Thanks for the comments!
So, I tried this thing!
First impressions from a new player:
1. The interface is horrible. And this is coming from a Dwarf Fortress player. Nested menu upon nested menu. An entirely separate system and keybinding for construction compared to item crafting. Not to mention one of the most commonly used keybindings for crafting is a highly inaccessible keypress (&). Hidden functions within the construction menu (*) which aren't intuitive, such as chopping trees or logs, when most other interactions use the interact key (e).
Agreed, it's miserable. There's been a gradual push to improve, but it's slow. By the time people know enough to fix the ux, we've grown accustomed to it and have to work against our own self-interest and sacrifice motor memory for the greater good.
2. Horrible documentation. The wiki's a neglected wasteland. The separate site for item searches regularly throws 500 server errors.
Not sure what's up with the wiki. It always surprises me that nobody makes any effort to update it.
4. I love the cooking system! So many ingredients, with options to farm them, scavenge from the ruins of civilization, hunt or gather your nutrition. Plus, item decay! Unlike so many other survival games which allow food to remain perfectly preserved, this actually forces you to use the stuff you find or face it turning to rotten garbage. By far the best cooking game simulator I've played recently.
We've got more in hopes for all that stuff too, like more granular decay based on storage. Some day we'd even like some sort of flavour profile system.
5. The crafting system is unbalanced. Some clothes can be disassembled, others can't. Some return full resources, others only partial amounts. Some return completely different resources than the stuff you used to craft it. It's obviously been created by multiple different designers, each with different levels of commitment and design philosophies. Really needs some polish and standardization. Give all clothing items the disassemble option for half resources, for example. The hodge-podge currently on offer looks like an abandoned project where someone just said "Good enough!" and shipped it as is.
6. The recipes themselves need a good look over for consistency and logic. A chest wrap has 0.5 L volume, 0.14 lbs weight, and takes 1 minute and 9 rags to create. A single rag has 0.25 L volume and 0.18 lbs weight. Why would anyone ever use the bundle of rags item when they can store nine rags without losing string and somehow break the first law of thermodynamics in the process? Don't even get me started on a 0.18 lbs rag being crafted with 80x 0.11 lbs thread.
"balance" isn't expressly something we're going for as such but the things you're describing are all parts of constant auditing efforts. If you'd like to help fix some of the ones you've noticed, it's a pretty enormous ongoing project with a very low entry barrier
7. Combat's pretty deadly for a new character. I figured out early in my first few games to avoid confrontation and spend time grinding skills and gear instead. Hopefully I'll experience more interesting stuff later once I have a character that can survive anything more hostile than a stiff breeze.
This is by design, but I'd like NPC interactions to help to teach more about what to do to keep safe.
8. The skill system is a grind, and also easily gamed. Ranks come quickly by repeat crafting items at your current level. For tailoring, I just picked a cheap recipe that I could disassemble for full returned resources and pumped them out. Presto, rank up! Only cost is time, meaning the game creates an incentive to hole up for the start of every game in a safe location and grind skill ranks instead of challenging the map.
We're hoping to have the new system in place for 0.F stable, or at least the bones of it. The overall plan is too big to summarize, but basically we want to make the "skill" levels much slower to gain, and add lateral, often easier to gain, "proficiencies" that represent more specific individual knowledge bases (eg. 'carpentry' or 'blacksmithing'). As well, we're adding 'practice' actions which automate the process of crafting/uncrafting the same recipe, so that rather than paying in keypresses and patience you're primarily paying just with in-game time. This plays into the overall design goal of, yes, incentivizing holing up and grinding - which you might in fact do during an apocalypse - but dramatically accelerating that downtime, watching a week of supplies run out ideally over minutes as you do various semi-background functions. I don't know if you're aware that the world progresses in your absence as well, with zombies becoming more dangerous the more you sit and let them evolve.
9. I don't really care about tile sets, and play the game just fine in ASCII format. Shame that so much time and energy gets spent on features that add nothing to the game for me.
To each their own, the tiles version is downloaded something like 10 times as much.
Closing remarks: I wouldn't recommend this game to any of my friends. I probably won't play it again once I've satisfied myself that I can build a successful character and have them survive in most situations. Still, the game has a lot of potential, and I hope the development team can fix some of the more glaring errors in the design over simply adding window dressing. Also, great cooking system. Top marks for that.
I suspect there's a fair bit of depth you've yet to explore: I remember telling my wife after a week or so that cdda was an interesting game but I was about done with it. As for "window dressing", the core contributors alone are around 30-40 people, so fortunately a couple of us can work on display and art while others adjust design or optimize code. However, it's never likely to not be a hodge-podge of work from hundreds of people, I suppose that's what makes it so fun to develop.
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Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (Read 124644 times)