Ultimately, I think it boils down to something along the lines of experienced players with coding ability trying to put a challenge into their own game using the code. I think it's great they are contributing, but I think that sometimes they are not allt he way coherent of other players who would prefer this not to be a problem.
That's not it at all. Most of the people who've been involved with the project have made a lot of interesting, sensible changes. This tedious bullshit>gameplay quality is coming from a specific source, and it's explicitly not the bulk of the folks who've made meaningful contributions.
It's not like these things are
hard. Filthy clothes, food that shouldn't rot rotting (and curing processes not affecting rot), the additional steps to vehicle construction, &c. do not meaningfully impact the core gameplay loop in any way beyond forcing players to spend more time repeating basic tasks. That's why they're disliked: because they drag players away from having fun to spend another week processing piles of supplies.
They're the video game equivalent of make-work. Endgame content is sparse, but instead of expanding that we get a bunch of time-wasting crap that seems expressly designed to stretch out the time required for initial build-up. It's not any harder to jump from spawning to having a secure base and supply cache, it just takes longer. I would fucking love to have proper endgame content expanded, because as it stands past a certain point there's very little danger beyond getting headshotted by a random M107 turret from outside your view range or something equivalent. When the game starts to get dull because you can have a hulk knock a building down on you, stab it to death, and walk away with a few bruises, the solution is not to make the midgame more tedious.
If you want to see me complaining about arbitrary
difficulty, I can rant about the old bullshit with overnight lighting storms starting wildfires that made soaking wet New England forests look like California scrubland. There's a reason I still refuse to let my characters sleep outside of basements.
e:
And it's not even that I'm particularly opposed to more realism. What pisses me off is that most of these things
aren't realism, they're just half-assed partial systems that use realism as an excuse for slowing down early/mid-game progress.
Take filthy clothes. An actual complete cleanliness system could be interesting. Have the outermost layer accumulate filth whenever it would be appropriate (getting puked on, smashing corpses, being wounded, dealing heavy damage in melee, &c.); if there's no clothing coverage, it goes right on the body. Reduce the rate of accumulation as Dodge increases. Tier the morale penalties so that direct skin contact is the worst and bulky outerwear is basically insignificant--getting covered in boomer bile while you're mostly naked is obviously more disconcerting than getting blood on your power armor when you go through a mob of zeds like a woodchipper through a pile of babies. Have different grades of filthiness based on how much you've picked up over time. Then, make cleaning make sense. Stand in the rain for a few minutes and you're good to go. Wash off with a jug of water anywhere, any time, to reduce how much crud is on you or remove smaller amounts of grime. Got soap? Good, you need less water and time for a given amount of cleaning. Add an additional pair of traits with a positive similar to masochist for enjoying the filth and a negative that worsens the penalties.
Instead it's a binary (was it on a zed y/n) that exists solely to make it take longer to get a set of pre-survivor suit clothes together. It does nothing after you hit your first clothing store. No penalties when you're mass-cutting them for raw materials. No penalties for eating a mountain of filthy clothes to power your bionics.
Or take car shit with the jacks and boom cranes. In abstract it makes sense for heavier/larger vehicles to need more dedicated equipment to service. In practice all these additions do is make it a total pain in the ass to build a proper deathmobile, ruining the fun of the folks who liked doing that. If you wanted to be realistic about it, you'd keep scaling things up. Let people build a whole goddamn scaffold like a land-drydock for their land-battleship, let them build fucking smoothbore cannons and mount them with an oversized crane like a modern-day ironclad. Let people use power armor to substitute for a crane or jack.
That's my peeve. All this shit is just splinters of systems that only exist to make people have less fun when they
could be ways to make the game more immersive or to further expand the absurd, with realism as the excuse, when even
actual realism approached from a position that's cognizant of how it has to mesh with the realities of good gameplay could make the game more difficult in organic ways, more immersive, and more supportive of diverse gameplay options.
I mean, hell, you wanna talk about realism? Know what's not goddamn realistic? Skill reading learn rates that let Joe Blow go from high school dropout to world-class multidisciplinary engineer/surgeon/sysadmin in a matter of days by skimming the contents of the local library. And guess what, the system stays because taking 10000+ in-game hours to learn one subset of those skills to that level would be intensely boring for no good reason.
Author
Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - 0.C is out! Our monsters fight each other! (Read 836516 times)