I've had issues with Cata for a while, since 0.C I feel the dev has gone down an irreversible path towards micromanagement hell, while eschewing meaningful changes to the gameplay. I decided to try my hand at the latest stable build, to see what's up, and to see if anything has changed.
1. Echoing the above sentiments, the game runs very slowly now - waiting or sleeping can take quite a while. 30 seconds staring at a clock does not make for compelling gameplay.
2. The game is still menu hell at it's core. A majority of my time is spent managing items. That's fine, it's a survival game, resource management and all that, but damn. It's kind of boring? I enjoy the exploration and fighting, but I dread finding a big pile of loot, because it means I get to spend 20 IRL minutes collecting, hauling, disassembling, and organizing all the junk. Even if you weren't playing like a packrat (which is sort of the only option, as literally everything you find has a likely use somewhere down the line), the bare minimum of survival still requires a fair amount of this micromanagement. And at that point, living in the wilderness, eating eggs and cooked meat, why not just play UnReal world instead lol?
3. Weird decisions made in the interest of precision and realism, at the expense of the player's experience. An example: a change to in-progress crafting jobs makes it so that if you are interrupted mid-craft, the half-finished object is spawned and placed in your hands or at your feet. That's fine because it means you save the work already performed, correct? WRONG it means that when your makeshift fire keeps going out, you end up with things like PARTIALLY FINISHED BOILED WATER (59%) in your inventory. This not only interrupts the flow of crafting, forcing players to used 8 different keypresses to freakin' boil water, it also doesn't make any realistic sense that you can carry this kind of thing around with you, outside of a container. .
4. Recovery rates are still untenable. My leg was bit in the first day, as is bound to happen, and it's been a week and it's still at 2 || of health in the yellow. I'm probably just not understanding yet another hidden mechanic, but considering I've been fully-satiated and resting every night for that entire in-game week, it just seems unfun. Realistic time frames are not necessary for an enjoyable apocalypse simulator.
What is this game even about anymore? Combat seems like it flips from 'get hit once and you're dead' to 'easily kill everything because I spent an hour grinding skill'. Survival is trivial, the only difficult part is convincing yourself it's worth the pain of micromanagement. The most compelling part of the game, the crafting and the building, feels like it only exists in order to save yourself from future micromanagement. Without a compelling gameplay loop, C:DDA falls into the territory of "Why am I even playing this game?" far too quickly. Roleplay can mitigate this somewhat, but the game itself fights against roleplay by forcing players to use meta-game techniques to survive the basics.
There's something really compelling about this game's core, and I think that's why discussion about this game often gets heated (ignoring the poor community relations handling of the lead devs . .). People want to play the C:DDA they read about in anecdotes, and not the bits-and-pieces survivalist simulator where it can take 10 key presses to boil a cup of water.
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Topic: The Cataclysm games thread. (Read 113938 times)