What is the 1 thing you dislike most in The Long Dark?


Lifferds

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In all honesty I wish the textures were more realistic looking.

Started playing yesterday and I really love this game - the gameplay is astounding. It's now my favorite game. Used to be the Fallout series.

According online reviews I've read I am aware that the look is an 'artistic move' but I have to admit that I am a spoiled "graphics junkie."

If the textures were as realistic as the rest of the game I'm inclined to think popularity would grow swiftly.

The "easiest" way I can think of modifying the look but using the same engine is by just replacing the textures with 'realistic high resolution textures.'

Despite what I consider 'old school graphics' that kind of remove "immersive-ness" for me, I want to emphasize that because of the 'gritty, unforgiving, simulated realism' that The Long Dark is my favorite game.

Please keep up the good work!

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my main complaints too is that the durability or your main tools(knife, hatchet) is all kinds of wrong no way a hatchet should wear out like that. Last is the amount of meat you eat is unnerving 1kg is 2.2lbs so we are eating 5+lbs a day lol guess I know where a the weight slowing me down is coming from.

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The lack of keyboard shortcuts for actions and the inventory is my biggest complaint. It'd be nice to be able to bind keys to the different methods of sorting, the different categories of items, placing bedrolls, transferring items between containers and the inventory, and maybe some more I haven't thought of.

The emptiness of Desolation Point is something I'd prefer to be remedied, although perhaps it was intended to be like that. A whole area with only four or five areas of note that is otherwise barren just feels overly barebones.

The inability to start indoor fires; it makes sense that starting a fire on a wood floor is dangerous and smoke ventilation might be an issue, but if it's a choice between that and freezing to death, it would be nice to have the option.

Moving furniture would be a nice feature, though that's been mentioned often, as I recall.

Those are my biggest gripes at the moment, I suppose; at the very least, the only ones that come to mind, anyway.

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Hunting bow is rubbish after frankly some extreme busy work to get all the items needed, forging arrow heads!!! Seriously?

It's lack of ways to fight back... Needs a spear.

It should have rain as well as snow

Ultimately not enough to the experience...

But nevertheless an amazing game considering how one note it is......

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Jumping.

I play only 4 h yet, but it's a bit weird that character can't jumping like ordinary man. Sometimes it become much annoying to walk around a little snowdrift instead to jump over it. Gameplay would be really better and realistic with jumping button.

p.s. don't worry that everyone carping and nagging so math (You put it in Alpha-test lol), cuz game already awesome.

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I hate the way you can just drop a torch in the snow and it is more effective vs wolves than swinging the torch. Also you can build a campfire while facing a wolf and IIRC building a fire takes time..its okay though the wolf will sit and wait for you to build it. Feel free to place your bedroll after dropping a torch and take a snooze. No for real!

Ugh..

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Far too much menu-based inventory clicking to perform actions.

When you're crafting or repairing or using fire to cook and eat or to make water and drink, it's just a succession of menu clicking and pressing Tab. It doesn't feel like you're actually playing a game.

More tangible item interaction and manipulation within the actual gameworld to replace all the inventory/status menus and sub-screens would improve the experience a lot.

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Far too much menu-based inventory clicking to perform actions.

When you're crafting or repairing or using fire to cook and eat or to make water and drink, it's just a succession of menu clicking and pressing Tab. It doesn't feel like you're actually playing a game.

More tangible item interaction and manipulation within the actual gameworld to replace all the inventory/status menus and sub-screens would improve the experience a lot.

What are some alternatives to menu based interaction? Like dragging and dropping wood,coffee, soup cans onto fires?

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":sbc4bpzp]
Far too much menu-based inventory clicking to perform actions.

When you're crafting or repairing or using fire to cook and eat or to make water and drink, it's just a succession of menu clicking and pressing Tab. It doesn't feel like you're actually playing a game.

More tangible item interaction and manipulation within the actual gameworld to replace all the inventory/status menus and sub-screens would improve the experience a lot.

What are some alternatives to menu based interaction? Like dragging and dropping wood,coffee, soup cans onto fires?

I'm thinking along the lines of allowing you to "Equip" everything in the inventory, so you can hold it in your hands and see it - then you can use context-based mouse clicks by moving close to relevant materials/tools that you can combine with the "Equipped" item in order to perform an action.

Eg: you light a fire by putting some "fuel" on the ground, equipping some "tinder" to your hands, then pointing yourself at the "fuel" - you get a text option to 'build fireplace' or something similar, and click to confirm. You could optionally equip accellerant or lantern fuel in your hands, point at the fireplace, and 'add' it, for higher chance of ignition. Once you've 'built' your fire, you could then equip matches, point at the fire, and click 'ignite fire' when that context-option appears. You could then equip more fuel and add it, or equip food to cook, and so on.

By doing it like that, all actions are performed within the gameworld, rather than in some abstracted menu-land. It'd be much more immersive.

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The forge. It's SO out of place in a survival game. That whole mechanic needs to die.

The mechanism will suit well the story mode but its true that in sandbox mode and due to the multiple maps its almost impossible to forge and get back.

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- stuff degrading without use

- the speed in which food degrades

- whetstone/cleaning kit degrade speed (20 uses of whetstone, I think same goes for cleaning?)

- Inability to kill deer/Rabbits without a gun (if you have a knife and you get close you should be able to strike)

- Wolves running away from torches/flares. I wish they kinda just backed up/stood their ground

- the forge location

- re-spawning of items (immersion breaking)

- more interactive cooking, like equipping the food, placing it on the stove and having the system curing uses (50%cooked) then you pick it back up

- the bow aiming system

- how some random man who just crashlanded has the ability to fire guns/bows accurately (implement some kinda training thing maybe?)

- no injuries from crash

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There is too much wildlife.

Stepping outside the Mystery Lake Camp Office, it's all too common that I see 1-3 wolves and deer. And there's more of them around every corner. After 30 days on voyageur, I haven't killed a single deer and yet I have 10+ deer skins, because there are so many wolves and deer that they're routinely being hunted for me. In fact, almost all of my hunting is accidental, defending against wolves, or killing wolves to get to the deer they killed. I've never hunted deer.

This saps the meaning out of hunting. The few times I seriously went looking to kill something was with bears. The blood-trail mechanic and animals bleeding out is great. It's fun to track down a kill, it's satisfying to go through a longer hunt and reap the rewards. This is lost when the world is teeming with so many wolves and deer that 'hunting' means stepping outside any random building and looking around, with a high chance of finding a wolf already snarfing away at a deer.

My solution would be to decrease the amount of wildlife and increase the time it takes for them to respawn.

Make the player roam a map in search for game, relocate to other houses or maps. If at all possible, I'd love for deer to have tracks, or signs of spots they prefer to visit like eaten tree bark. Allow deer to be baited, perhaps I might even start using the hunting perches as hunting perches.

Have less wolves, but make them roam an entire map, either solitary or in packs. Wolves that patrol around on 10 square meters of ice are weird and non-threatening. A roaming loner with the strength of Fluffy that can show up anywhere or a widely patrolling pack are a lot more fun and dangerous.

This is more a quality of life thing: decrease the amount of meat every animal drops, but increase the amount of calories their meat offers. This would make cooking less of a lengthy chore and eliminate the absurdness of eating 2-4kg of meat every day. You'd have to do some testing to balance total calories from animals with the effort of finding them though.

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It's best to add an auto-picking mode which needs no clicks but merely looking at something you want to pick up for 0.5 second.

500 msec to pick up a stick? I can double click faster than that. I would not want that. Picking up the sticks gets boring but it's a necessary action to ensure sufficient fuel and it correctly simulates the mundane but critical task of gathering firewood in real world survival outdoors (or indoors)

Harvesting firewood is usually quite productive use of time; the compressed time mechanic makes it easier to accumulate more fuel but you need the hatchet to do it. I always ensure I carry much less than 30kg and then pick up sticks wherever I find them. I build up caches of firewood wherever I anticipate I will need it. I devote an entire day indoors to breaking down crates whenever there is an outdoor storm.

If I could ask for one thing, it would be more animals to interact with. I'd like a moose, a beaver and a wolverine. Options to craft decorative items would be nice time filler and something to address psychology of loneliness, boredom and ennui.

What do I hate the worst? not having a hatchet when I desperately need it. Lacking the hatchet severely cripples progress in the game. In the past, I could always manage to locate one but with v.282 and DP, it seems possible to end up without a hatchet anywhere in the region. Possibly it's in the mines on a corpse. The hatchet is the only tool that can harvest the bow and arrow saplings. If the knife could do the job, it would be more reasonable and less of a slow death lacking the hatchet.

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- If you bury food underground, in the wilderness, in real life, where there are bears and wolves.. guess what's gonna happen :roll:

Game meat is treated with salt to desiccate it and hung from a bear pole or in an underground cache or smoked to preserve it. If it's cold, there's not much worry of spoilage. An underground cache is not dry so not ideal for storing things like dried meat once the temperature goes above freezing. An underground cache needs rocks or heavy logs to keep bears from ripping it apart. The ideal temperature for storing meat is about 36F or 2C. See also How to preserve meat

The advantage of underground storage is that the temperature is much more appropriate for long term storage during summer or winter.

- Deer has 9.7 kg's of meat.

Typically you get about 25% of total carcass weight in usable meat from a deer or wolf. A mule deer should give about 10 to 40 kg of meat. A moose gives a lot more, perhaps 100 kg to 200 kg of meat. "Males [moose] (or "bulls") normally weigh from 380 to 700 kg and females (or "cows") typically weigh 200 to 490 kg "

"Adult bucks (male deer) normally weigh 55–150 kg, averaging around 92 kg, although trophy specimens may weigh up to 210 kg. Does (female deer) are rather smaller and typically weigh from 43 to 90 kg, with an average of around 68 kg " I'm using the mule deer for example; the white tail deer is smaller.

"[Grey wolf] males averaging 43–45 kg, and females 36–38.5 kg" so a wolf should yield from 9 to 12 kg of meat.

"Adult [black bear] males typically weigh between 57–250 kg, while females weigh 33% less at 41–170 kg. In the state of California, studies have indicated that the average mass is 86 kg in adult males and 58 kg in adult females." - Wikipedia

Therefore you could expect anywhere from 10 to 55 kg of usable meat from a bear, 10 to 25 kg from a deer and 9-12 kg from a wolf, if the game were simulating real life. The problem comes up with the high caloric requirements of the game. Beef for example carries anywhere from 3000 to 1700 calories per kg yet in the game we only get about 800 calories per kg of wolf, 900 cal/kg for deer or bear meat and a mere 300 cal/kg of coho salmon which should have a caloric value of 2000/kg! Bear meat has 2600 cal/kg.

I suspect they were able to research these numbers but chose to use smaller values in order to make the game more difficult and challenging.

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Staring at progress bars.

Ok I know I already wrote another dislike above on too much wildlife, but this is a strong runner-up for me.

Currently there is way too much staring at progress bars. I catch an animal, skin it and harvest meat. Starting the fire gets me a bar to wait on. Then cooking each individual kg takes a bar to stare at. If I want to melt and boil some water, more bars. Want to eat and drink? More bars. Repair your stuff? Bars. Craft? Bars. Fishing? Sharpening? Bars. Bars everywhere.

I don't know a good, easy way to solve this. But perhaps make those bars move a bit faster at least.

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Staring at progress bars.

Ok I know I already wrote another dislike above on too much wildlife, but this is a strong runner-up for me.

Currently there is way too much staring at progress bars. I catch an animal, skin it and harvest meat. Starting the fire gets me a bar to wait on. Then cooking each individual kg takes a bar to stare at. If I want to melt and boil some water, more bars. Want to eat and drink? More bars. Repair your stuff? Bars. Craft? Bars. Fishing? Sharpening? Bars. Bars everywhere.

I don't know a good, easy way to solve this. But perhaps make those bars move a bit faster at least.

My complaint is similar but more towards cooking in particular. I was extremely low on calories at one point. I got my whole stockpile of food, made a big fire and tried to cook most of it. I had some cold coffee that I heated up, but I also wanted to cook a couple cans of tomato soups. By the time I was finished cooking 4-5 items, my coffee and some of my tomato soups were already cold. Cooking should be something that you can multitask with and cook multiple things at once. I understand that crafting or repairing might be a different story because you probably cannot do 2 of those projects at once, but this is a small suggestion to improve the wait time.

(If this suggestion is implemented into the game - remember to finish cooking all items at the same time! Some items might take "5 minutes" while other items might take much longer. You don't want cold coffee!) :)

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If we MUST write just one thing.. well...

The time.

Day/night cycle is just too fast.

Hours fly by too fast, and consequently you get tired/hungry/thirsty..etc, too fast.

+10 on this

and also on the item degredation..... my clothes break from normal use to RUINED in 3 days??? what??

also on the food amounts.... why would I eat 4 pounds of meat when I wake up.....

PLEASE FIX THESE THINGS!!!

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