improved bear behavior


Tbone555

Recommended Posts

so, when you're in a climate with bears, they are a huge risk and concern when leaving any food lying around. bears have an advanced sense of smell that can pick up food over long distances. when camping in bear country, you're urged to close your food into special bear-proof containers so that they don't come sniffing.

however, in the long dark, bears aren't really that big of an issue. bears don't come looking for your food, and if you see one you can just walk around it and it won't really bother you as long as you don't get too close and don't poke it with a bullet

i know that hinterland has taken liberties with wildlife behavior in this game. for instance, the wolves are overly aggressive and their senses are dulled beyond reason, so badly that you can crawl along the ground 4 feet away from them and they never know you were there :P

but i want the added danger that if you have a long time fire, say, in the train tunnel of ML, and you're in there cooking venison over your fire for an hour, a bear is able to catch the scent and come investigate.

or if you're cooking lots of food over a fireplace, the scent would head up and out your chimney and you'd walk outside face to face with a bear.

i feel like bears don't present enough danger in this game, as the wolves do. basically the only way to get attacked by a bear is to poke it with a bullet, run straight up to it, or if it sneaks up behind you while you're pre-occupied.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

there's no such thing as a bear proof container unless it's those huge metal trash bins! Hoisting yer food into a tree helps save it but if you are in Grizzly country, you don't even cook near your camp site much less leave food scraps about. Burn it. In the parks they say pack out your garbage but that's not Griz country. Personally I burn any garbage I can and pack out the burnt cans, that is if we don't have a fire ban.

I do agree that the scent of hot grease is like a magnet for bears; I think it tends to be offset by the smoke of your cooking fire and the black bears fear of human contact. Bears get habituated. Once they have found a food source, they keep coming back for more and have to be taken far away by wild life rangers.

I don't think we should have bears drawn to cooking near our shelters; maybe for Stalker mode but I worry it would make the game excessively difficult. It might trap players in early game so maybe there could be a grace period until the player has had the opportunity to accumulate torches and flares. I do know that a wounded bear can trap you in a house until it's died from loss of blood yet that risk seems manageable. You can hear the bear outside the door, snuffling and such. It might be good to add more sound effects of suffering. I tend to give the bear the double-tap if it's in a fire trap. I don't want it to wander off and there is the ethical consideration of unnecessary suffering. Hunters never like to let an animal suffer yet its extremely dangerous to approach a wounded bear in the woods. You can't always see it and it can ambush you, even when its severely wounded. This from the bear hunt videos on Youtube.

The bear on DP seems to be "fenced" by the scent of a salmon that keeps drawing it but it gets blocked by the trees and cliff. Take away that raw salmon and the bear will start to roam. Raw fish can be very useful for baiting the bear I think. He will probably travel great distances with the right bait. Is there a range limit for bears and wolves and game to smell things?

BTW, I have had a bear sneak up on  me while harvesting a rabbit or a wolf. As soon as I finished the activity, he got me! It may be a bug or feature that bears and wild life tend to freeze while certain time compressed activities happen. Building a camp fire is a wise precaution but you can't always do that while chopping wood esp in inclement weather.

It brings up another point; how much of wild life behaviour should be documented officially, by community or should it be left for the player to learn? I worry that some behaviours might be incorrectly documented in the community wikis. I don't think Hinterland has time or staff to check out all of that so they should have a disclaimer. There is an "official" wiki but a more comprehensive one is on wikia. Community support certainly has been enthusiastic!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.