Some suggestions.(Honey, alcohol, music, sanity, baits and more)


Typical Russian Guy

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Hello, everyone!
Here are some suggestions of me and my friends:
1) Honey (in jars and honeycombs) is a very nutritious food that spawns in cellars and kitchens. Doesn't spoil and can be kept for ages. Honeycombs can be used as a bait for bears. After eating honeycombs you can receive wax which can be used to create candles(wax+cloth).

2)Sanity. In the first day the sanity bar is full and you need about 10 days for it do drop completely if no effects are active. Insanity doesn't decrease health but causes hallucinations of dead or alive people, music, scary sounds and desorientation. Also slows you down. Sanity increases when you drink little doses of alcohol, listen to the music on radio and grammophones or play music instruments, It decreases faster when you are in the state of illness, when you see a dead body and when you're in darkness. 

2) Alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are nutritious:
(about 230 calories per 100 grammes for moonshine; 50 calories per 100 grammes for beer; 250 calories per 100 grammes for vodka; 350 calories per 100 grammes for liquor; 80 calories per 100 grammes for dry wine) and add an effect ''Alcohol in blood'' which increases heat gain in buildings or near to fire and icreases loss when it's cold. After drinking a certain amout (200-300 grammes for moonshine and 1500 grammes for beer)  there's a big chanse of getting ''alcohol poisoning'' offect which causes disorientation and makes your character sleepy. After drinking some more there's a big chance of getting ''severe alcohol poisoning'' which also causes hallucinations of wollves running around you and a lot of different noises appearing and decreasing sanity a lot. In little doses increases sanity.

3) Music. You can fing guitars, garmonicas and pianos all over the place. Guitars and garmonicas can be taken. You also find notes which can help your character learn music to play in instrumeents. You can also find cassetes to listen in cars (because cars have batteries inside which we cannot use at the moment).

4) Weapons. You can craft a homemade gun with a gun base made in forge + wooden components made using a workbench. Takes a lot of time to reload but can kill a deer or scary a wolf. Makes bears only angries though.

5) Goats on some locations to get some goat wool and meat. Wool can be used to make hats scarfs and pullovers.

6) Baits made of peaches to attract rabbits. Baits made of old man's beard, ''herbs''(found in kitchens); birch saplings or even rabbit meat(be careful with that, it can also attract wolves!) to attract deer.

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Strongly against anything that deals with mental health, would ruin immersion, since different people react differently to different stimuli. It would force players into certain behavioral patterns to keep it up, casualizing game experience.

Alcohol doesnt work this way.

Music could be an interesting addition, lightening the mood.

Crafting firearms, that would actualyl function, would require a lot of skill. Considering that we cant even craft basic stone/wooden tools, dont really see it happening.

Goats would die fast, unless were talking wild ones. Good luck catching those.

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1 hour ago, Dirmagnos said:

Strongly against anything that deals with mental health, would ruin immersion, since different people react differently to different stimuli. It would force players into certain behavioral patterns to keep it up, casualizing game experience.

Alcohol doesnt work this way.

Music could be an interesting addition, lightening the mood.

Crafting firearms, that would actualyl function, would require a lot of skill. Considering that we cant even craft basic stone/wooden tools, dont really see it happening.

Goats would die fast, unless were talking wild ones. Good luck catching those.

After a certain point everyone ignores dead bodies completely. This ruins the experience.
Alcohol increases heat gain in buildings or near to fire and icreases loss when it's cold. That's an interestring mechanic! Also don't forget about spiritlamp which can be used to cook without losing wood.
But we can craft axes. An improved potatocannon(which uses bullets instead of potatoes) isn't more complicated then an exe.

What do you mean talking about goats?

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6 hours ago, Typical Russian Guy said:

Hello, everyone!
Here are some suggestions of me and my friends:
1) Honey (in jars and honeycombs) is a very nutritious food that spawns in cellars and kitchens. Doesn't spoil and can be kept for ages. Honeycombs can be used as a bait for bears. After eating honeycombs you can receive wax which can be used to create candles(wax+cloth).

2)Sanity. In the first day the sanity bar is full and you need about 10 days for it do drop completely if no effects are active. Insanity doesn't decrease health but causes hallucinations of dead or alive people, music, scary sounds and desorientation. Also slows you down. Sanity increases when you drink little doses of alcohol, listen to the music on radio and grammophones or play music instruments, It decreases faster when you are in the state of illness, when you see a dead body and when you're in darkness. 

3) Music. You can fing guitars, garmonicas and pianos all over the place. Guitars and garmonicas can be taken. You also find notes which can help your character learn music to play in instrumeents. You can also find cassetes to listen in cars (because cars have batteries inside which we cannot use at the moment).

5) Goats on some locations to get some goat wool and meat. Wool can be used to make hats scarfs and pullovers.

I generally like the ideas, they would add alot, problem is: they are probably far from the games scope (this is sadly no AAA :( ) . If the game would have modding support you could imagine such things being added as mods but again, the game is close to release (as I understand it/storymode spring 2016 which means within the next 3 months) and your suggestions are probably craving to much testing, balancing and so discussion (disregarding implementing them in the first place).

Let me just elaborate my opinion on a few of these. 

1) Honey is definitely not the worst of ideas, and I actually care most about this because of the candles which are already wished for. Then again it is a new mechanic which would need balancing and "smooth" integration. 

2)Sanity. This should probably be discussed in thread of its own, as it can simply explode into a way bigger topic. Well generally though, I do have to agree with the Dirmagnos here, a "sanity bar" can feel really strange. I would personally not take it as far as talking about sanity and rather look at "determination". It would basicly be a tracker for how determined you are to survive. This determination could decrease as you suffer from anything (everytime your condition goes down, you question why you are at all fighting etc.) but it would not recover while sleeping. You could recover determination by e.g. reading books (something that was already asked for in another thread) or playing music (not a big fan of alcohol as a solution for sanity problems, wth alcohol does not make you sane). Determination can then affect how quickly you get tired, i.e. if your determination is low, you get tired faster than if it is high. HOWEVER: This is implementing the function of depression into the game which I STRONGLY doubt the developers want. While it would add a new level of depth and realism to the ingame mechanics, it raises way to many ethical questions.

(Sidenote: notice all those "could"s? those are just broad ideas, design cycles to come up with solutions for how it has to be to feel intuitive would take time again, and currently the intuitiveness of the game is one of the things that speaks most for it in my opinion, hence: every change should focus on that)

3) Music can work well just as books as it can give the player other ways of spending "free-time" while having stocked supplies rather than simply sleeping over and over again. 

5) Goats, well, This is simply a question of diversification of ingame wildlife. I don't think it would be the worst idea but I neither know whether there are any wild goats in Canada, and I don't really see them as necessary for the experience. Nevertheless I do agree that making hats, scarfs and pullovers could be nice. 

Cheers

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26 minutes ago, AverageGatsby said:

I generally like the ideas, they would add alot, problem is: they are probably far from the games scope (this is sadly no AAA :( ) . If the game would have modding support you could imagine such things being added as mods but again, the game is close to release (as I understand it/storymode spring 2016 which means within the next 3 months) and your suggestions are probably craving to much testing, balancing and so discussion (disregarding implementing them in the first place).

Story mode will also go through alpha testing; it's not final release. More features to come according to Hinterland staff. Sandbox has much more interest that initially anticipated. The forum is also driving things too with the community interest! I do think Hinterland has found a new gaming paradigm and genre. They are following Agile practices with lots of end user involvement to drive functional needs. The studios tend to throw the kitchen sink at things resulting in a lot of complexity just for the sake of keeping the big team busy and hoping to pick up user interest in that way. Less cost effective S/W development.

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Story mode will not be released until it is fully completed, so the individual episodes won't really be considered to be in an alpha state. We will continue expanding and improving the sandbox and gathering feedback for future releases. 

@Typical Russian Guy Thanks for sharing your detailed ideas and feedback! Honey is a pretty popular suggestion, but I think this is the first time I've seen a call for goats!

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58 minutes ago, SteveP said:

I think the addition of alcohol would change the ESRB rating. The target audience includes kids, eh!

It's a weird one that, take World of Warcraft, which I played on and off for many yrs, it has alcohol, some after drinking even has special effects like flames or my favourite projectile vomiting on a nearby player, yet a seasonal event called Brewfest with quests which required drinking alcohol is significantly different in non US markets.

That said though I still think alcohol is a bad idea in the game as in any survival situation, given it only makes you feel warmer by opening up the capillaries around the skin and lowers your core body temperature increasing risk of hypothermia.

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23 hours ago, Typical Russian Guy said:

After a certain point everyone ignores dead bodies completely. This ruins the experience.
Alcohol increases heat gain in buildings or near to fire and icreases loss when it's cold. That's an interestring mechanic! Also don't forget about spiritlamp which can be used to cook without losing wood.
But we can craft axes. An improved potatocannon(which uses bullets instead of potatoes) isn't more complicated then an exe.

What do you mean talking about goats?

Thats  the nature of human psyche, it doesnt really take that much to get used to dead bodies. And generally corpses tend to create feeling of repulsion, rather than dread.

Alcohol expands veins, among other things, causing greater blood circulation. At the same time it dulls senses. So it feels warner due to increased loss of body heat and impaired sensory perception.

I like an idea of alcohol, but it should be a blade that cuts both ways. In some situations it may give a bit of help, while in others it could lead to death. Not to mention potential crafting implementation.

Potato cannon requires something to create pressure, havent seen anything that would do the trick in the game. Making zip guns would require both expertise and live ammo.

In terms of goats i was referring to domesticated ones. With all/most humans gone, they would starve. And if player is come across wild one, then im pretty sure it wont be waiting to get caught.

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You could encounter mountain goats and mountain sheep in Timberwolf Mountain. One should never attempt to kill them, even in desperation. You could never get close enough! (except for the tame ones that we encounter on the highways) Just observing them is a real treat!

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+1 to honey & goats.

I dimly remember having suggested honey a long time ago as bait to lure bears. Currently you can lure a bear to a place where you want to shoot it just by walking ahead. Having to use honey would make the whole thing more intricate. Open a jar of honey, place it near a hunting blind, enter the blind and wait...

Mountain goats would be a great addition to Timberwolf Mountain (no idea whether they exist in Canada though). They should climb up the cliffs and hang out at inaccesible places. Very hard to hunt.

Not sure about musical instruments. We have seen them in other games, but TLD is kind of a "quiet" game - a lot of the soundscape is just nature. Maybe the player playing musical instruments would disrupt this. But it could also be good. Really don't know.

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