Lurve

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Everything posted by Lurve

  1. Yep. Harder difficulties are less a game of exploration than of map knowledge. They assume you already know the possible locations of the legendary Last Box of Twinkies as well as safe routes to get around, and are balanced around making it a challenge to check them. Conversely, that same map knowledge makes easier difficulties trivial, because everyone knows if you need a twinkie box you can just rope climb down Suicide Cliff and find one at the base of Greeble Canyon, but then one just spawns in Trapper's? Loot pinata!
  2. It's an interesting aspect of game design that turns out to be much more complicated than you'd imagine. The real problem is that your advice flatly fails on a particular demographic of players. Another game dev (Jick) once coined them "dickpunchers." Reason being, if you ask them to punch themselves in the dick for ten points they'll do it, because free points! A dickpuncher who knows that mincemeat is the fastest way to level cooking to 5 can't help but mince their way there immediately. They will complain about how boring the grind is. They will complain about how easy it makes the game. They will complain about everything but their own agency. Because they will never, *never,* not grind through anyway. But, as you say, it's a singleplayer game. What one person chooses to do doesn't affect others' experiences. Except it kinda does. Because dickpunchers share the same game mechanics as everyone else, and the devs have to put the balance somewhere. If they tune cooking experience for dickpunching, it'll train impractically slow for everyone else unless they grind too. If they tune it for everyone else, it'll ruin the dickpunchers' gameplay (and, to repeat, they WILL NOT not grind the skill). No matter how you set it, people are going to gripe. Unless, as people have said, you find some way of cutting the Gordian knot, either by making the grind unproductive (xp by weight) or by making the goal less desirable (ruined meat still sucks somehow). Then everyone gets to gripe a bit while they adjust and life goes on a little happier.
  3. Close. The greatest feeling is doing it outside where you can watch the snow. Stone Church in DP is my preference.
  4. Something I learned recently: the stink bar indicator not showing up doesn't mean you don't stink. Carrying any meat at all gives you a sizable aggro radius for wolves and a wide one for bears. On voyager animals are still sparse enough to avoid, but on stalker there's just too many wolves who mosey your way as soon as you get within a half a kilometer of them, while bears home in basically as soon as you can see them. But drop all the meat and you practically have to boop them on the nose before they'll notice you. Which means that baiting with a sliver of meat is not a *defense,* you don't want to carry one around just in case. It can bribe off a stalking wolf, sure, but odds are the wolf wouldn't have noticed you if you didn't have it. Instead it's an offensive maneuver to work around an explicit game mechanic. When a wolf or a bear is stalking you and you aim at it (with a rock, a gun, anything), it'll charge you while dodging sideways, making it hard to hit. But if it's going for some meat you've dropped instead, it's no longer stalking you so as long as it stays outside the normal attack radius it won't mind you aiming at its head. The same attack behavior is why people say you should practice throwing rocks without aiming - if you can hit a wolf it'll scare him off - and hunt by driving a deer into a wolf - the latter won't mind you lining up a headshot at a distance you'd be charged otherwise.
  5. That picture appears to be a potion of Summon Bear Spirit.
  6. Many of these deaths are just honest mistakes and learning experiences. They're only stupid if you keep doing it. For example, a learning experience is harvesting an entire deer in an unfamiliar region, thinking that bear you see in the distance won't wander over and maul you the moment you finish. An honest mistake is when upon picking yourself up you think "you know, I can probably get a headshot on him from here," then fail to do so and get mauled again. Immediately taking a shot again, this time thinking "come on, he's gotta be nearly dead by now," that is stupidity in action.
  7. Anecdotal experience sucks as a measure of fact. We tend to discard information that doesn't fit our model instead of updating it. You've already given an example where the thing that should happen every time didn't happen, you just don't want it to count because then it wouldn't happen every time. Try this: next time you play, use a stopwatch to measure the time between seeing crows fly overhead (EVERY time you see them) and the next low-visibility condition. Do the same for a phenomenon you think should be unrelated, like hearing that wolf-howl-like bird call, and do it until you have ten of each measurement. If you're wrong (seeing which is more reliable than seeing if you're right), the crows should have similar or higher average time to the next weather change.
  8. Confirmation bias. The weather is always moments away from a change in this game, and crows quite often fly overhead. You're only remembering the times those happened together, because when they didn't it wasn't worth paying attention to.
  9. 1) Add a whittling craft that takes an hour, consumes a stick, and produces a little wooden rabbit or wolf or something to put on a shelf to track the small, quiet moments spent waiting. 2) Smooth out gameplay breakpoints to reduce the impetus for deliberate grinding. Decrease the chances of getting food poisoning by 25% per skill level, down to 0% at cooking 5, instead of suddenly being immune the moment you hit 5. Make tinder never strictly necessary, but it gives a boost to firestarting and slightly increase the level 3 bonus to compensate. That sort of thing. 3) Tinder and charcoal should be burnable for small amounts of lifetime, just to get rid of them. 4) Ruined items disappear everywhere, or nowhere. I don't care which, just pick one and stick with it. 5) Movable containers to better organize storage, either applied to existing containers or as a new uncommon thing to loot. It's the sign of a good game that the nits worth picking are so small.