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Vib Rib posted:At some point into story progression I hit a point where I just don't care about anything but beelining the rest of the story content because that's what everything focuses on and I've already long-since become self-sufficient, but it turns out that point is like, 25% of the way into the story. That's largely the problem in situations like this, because once you figure out how to survive sustainably you've basically beaten a survival game. Then it becomes a question of endgame where you are dumping loads of resources into high tier stuff to achieve some objective. Some games get around it by making automation of survival a lot harder (such as how Don't Starve doesnt have a lot of continually cycling renewable resources), or raising the bar of what you need continuously (like Card Survival's isolation stat), but at some point the game is largely over and it turns into a normal open world game with some unusually complex inventory mechanics. But if that point happens at the 25% mark, like you said, then it isn't actually a survival game. It's just whatever 3/4 of the game is with a somewhat tricky tutorial.
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Oct 4, 2023 13:41
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Vib Rib posted:Raft is such a weird goddamn game to me. I love the early game where you're trying to survive, and getting things like water purification, fishing up food, etc. But then after several hours of sort of sandboxy survival it takes a hard turn and decides to be an extremely drawn out story-driven experience where you just wander around enormous islands, away from your raft, reading notes and audiologs of characters I don't care about. It's kind of amazing how long it takes to get through all that. Green Hell is also exactly this, unfortunately. And so is The Long Dark. It seems to be a hard balance for devs to pull off. Subnautica is probably my go-to example for survival/crafting games that keep you exploring and building throughout the entire storyline. You stop caring about food and water very early in the game, but you're still motivated to do other gameplay-oriented things up until the very end. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 14:26
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BreathsEdge had a similar problem. It starts out as 'Subnautica in Space' then got really linear towards the end.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:42
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Tiny Timbs posted:Green Hell is also exactly this, unfortunately. And so is The Long Dark. It seems to be a hard balance for devs to pull off. To a point imo. I personally ended up cheating my way to the end once I got to a certain point because I had reached the pinnacle of technology and then the game wanted me to stockpile a load of stuff and spend a lot of time very slowly moving through deep caverns to find the story points. I played legit for a while til I painstakingly went to a deep water alien structure where the front door literally went "You need the BLUE key to progress" like we were playing Doom and then went "gently caress it" and just started spawning items in with the debug menu. There wasn't really a puzzle left to solve, it was just whether I wanted to spend hours doing it "right".
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Oct 4, 2023 14:47
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Tiny Timbs posted:Green Hell is also exactly this, unfortunately. And so is The Long Dark. It seems to be a hard balance for devs to pull off.
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Oct 4, 2023 15:00
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I don't necessarily dislike the "nothing going on" of early Raft for the reason I like Voidtrain, because I'm a sucker for both boats and trains. Raft just has the problem of wanting a chill out and build Co op game AND a hard survival game so they had to put in sharks that will just come and eat the poo poo you have been scrounging together for an hour because otherwise it would feel too relaxed. Voidtrain has this in some sense with the mines if you aren't careful but it isn't as egregious, and at least there you get a gun because it more knows what it wants to be.
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Oct 4, 2023 15:44
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CuddleCryptid posted:I don't necessarily dislike the "nothing going on" of early Raft for the reason I like Voidtrain, because I'm a sucker for both boats and trains. Raft just has the problem of wanting a chill out and build Co op game AND a hard survival game so they had to put in sharks that will just come and eat the poo poo you have been scrounging together for an hour because otherwise it would feel too relaxed. Voidtrain has this in some sense with the mines if you aren't careful but it isn't as egregious, and at least there you get a gun because it more knows what it wants to be. I mean the trick is that Raft doesn't ever really want to be a chill out game until the end. Raft is a game about chores. until pretty late in the game you've got a fairly long list of chores (check the nets, refill water, start some food cooking, water plants, cut down trees, check the radar, trim the sails), and the sharks and seagulls both exist as a way to throw a monkeywrench into your routine. it also makes any raft expansion a calculated risk. a wider raft makes it less likely that you can get to a shark before they break off a piece of raft, and a taller raft makes it harder to get from the bottom floor to the top before a crop is eaten/your scarecrow is beheaded. I wouldn't hate a version of raft that didn't have that friction, but needing to disengage with whatever task I was on and go stab a shark/gull tingled my brain just right so I never hated it. I played like 3 hours of void train when it first came into early access and I regret every second of it. it's like they didn't understand why raft pushes you away from relying on the hook to fish up materials
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Oct 4, 2023 16:37
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egg tats posted:
I don't know how it was at launch (although I don't think it launched that long ago) but you get a pretty big amount of resources at the mandatory stop outposts so it's not *too* bad. Later on being able to break down chunks of coal you find floating around helps with the wood problem as well. I'd say it's pretty efficient if it wasn't for my hook bugging out every third shot. I get the idea of Raft being a chore game, and that's certainly a way to run this kind of stuff, I just found shark bashing more tedious than engaging. Especially since if you don't get on it immediately it can often tank enough damage to just blow things up anyways. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 16:43
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When I played Voidtrain, it didn't have any kind of passive resource generation the way Raft does with its nets, and from what I hear they never changed that. You do get a handheld hook at some point (you know, like Raft starts you with), but you will spend the entire game drifting around your train grabbing single units of resources.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:20
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egg tats posted:I mean the trick is that Raft doesn't ever really want to be a chill out game until the end. Raft is a game about chores. until pretty late in the game you've got a fairly long list of chores (check the nets, refill water, start some food cooking, water plants, cut down trees, check the radar, trim the sails), and the sharks and seagulls both exist as a way to throw a monkeywrench into your routine. it also makes any raft expansion a calculated risk. a wider raft makes it less likely that you can get to a shark before they break off a piece of raft, and a taller raft makes it harder to get from the bottom floor to the top before a crop is eaten/your scarecrow is beheaded. The version of raft that doesn't have that friction is the version where you build scarecrows and build reinforced tiles at the edges of your boat. The birds will damage the default scarecrow but it has more health than a plant and can survive multiple attacks, and you can build many, birds cannot attack any plants within range of an intact scarecrow. The upgraded scarecrow (I want to say the blueprint is at bear island but it could be at the trailer park tower island) is indestructible. Also you can alternate empty spaces and reinforced tiles at the edge of the boat, as the shark can't bite in a 1 wide gap and can only bite exterior tiles. He'll still hang around, but he won't be able to hit the boat. If you make the boat large enough (40 or so tiles wide) he tries to patrol the whole thing but his patrol is slow so you're basically always safe. E: you can also build the bird nest using a clam shell, then sneak up and murder the birds. They take about a half day to return, plus free feathers!
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Oct 4, 2023 20:24
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Voitrain sounded really interesting but people here are complaining which makes me wary. I actually found grabbing things with the hook really relaxing.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:45
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Panfilo posted:Voitrain sounded really interesting but people here are complaining which makes me wary. I actually found grabbing things with the hook really relaxing. The determining factor for me was watching someone do research in the game. It was at that moment I thought to myself: no. Harvesting resources by hand. Okay, we’ve all been there. Tiny storage chests? This is looking a bit annoying but surely he’ll unlock larger chests soon. You unlock them when? You have to research everything before then first? They add how many slots? And then they added researchable decorations and I saw hell. Imagine handcrafting all the components that go into Factorio science, one step at a time manually. You only have to make one set, but that only unlocks the tech, you have to dive back in grab and process components to make more. There’s no automation besides putting in more fuel/parts so your benches work longer. It was just a ton of tiny tasks, and you never got to look at the big picture. The streamer was enjoying it, but that grind I saw was after offstream grind. If you watch a video with a dedicated late-game research episode and you don’t mind, then more power to you. It wasn’t helped by early access meaning a lot of new recipes were dumped instead of spread out naturally. It’s issues, if they’re your issues, aren’t really hidden once you see play further up the tree.
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Oct 5, 2023 04:41
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I think the tricky thing is that too much automation and the player ends up with very little input which itself can be boring unless there's a ton of other things you can be doing with your time. Too much manual input and yeah, it can feel like a bit of a chore I guess. How is the gameplay loop? Drive train, stop to get rocks, make more train cars? That's my mental image of it.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:07
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Panfilo posted:I think the tricky thing is that too much automation and the player ends up with very little input which itself can be boring unless there's a ton of other things you can be doing with your time. Too much manual input and yeah, it can feel like a bit of a chore I guess. Basically it's drive train through void while jumping off to grab resources til you tech into a hookshot in an hour or two. Each section is of finite length and ends with you being teleported back to a terminal with some boxes you can loot for resources, a train modification system, and a guarded area where you can optionally shoot enemies to get more loot boxes/recyclable materials/ gun parts. Occasionally you'll get fed a new system as you complete the loop. It can take a bit to get resources if you need a lot of them but there doesn't seem to be any penalty to just continually looping at max speed and you can quickly jump off to get boxes in between runs. I don't really mind having to scrounge resources since that's kind of what the game is. Automating it a lot would just trivialize the whole thing and reduce a lot of the gameplay to just shooting space sharks. You also have a small amount of breaks in the resource gathering game; fat is something you can only rarely get from monsters and drops but once you unlock the lab you can just make it fairly cheaply and it can be used for building machines or just a straight fuel source if you're desperate. The biggest problem I have with the resource management system right now is that making a new building involves putting the resources to build it into the research table, and then having to put all those resources together a second time to actually build the unit. It's not bad if it's a simple thing but if it's something expensive it's pretty annoying to have to do it twice.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:33
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:The version of raft that doesn't have that friction is the version where you build scarecrows and build reinforced tiles at the edges of your boat. The birds will damage the default scarecrow but it has more health than a plant and can survive multiple attacks, and you can build many, birds cannot attack any plants within range of an intact scarecrow. The upgraded scarecrow (I want to say the blueprint is at bear island but it could be at the trailer park tower island) is indestructible. IIRC the forever scarecrow is from the shops, so bear island is the first place you can get one, but I think for my group it was another few before we wound up buying it And yeah, by the end of Raft, you've got an indestructible fortress and tools that last practically forever, while an entire farm runs itself without your input, but since it takes so long to get there it's (for me at least) deeply satisfying to finally be able to start decorating your raft or just sitting and watching the water for a bit without any interruptions. To me, the driving force of raft isn't to see the end of the story, it's to get more and more doodads to make your life easier. or more stuff to decorate your raft. My group played through Grounded after Raft and the decoration options in grounded are really disappointing in comparison. One of the richest red dyes in the world is derived from beetle shells, how were we not allowed to paint our walls you hacks (our base looked pretty cool actually but like in raft we all made completely personalized bedrooms and in Grounded we didn't even bother. we just had like 2 rooms, one with all the crafting and storage and the other with all of the furniture)
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Oct 5, 2023 17:59
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egg tats posted:IIRC the forever scarecrow is from the shops, so bear island is the first place you can get one, but I think for my group it was another few before we wound up buying it I think you're right about the scarecrow. Just for context here's some pics of my most recent endgame raft. This was a 3 person playthrough with my buddy and I supporting our friend who had never played before. Spoilered because we're at the last island, have all the best stuff, and there's a boss trophy prominently on deck, but it gives a good idea of what's possible. It's not useful to grow a raft to this size, hence all the empty space, but once you have that many nets your choices are to grow the raft to support the ongoing growth of the raft, or to start hurling planks into the sea.  From here you can see the tree farm, the navigation tower so you can see all edges of the boat, and the leafy bungalow in the back.  This is the reinforced net pattern I was talking about earlier, the shark can't do poo poo here.  String lights can go underwater  Useful for night diving and night shark-seeing. Here's two gallery links to all the screenshots I took. https://imgur.com/a/uWyu18T https://imgur.com/a/TYgF2qa If anyone wants to play the game for the first time I'd be happy to hop on for a couple hours and get you up and running at least to the point of having a raft core the shark can't attack that you can build off of, and my friend may be down as well depending on the time (he's in Tokyo). If you don't know what you're doing the first 30 or so minutes are generally spent dying over and over again until you're able to determine how not to do that, and we can skip all that for you. Also if anyone wants to hop into the raft above with me, we can wander off into the open ocean and build a colossal yacht in defiance of God and reason until the framerate tanks. Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 21:48
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Decided to go ahead and get voitrain. It's OK. Controls feel weirdly counterintuitive (I'm playing on Steam deck, and some menus have you use ganepad, left analog stick, or trigger buttons.) The research method is certainly familiar though at least in raft you only have to put in one component for it to help unlock everything that needs it. Being able to freely stop and even reverse is a step up from raft where you had to tech up to just being able to freely stop or maneuver. No Bruce nipping at my ankles (yet). Can you not eat organic matter directly? I'm not seeing a control input to consume organic matter.
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Oct 5, 2023 22:21
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When I played Voidtrain all research was linear. Every research project came one after another and you couldn't pick what to research, just keep going down the line. I guess that's thematically appropriate to a train themed game but it was really frustrating to have to research a bunch of poo poo I didn't care about and constantly hope the next project would upgrade my expensive chests from 3 to 5 slots.
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Oct 5, 2023 23:23
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One of the main things dragging Voidtrain down is absolutely the storage— it’s so hilariously tiny and stacks are so small that you never feel like you’re able to get a decent backstock of anything. And chests both aren’t easy to make and take up precious limited space on your train. It’s a solid concept but its buried under a ton of bad ideas.
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Oct 5, 2023 23:29
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egg tats posted:I mean the trick is that Raft doesn't ever really want to be a chill out game until the end. Raft is a game about chores. until pretty late in the game you've got a fairly long list of chores (check the nets, refill water, start some food cooking, water plants, cut down trees, check the radar, trim the sails), and the sharks and seagulls both exist as a way to throw a monkeywrench into your routine. it also makes any raft expansion a calculated risk. a wider raft makes it less likely that you can get to a shark before they break off a piece of raft, and a taller raft makes it harder to get from the bottom floor to the top before a crop is eaten/your scarecrow is beheaded. Early game Raft there's def way more chores, but you can also do a lot to mitigate those chores, including your main complains of shark and seagull. Seagulls are easy, just make an enclosed room to set your crops up in, they don't need sunlight to grow after all, just water. And they don't attack tree saplings so you can just put those outside or on a roof you don't plan on expanding on top of. If you want seagulls for feather and meat, you can just have a shoe or two near areas you're around and if the mood strikes you stab the constant stream of gulls coming to stab at a potato shoe. imo Tall rafts are better because at a certain point you can just armor all the outer raft bits, and if you plan on any expansions you'll probably have the resources to armor those bits too. That, or just make a big nothing are that you don't really care about the shark munching on. Ironically I think the livestock are the bit where it's an unavoidable chore, you need a lot of grass and to keep that poo poo watered constantly so your stock doesn't get sad or die. Even then I still consider Raft a very zen experience.
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Oct 6, 2023 00:54
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Bussamove posted:One of the main things dragging Voidtrain down is absolutely the storage— it’s so hilariously tiny and stacks are so small that you never feel like you’re able to get a decent backstock of anything. And chests both aren’t easy to make and take up precious limited space on your train. Another thing I'm struggling with is the crafting tables themselves don't really have storage (and I have a feeling in never gonna have a glut of fuel to dump in there). So your inventory is full and you make a spring, you can't grab it nor can you make anything else until you make room. Games like 7D2D had rather generous storage on their benches in comparison; you could queue up hundreds of nails/bullets/whatever. I've played other games with tight inventory and one thing that balanced it was that the game would draw from nearby inventory or dropped items on the ground. While your base would become rather gooncave like in clutter you spent way less time fussing with items- just dump em in a pile and build stuff nearby.
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Oct 6, 2023 01:05
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A Cool Video Game Too posted:Ironically I think the livestock are the bit where it's an unavoidable chore, you need a lot of grass and to keep that poo poo watered constantly so your stock doesn't get sad or die.  You can automate grass watering now, those showerhead looking things connect via pipe to a central water storage and automated collector.
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Oct 6, 2023 01:17
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:
I hadn't gotten that far yet, hell yeah.
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Oct 6, 2023 01:36
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:
gently caress yeah goat jail. The single biggest turning point in Raft is when you get a solar still and water finally stops eating into your planks and your stills hold more than a single cup. Raft is awesome but you have to enjoy the story/exploration sections. There's still a great time to be had with slowly eliminating the survival chores and building a sick raft, but yeah there's a lot more questing than most survival games, and it's mandatory for the tech upgrades.
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Oct 6, 2023 01:59
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I feel like I've had the opposite experience with Voidtrain because I finally put in a steam engine last night and found it to be actually pretty lame. You can absolutely fly through the levels *so long as you have the resources to support it*, and it burns ice and fuel way faster than I expected it to. I think that unlocking the ability to make charcoal will help but it's still a letdown. It would make more sense if the hand trolly system was harder but you generally could just pump the handle a few times and then cruise continuously at a moderate speed without really touching it again.
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Oct 6, 2023 16:43
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Double posting because of new topic Is there a consensus whether playing Don't Starve on DS or DST is better for solo play? DS is still being somewhat developed but DST seems like it has way more content and updates. But I'm not sure if the new stuff is balanced around group play and it'll be a terror to do solo. I think the advice a while back was DS was better for solo but there have been a lot of updates between now and then. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Oct 8, 2023 |
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Oct 8, 2023 14:32
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There's a mod for dst that alters monster hp according to the number of players. Dst is dst, it has some stuff not in the base game, yes. Not a whole lot though imo. I have played dst with my friends regularly for like ten years at this point. Don't starve with reign of the Giants has stuff like adventure mode and glommer that are not in dst. You can also find all of the bits of the machine and transmigrate to a new world. There's more stuff in the caves in don't starve that is not in dst. You can also move to Hamlet or shipwrecked worlds in single player. I wouldn't consider that much of a benefit though, shipwrecked is bullshit hard. Hamlet is ok but I never got into it. I'd do single player don't starve with reign of the Giants.
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Oct 8, 2023 15:33
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Thanks, I'll keep with DS then. I like the better UI of DST but if it's just a different game rather than "DS but they kept patching it" then that's fine. I have all the DS DLC so I've made a survival one with hamlet compatibility just for the mechanics to get synced in but I don't plan on jumping to new worlds. RoG stuff is wrapped up in SW and Hamlet iirc so it'll work out. I was thinking about the extra characters that are in DST but that presupposes I'm not just a lazy gently caress that is going to run Wilson for the 89th time.
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Oct 8, 2023 21:32
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Fishing in Graveyard Keeper is the worst fishing game i've played, and 99% of games that have a fishing mini game, have bad ones. Someday someones going to realize that making a fishing mini game that isn't the same bobber moving up and down with horrible controls is not the best way to do it.
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Oct 9, 2023 06:16
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Bussamove posted:One of the main things dragging Voidtrain down is absolutely the storage— it’s so hilariously tiny and stacks are so small that you never feel like you’re able to get a decent backstock of anything. And chests both aren’t easy to make and take up precious limited space on your train. Hey now, trains are famously bad at moving large quantities of goods.
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Oct 9, 2023 06:20
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redreader posted:There's a mod for dst that alters monster hp according to the number of players. I don't really think Shipwrecked is that hard (though I might be biased because I love a good tropical island setting), but if you're moving between worlds then a lot of the difficulty is further alleviated because it solves the two main problems you face right there: you can avoid the general resource scarcity of the early game by looting the other worlds, and avoid the volcano eruptions by just staying in another world during the entirety of Dry season.
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Oct 9, 2023 14:09
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Reinstalling the mods for Don't Starve, and after a few rough starts I just enabled the setting to have the map revealed at the start. It's entirely a cheat but I'm tired of circumnavigation of the map before starting to actually build things up. And I'm glad I did in this case because turns out I only had 2 buffalo on the whole map twistedmentat posted:Fishing in Graveyard Keeper is the worst fishing game i've played, and 99% of games that have a fishing mini game, have bad ones. There are actual fishing games that aren't that far off from that; the biggest play in generally finding the fish and baiting it to bite rather than the reel mechanics. It can be done but it would be annoying for a game like that if you had to figure out a large environment-based system just to maybe catch a fish
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Oct 9, 2023 15:44
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CuddleCryptid posted:figure out a large environment-based system just to maybe catch a fish They have a term for this behavior. It’s called fishing 
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Oct 9, 2023 15:59
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I wish there was a fishing minigame that actually had a passing resemblance to real world fishing. You can't tell me that you can't make a fly fishing or spinner fishing minigame.
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Oct 9, 2023 16:01
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Anime Store Adventure posted:They have a term for this behavior. It’s called fishing Sure, but more my point is that expecting to go through a fifteen point tutorial to catch a fish is a big ask unless you're making a real grognard survival game. I wouldn't turn my nose up at it but it's a hard sell, as Vintage Story can attest.
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Oct 9, 2023 16:15
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I gotcha, I was just being a troll more than anything. I would dig a fishing game that was more like real fishing, but I’m not sure it would make a good game. More about time of day, weather, location, etc, and then things like setting the hook. Those parts always struck me as more the finesse of fishing, also things like jigging if you’re doing that style of fishing. It’s funny that fishing games focus on casting and reeling mechanically when those are probably the easiest parts of fishing aside from drinking beers in the sun on a boat.
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Oct 9, 2023 17:00
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Antigravitas posted:I wish there was a fishing minigame that actually had a passing resemblance to real world fishing. You can't tell me that you can't make a fly fishing or spinner fishing minigame. Closest is fishing in Sailwind. That's a game about sailing and it's still in EA, however you basically set sail between islands to hawk goods, and one way to pass the time, and make your supplies last, is to fish off your boat while underway.
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Oct 9, 2023 17:42
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You can't fish from a moving sailboat. 
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Oct 9, 2023 18:03
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People troll fish all the time where I'm at. 
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Oct 9, 2023 19:08
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I just want a fishing mini game to not be bad and tedius. I can just buy fish to give to the bishop, but money is hard to come by. Its weird, one of the great things about Stardew is that its pretty relaxing, the only frustrating things can be once you get deeper into the mine and dungeon but you don't have to go there unless you need a resource from it. Most of it is just chill farming. Graveyard keeper though "naw, lets make everything a frustrating slog". You need to buy seeds constantly, this is by far the worst part of the game. Even if you use fertilizer the chances of you getting enough seeds to plant is pretty small.
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Oct 9, 2023 19:16
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