My wishlist...

[ChuckSquared]

Here is my wishlist after playing this game almost non-stop this weekend... My painpoints are denoted by numbers and my solutions are number.letter. The solutions are and/or meaning I would be happy with 1.A and/or 1.B.

I'm give suggestions that allow people who want to play hardcore keep it the way it is and people who want it toned down can do so too. This is not an online game so there is no competition between players. So player X shouldn't worry about whether or not player Y wants to play the game differently so long as they both can play it the way they want. The most competitive aspect of the game would be achievements I guess... I took that into account in my suggestions.

1) I think there's just too many wolves for me to enjoy the game. I like to play with the wolves having the ability to maim me... and I like to worry that there might a wolf around the corner... but I'd like that worry to turn out to be untrue more often... I don't want to run into a wolf every 100 yards as it seems like I am right now. Either or both of my proposed solutions would alleviate this pain-point for me.

1.A) In the settings, allow users to control the population size and re-spawn rate of wolves. I'm not sure how you guys (the devs) do your backend logic on this stuff so I won't go into further details and leave it up to you. I would assume this is already controlled by a variable somewhere and you could link that to a scroll bar in a menu. Might as well throw other animals in there too and possibly some sliders for other attributes of the game. Maybe give people a warning that tinkering with this menu could screw up their game and then disable achievements if they change any of these settings away from the default values.

1.B) In voyageur mode drastically reduce the amount of wolves the wolf population and increase their the time it takes for them to respawn. Leave it the same or do the opposite in Stalker mode. Differentiate between achievements in voyageur and stalker mode. That way people who get the Stalker mode achievements can feel special.

2) The food weight to hunger alleviated ratio needs to be re-tuned for meat. I have to eat about 6.6 to 8.8 pounds of meet to go from a nearly full hunger bar back down to an empty bar. This is very unrealistic. Consider this... your average t-bone steak has around 16 ounces of meat (not including the bone). That's 1 pound. That's like eating between 6 and a half to almost 9 t-bone steaks in one sitting. Your average person would be puking their guts out if they were even able to consume that much meat in one sitting. It would not be healthy.

2.A) Double the amount of hunger that meat reduces from the hunger bar. If I was super, super starved... I could probably eat 3 or 4 t-bones and then have an extra full belly with out getting sick. I probably wouldn't want to move at all but I'd be ok. I'm kind of fat though. So I bet that would be a lower number for some people though. So it might have to be more than double.

2.B) Add in sickness for over-eating. If you eat too much then you throw up, causing you not to gain any hunger relief from what you just ate and causing you to become tired and dehydrated.

3) I suck at shooting games. That's probably I don't like shooting games. I like almost everything about this game except shooting stuff. Maybe if ammo wasn't so scarce it wouldn't drive me so crazy but I pretty much miss every time.

3.A) Let's assume that the Will Mackenzie knows how to shoot (a whole lot better than I do). He's a Canadian bush pilot so he's probably more bad@$$ than I am. Give me a setting so that when I push the aim button and my dot is in the general vicinity of a target then it auto-aims and lines up the shot for me. This has been done in shooting games before and it's usually what makes them bearable for me if they have a good story line. This should only work when you are standing still. It's totally unrealistic to have good aim when shooting a gun while running. Maybe enabling setting this disables achievements. Also, crouching and using this setting should make you super accurate.

3.B) Instead of disabling achievements, make the auto-aim setting available in Voyageur mode and not available in stalker mode. Also differentiate between voyageur and stalker mode achievements.

4) Why is there no jump button? Come on... for a game that's supposed to be super-realistic I can't believe that Will Mackenzie is completely incapable of jumping. I have ran into a few situations where I was not able to get over a 1 foot obstacle. That's just silly.

4.A) Pretty self explanatory. I push the jump button and my guy jumps. Jumping should be available on demand at any point... just like it is in real life. It should sometimes have consequences, like in realife, such as landing on something that isn't level or on something slippery and then falling down and breaking your face.

4.B) In addition to 3.A, a climb action that is available by pushing the the jump button (or interact button?) when you are standing against an obstacle that is higher than whatever jump height you implement but still reasonable that a human could overcome it. Maybe even add in a chance to slip and fall down and get injured? This might take a lot more programming work than 3.A, so it wouldn't bug me too much if it didn't make it but seriously please give me a jump button.

5) Save games. It's cool with me that you can't save your game in sandbox mode. I think you should keep it this way. It makes the achievements harder to get. However, for the love of all that is good in the world, please let use save on command in story mode whenever that is released.

5.A) Only allow manual saving in a house/cabin/etc. For those that didn't read above. I am suggesting this for only story mode not sandbox mode. Just don't overwrite or delete my manual saves.

5.B) Require a special in game, consumable object that allows one manual save per item. These items are scattered scarcely throughout the world in limited quantities. They can only be used indoors and the save is never overwritten or deleted by auto saves or deaths. Once again, this suggestion is for story mode only.