Truly living off the nature

[Ignacio Ramirez]

I've been playing this game for quite a long time now.  There are some things, in my opinion, that would make the hardest settings a little more interesting.

Not extremely sophisticated things. Quite the contrary.

I find it odd that, no matter how skilled, you still have to rely on human made objects to make fire (at least for a LONG time), or cut, or defend yourself.

Here are some suggestions:

- make fire with sticks. Maybe with very low probabiltiy at the beginning, but it should exist. In particular, in the hardest settings, your survival depends on finding a set of abandoned matches!

- make crude spears out of branches. Games like the great NEO Scavenger (really good), allow you to craft hardened spears with a stick, a knife, and some fire.

- make crude knives out of glass shards and pieces of cloth (also from NEO Scavenger)

talking about knifes, it is odd that there are no kitchen knifes. Those would be nice to have too.

Overall, I think the first one is key. It is too unfair to die in the hardest survival mode because you just can't make a fire in time.

[UpUpAway95]

One thing I have always found immersion breaking about standard Interloper is that it pretty much boils down to memorizing the "guaranteed match" locations and bee-lining directly to that location at the start.  Your suggestions would circumvent this issue and has my vote.

[Pablo_Loko]

Homemade knife in 5 minutes 

[Admin]

7 hours ago, Ignacio Ramirez said:

I've been playing this game for quite a long time now.  There are some things, in my opinion, that would make the hardest settings a little more interesting.

Not extremely sophisticated things. Quite the contrary.

I find it odd that, no matter how skilled, you still have to rely on human made objects to make fire (at least for a LONG time), or cut, or defend yourself.

Here are some suggestions:

- make fire with sticks. Maybe with very low probabiltiy at the beginning, but it should exist. In particular, in the hardest settings, your survival depends on finding a set of abandoned matches!

- make crude spears out of branches. Games like the great NEO Scavenger (really good), allow you to craft hardened spears with a stick, a knife, and some fire.

- make crude knives out of glass shards and pieces of cloth (also from NEO Scavenger)

talking about knifes, it is odd that there are no kitchen knifes. Those would be nice to have too.

Overall, I think the first one is key. It is too unfair to die in the hardest survival mode because you just can't make a fire in time.

Thank you for your suggestions. While we can't promise to implement game suggestions, we appreciate and value community input, and we will continue improving Player experiences in The Long Dark. Thank you again for your support! 

[Valuable Hunting Knife]

On 4/7/2022 at 2:27 PM, UpUpAway95 said:

One thing I have always found immersion breaking about standard Interloper is that it pretty much boils down to memorizing the "guaranteed match" locations and bee-lining directly to that location at the start.  Your suggestions would circumvent this issue and has my vote.

I was thinking the other night, randomising the number of matches found in a box could also make things more interesting in that regard.

[UpUpAway95]

31 minutes ago, Valuable Hunting Knife said:

I was thinking the other night, randomising the number of matches found in a box could also make things more interesting in that regard.

It still commits the Loper player to going to the location where they find matches first... and then going to one of the hammer spawns... and then going to the forge, which is a boring, repetitive pattern after you've done it several times.

The stated starting premise in this game is that your plane has crashed in the Canadian wilderness.  IRL, if a pilot is in a plane crash, one would have a means of starting a fire (along with appropriate survival gear) with them in the plane (it's aviation law here in Canada).  That's why I find it particularly immersion breaking... and once you memorize where that first match is found, it's not particularly interesting or particularly more challenging than starting a custom run where the starting gear puts matches in my pocket.  A low-probability of starting a fire with natural materials without matches combined with totally removing the guaranteed nature of any match spawn locations would be, IMO, much more interesting.

Edited April 8, 2022 by UpUpAway95

[hozz1235]

On 4/7/2022 at 8:08 AM, Pablo_Loko said:

Homemade knife in 5 minutes 

Not what I was expecting.  That's one use for a scraper but unless you have those power tools, might be hard to do the transformation.

[Pablo_Loko]

In the context of the game, it is enough to clamp in a vise on the workbench and break off the corners with a hammer.

Edited April 9, 2022 by Pablo_Loko