like in real life), you couldn't just rely on old habbits and the assurance of timed respawns. Or for the endless fishes in a little pond that couldn't possible sustain such population in reality. The ridiculous amount of excess cat tails every one of us veterans have, would finally come to use as proper backup food...

Often time, people hope for randomized maps to keep the game fresh, but since that is almost impossible, this would be the next best thing. It would nicely mix up late game and bring well deserved difficulty curve for those bored with late Interloper, and for those who don't find Deadman enjoyable (it's not for everyone) or can survive almost indefinitely even in that.

Making the game colder would be the other major area. Most certainly indoors, Winters Embrace -10 at minimum but preferably even more...

Also, way less materials would be welcomed, even Loper loot amount is quite ridiculous, no-one needs all of those 1000 pieces of cloth and 5000 matches... and before you say, "just play custom game then", well those 1000 cloth and 5000 matches are still there, the Loper item spawn is the max you can reduce it to. The only things you actually can "worsen" are the harvestable plants, which for some strange reason are set to high on Loper.

Finally, there are obviously numerous other artificial ways of hardening the game, ie never going indoors, never picking up food items, never wearing clothes, only eating moose, only living in HRV, only sleeping in snow shelter, and so on, whatever you come up with. Of course this is an option for longer replayability, and many of us have indeed experimented with variety of own ideas. It can be fun. But having said that, it's kind of same as playing DOOM and not picking up existing health items or ammo in order to have more fun time. IDK, to me there's sort of a difference between pre-set Rules of the Game (even Custom game), and in-game pick'n'choosing

Edited June 22, 2021 by Mistral

[Guest jeffpeng]

10 minutes ago, Mistral said:

So how this works is, a deer or two may be in ML this week, but for the next few weeks there likely will be nothing, short of some faint rabbit footprints. You find absolute nothing in FM too, at least not for the moment, but hey there's a wolf pack in Milton Basin. A bear in HRV. As you would never be completely sure when you see an animal (just like in real life), you couldn't just rely on old habbits and the assurance of timed respawns.

I have, some time ago, proposed a mechanic somewhat akin to that. I'm not sure the extend of what you propose would be interesting for more than a fringe population of players, but it would indeed incentivize late game mobility, which really is something you now hardly ever have to do.

You see, I'm not against giving the game a maybe more challenging, but certainly more "vital" late game. There is a poetic element to the fact that the game gets so repetitive that you either just abandon the save or run into a bear head first by "accident", but once you're over that it really can be quite boring. I just think that what you want to achieve would to some extend achieve itself if long term starvation wouldn't be thing and an active play style would be rewarded over an inactive.

I'm not saying a player should be overly punished for having to survive without food for a limited time. To that: a normal person would have a very hard time to even be somewhat mobile after a week without calorie intake. You don't die, but you certainly don't move a lot. Even limiting yourself to a thousand calories a day while remaining physically active is something you just don't do for a very long time as I can attest from experience. So 

12 hours ago, Mistral said:

it's also a bit silly how you could die in a day or two without eating... when in reality you would last for weeks

is absolutely correct, but getting by on a 700 calorie diet would eventually kill you rather reliably even without running around with a 40 kg backpack all day. So maybe we don't stretch the idea of reality too much.

I've dreamed up one or two mechanisms to achieve that in TLD, but personally the best way I've seen this done is via a mod that actually works with a much larger calorie pool, but actually harsh damage if this pool reaches zero (you probably know which one I mean, I just can't remember the name since... well I don't actually mod). I still think this plus a few tweaks such as no actions can be performed unless you have sufficient calories would go a long way to remedy late game boredom for most people.

All that being said a custom game option that at some point reduces wildlife spawn to .... 10%? .... should be easy enough to implement to remedy the fact that almost noone would want to play that. And not just maybe trapping really needs fixing.

39 minutes ago, Mistral said:

Making the game colder would be the other major area. Most certainly indoors, Winters Embrace -10 at minimum but preferably even more...

I'm not entirely sure how colder indoor temperatures would even matter once you have your gear. So while there is merit behind this, it wouldn't put any difficulty/challenge in the late game.

[I Have a Big Beard]

There are probably a lot of small tweaks that could be made in order to keep the late game interesting. To build upon making wildlife less predictable, perhaps a more subtle approach would be that wildlife can't respawn (or has dramatically slowed respawn?) while you're in that region. There's a lot of knobs that can be tweaked here,  I feel. It can be as generous as "you have to at least flip flop between two areas" to "you should routinely be on the move and keep track of where you've been otherwise you might be in trouble" depending on the balance between respawn time and amount of food you can get.

I also agree with starvation tech being too strong. Prior to learning about it, I was devoutly keeping Well Fed going and felt legitimately crushed and concerned if I let it drop. When I learned of it... it felt a bit... "gamey", if that makes sense. Like abusing a mechanic that isn't quite baked all the way. I'll admit that I do it because it makes things dramatically easier but it shouldn't be a long term strategy, IMO. If we're making the real life comparisons, you can get away with a little starvation here and there (due to having extra energy in fat, and in muscle for true desperation) but there's a limit to that and your ability to do much would be severely hindered after a while.

I like the idea about the calorie store being much larger, but with bigger penalties for running out. Another option could be broadening the Fatigue-impacting "affliction" to have more repercussions and also behave more like Cabin Fever - being starved more than fed as an average over time would cause some sort of detriment til you balance it the other way.

Ultimately I think getting so comfortable to the point of discussing these options for Interloper is definitely a fringe issue where you've probably mastered the game beyond its intended scope so it might not be worth pursuing too much, however there is probably some room to make things a bit more dynamic without impacting that long term feeling of "making it" in a good sandbox.

[Sherri]

On 6/13/2021 at 11:28 PM, Jrod7405 said:

The long dark can get pretty easy after the initial 50- 100 days because you can hunker down and get kilo's upon kilo's of meat and especially when you get cooking level 5 when you can eat anything you kill. To combat this I think that any meat you leave out can be eaten by wolves making it much harder to stock up a bunch if meat that basically never degrades if you play your cards right.

I've assumed that the rock storage things they added recently was a precursor to eventually having meat left in the snow, vanish or attract predators or something.