(edit to add: sorry for the bitchiness above. I fell and hurt my ass and took it out on you guys, shouldn't have done that. Literally butthurt.)
I don't really see it heaped on anywhere but here. It is a mechanic that slows down resource acquisition in the early game, and makes some of the easier to acquire gear more of a choice, extending the timeframe of the (to me anyway) fun part of the early game. Generally everyone has gotten used to it; to me, it's how the game has always been, and like I said, it feels shallower without it.
I realize for a lot of the folks in this thread specifically, the game has moved in a different direction than you'd have liked, but it's been moving in that direction for what, five years now? There's now a large (very large, in fact) user base for whom those features are what brought us in. I decided to start contributing because I like playing a post apocalyptic survival simulator with zombies, and I'm by far not the only person. That's why development and forums for the game are significantly more active than they've ever been. If it's not your bag, that's too bad, I guess, but you'd probably be better off accepting at this point that "I did surgery on my own eyeball" is not going to be the direction things are developing, and "I need to build a shelter from windchill, it'll also keep my scent from spreading to that horde west of here" is.
Okay, let me try to break down the whole history of the issue for you.
This wasn't a thing under Whales. This wasn't a thing under the original CDDA dev team. This is specifically a product of Kevin and his cronies trying to force everyone to play in the specific "right" way they want people to have to play in.
Cataclysm, and DDA in its original form, had an incredible degree of player freedom. There were a
lot of different things to do, and a great many different ways to go about them. Two people could play the game totally differently. In all the years I played, I never once built a deathmobile. There are people who never once carved out a bow. There are people who never installed a bionic, chugged mutagen, delved into a lab, &c.
There were also lots of people who did all of those things. The current dev mindset seems to be aimed at
reducing player agency by steadily nerfing every source of player power while simultaneously adding in as much tedious sit-in-a-corner-and-wait-for-craft-timers as possible. The whole filthy clothing thing is far and away the most well-known example of the latter. It's a change which was added solely because Kevin didn't like it that other people decided to speed up their starts by picking damaged clothes off of zombies they'd killed and fixing them up, so he added an extra layer of crafting tedium dependent on a combination of resources (access to water, semi-uncommon soap mats). This was done in the name of realism, despite the system being utterly unrealistic: there is no way for clothing to
become dirty, no stages of dirtiness, and no randomness (i.e. why would a fresh zombie with nothing but a tiny arm wound and a hole in the head have disgustingly dirty pants or shoes?).
This is the pattern of behavior: add pr which requires players to jump through more hoops in the name of realism and/or removes/reduces content which contributes to player power potential in the name of realism. Promise to add new content/mechanics to replace the gutted/cut content (maybe). Never actually do so, or do so years after the fact.
Look at how long guns were completely fucked for, because Kevin and co. didn't like it that people could find guns and shoot things with them without standing still for six hours to sight in on the target. Look how long it took to get a mostly not fucked up replacement system in place.
It has nothing to do with difficulty (because adding more tedium does not make the game harder) and everything to do with the combined removal of player agency and narrowing of scope. Cataclysm used to be a game which was, more than anything else, defined by all the
options the player had. They're trying to force it to become a "scrounge for food and water until you die in a week or two" simulator because Kevin and a handful of vocal yes-men like that. They've even fucking booted the original setting because the cyberpunk future melange was tied to player agency and power (through bionics, mutations, high-tech guns, &c.) and turned it into contemporary New England instead... without actually changing any of the game flavor to reflect that. As always, "realism" is just an excuse for forcing people to play like them.
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Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - 0.C is out! Our monsters fight each other! (Read 838836 times)