Snowtippedwolf

Wolves are often ignoring campfires. I don't think this is intended as it's not mentioned in the patch notes.

Hey, guess it's my first time asking here. Hope all is well with the team. I guess I'll start with the schmoozing first. Thanks for all the hard work creating, in my opinion, the greatest survival game out there right now. I'm stoked you guys keep working on refining the game. I look forward to each and every update. Now on to my question. As with everything in Survival mode, it's about a mixture of game balance and realism, and your goal of surviving for survival's sake. One thing that currently strikes me as 'missing' from this mode is, in mine and many other's opinions is the lack of a 'late game.' (Sorry if this has been addressed before, I searched and did not find anything addressing my specific concern.) For a brief example, we have the early game where you have nothing and are struggling to make it by day by day, and you have the mid-game where you've collected all the tools and clothing necessary and are fully self-sustainable, or have the means to craft or hunt or fish or gather whatever it may be that you need to continue surviving. But there's no late game. Yes, the temperature decays globally to a certain point, and decay rates are a continual march to death, but the path to that end is in the thousands of days. For as long as I've been playing and as long as I've been interacting with the community on Steam and elsewhere, I've yet to see a meaningful challenge later on in the game. The challenge early on is collecting gear just to make it a few more hours. The challenge in the mid game is getting used to managing your time and resources carefully to survive off of what is available in the world now that the processed goods are running out. But there's no further challenge from that, nothing else that changes or tips the balance in any way that would create an immersive or meaningful challenge to continue to engage players in risk/reward and survival aspects. Obviously, we all have our own ideas of what would begin to create a meaningful, balanced, and immersive late game challenge or set of changes to the world to create more variability and risk, but I wanted to hear from you on your thoughts on the subject. Do you currently feel across all stock survival modes that the later portions of a run (100-200 days and beyond) are well balanced and MEANINGFULLY challenging? This may be anecdotal, but I know a lot of people who finish or end a run after getting self-sustainable because that's the 'engaging' or 'immersive' part of the run, and there's no more fun to be had after that as it's too easy (regardless of experience mode.) Do you have any thoughts on changing up how the world handles having the player in it, things that could be adjusted and tuned to start to turn those longer runs more dangerous, more progressively difficult, to a point it's still possible to survive but not skating on thick ice with ease? Do you currently feel that there is no point to a later game challenge or think that it is challenging enough from self-sustainability forward? If you do think that more work needs to be done there, (it may be too early to ask,) do you or the team have any ideas and mechanic introductions or re-tuning in mind to pursue towards achieving a more equally balanced gameplay that's engaging and immersive and 'surviving for the sake of surviving' at all points in a run? Thanks for all consideration, and sorry for the wall of text. Cheers Raph! -Lonelywolf