Gwynren

YES please 😂

Wow. Just wow. I finished the very first chapter of Episode 3 tonight and it already feels so much better than the first two - so far, the story and interactions are much more streamlined and logical, and the emotional impact from even the smallest things so much greater. It's like the story mode has matured into actually being good, which makes me very excited. Really grateful that I got past the, ahem, hurdles to arrive here 😊Thanks so much for the encouragement, y'all!

Update: IT'S DONE! Ugh. For those who don't care about spoiling it and cheating the absolute heck out of it, this walkthrough below got me through it step by step.

YES! I totally agree with your rant, funnily enough I basically wrote the same thing earlier today (see below). That whole mission made me quit Wintermute more than once, and I still haven't finished the story to date because of it, although am trying again. One thing is having a difficult challenge, another thing is designing it well for various levels of player skill and experience.

Same!! I play this game to relax and escape; I have anxiety and am very jumpy so I don't seek out the experience of being jumped by aggressive wildlife, despite that being a core part of TLD for many! If I play with aggressive wildlife, I get palpitations immediately, it's not healthy.

Haha you guys, I returned to Wintermute last week and started from the beginning (because it has now been so long since I started the story, I'd forgotten many of the finer details), and am now up to the last radio tower. I'll update you on my progress! This time, I am determined to get through the cave and finish episode 2, and I will shamelessly use that YouTube tutorial to do that: thank you @Glflegolasfor posting it! Already, I am finding it much easier to do the struggles now that I've had more experience with them, and also because I've set my mouse to 'click and hold'; in fact, I only died twice at the previous tower! Timing the spear is still annoying, but becoming more doable. All that said, I still think this part of story mode is incredibly weak and doesn't gel with the rest of the TLD story mode experience to date. What's especially bad is the tediously long cutscene with all the screaming and mauling that cannot be skipped. In my opinion, it's a lapse of judgement and poor story design - to not expect at least a fraction of the players to die in the attack repeatedly, to the point where they will get sick of watching that scene over and over. I know I'm not alone in this, I have Google 😁 To touch on some points raised earlier before this thread became a hunting discussion (not dignifying the bit about age, I'm afraid to even ask what Stinky meant by 'elderly' given I'm a couple of decades younger than @Leeanda...), yes, this bear part is not difficult for some, and extremely difficult for others. All of that comes down to not just the possession or lack of gamer reflexes, but also what kinds of games the player has experience with. For example, I didn't even know what type of encounter the cave part is until I read somewhere that it's a stealth thing. I've never played a stealth game. I've never played a FPS. Someone who has played a lot of both may likely find this 'boss fight' a cakewalk, but we know that TLD has a pretty diverse player base, and not all of us have been trained by games in the above genres to successfully beat this challenge. The difficulty of the encounter is entirely subjective, but from a game design perspective, it seems to only work and appeal to a certain type of gamer, which only represents a subsection of the people who gravitate towards TLD. I don't know how much harder it might be in other difficulties, but in Green Survivor mode it just comes across as shockingly tough and out of line with the rest of it. However, they've already done a Redux on the first two eps, so we can hardly expect that to ever change. I just hope the next two episodes are worth this nonsense, for me 😁

What a lovely contribution! Thank you so much for sharing with the TLD community I particularly enjoyed the Boy Gone North parts (okay so I didn't fully understand the part where he was out cold for long enough for the apocalypse to set in and seasons change, but the rest was fantastic).

So, here's a funny update. Turns out I had completed all three radio tower encounters before I quit playing story mode for months and months... I just logged back in only to discover that. Of course, now Every good feeling I have about TLD based on my love of survival mode has been utterly crushed by this section of Episode Two. At the very least, we should be able to skip the gruesome cutscene after having to experience it dozens of times? I can't be alone here... And yet, I really want to learn what else the story holds for us! Ughhhhhhh.

I have managed to defeat the bear a few times, so I know the general principles of how to do it... but there are so many individual struggles to get through, and my timing is just poor a lot of the time, I don't have good 'gamer reflexes'. Then, once you fail to time the spear, you have to watch that entire mauling scene, and then respawn, and then go again, so I just got utterly sick of it. I have unfortunately gathered spoilers that , but it's just so tiresome to keep dying 😅

I replied 'yes', but I meant the in-game charcoal map you unlock yourself, which I generally really like and find super useful. Plus, I'm going for Faithful Cartographer so I'm charcoal mapping errryything in my current survival save. Not sure I would be using the map much once I've learned the locations - I find that once I'm revisiting an area I already know decently well, I just use landmarks. I have only used a community map on a single instance when I got really confused about a particular aspect of a place I was re-visiting in Ash Canyon. Otherwise, I treat community maps as spoilers!

Last August, I got back into TLD after a very long break, and finally got to experience Wintermute. I loved the game back in beta and it was fun to revisit it with a full, immersive story mode... until I got to collecting radio parts. I play with passive wildlife, so I'm not at all adept at animal struggles... after at least 20-30 times, I simply gave up, and switched to sandbox mode instead, which I have been loving (currently 70% into a Faithful Cartographer attempt). However, there's still that niggling feeling that I didn't get to finish the first three episodes of the story! Plus, it can be really tricky to read about the game online and have to dodge story mode spoilers. I've read all the tips about frame rates and mouse buttons and all that, and I can probably beat this thing if I keep trying...? Looking for encouragement from the community here, please tell me it's worth to go back and finish the episode, so I can move forward with the story 🙃