My Experience so far

[MueckE]

Hello guys,

I want to give you a small feedback from my plays and what i think about it. First of all, its just my opinion and after i watched the GDC statement i assume, that i represent the minority of the community.

The Long Dark is really unique and has its own style. I can play easily hours and still have fun (stalker - almost all achievments). The main critique is: After a while it becomes really boring!

After you have explored the map, learned the mechanics it becomes a pretty boring grind (how long can you survive?)

First there was the Leaderboard but it was very fast invaded by cheater and exploiter.

The next thing were the achievments - and yes - a few of them are fun and challenging but these like survive 200 days are just boring and i didnt do that.

Why? Because if you know the game it is really easy and not challenging at all. I mean, infinite water, firewood and food leads to sleeping, healing up, sleeping .... every 30 Days get some fresh meat and again ..

The only thing that really can get in your way are either these crazy zombie-wolfes or if you get caught in a bad blizzard at pleasant vally while you are very far away from the next shelter, thats it. And both are still not challenging but just a pain in the ass. Ok, the blizzard is a good feature but the wolfes are still just horrible bad programmed (no, if you increase the population or make them harder to kill they still are not a challenge - just more annoying)

I think the sandbox is more of a testingground for the devs for creating the storymode. So from this perspective the sandbox alone is still one of the best kickstarter/early access you can get.

The thing is, that i wish there would be much more to do, more complex mechanics and the most important thing:

1000 possibillitis to die and it is THE PLAYER WHO IS IN CHARGE! If i die i want to have the feeling that i could have prevented that by doing or trying something else - and not just cause of bad luck or bad programming.

And when i play, i ALWAYS want to have the feeling that i could die any moment. And thats not the case! Its just to easy to "survive" 200 days or more - without any fear - no, thats not survival.

So my wish is that the aspect of "survival" would be more noticed. At the moment, the game has nothing to do with survival just grinding throu the days and dealing from time to time with strafing and barking zombiewolfes :mrgreen:

Now i will wait till the next big update, than explore the new map, do new achievments (if interesting) and wait again

Anyway, i hope you guys go on and maybe the survival-experience will come one day

[jackattack]

But wouldn't that be the real-life experience as well? Once you figure out how to survive, life becomes a daily grind of gather wood, find food, melt water, avoid predators. Interspersed with occasional storms and wolf attacks.

I think that as they add more regions, there will be more to do. And if they add "quests" to unlock regions, it will add even more. We the alpha players actually have the disadvantage that we are experiencing a slowly expanding game world, instead of a fully realized one. This is absolutely the test bed, and our role is to rate the experience and suggest ways to improve it.

Would it help if the game had an option that would make the game more difficult as time passed? Things like increasing animal scarcity, decreasing harvestable resources, maybe even have shelters lost to storm damage or tree falls?

Maybe animals could get leaner as time goes by, so they have less meat. (Not each animal starts full size and loses mass, each new animal starts with a little less meat and stays at that mass for its lifetime.)

Does the weather change with time? (I don't know because eight days is my record.) Does winter set in, with much colder temperatures and more frequent storms? Would that address the boredom issue?

[MueckE]

Yes it is kind of real life boringness, but if it gets boring in real life i play the long dark :mrgreen:

But you wouldnt say that daily living is "survival" (at least where i am from)

What i mean is, it would be really cool if you could not control everything in such a way. On the opposite side the game offers to little to give me control about that what i actually can control - me and what i do.

So the situations and what happens next should be (in a survival setting) completely unpredictable BUT the ways i handle them are in my power.

That is the reason why a lot of players wish things like crafting bows, snowshoes or whatever possibility comes to your mind if you have to deal with these situations. At the moment, there is only one, or sometimes two things you can do but overall you are very limited.

So why i am saying this while knowing that this is just a game .... because it seems that this survival-experience that i am talking about already has its roots in that game. It seems that this is what the game is all about.

For calories you can actually go hunt, can scare of a deer into a wolf, use snares, fishing .......... and so on. Here you have a lot of possible ways to get calories and depending on the specific situation you can freely chose how you want to do it and whats the best (not basicly but in that situation).

As if exactly this is what the devs and at least the hardcore-player want.

So i wish there would be much more things to use to survive (because that leads to free decision making) - and more situations you have to deal with. Yes, in the end there should be a balancing/tweaking what i think is really hard.

The balancing is on top for forcing the player to make a decision and to live (or not) with that. Now the balancing is actually not there because it really doesnt metter how you get your calories. You can chose one method

and survive easily 200 days, independend of the situation and source.

You should be punished and rewarded for every decision you make and everything should have an advantage and disantvatage at the same time.

I know its the old topic - wolfes

Take this example. Either wolfes would actually behave like wolfes (but than they wouldnt be a threat at all) or lets say in the game they are just like they are - but i dont have the tools to deal with them like i would do. In real life everybody

would have weapons and kill all wolfes till wolfes died out (sadly but true - and in real life wolfes rarely attack a human)

So the game gives me the illusion to have a survival experience to do my decision, but denies my the possibility to deal

with that situation in diffrent ways. So either shoot, throw a flare or fight. Maybe i want to spend a month of ingame time

to kill all wolfes with handcrafted weapons if they are so annoying and dont learn that they are the pray and not the opposite? Maybe i catch a wolf and make him a dog? Maybe i run into a wolf and he doesnt care or runs away or comes closer to investigate? Maybe he attacks me, maybe maybe maybe...... a lots of maybes and much more how to react.

You dont have to replicate the unlimited amound of possibilities of a real human brain, but it would be more interesting to add at least a few things every child knows - so in the long run it wouldnt be so boring anymore.

All what i am saying is just for me and few other player. The mayority of the call-of-duty-casual-gamers that are complaing about surviving 7 days are happy with it as it is, i guess

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

Thank you for the feedback, we are still in Alpha so lots of things are always changing. Yes the Sandbox is more of a testing ground, but that's what Early Access is for, to test out different things to see what works and what doesn't.

Jeremy