Dear Hinterland...


Mentatt76

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Dear Hinterland,

I am a veteran player, who joined the community some 6-7 years ago. I played and fell in love with TLD in the very first play and come back occasionally to check what is new. I have followed and embraced almost all of your updates but in my current game, I am very unhappy with the fact that injured wolves and deer run like mad to the otherside of the world.

Thats ok, to run like mad, and this is what they suppose to do. We used to be able to follow blood trails, look for the crows ahead, try to track them dowen and eventually find them lying somewhere and that was a great find! This was the part of the adventure and one of the core elements what made TLD a gem. Now, they are all gone and in my current game (with a lot of reading and consulting with the community in forums) I am experiencing that wolves and deer run like hell, almost non stop and usually to the steep hills that often players have no access to. No blood trails, no crows, nothing guide the player to the prey. Most of the time they run half way to the map and this made impossible to track and claim the game.

Most of the members I have contacted in the community, advice me to not to bother tracking them and even not to try searching the vicinity for them. Specifically they have said "shot to kill and if they run, dont bother to track them" I give them credit as according to my journal, (my game show 20 days of survival) I have killed 7 wolves, that is, I have been in 6 struggles ( 1 was shot by me) and wolves are dead somewhere. I have tried to find their corpses and I could find none. Zero. Not a single one. 

This is a drastic change from what this game used to be. It was an essential part of the game now its gone. In other words, tracking down a prey what made TLD differ from other survival games and seing that made me really unhappy. 

Of course this could be a design decision of your team, and to satisfy more hard core players and increase difficulty which they ask for. But for a lot of players like me, (and I have never encountered a single soul in forums who appreciates this new behaviour) this is a game breaker.  If that is requested by hard-core players, it could be a feature of Interloper and/or stalker difficulty setting. But we need room to play as well. 

Therefore, I humbly ask you to restore original dynamics in the next update as a veteran and long time supporter of your product. 

Sincerely,

 

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I have tracked down quite a few animals as well. They do run very far away, quite often,  halfway through the map.

I remember not very long ago, I was in ravine and there was a deer hanging out on one rock platform and there is no place to climb for the player. Not sure if the deer climbed there, or more likely just spawned there. Animals do have the ability in this game to run up steeper hills and get into spots where you can't. 

@Mentatt76, how far into the game are you on your current run? If you started from scratch, bow skill will be low until you build it back up again and most hits will not do a lot of damage, hence leaving the prey strong enough to run very far away. If they run long enough, they will 'outrun' their trail and if you can't keep up, trail will begin to disappear.

Pretty sure you've played much longer than I have though, so you have further point of reference to compare vs me.

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Not discounting what you're saying, but even on my current interloper game, I haven't noticed any real changes to tracking. You do have to really keep on them, and it's easy to lose them, especially if the weather turns. But there are still blood trails right after the shot, and crows over the corpse. The better the shot, the shorter a distance they'll run. maybe @Stinky socksis on to something, and you're shots are just not getting their health down as far as you remember, and that's givng them more time to roam?

 

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Yeah I think there's something wrong on your end, I haven't had any troubles like what you're describing. Non-fatal shots send animals scurrying, and sometimes I'm just never able to find the carcass. Especially in huge regions like Pleasant Valley. Also crows won't show up under certain conditions, like high winds.

Try to replicate the problem in a tiny region like Crumbling Highway or Desolation Point. (I'd say Raven Falls Ravine but that might be TOO tiny.) Even if you have zero idea where your animal ran off to, those regions are small enough that you can use a dragnet approach to search the entire region in less time than it takes a carcass to despawn (which is 4 full days, or 96 hours). And if you can, try capturing video evidence of what's going on. Video can capture details that you might not think to mention, and that others might not think to ask.

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Thanks for all the answers. Its my 25 th day now in my current game and yes my bow skill is low. I am on MT region and it is a rather small region. But the problem is before the update I used to be able to take a walk the next day say, following a wolf struggle, with fresh stamina and equipped for search. After travelling around a bit I used to see the Crows,  and/or even spot the corpse from very far laying in the open.

Now what I observe is that They specifically run for the hill tops, inaccessible terrain to player and I have never seen a single crow over head. They seem to be going and taking a dying spot where it is impossible for the player to find. 

Well, I have to mention that I did find one wolf corpse in my game, albeit it was a spectacular coincidence, because I spotted an "unusual thing" from a far (again walking around hill tops) but couldnt understand what they were. When I approached these things which lay at the edge of a big rock, I still couldnt understand what they were untill I moused over them and realized that they  were the feet of wolf which his body is actually inside the big rock only his feet were protruding from it. It is nearly impossible to find this. I wish I took a screenshot of this, but this explains my frustration quite well. 

Dont get me wrong I do love this game and it doesnt change the fact that it is in my favorites list but somethings have changed in comparison to 2017 (which wintermute is released and the game was out of early release - and that was the last time I played it) and it is really interesting that no one here is experiencing this. Steam forums are full of more complainant people about it.

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I have had issues with prey running to impossible to reach locations. One time I shot a bear with the bow near the CH campground and it died on a hill that was too steep to make a fire. I tried pretty hard to make one and warm up in between harvests but it was really difficult to get a lot out of it and wasted time. It broke down the immersion a bit but other than that the actual tracking hasn't been too crazy for me. I lose a wolf if I wait a while but usually I look in the direction it ran and find the carcass the following day. Been a while since I've legitimately used the crows though. 

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Guest jeffpeng

I can only chime in and report that I haven't noticed any significant change for a very long time. Crows seem to be buggy sometimes since 1.94 (or earlier?) but other than that prey has been running ludicrous distances for a very long time, and that it somehow tries to die right where you cannot get to it has been bugging me from day one (and that day one was 2016). Blood trails have been spotty since that as well, and it's easy to lose them if you don't keep up.

What I can agree on is that it often isn't worth tracking animals when they don't die on spot. If we're talking wolf or deer, that is. Bears ... yeah, always worth it. Moose .... well they don't run 😄. But unless I am in real dire straits for ammunition and need a meal real bad I won't follow a deer halfway across the map just to find it dead on a slope.

As to wielding the bow: I must admit that I'm both a) rather good with it (but I still haven't figured out what the Revolver is for) and b) still shoot every rabbit I come across until I get Archery V. Deer and wolves become rather trivial prey once you can just sneak up on them and shoot them in the noggin. Needless to say that "Stay on Target" is my favorite magazine by far. Getting Archery V really is the moment when you become the Apex Predator - and frankly when the bow becomes almost as good as the rifle if you know how to wield it.

Personally I would love to have the random element of slope-dying removed. It just feels so unrewarding. But I also see why this isn't a trivial thing to fix and/or balance. To "actually" fix this animals would have to adhere to an additionally defined subset of the actual nav mesh when fleeing that is "slope safe" - or "weak ice safe". This would be quite a lot of work (if at all possible engine-wise). And it would have to be accounted for on the balancing side. So ..... yeah.

 

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On 7/10/2021 at 9:04 PM, jeffpeng said:

Blood trails have been spotty since that as well, and it's easy to lose them if you don't keep up.

Just as an aside, I found that playing at 4K made the blood trails MUCH easier to follow. Like, massive massive difference in their utility.

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6 hours ago, stratvox said:

Just as an aside, I found that playing at 4K made the blood trails MUCH easier to follow. Like, massive massive difference in their utility.

That would require a monitor that supports such resolution and quite possibly, a stronger graphics card, which at the moment is quite difficult to obtain at reasonable price.

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I understand that stalking your kill can be challenging but I figured that it was just part of the game. I have lost a few but I have not had the kind of trouble you have had. Maybe there is something up with your settings or your installation.

I hope you find a solution.

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14 hours ago, Stinky socks said:

That would require a monitor that supports such resolution and quite possibly, a stronger graphics card, which at the moment is quite difficult to obtain at reasonable price.

Yep. Not commenting on its practical utility, just noting that going from HD to 4K made them  much easier to follow.

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I do think that tracks and especially blood disappear way too fast. If you lose them once or twice you can forget picking up a trail again. Which is problematic given the weird routes shot animals usually take. It shouldn't be that way. But it has been like that for a long, long time. This isn't a recent change if one happened at all

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On 7/15/2021 at 11:09 AM, Mentatt76 said:

which rules you are mentioning? 

Like what hills you can go up, what you can get inside of(rocks, hills, etc), falling through the ice, not being able to teleport, etc. Mostly movement rules I guess.

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  • 3 months later...

There is an issue here I feel needs addressing. Blood trails and footprints just disappearing. I have now lost 3 wolves in this 40+ day run. And I've only shot 4 altogether! The trails just vanished and I've quit the game twice because I couldn't find the bodies after hours of looking!

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I cannot confirm that, I was following a blood trail yesterday of a Timberwolf from the Cannery to the island on the frozen sea and back. Maybe it has to do with snow? There are places in the game where if you put something on the ground, it will vanish into the ground but is still clickable, like the roof of a trailer in cannery. Maybe the trail "sinks" in in some places too.

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1 minute ago, ChillPlayer said:

I cannot confirm that, I was following a blood trail yesterday of a Timberwolf from the Cannery to the island on the frozen sea and back. Maybe it has to do with snow? There are places in the game where if you put something on the ground, it will vanish into the ground but is still clickable, like the roof of a trailer in cannery. Maybe the trail "sinks" in in some places too.

I can see your point but I scoured the entire area several times and found nothing after the initial tracks.  

I went from the farm to the main road round up the river and across the fields behind the house  covering every inch before and after sleeping. Still nothing!

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