Enjoying game, here is my suggestions!

[GoldenH]

I have been playing on random / stalker mode for about 24 hours now on my twitch stream and it is great. I am not at all interested in the story mode, although the teaser video is great it just makes me want to explore the city

However of course I do have some issues of confusion or suggestions to make the game more immersive. Maybe move this to wish list? I do not know.

First I am somewhat confused about the situation you are put in. Your airplane crashed yet there has already had time for houses to burn down, all survivors to be gone, and many avalanches to have filled in roads and bridges to be taken out ? It is a very cool world but does not at all make sense within the timeframe.

I love the beauty of the world but one thing I did in skyrim was add in the mods for glittery snow and colorful starmaps. Since the aurora is part of the game I hope to see them in the sky soon!

I enjoy the exploration however I feel there needs to be a compass of some sort. It would be cool if the compass was not always reliable (perhaps the north direction changes from time to time or there are auroral events that make it spin wildly or there are local 'hot spots' that act as a false north. Whatever, be creative! Ideally, I would be able to use the sun or stars to get my bearings but that neither seem to be useable in the game so far. Right now i have to use my footprints to know where I came from, but that is not always workable either.

When getting the equipment I felt like I really wanted a third person mode. One of my favorite parts about RPGs and Roguelikes is how equipment changes the appearance of my character!

On that note being able to creatively use equipment would be great! I use warm fuzzy socks on my hands when I'm snowblowing and a travel blanket as a heat skirt in real life. If I was freezing to death I think I would take the bed comforter and wrap it around me or maybe put on two parkas so i could be double warm!

I should not need to wake up after 4 hours and eat and drink water... it would be great if I could sleep 12 hours straight without either, but then have a 'weakened' debuff until i have breakfast. Just have us not take damage from food/water shortage until after we wake up, unless we went to sleep hungry! maybe a one hour window so we don't have to click super fast.

Being able to drag things would be super great. Maybe add a sled into the game if you want to limit it somehow.. then we can put dead animals or small branches onto the sled and drag them to shelter where we can work on them without freezing to death.

Burning calories warms us up. Running should warm us up too. Make it more dangerous by adding a 'perspiration' debuff after this, so you have to go inside for a couple hours while your clothes dry or else you will freeze faster.

Let us set items for automatic eating. If I have 10 liters of water I would like my character to drink it automatically. If I have to craft an item for 50 hours straight I hope my character will take a break to eat and drink! Make the character stop suddenly and eat/drink. That way we are encouraged to still drink/eat manually!

Let us interrupt sleeping if we are dying of starvation/thirst! It is pretty easy to allow escape button to wake us up or to put a big red cancel button on the screen.

Finally I would like two options for difficulty. First I would like to be able to control wolf respawning / damage. I enjoy the difficulty of all other aspects of Stalker mode, and I don't want them to be less aggressive just so that I don't have to click quite as fast when I don't have weapons. I will break my mouse! Second the option to turn on crafting at the forge for specific items like the firestarter.

[Patrick Carlson]

Hi there and welcome to the forums! Thanks for the detailed suggestions.

I will say in terms of navigation, how do you find navigating by in-game landmarks? Has that been useful to you at all?

Thanks again,

--Patrick

[GoldenH]

I've now played the game over 100 hours. I have a much easier time navigating now. I actually managed to navigate blind from mine #5 to the lighthouse in desolation point the other day. (Blizzard at night with no light).

However I don't find the landmarks to be useful for navigating. There is a degree of recognizing where I am - Knowing to follow a ridge or that I'm in a picnic area or what direction to shoot out of a cave to get to the next shelter. But if I go somewhere new, I cannot look at a mountain range and see a distinctive peak or look at an island in the fog and know what angle I am at.

Some things are really distinctive. The three sea-based locations at desolation point are clear because it is easy to tell land from sea. I can identify the sea on Coastal Highway and know I am going towards it. But some are almost impossible - most of the bridges in Pleasant Valley look identical and tree placement is too even and identical - in a real forest I would know where I was by maybe seeing this really old tree by the path or three of four trees grown into each other.

Unfortunately I am finding the most fun to be learning the maps. When I have learned the maps they are stopping being fun and becoming more tedious. To some degree this can be helped by adding more content. But a large part of it needs to be adding more varied dangers and placement and giving ways to alleviate things that make the rest of the game fun. It is great for a story game. You will always be moving on to new places and new challenges and having to leave things behind. But moving 200 arrowheads and a dozen hatchets and knives because I never want to go back to desolation point again... just means I end up spending more time hauling items back and forth. Ugh!

[GoldenH]

So some reflections on what is working for me in the game at this point, and what isn’t.

Working:

Beautiful vistas. I’ll still get up before dawn to watch the sun rise.

Repairable Item degradation. I think constantly patching up your equipment is great. However I would allow items to go in quality above 100% (But not being able to repair them further) to encourage keeping equipment in perfect shape. Including scarves, hats and other one-repair items. Carefully stored, non-food items (and canned foods) shouldn’t degrade at all tho, imo.

Chaotic weather. The threat of a sudden whiteout blizzard or night fog is the big threat.

Persistence Hunting. Running deer into wolves is brilliant and fun.

Looting. Finding survival tools is a lot of fun and definitely beats crafting everything.

Isn’t Working:

Animal AI: wolves should move between waypoints rather than (apparently?) teleporting there or patrolling a small area of the map. Also it’d be great to see wolf packs (Not all wolves in packs, but occasionally!). Also I like to climb up the side of a mountain and shoot bear. That’s great, but it shouldn’t run at the base of the mountain forever. At least have it sit up and roar at me like it does when there is a fire.

Hunting mechanics: Frankly it’s too hard to kill an animal by bleeding it. The animal often disappears completely. Possibly it falls off the map or whatever, which is cool for random denial of food but not so cool for recovering arrows. Animals with arrows in them should either have their blood trails persist for a day or crows surrounding it when it the next day (but with less meat). Animals killed with bullets can retain the current mechanic.

Animals that fall off the map should be respawned as an empty corpse with the arrow stuck in it. It's awesome when animals bleed and run off into a pack of wolves and I can't get at them until their meat is rotten. Also make sure bleeding isn’t so random. Last night I had a bear survive ten hunting rifle shots (including a couple shots to the chest and a headshot). Confirmed with blood spray. The Bear never left a blood trail.

Tracking animals: Animal prints should last longer so we can find deer and bear instead of just going where they spawn. Attract wolves to these trails so we have to go around them and pick up the trail.

Exploring houses: I enjoy the houses with a certain frequency. I think Pleasant Valley is the perfect frequency, with Desolation Point being too few and Costal Highway being too many. Houses are also too safe to explore: I get in a house and the tension is gone. Animals should be able to break into houses and some parts of it should be traps. If a wolf is latched onto my leg I should drag it with me when I enter a house. Maybe render a house with a broken window image if an animal is inside. Sometimes spawn deer inside too for the luls. Also it is too hard to navigate in the house in the dark. Please put in a system to move along the wall so we can navigate in the dark. We should be able to move by feeling and also know if we are staring at the roof or floor. Also make cabinets and such furniture spawn randomly. It is somewhat boring for all cabinets of a certain shape to have the same drawers searchable.

Moving Loot: It is simply too slow to move while fully encumbered. I think it’s totally fine up to about 80 pounds, and I think there should be a difficulty with going above that but not the slow movement rate currently implemented. I am that guy who cleared the dungeon in skyrim and dragged everything back to town to sell it. Definitely include a sled that only can be crafted in survival mode, for dragging items: Make it so that your exhaustion, hunger and thirst increase exponentially. It takes several long seconds to let go and ready a weapon. That’s fine! Maybe things fall off or items degrade faster on the sled. But the speed of movement is way too slow.

Crafting Cycle: This is obvious to me in a few places. First, knife fighting wolves isn’t sustainable because you’ll get more infections than you have resources to cure. Second, crafting at the forge is too boring because you need too much fuel. I like the fuel requirement to get started at all, but I would make the forge double or triple all the fuel burning times after the temperature is maxed out. Thirdly, it seems better to craft new clothing rather than to repair crafted clothing. That is really disappointing! It should be the other way around. Finally, harvesting natural wood wears out the hatchet a bit too quickly. Harvesting wood is fun, dangerous and it shouldn’t be so much better to mine coal.

Spawn Rates: In general, animals are too fast and items are too slow. Wolves and Deer should take a long time to respawn, and without them around, maybe the bunnies should eat all the wood forcing you to move on . Dead bodies and saplings should continue spawning randomly, giving a reason to continue to explore larger maps.

Hunger and Dehydration. It isn’t very interesting to me how they are represented currently. Rationing is understandable but not in the way it is currently. (encourage eating a little every so often, instead of only eating before you go to sleep) I think it would help if hunger had something to do with the cold (Your body heat needs food to rise), and if having multiple conditions were multiply bad. Like if you’re tired and thirsty, you have a chance to pass out. Or if you’re tired and hungry you can’t go to sleep (But you can Wait). And if you get food poisoning it should wake you up or have some kind of double confirmation button.

Static landscapes. Exploring the areas are the most fun. But having memorized the positions of houses and such it isn’t as fun. You could randomize parts of the map, adding and removing rivers or replacing houses with picnic areas or small lakes with mountains. I feel like the elevations of each map are the most important part, and while I love the hand crafted detail in each of the maps, the time it takes for me to find myself back to a “safe zone” on start is getting shorter and shorter each time I play.

Timberwolf mountain: I love the area because it’s so hard to survive when you spawn there. But also keep in mind that making areas you need prep to survive means spending time in areas doing that prep. Which can exhaust the fun of playing in that area. Timberwolf mountain is perfect as a lone area, but if too many areas need prep to survive in then those prep areas will be not as fun. But at the same time, areas you can’t survive in are harder to fully explore, and so are more fun to start in. So there needs to be more areas like timberwolf mountain, but also more areas to prep in, at some kind of fun ratio.

Things which don’t bother me at all:

Movement bugs: Sometimes I get stuck in terrain and fall through the world. Right now, it’s about on par with a finished Bethesda game so I’m fine with it.

Usefulness of items: I should logically be able to use items in other ways, but it’s fine if they each only serve certain purposes. Adding in more items and uses (layering clothes, a kerosene-powered chainsaw, whatever) can be fun, but we don’t really need them.

Ice: I think some more varied ice textures would be wonderful. Let me see through the ice in some places, and other places make the ice uneven : Ice sheets like to crash into each other making mini mountains and are often more dangerous at shore than in off shore. But it’s fine as it is.

[GoldenH]

Hit 200 hours played!

UI feedback:

- Need a way to cancel sleep when we realize we made a mistake that could kill us. Cancel exists for crafting, eating, and everything else - why not sleeping?

- Torches are a pain - too easy swung and put out, and it’s hard to tell how long they last. You should need to hold down a button combination to swing – I suggest run + action, while you should have to hold a button to turn it off, just like lanterns. Also, light source life bar should always be visible. Constantly checking the inventory, or dropping it and picking it up, is just annoying and jarring. If you want the UI to be 'clean', can I suggest just looking straight up makes the torch life bar appear? So much more elegant than the current drop and check method.

- A nice hotkey to place items from our inventory, specifically the bedroll and snares and items for throwing like burnt out torches.

- No way to tell how fast we are getting cold. Often the weather can look nice, but actually be frozen death, and I’ve likewise experienced balmy, 30-degree blizzards in the game. Place the temperature change arrows on the main UI, and for that matter, a UI element that indicates that running, climbing, swinging a torch, or moving while encumbered is exhausting us faster. Ideally, I should be able to tell what the windchill is by how loud it is and maybe some color tinting for temperature.

- Get rid of empty cans and broken mre pacakages. The game has a cluttered environment and we have few ways of interacting with it. Being able to recognize patterns and outlines is what allows us to find the goods in the environment to begin with, which makes appearances of those shapes extremely annoying. If you must have these discarded refuse in the game, at least make them interactable – we can pick them up, but they are red condition, maybe only 1% or 2% remaining. or when we break down the object they are sitting on they are destroyed. This would ensure their current process of finding waste but also mean that they do not remain a constant annoyance.

- Likewise, if one graphic resource is interactable, all instances of that object should be interactable. That is what allows us to play the game – looking for interactables, accepting that we cannot interact with things we logically should be able to, and not fighting with the UI. Specifically I am thinking of the cellar doors – currently some cellar doors are interactable and others not. The same with vents in the dam, they are not interactable, but they are in bunkers. A object should either always be interactable or never interacatable. Likewise, putting lichen on trees too high to reach – just mean.

- Better indication of why we died. I have died in my sleep for it to be attributed to food poisoning or the long dark. Neither of these make sense, because food poisoning doesn’t reduce your health below 15%, and while you CAN die from the cold while sleeping, if I went to sleep in a cave with a fire going that would last my entire sleep period .. and I can hear it crackling when I die, I think there some other way to die from the Long Dark that it isn’t reporting?

- Indication of unsafe terrain. I’ve injured my wrists and ankles countless times on otherwise open surfaces and gently sloping paths. I think that it may actually be a physics glitch, since the game freezes for a second or so whenever I am about to get injuries of this type.

- Try and make sure the charater uses up lower quality items first. It seems to try and use your highest quality item first, which makes no sense to me with things like tools and matches.

- A "place" button next to the "drop" button so we could put piles of small items like sticks and water on shelves instead trying to drag them there one at a time.

Also: There needs to be a way to mothball items for storage. It is so counter intuitive for items to start degrading once you find them. If not, I'd actually rather all items in the world degrade from the start of the game. (Use your current algorithm, just subtract time survived from item quality on newly generated items). Meanwhile, I have a locker full of canned goods i don't need and the backup clothing I found is rotting away unused.