Returning Player Feedback. (Updated)

[Incariuz]

TL;DR List at bottom. Also note that my feedback is based mostly from time on the Pleasant Valley map.

Shortly after the addition of the Coastal Highway map and 90 hours of gameplay, I decided to take a break because I found the game had gotten too easy for me. Now that a fair amount of updates have been done, I've decided to hop on and give it another go (almost 30 hours more so far). Here is my input so far.

Love the addition of the difficulty levels, naturally I play stalker because I want the game to be hard. Playing how I used to play resulted in 2 short lived games due to carelessness. Shooting a bear in the face resulted in me getting mauled to death after 5 days, so no longer do I feel like the invincible hunter. In addition, it's nice to see wolves in small packs in areas, makes picking travel routes in the wilderness a bit more challenging. They're still not overly challenging, but now they're not as easy to deal with as they were before.

Pleasant Valley is a nice map, I'm liking it's size with limited buildings, I've actually gotten lost once in a storm, something that hadn't happened to me since my first 20 or 30 hours of gameplay with the other maps. Spent almost 24 hours outdoors fighting to survive storms and the night, but they overpowered me and I froze to death. The transition zone from Coastal Highway to Pleasant Valley also had me sweating bullets. Felt so lost inside it, slowly creeping through, fearing I may run into one of Fluffies pups seeking revenge on me, or worse, an angry starving bear. Thankfully there was nothing, but damn it was intense.

As for storms, those things are brutal now with the fact fires don't keep you warm in them. Had fires going, heating up food and drink for extra bonus, taking one hour sleep intervals for the extra warmth bonus, and still got overwhelmed by the cold. Haven't had the chance to craft new clothing from animal hides/furs, assuming they probably help more, but not too concerned, I do like the difficulty of it. Spent my time in cars through a few storms too, and I have to mention one thing in regards to my time spent in them. We're able to sleep in vehicles by selecting the bedroll, but don't get a warmth bonus. Personally, I'd say add a warmth bonus, it's not like we can't wrap ourselves up in it inside a car, I've used sleeping bags in cars before.

Gathering ingredients for making medicine, bandages and so on is also nice to have, though aside from the calories and warmth bonus, I see no real point in the rose hips and mushrooms because I'm typically overstocked on medical supplies. Heating up food and drink is a great addition though. Very useful for keeping warm while exploring, or for hunting and foraging. I'm hoping that with both these systems in place we'll slowly get more variety of things we can gather and eventually cook. Would be nice to make some rabbit/venison stews/soups as an example. One more thing about food though, would love to see cooking times for meat based on weight. Taking the same amount of time to cook 1kg and 0.1kg is a bit discouraging, makes you just want to toss the extra little bits.

Free time is probably the thing I can be negative about still though. I often find myself in situations where I have only 3 hours of daylight left, I'm stocked on food, water, wood etc, and have absolutely nothing to do. Sure I can go sleep the time away, but I feel like I'm cheating when I do this, and really, why would I want to end up sleeping 12+ hours a day. Now that there are books in the game, I think it would be interesting if they were actually readable, flipping through the pages of a survival book, some journal left by previous owners of the house (I know, who reads someone's journal? lol), some poetry books or something. Being able to find a deck of cards or something too, so you could sit at a table and play some solitaire or something would be another alright pass time would be good too.

Edit: After playing a new game more cautiously then I used too, it's become clear that even on stalker the game gets to be too easy after a few in game days. My previous 2 deaths were from carelessness in the wilderness, but with planning, thinking and careful travel, you can avoid almost all threats, quickly scouring every area, leaving you with the ability to survive for long periods of time, barely ever needing to leave your base. That being said, this doesn't bother me too much, I'll simply force myself to play different in new games, use remote locations where a bit more work is required to survive, but I'm sure many players (especially those who care for leaderboards), this becomes tiresome and boring playing the easy way.

TL;DR

-Haven't played since shortly after introduction of Coastal Highway.

-Difficulty levels are a nice addition.

-Game more challenging for careless play styles now.

-Love the new map (Pleasant Valley) and mine transition zone (had me nervous as hell).

-Storms more challenging to survive (This is good).

-Would be nice if Bedroll gave warmth bonus in vehicles.

-Gathering ingredients nice addition, though medicines seem useless other then for warmth and calories. Regular medicine in high abundance still.

-Heating food and drink is a nice addition, very useful. Hoping for more cooking options in future.

-Cook time based on weight would be a nice addition. Hate that 0.1kg of meat takes as long as a full 1kg.

-Game still suffers a lot from spare time boredom, to avoid wait timers and oversleeping, I think the ability to actually read books, or play cards would be a handy pass time.

-Stalker difficulty starts hard but gets easy fast if you choose the right locations to hold out.

That all being said, thanks for you continued progress and efforts on this game. This was my first Early Access game ever purchased, and after getting a few others, I can honestly say none of them live up to the hard work you guys do. Looking forward to the future, and hundreds of hours of even more fun.

[bethany]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll make some notes for consideration.

Welcome back to the game! You picked a good time to start up again