Random difficulty

[Fuchikoma]

Hello There,

First: I love the game (got it from Steam about a week ago)! It's got almost everything I'm looking for in the genre including, most importantly, a true sense of place and the right kind of open world freedom (the one that puts you in charge of your own fate and forces you to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions).

I've got a few minor suggestions though, which I thought I would share...

I've only done one playthrough so far and I didn't survive for long, but I kind of felt like I was doomed to fail early on. The main reason is that I never found any of the items that I quickly realised I needed to go on. After 3 days of scavenging around Mystery Lake (I died before sunset on the 4th!), I had found some food and enough matches/accelerant etc. to make fire, but *no* tools, *no* weapons (not even a kitchen knife) and not enough scrap material to build or repair *anything*. By contrast, I had found several items that were no good on their own (e.g. scrap metal) twice or more...

I am a programmer myself and it looked a little like there was something wrong with the random number generator, or rather like it was "truly" random, making me fall victim to a statistical fluke :-) I may be wrong but it made me suspect that the content of every drawer or cupboard was randomly generated independently. I would suggest that you start from a list of items that contains at least one of each desirable object (an axe or crowbar to break the ice of a fishing hole would have been nice) then distribute it at random between caches. Now that may have been what you did and perhaps I was just unlucky, in which case I humbly and sincerely apologise for being so presomptuous...

Randomness may also need some tuning with respect to the blizzard. More than once, I ended up "ambushed" by it while crossing the frozen lake and therefore forced to stay in one of the fishing shelters for hours. Since that basically meant having to choose between slow and fast freezing, I felt like I had reached a dead end (pun intended). Blizzard also kept me indoors for a whole day when I was already starving, which was frustrating (no doubt the feeling would have been slightly worse had I actually been in that predicament! ;-)

I guess this is all very realistic in a way, but it could undermine the game's appeal, so these are my two cents to make it more playable...

Cheers,

F.

[Majales]

Which difficulty you played? If you are starting, then I recommend Voyageur (middle one). You can die by wolf attack or get some bad weather, but there are more resources then in Stalker. There is always rifle, knife and hatchet somewhere. First days are about moving, scavenging and surviving hunger.

You can forage wood or meat even without propper tool.

[Ryan CM]

Hello There,

First: I love the game (got it from Steam about a week ago)! It's got almost everything I'm looking for in the genre including, most importantly, a true sense of place and the right kind of open world freedom (the one that puts you in charge of your own fate and forces you to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions).

I've got a few minor suggestions though, which I thought I would share...

I've only done one playthrough so far and I didn't survive for long, but I kind of felt like I was doomed to fail early on. The main reason is that I never found any of the items that I quickly realised I needed to go on. After 3 days of scavenging around Mystery Lake (I died before sunset on the 4th!), I had found some food and enough matches/accelerant etc. to make fire, but *no* tools, *no* weapons (not even a kitchen knife) and not enough scrap material to build or repair *anything*. By contrast, I had found several items that were no good on their own (e.g. scrap metal) twice or more...

I am a programmer myself and it looked a little like there was something wrong with the random number generator, or rather like it was "truly" random, making me fall victim to a statistical fluke :-) I may be wrong but it made me suspect that the content of every drawer or cupboard was randomly generated independently. I would suggest that you start from a list of items that contains at least one of each desirable object (an axe or crowbar to break the ice of a fishing hole would have been nice) then distribute it at random between caches. Now that may have been what you did and perhaps I was just unlucky, in which case I humbly and sincerely apologise for being so presomptuous...

Randomness may also need some tuning with respect to the blizzard. More than once, I ended up "ambushed" by it while crossing the frozen lake and therefore forced to stay in one of the fishing shelters for hours. Since that basically meant having to choose between slow and fast freezing, I felt like I had reached a dead end (pun intended). Blizzard also kept me indoors for a whole day when I was already starving, which was frustrating (no doubt the feeling would have been slightly worse had I actually been in that predicament! ;-)

I guess this is all very realistic in a way, but it could undermine the game's appeal, so these are my two cents to make it more playable...

Cheers,

F.

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