Scrap metal ridiculousness


Scyzara

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@octavian: Some of your earlier posts were too long and too difficult to understand. I once made fun of that and maybe turned you off a bit by doing so, it's possible you remember when and where. I feel a bit sorry now, because I later realized that you made a lot of interesting contributions on the forums. I hope you find it within yourself to forgive me

Nothing to forgive. ( ˘ ³˘)♥

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With respect to the argument TLD isn't a simulator. They are half right. It only goes half way in the simulation aspect.

We need to eat food to build calories, simulation.

We need to cook food that is raw or we get sick, simulation.

We need to drink water to not become dehydrated, simulation.

We need to boil water to make it safe, simulation.

We need to stay warm to not freeze, simulation.

While all of these and more factors are an abstraction, and indeed a close approximation of the specifics of survival, they are a simulation. Another supporting point is the fact that they are simulation aspects in direct proportion to the case and effect. If I drink a small amount of liquid because that is what I have, I only recover a small amount of thirst. Same with food, If I eat a small bit of food, with a lower weight and varying calorie densities it has an effect in direct correlation to the cause.

However I don't need to actually harvest the snow, or actually capture the water in a vessel. Indeed keeping food and items in my backpack is sort of an abstraction too but much more visual. There are plenty of bottles to be found in the world, and you should never be able to leverage more water than you contain in a vessel. Water also is permanently liquid once you create it with the abstract hand of the gaming gods... Why is that? In order to get food, you either have to find an object already in the world, or harvest it, or kill it or see to its killing and then harvest it. With water, there is no additional danger. However if it was a simulation, water would be much more necessary and I'd take far greater risks to secure water than I would food until days or weeks into my survival because even on an empty stomach I can survive weeks after a plane crash eating nothing but I can't make it past day 3 without drinking my piss or water of some kind.

The idea that I can start a fire, and magically have snow to melt in unlimited quantities, and unlimited amounts of water I can hold in liquid form permanently is an abstraction too far in my opinion.

For those that want to argue it was never intended to be a simulation, frankly it is too late to cross the simulation/arcade bridge because that happened as soon as the meters came into the game many-a-patch-a-go. It is all a level of degree. No it is not a flight simulator but most actions to affect the meter have direct inescapable consequences of cause and effect, that in essence makes it a simulator not an arcade game.

The point I am agreeing with in terms of difficulty is that each of these causes and effects can be leveraged against what resources you do not have in abundance, and in the early versions of the game the difficulty was much higher to make it 100 days because we did not have tools and crafting and as many ways to do things, we couldn't move fire, we couldn't spend time picking up sticks without a hatchet, we were bound by the tools already in the world and indeed the only level in the world when it was just Mystery Lake.

Anyway I am not trying to light up a debate here. I am simply saying inspite of the difficulty levels the challenge in Stalker is not what it once was, and this is beyond taking into account the effect of learning the system and adapting to it. The current system is easier to learn, and easier to use because of these different leverages.

The ability to recover without permanent injury is something that should be looked at. The ability to make fire on a low starting success basis without any matches, water containers, ability craft a sled and carry stuff on a sled for making large transits more feasible, all of these would be great additions to the game. With that more difficulty could be added.

Nobody should be able to survive Stalker for 1000 days theoretically.

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Nobody should be able to survive Stalker for 1000 days theoretically.

Goal of the Sandbox is to develop a world for the Story.

Goal of the Story is to progress its plot while transitioning to the next installment: Springtime.

Sandbox should therefore end at day 100 with "Tune in again for TLD:Return of Spring, ETA 2017".

That they have left it open-ended/find-your-own-ending is apparently hard for some people...

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Simulation or not: Creating plastic bottles out of thin air is just a placeholder for a missing game mechanic.

The same way foraging wood was a placeholder before it was revamped into the current way.

I can only hope and wait that it will be replaced.

As for the general difficulty level:

Increasing the amount of resources that can be directly found and also adding ways to obtain even more of these resources (e.g. harvesting Scrap Metal with a Hacksaw) can ever only reduce the difficulty.

Instead of settling for a lower balance of resources (low supply, low need) we're moving towards a higher balance (high supply, high need). While in theory this creates the same amount of pressure to find resources, it eliminates the feeling of being desperate.

I'd really like see a mode where not a single item, plant or animal respawns.

But even then the current amount of resources would easily allow for surviving well past 200 days.

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Am I the only one who finds the amount of scrap metal available on the Desolation Point map more than just slightly ridiculous?

I haven't been to Desolation Point yet (started a new game in ML and am just about to take off for CH with DP as my destination) but there is indeed way too much scrap metal available. If you take a hacksaw to the dam, you get more scrap metal there than there used to be in the entire game!

I voiced the exact same concern with the previous major update when harvesting furniture was added and cloth could be harvested everywhere. A limited amount of resources is a huge part of what makes this game so much fun.

...what you are witnessing is essentially a moment in time for a game that is not yet complete...

...we're certainly doing our best to make a game we hope people will love in the end...

Considering I've been playing TLD for about a year now, I'm not seeing a moment in time but a string of moments in time. What I'm seeing is a trend. And the current trend is to give the player access to a lot of resources.

As days survived is currently the most popular way players measure their success, we felt we wanted to offer opportunities for those players to expand their time even further, if they choose to do so. As I pointed out before, things are obviously still growing and changing. We'll see what happens.

Well, days survived is the only way to measure success in TLD. Of course it's great to be able to boast about how long you have survived. But only if that number of days actually has a meaning. It used to be a struggle to get to say 50 days (for the experienced players that is, heck it was the highest attainable Steam badge when the badges were introduced) when I started playing. The current #1 on the Stalker leaderboard has survived 10141 days! So being able to say "I survived for 100/ 200/ 500 or even 1000 days" doesn't really mean anything anymore. Getting in the top 10 is not about being the best player, it's about who is willing to do the eat-drink-sleep-rinse-repeat cycle the longest. It used to be about survival, now it's about staving off boredom.

Don't get me wrong I love TLD but I hate the direction it seems to be taking. I am anxious about the developments the last two major updates have brought us. Resources like cloth and scrap metal are way to abundant right now. You don't have to make tough decisions like 'do I use this piece of cloth to keep my jacket from falling apart or do I make some bandages since I'm all out?' anymore. You can do both and then some now. I can only hope future developments will either lower the amount of resources available or introduce something that uses a lot of them.

I'm not trying to put down the team, I think they are doing an amazing job. But you are not the only ones who are passionate about the game. Many of us players are passionate about it as well. We also want TLD to be the best game it can be. And that's why we voice our thoughts when we don''t like something about the game. And sadly sometimes our emotions get the best of us. That doesn't mean we're trying to bad mouth the team or bash TLD. Of course there are always people who do go too far and I certainly don't condone that.

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I actually don't have an issue with breaking down furniture and such for materials. It is what I would do in a real-life survival situation.

What I have issue with is how long it takes to make use of said materials. It only takes a few minutes to break down a metal shelf with a hacksaw. In real life, that would take me a couple of hours, at least

Everything (with the exception of weak things, like cardboard/wooden boxes, small furniture, etc) should take far, FAR longer to break down, to the point where you don't consider " how much material am I going to get", but "is the amount of material I am going to get worth the effort"?

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In current state of the game, person really needs to have no life to go to the extremes of surviving 3000+ days or more... i mean which sane person would play like 100+ hours of just hibernating? When pv came out, i had fun for like first 200 days, barely hibernated just stayed in PV, had fun exploring and testing bugs, but after that was done, the old boring stuff sank in. Back in a day the game was not so much demanding of real life time, so it was not as bad to get good scores. When ML was only map (up to like .140 or whatever) i beat current #1 at that time of 270 days survived, by half... ~540 days survived, 1st ever to reach 500 days. Then a week later Tabby beat me with 750, and scores got cleared because CH came out. It is easy to survive 1000 days on one map nowadays... and its the only way i actually been playing, when new map comes out, i just unlock it, and start a new run. I'm ~40 days in in DP, explored everything, have handmade axe and knife, 3 guns, bow, 6 arrows, 3 hacksaws blah blah blah.... played for like 20 hours on this update, which is actually a lot, i could of done it in 3 hours if i wanted (just come from saved game, were character already has all the tools and food, and just sweep the DP).

I think its possible to survive infinitely at a moment with so much scrap. p.s. have two magny lenses. Game is so easy on stalker that folks like me and lmg, pockets, kraelman dont even go indoors and survive for like 50 days.

I waited for this update for 5 months, and a bit dissapointed.... and now i will have to wait another 2-3 months for a story or new map.

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So, as a dissenting opinion, allow me to offer my two cents (or two nickels in Canada).

Firstly, I agree: there are no longer any true "limited" resources and the game does get boring once the areas have all been explored. However, from my experience:

-Stalker is still punishingly hard (I can't make it to 24 hours yet without being eaten by wolves)

-I still get ravaged by wolves and almost die in Pilgrim

-As someone who only has ~3 hours to game at most per week (normally less) the game is still a challenge when I start fresh due to not having time to perfectly master the mechanics.

Now, I don't consider myself a greenhorn (I have a character at 200+ days) but from a "casual" player perspective - when you can only game for short periods - I do not find the glut of resources to be game breaking. I have fun exploring the maps and seeing what changes between playthoughs. Not having to worry about a broken axe or a hunting knife at 10% condition makes that much more fun for me. When I have a few precious hours to game, I want to soak in the atmosphere of The Long Dark. Yes, there has to be risk of death for the game to be fun (I fail at shooting wolves so that's not a problem) but I would get more bored of the game if I couldn't do anything with my character due to constantly succumbing to the elements because I couldn't harvest wood or skin animals.

Personally, I am less concerned with the resource glut (as others have mentioned, this is easily tunable by increasing harvest times/reducing supply) than I am about a potentially static game world. If the sandbox maps never change in the final game than the game automatically limits its replayability. Having random elements and limited procedural generation would probably be very costly to implement but are necessary to ensure longevity of the game. When repeating the same action for certain locations gives you a maximum chance of survival or if you "know" where drops for certain items are than you're not playing a game, you're solving an equation. Can you imagine how crazy it would be if, in some future update, it's possible that you come out of the woods to find the Camp Office on ML map (for instance) burned down? Wouldn't that completely change how you play the game? If locations can change between playthoughs than as opposed to having an optimal strategy to follow you actually have to explore again because you will no longer know what's around the corner.

Anyways, that's my input. Regardless of whether resources are abundant or scarce I believe the true limiting factor for The Long Dark will be how static the game world is. Would you rather play a game where all animal, shelter and resource locations can easily be listed in a guide or a game where nothing is certain and every time you step outside you walk blindly into the unknown?

And the best part is, you only require a little randomness to achieve this effect :)

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I think you guys need to remember they are setting the game up for the story mode too. Clearly there is going to be some goals which require you to move from one area to another back to an area, etc. checking in at the radio tower, finding a book there, or meeting a NPC, etc, reading a diary whatever, transit to the dam for something in the safe, schematics maybe, and then using a car battery to wire up radio or something, who the hell knows.

The resources are in such abundance in order to make these transits possible.

Is the sandbox boring after a few hundred days, yes, but the final game is probably intended to be hard but we don't know what they have behind the curtain in the story mode or why there needs to be so much in the way of resources.

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There's no doubt in my mind, that the team is doing an absolutely amazing job. I'm sure the story-mode has a lot of influence on the sandbox, as it should have. But I hope, when story-mode is released, the team will dedicate more effort to a pure sandbox experience. More randomness :-)

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I think you guys need to remember they are setting the game up for the story mode too. Clearly there is going to be some goals which require you to move from one area to another back to an area, etc. checking in at the radio tower, finding a book there, or meeting a NPC, etc, reading a diary whatever, transit to the dam for something in the safe, schematics maybe, and then using a car battery to wire up radio or something, who the hell knows.

The resources are in such abundance in order to make these transits possible.

Is the sandbox boring after a few hundred days, yes, but the final game is probably intended to be hard but we don't know what they have behind the curtain in the story mode or why there needs to be so much in the way of resources.

We have already seen many implementations where travelling light and managing fatigue and stamina benefit the character. Look at the bounty of resources as opportunity to not carry so much as you explore. Such play can only benefit when traveling becomes necessity instead of luxury.

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