starlin

I think its even more rude that you misquoted me

I use them heavily to make arrow trails and short cuts, so I can quickly navigate to safety in a blizzard/fog. And to mark stupid quirks of terrain that aren't immediately obvious..... like when theres a steep foot trail that doesn't look like a foot trail, and its more dangerous cousin "what looks like a gentle slope down, but then turns into 4 minutes of steep hillside that gives you sprains if you try to goat down too fast....and had you only gone like 10 meters to the right, you would had found the real trail down".

I can tell you my shortest run.... a Day and a half. Cause of death, Hypothermia and Exhaustion because I'm an idiot that got stuck in a blizzard with no matches, and no sense of direction. On Voyager. Second try.... First try would had been the same thing if I hadn't given up because the blizzard I started in wasn't letting up. So 3rd try is now my longest at 213 days, 3 bear maulings, and countless wolf attacks......

Whats he gonna do? Nibble our bums?

A. But you're imposing that rule set on yourself B. Do you think the feats are important/critical to what you're doing? C. Regardless of B, you can still function without them D. Your last line just reinforces why the Challenges and Achievements exist in the first place. See, the thing that I'm complaining about is this inevitable circular argument about effort and rewards, and the sheer amount of external systems layered over the core game play, to feed this growing OCD for metrics and validation. And much of it runs in parallel with the same traps social media uses to drive people to use it, because operates on similar principles. The circular argument happens because players expect "rewards" on top of "success" for their actions. Back in the old days, it used to be pretty unimportant things (like points and high scores) which acts as proof of your accomplishment, but doesn't affect the game in any meaningful way. Come 2008ish, and we're knee deep in the RPG Lite era of games.... where everything has a leveling system for the sake of having a leveling system. And tied to a lot of that is a power progression system of varying degrees; ranging from functional to borderline incompetent. Fast forward a couple years, and you start to see the popularization of custom hard modes in a number of more fringe games. Some, like Demon Souls, have that scaling baked into how the gear works. Other games, like Bastion, managed it by selectively altering game rules. Models like the one Bastion uses incentivizes the difficulty by multiplying parts of the reward system..... higher payouts, more exp, etc. Over the next decade we've seen a rapid shift from a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, to almost entirely extrinsic rewards at the core of almost every non-experimental game. And this kind of wouldn't be too big of a problem..... if it wasn't for the fact that custom difficulty got super popular, but the acceptance of lesser rewards was not. Even the collectathons started getting roped into this problem, because people now believe there should be some "meaningful" reward for having done it. And among the most egregious are the milestone rewards.... because designing stuff around them can snowball very quickly in either direction, based on a myriad of other design factors at any given time. This isn't the only thing in play here though. I keep mentioning metrics, because thats another part of the circle. Humans tend to not like leaving things unfinished. Which exactly the thing that a lot of Achievement tracking and notifications directly trigger. On the more innocent side, its there to make the player aware these things exist, and can peruse them if they wish. The more sinister side is that high frequency of notifications and milestones has a tendency to pull their attention in that direction. A knock on effect of higher frequency is a keen awareness of the amount of unfinished stuff going on in parallel; and has been known to create anxiety because its too many things at the forefront at the same time. Lower frequencies allow more passive accumulation outside of the player's awareness bubble, and the notification of a milestone comes as a nice surprise. Unfortunately, on the flip side of that is active pursuit comes off as frustrating, because the player doesn't think fast enough progress is being made due to the time scales involved. The third part of this is the Meta game. So you have a reward system that gives perks or power, which are then incorporated into BiS and Optimization strategies. But the progression system prevents you from having it at the onset; so a secondary meta grows with the goal of optimizing a path to obtaining those rewards. Thus the entire progression model, and the tracking system used to understand it, is considered an obstacle to optimal play. And its THIS is what makes the circle so damn infuriating when trying to design a game system. If the effort cost is too low, players think its too easy, and the rewards are devalued on either a psychological or economic level (depending on what kind of game you have). Make it too hard, and the player thinks the Devs are being cruel for the sake their twisted sadistic personalities (which is only true in like maybe 10% of them). Thread the needle correctly, and then players will complain about how theres not enough of whatever to keep them motivated. Put too much stuff in, and then players feel like theres not enough time in the world, and this is just grind to pad the game out. Actually do pad the game out, and the players think the rewards aren't meaningful. Tighten that down to fewer, but higher impact things that are harder to obtain, and you run into a problem of the player having the assumption of "attainability" (the list is small after all). Which then loops back around to "game being too difficult", uses the left lane to pass "grinding", and has a head on collision with a truck marked "unfinished achievement", and was all kicked off because "Meta Game" called you a Chicken for following the speed limit.

Theres huge blind spot I've noticed throughout the whole conversation...... Why do people even want the Feats in the first place? This sits at the crux at all the other decisions that surround it. Theres a pretty argument to be made that they exist more or less for the "progression" that wanna feel like things they HAVE contribute to their improvement. But I've long been of the opposing position that Progression and Perks have effectively muddled the concept of Player skill, to the point that it completely dominates any related conversation about game design. And as a quick sidebar, there is clear evidence that the vast majority of players, across nearly all games, have this deeply rooted assumption that rewards should be meaningful and earned. But when put into practice, those players will optimize out the "earning" part of process, and maximize rewards. Whats kind of mind blowing is that this reward could literally be anything, but its perceived value is derived not from any realistic advantage, but the player being convinced it does. Which is why cosmetics drive this behavior so much more fervently, because theres little to no quantifiable objective advantage to ground it in the power scale. I played a lot of Guildwars 2 (aka Fashion wars), and this phenomenon was absolutely fascinating to watch between the chat and forums. The history of the gear tiers alone is a bountiful case study into the Achievement based mindset. Which brings us back to Feats in LD. Part of the problem is that they are straight up advantages designed to make aspects of the game easier. Normally stuff like this in modern RPGs would come at a trade off of some kind, or paired with a flaws table to point balance it out. This is known as difficulty shifting; and, with enough foresight, can collectively increase or decrease the overall difficulty on a playstyle level. Thus players see it as vertical progression. When I first started out, the feats looked very interesting..... but after spending time in the game, and specifically working toward some, I can already understand why players don't understand why its setup this way. The mere fact that its cumulative across all play throughs means its serving triple duty to be a thing for the Achievement people who more or less need constant direction for their activities. Surviving the most optimal way lands up being very risk adverse. And what the Feats are laying out is a mechanical incentive to take risks, and hopefully die in the process. And the feats themselves applying specifically at Sandbox start up is how you convince the player that dying in the last playthrough wasn't a write off. See, the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize Feats actually hurt the game on a small, but fundamental level. To some extent, the skill leveling does this as well, because of how seasoned players begin to cheese it in order to minimize the "hardship" phase, and get back into their previous survival groove. If you pay close attention to how the difficulties are tuned, a lot of comes from the sheer performance gap between many skills below lvl 5. Once level 5 is achieved, the survival as scavenger aspect is largely side lined, and much of that focus shifted to this game's version of industrialization. Farming Food, Farming resources, Processing and Restoring tools, building infrastructure and optimizing movement around the map. Once at that level, you're effectively riding on not making a stupid decision. And Feats essentially get you there faster. So people feel a compulsion to grind them out, as this has the same conceptual profile of what gamers are convinced "end game" looks like. IE: Things being easier when they started out hard means "I'm getting stronger" (progression), and those obstacles were just a contrivance created to measure my strength. The ultimate irony that games get easier further up the progression line, despite being functionally impossible not long ago, is conflated as growth and improvement. Where as if the game didn't have these artificial barriers, but had difficulty based entirely on player knowledge, mechanical understanding, and practice of execution.... that game is deemed "too easy" or "too hard" based almost entirely player's performance ceiling. THIS is why people talk about the Soul's series they way they do. Because in those games, Player knowledge and control proficiency directly translates into performance. Instead HL went with the skill levels in order to make the game more accessible to more players. But the down shot of that is it trivializes the purpose of the early game phase to Seasoned player, because each advantage gained as skill levels cross thresholds changes how they play. Thus early game is considered something of an inconvenience to getting back to your previous state, as the static maps don't create a need to rethink how you go about playing. And I understand pretty good how that division was supposed to switch the player between scavenger (early game) to hunter (late game). Which is why I think interloper got added later, and is so drastically different from the other difficulties, because a bunch of players got way too efficient at the standard modes.

But that would require a lot of animation work. I think its more fun to have more frequent Auroras and have animal aggression carry over into the next day. Or have Old Bear wandering the map. Or knock out a long time wishlist item, the Cougar. Whenever it gets foggy out, you can hear Grey Mother whispering at you from the mist.

Step 1. Kill Moose. Step 2. Yay skin for moose bag Step 3. Look up and see bear while holding a bunch of moose meat Step 4. PANIC!!!!! Step 5. One Shot Bear with Rifle. Step 5.2. Change pants

All keep in mind that Moose is a super rare spawn, and kind of move between regions on the backend logic. So you have to either camp an active spawn point (marked by scraped tree bark) for days or weeks on end...... or just get super lucky. I've seen 3 so far.... and always caught me off guard. Manged to come back and murder all of them before they disappeared...... and 2 of those times it had a bear come in to back it up. The one I ran into at the gas station was a trifecta of everything that could kill you all coming at the same time. Moose on one side, Bear on the other, the place crawling with wolves.... and a blizzard decides to say hello. Wolf gets wind of me, and I botch the arrow shot as it charges me. So I'm now I'm bleeding on top of all that, and the other wolves are trotting over to check out the smell. Cost me 2 revolver rounds to scatter the wolves, so I could make a break for the garage. So you bet your butts after the storm cleared, I was intent on killing everything still there. Wolves and the Bear was gone, so I put all of my revenge work to lure the moose to the pumps.... and I screwed up the AI, so it started running away to the shoreline... where the wolves go when not at the gas station. Eventually it came back, and finally took it down with a 3 arrows to the head. DO NOT underestimate how much of a pain they are.

If we care about what the wiki says, it claims Bear and Moose have agreed to quietly disregard each other's existence... but left in a stipulation to tag team a human if they ever discovered one.

I saw a thing not long ago about how people's favorite seasons tend to be opposite of whatever region they're from sees the most. And that goes for weather in general. The change of pace is highly desirable. Think about it. Summer in Nevada is miserable..... its hot, theres nothing to do, any place worth going to escape it will be crowded as hell. Britain is humid when warm, foggy when cold, hardly any sunlight. Australasia is either hot as balls, or cold as balls, sometimes at the same time.... and usually the opposite of what the rest of the world complains about year round. You live along the equator, Winter and Snow seems like this myth other places make up to try and sell vacation packages. I grew up in tropical weather. Muggy, Sunny, lots of blood sucking insects, and winter is this nice time of year where I'm not constantly sweating, cooked from UV exposure, or dying of heat exhaustion. So imagine my brain trying to comprehend seeing snow for the first time, during a trip up to the north to Boston for work. I chased like 3 Squirrels that week.

Alaska doesn't have a Summer season. Its just a single summer day that lasts 4 months.

Survivor Shepard or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blizzard

I wanna see an Elk. Just to put a twist on the formula, they'd challenge you if you get too close (ala moose behavior), rather then automatically run. It would cover that gap between deer and predators, where they are common enough to be more attentive of them, but not significantly more dangerous then wolf. Definitely have the biggest impact on bow hunting before lvl 5. Would also be interesting to see an Elk get dicey with a wolf pack before it gets taken down. Helps drive home they are a tougher prey animal.

You don't........