isn't game a little predictable?

[darkhero]

i was thinking. after awhile, when you explore the map. there is no danger at all. spiders, tallbirds, hounds, merms have nest which mean you know exacly where you going to face them, and there isn't any mob that threat you. yiu can just get out of base with no armor and weapon if you dont want to fight.

I thought it would be a little more fun if someome you see aggressive mobs or may be mini bosses on you way. specially in late game.

[FreyaMaluk]

I think this is a problem in general when people think DST is solely a survival game.

Imo... Wrong.

Dst is a base builder with survival elements. 

Ofc you can have a purely survival experience shaping your world but so many structures and Deco elements were introduced that the base builder focus is pretty much undeniable. 

Now I think late game changes to RoG bosses might be a cool addition. Like bosses get smarter with time with random attacks of abilities here in there to keep u on your toes. 

[Prismaux]

Hound waves? Giants? Overheating/Freezing? Shadow Creatures? I think DST is challenging enough as it is.

[Well-met]

base game is survival, not a forge simulator.

[fimmatek]

In my opinion DST is hard (in fact, very hard) while you're learning the game. Once you know how to deal with each danger, it is not difficult anymore.

I don't see how could Klei change the game to make it difficult enough, but not annoying at the same time. Most of the difficulties for experienced players in late game come either from mistakes, or from unexpected events, neither of which happens often. Adding unpredictable events could make the game more survival (technically, hound waves are these too, tho they are still quite regular and expectable). But these could get very annoying for those who play not (only) for the survival aspect.

[Pab10Suarez]

I've 1000 hours in the game and i still dying by a spider inday 3 :C

[darkhero]

20 minutes ago, PriscaMitica said:

Hound waves? Giants? Overheating/Freezing? Shadow Creatures? I think DST is challenging enough as it is.

all of them are under control. i know when hounds come plus  there is an alert. giants too, there is an alert and its just 2 times in year. you can control your sanity too.

17 minutes ago, Hell-met said:

base game is survival, not a forge simulator.

thats the point... mostly in survival games you have random unexpected fights

10 minutes ago, fimmatek said:

In my opinion DST is hard (in fact, very hard) while you're learning the game. Once you know how to deal with each danger, it is not difficult anymore.

I don't see how could Klei change the game to make it difficult enough, but not annoying at the same time. Most of the difficulties for experienced players in late game come either from mistakes, or from unexpected events, neither of which happens often. Adding unpredictable events could make the game more survival (technically, hound waves are these too, tho they are still quite regular and expectable). But these could get very annoying for those who play not (only) for the survival aspect.

yeah. actually i open a thread in feedbacks about this

 

[NoscopeFelix]

29 minutes ago, darkhero said:

 you can control your sanity too.

Would kinda suck if you couldn’t.

[camelot]

I think predictability is not the main issue here. The biggest problem seems to be you have a lot of free time hence very well prepared for all situations. It's mainly because you need very little time to acquire foods in this game IMO. 

I remembered the early day playing DS, and it actually feels hard in winter. After some first days, all veggies are gone so I need to go farm spiders, rabbits and sometimes birds using boomerangs and eat bacon and eggs everyday. But after ice filler thing, discover fire farm (or bunnyfarm in DST), foods became trivia.

I mean even if you were a veteran, you should spend around 40-50% in-game time to prepare your food. So you won't have much time left to prepare for hounds/giants or go hunting Mctusk... you will find the game harder and therefore less predictable

I could think about something like:

• Nerf bundling wrap. Foods will be perishable, maybe 50% or 80% slower in wrap. Save a lot of inventory slot is good enough
• Nerf bunnyman farm. 3 days respawn might be ok
• Spiders, bats should only drop small monster meat since it's a lot easier to farm/fight them compare to pigs/bunnmen. Spider warriors, spider queen will drop full monster meat
• Small meat + 3 fillers in crockpot should become Kabobs, not Meatballs (might heavily affects newbie)
• Can not feed birds with cooked eggs
• No ice as filler (might heavily affects newbie)

 

[1bubbainpa]

I think people the problem is that you have gotten good enough at the game that you know what the threats are and how to deal with it.

Remember that there are still other people in-game that are struggling to learn how to survive. Heck, just look at the workshop and every week there’s a new mod that helps make the game easier.

[FreyaMaluk]

13 minutes ago, camelot said:

I think predictability is not the main issue here. The biggest problem seems to be you have a lot of free time hence very well prepared for all situations. It's mainly because you need very little time to acquire foods in this game IMO. 

I remembered the early day playing DS, and it actually feels hard in winter. After some first days, all veggies are gone so I need to go farm spiders, rabbits and sometimes birds using boomerangs and eat bacon and eggs everyday. But after ice filler thing, discover fire farm (or bunnyfarm in DST), foods became trivia.

I mean even if you were a veteran, you should spend around 40-50% in-game time to prepare your food. So you won't have much time left to prepare for hounds/giants or go hunting Mctusk... you will find the game harder and therefore less predictable

I could think about something like:

• Nerf bundling wrap. Foods will be perishable, maybe 50% or 80% slower in wrap. Save a lot of inventory slot is good enough
• Nerf bunnyman farm. 3 days respawn might be ok
• Spiders, bats should only drop small monster meat since it's a lot easier to farm/fight them compare to pigs/bunnmen. Spider warriors, spider queen will drop full monster meat
• Small meat + 3 fillers in crockpot should become Kabobs, not Meatballs (might heavily affects newbie)
• Can not feed birds with cooked eggs
• No ice as filler (might heavily affects newbie)

 

these changes sound interesting BUT for a new game mode.. something called.. Bear Grylls' mode or something xD.. Jokes aside, those shouldn't be Vanilla settings

I agree DS winter is harder but that comes from how thermal stones in DS work....  again.. this could be included in that "harder mode"

even with the OP thermals in DST, many players don't even survive the winter. So... from the devs perspective.. to make the game more popular.. I don't see that changing either in normal DST...... 

[camelot]

8 minutes ago, FreyaMaluk said:

these changes sound interesting BUT for a new game mode.. something called.. Bear Grylls' mode or something xD.. Jokes aside, those shouldn't be Vanilla settings

Well, no ice as filler and meatball nerf might be much harder for newbies, but other things mostly affect veteran players. Newbies shouldn't have access to bundling wrap or bunnyman farm and not abuse cooked eggs, right?

[darkhero]

5 minutes ago, camelot said:

Well, no ice as filler and meatball nerf might be much harder for newbies, but other things mostly affect veteran players. Newbies shouldn't have access to bundling wrap or bunnyman farm and not abuse cooked eggs, right?

about the foods... i think the problem is abundance. everywhere is full of food resources. i try reduce it in setting but it really dosn't effect. 

changing food recipe is a good idea but other than that, moving resources apart so you dont see foods often on your way ( i mean you have to go to a specific direction for food ) can help for nerfing them.

[FreyaMaluk]

28 minutes ago, camelot said:

Well, no ice as filler and meatball nerf might be much harder for newbies, but other things mostly affect veteran players. Newbies shouldn't have access to bundling wrap or bunnyman farm and not abuse cooked eggs, right?

tbh I disagree with any changes to bundling wraps... if you play solo they are a lot of help to keep your lightbulbs and save you some trips to the ruins when you are busy building stuff or for people who play in small groups

if those changes are part of harder game mode then the people who want to apply them can enjoy without affecting the majority of the player base, that would be a much better alternative that forcing some conditions on the majority of players

15 minutes ago, darkhero said:

about the foods... i think the problem is abundance. everywhere is full of food resources. i try reduce it in setting but it really dosn't effect. 

changing food recipe is a good idea but other than that, moving resources apart so you dont see foods often on your way ( i mean you have to go to a specific direction for food ) can help for nerfing them.

this is a great point.. but the problem is that the game has no system to regulate resources for a) number of players b) public vs private servers and my suspicion is that the devs do adjust setting so that ALL players regardless of server can find food--- mostly..

BTW if you play in private servers you can set your resources on less for berries and food in general so that's actually something given already in the game settings, while people playing in public have to scavenge and pretty much fight to get to crucial resources first... so that's an issue too

[Sinister_Fang]

3 hours ago, FreyaMaluk said:

I think this is a problem in general when people think DST is solely a survival game.

Imo... Wrong.

Dst is a base builder with survival elements. 

Ofc you can have a purely survival experience shaping your world but so many structures and Deco elements were introduced that the base builder focus is pretty much undeniable. 

DST is still a survival game. So many of it's mechanics are based around surviving, and the only real goal is to not die. Although, when you master how to survive, there's not much else to do. So that's when it becomes a base builder game. But that doesn't change the fact that at it's core, it's still a survival game.

[FreyaMaluk]

23 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

DST is still a survival game. So many of it's mechanics are based around surviving, and the only real goal is to not die. 

I never said it's not a survival game

4 hours ago, FreyaMaluk said:

I think this is a problem in general when people think DST is solely a survival game.

SOLELY as JUST a survival game

What I meant is that survival is intrinsically tied to your base..

then after a year... the survival aspect resides more and more in the background and the base building aspect comes in to be more to be in central focus.. as you yourself said

23 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

Although, when you master how to survive, there's not much else to do

Ofc you can survive with only veggies and fruits and eating from what you hunt but at it's core you hunt and explore to make your base better (loot for lamps, furnaces, bigger chests, etc)... not to just survive longer

[Canis]

Honestly, I'd love to see more dynamic mechanics that change as the days go by and/or how well you're doing. Yes, the game is too easy, but that's because the skill levels for this game come out as a plateau rather than a liner line upward. In other words, once you hit the skill ceiling you can't really go that much higher, so youre just stuck there. Maybe more trivial activities become harder after the first year. I don't really have any good ideas / examples right now, unfortunately.

[camelot]

42 minutes ago, FreyaMaluk said:

tbh I disagree with any changes to bundling wraps... if you play solo they are a lot of help to keep your lightbulbs and save you some trips to the ruins when you are busy building stuff or for people who play in small groups

if those changes are part of harder game mode then the people who want to apply them can enjoy without affecting the majority of the player base, that would be a much better alternative that forcing some conditions on the majority of players

Well, I pretty confident that if in ANR update, the bundling wrap were introduced with 50% slower perish time, most of people would have been happy with it and none would have been suggested to buff the bundling wrap. 50% slower perish time means you make the trip to ruins each 12 days for lightbulbs. Maybe currently you would visit ruins every 20 or 30 days, but reduce time to 12 days is not like affecting players in a major way. At this point, I feel that most of players simply take things for granted and don't want to lose a single bit of it at all

Same thing could be said about bunny farm. It's a ridiculously cheap and could replace all other food sources easily. Compare to pig, you got 2 more carrots each kill but still got 4 times less of respawn time and acquire it is not a problem with a veteran players. But if this were going to be nerfed, I can guess a lot of players will come and say they don't want/like any changes

Changes, either good or bad is a good thing since it provides useful insights to devs. It this point of DST, testing of changes feel quite slow (including Forge, Gorge, character rework...). Maybe pick only handful of people and test new ideas and drastic change with them very quickly to see their feedbacks instead of release to 100% of people is a good way to go

But realistically, after some observation about character rework, I won't expect that from DST 

[FreyaMaluk]

19 minutes ago, camelot said:

Well, I pretty confident that if in ANR update, the bundling wrap were introduced with 50% slower perish time, most of people would have been happy with it and none would have been suggested to buff the bundling wrap. 50% slower perish time means you make the trip to ruins each 12 days for lightbulbs. Maybe currently you would visit ruins every 20 or 30 days, but reduce time to 12 days is not like affecting players in a major way. At this point, I feel that most of players simply take things for granted and don't want to lose a single bit of it at all

Same thing could be said about bunny farm. It's a ridiculously cheap and could replace all other food sources easily. Compare to pig, you got 2 more carrots each kill but still got 4 times less of respawn time and acquire it is not a problem with a veteran players. But if this were going to be nerfed, I can guess a lot of players will come and say they don't want/like any changes

Changes, either good or bad is a good thing since it provides useful insights to devs. It this point of DST, testing of changes feel quite slow (including Forge, Gorge, character rework...). Maybe pick only handful of people and test new ideas and drastic change with them very quickly to see their feedbacks instead of release to 100% of people is a good way to go

But realistically, after some observation about character rework, I won't expect that from DST 

but the fact is that they introduced it with no perish time.. not the other way around...

the devs have introduced changes before about perishing items specially in DST. I think they are aware how they want bundling wraps to work: drying racks used to hold meat for ever in a perfect 100% state, food on croc pots used to stay 100% condition for ever, farms used to hold crops 100% condition too. If you find bundling wraps too ez you always have the chance to avoid using them for your own game.. but why punish the whole player base for it...

as I mentioned before.. that would be nice as a different game mode

if you play with 4 to 6 people that change might be pretty balanced cuz they can divide different tasks that are gonna get done at the same time, but playing solo or in small groups nerfing bundling wraps means only you are gonna increase the chores... not really interesting from a gameplay experience..

I rather have the devs to put their focus on creating new biomes and bosses and structures and new gameplay mechanics that nerfing a feature that is not gonna really change the game to make it more fun but more prone to chore activities.

[Bleblu78]

I'm just gonna say something in this topic, even as noob as I am myself in the game (even after 80 years of playing it and loving it to bits (?)), with some things that are already here, and some that I didn't really see.
So, answering the main question in the title, I don't think this game is predictable. As every single game, it turns predictable when you play it a lot or, if you are not that adventurous, you look info on the wiki xD
The only thing that makes a game not "predictable" is the pvp, mostly because you can only predict a person's actions to some point, but everything envolving pve becomes predictable after some time (and I don't really like the pvp aspect of this game, so meh... xD).
Again talking about the main first point, even if we take "dynamic mechanics"... how much time do you think will it take for them to be on a wiki or in the mind of the veteran player? You will eventually know that dear deerclops do an icicle-popsicle attack after day 100 when the moon is out and the pigs grow armpit hair... and then after 50 more days he changes between that attack and an ice boulder attack mixed with a snow starfish attack...
I think that those "changing" ideas about enemies kinda growing up in power over the days is good, don't get me wrong, it would be interesting... but it would be the same in no time, that's why the devs are making new content, because that is what makes the game "non predictable" again to veteran players.
That was all I had to say about the predictable thing xD (my opinion, of course, I'm not trying to indoctrinate anyone) and about the lots of "nerfing"... seriously, if you as a veteran have problems with the game being too easy, you have:
a) An entire settings page to play with (which I think it's the greatest thing about the game that let you do whatever you want with your world, really). Lights out, lots of giants, lots of hounds, lots of worms, lots of everything harmful in the world... and less and less of everything useful for you... you can even completely erase some types of food if you think there are a lot out there.
b) There are tons of mods that make your life easier, but you can use some of them to do the opposite. If you don't have enough having to punch a giant toad with a fungus problem or a bee with kingly aspirations for twelve hours, you can use the mod of giant's health to bring the health of the other murderous things to the same level, or their damage anyways. That way you will have twelve hours of possibilities to fudge up and die. I suppose that would make the game harder too (?) xDD

But, really, if you go for "realism"... you will have a lot of food options, even in a horrible twisted world as the Constant. If it breaths, you can eat it (even if you get food poisoning by eating an adorable yet annoying hellhound), if you have bees, you can have their honey; if you have an atmosphere, you have woods and veggies (okay, that would need a bit more argumentation, but... you know (?))... so: you need resources to get all of these going (farms, bee farms, those bunnyman farms that I don't really use at all (?)...), you need to spend time doing those farms, you need to (at the same time) get food to just survive while you are establishing a source of reliable food, you need to fight to get the resources to get those farms going... so, I mean... I don't see a problem with, for example, "needing very little time to acquier foods in the game".
"Surviving" means a lot of things: getting food, getting resources (to build, to create tools, weapons, armor, science, MAGIC! (?)), building, creating, fighting, cooling down, heating up... first of all, I imagine it's pretty difficult to balance (as a game creator) the time required to do all of those things... but the thing that I want to say is: if you enter a game and you have to be like 90% of your time searching for food, or waiting for food to be done, or having an eye on your belongings to know if your perishables are perishing... then it won't be fun, at least for me. When I have a source of food, I go for exploring, resources, building a better base, etcetera... and even then, because I'm not a veteran (talking about my faaaaar less than perfect skills xD), I can fudge up and die, and face the difficulties of reviving and retrieving my things in winter while I'm being hound chased and I have a giant one-eyed freak patrolling my things (?) for example (never happened, lucky me xD)
I don't even think that nerfing late game things would make any difference, really.

World: "Your pigs spawn after 8 game hours instead of 4..."
Me: Ok, I have bees...
World: "But it is winter!"
Me: Ok... I have spiders and a birdcage...
World: "But now the spiders only drop half a disgusting chicken wing!"
Me: It's still enough for me to get an egg for each one of those, if they are like morsels.
World: "... I will send my giant mutant lava-spitting dragon to vom on your chests"
Me: Can't we just be friends? ):

Ok, sorry, I got carried away xD but you know what I mean... if a food farm is less efficient, then you just build the one that it's the more efficient first. And then, when you have time, you build the others if you want. I don't really know but, you guys that are veteran players, would you have more difficulties getting food just because some spawn rate changes?
I like the idea of making the small monster meats, it would add "realism". You kill a small ("small", they are like half of the body of a normal character...) spider, you get a small meat; you kill the big baddie spider, you get some full meats. Other than that, I prefer the things that they have being doing; simply adding new content, new baddies, more variety. Making little things more difficult just because wouldn't solve anything, I think.

I probably miss a lot of things, made myself a mess and everything... but I hope my opinions where a bit clear at least and not offensive (because that was not the intention at all, but you never know when you write, so making that clear xD). I wrote a lot... sorry, and sorry if there are errors, english is not my native language xD

[NSAiswatchingus]

2 hours ago, FreyaMaluk said:

nerfing bundling wraps means only you are gonna increase the chores... not really interesting from a gameplay experience..

Exactly this. If I'm going to have people join me for a big boss fight I'd like to have full bundling wraps of fresh healing foods that I've taken the time to acquire and prepare. No one wants to wait around for 30 minutes as I dry out 40 jerky so everything's fresh. This game already has few moments of excitement. Let's not add more menial tasks to do 10000 times. 

 

EDIT: NOBODY REACT TO ANYTHING I POST EVER AGAIN. LEAVE MY KARMA WHERE IT'S AT well now you've done goofed it up. Thanks a heap

[BeliarBAD]

i would never say dst is a base builder game. its evrything but not that. first of all evrything wants to destroy your base like bearger, dereclops antlion... firehounds... WILDFIRES

 

and the placing mechanics arte the worst ever. if you make a chest area for example and then you change the view with Q or E then it looks completely different. from one side it looks like it fits perfect and form the other side its completely messed up.

also the mechanic you cant place things closer together....

the mechanic you need to place first buildings and then walls... same with firdge and crockpots.

the mechanic that you dont have geometric placement....

building a megabase without mods which looks good is 1000 times harder then killing all bosses solo imo

[ButterStuffed]

That's just a problem with survival games in general. They are games that test your ability to retain and put knowledge you've acquired to use. Once you've experienced enough of the game and acquired enough knowledge it's no longer challenging. Inserting unpredictable threats wouldn't make the game more fun just infuriate people.

[Canis]

2 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

That's just a problem with survival games in general. They are games that test your ability to retain and put knowledge you've acquired to use. Once you've experienced enough of the game and acquired enough knowledge it's no longer challenging. Inserting unpredictable threats wouldn't make the game more fun just infuriate people.

I have a solution

*clicks tongue*
dynamic mechanics based on day count.

Kind of like hound waves, but if you injected that idea with LSD and then dumped it's head into a bucket of red bull.

 

In words that actually make sense:
I'd love to see mechanics that scale in difficulty based on day count (edit: and I don't mean cap at day 100, I mean the full nine yards, maybe cap at day 1000, and that's when it starts getting crazy). The only time it will plateau is when it becomes a lot of a challenge, even for the skilled veteran. It would make crazy high day counts actually impressive again.

I don't really have any good examples in mind, but basically, think of Terraria's hard mode, and apply that idea to DST. Basically, get all the mechanics you know and love and just put a small spice of challenge into them, while leaving some of the more basic ones unchanged, because lets face it, there are some stuff that should be left untouched.

 

Edit: This aside, I don't easily see myself being immensely bored of DST, even after a solid 2 years of playing this game. It is hands-down my favorite game of all time, and I don't know why I always come back to it.

[camelot]

 

 

 

14 hours ago, FreyaMaluk said:

I rather have the devs to put their focus on creating new biomes and bosses and structures and new gameplay mechanics that nerfing a feature that is not gonna really change the game to make it more fun but more prone to chore activities.

Well, mechanics to remove chores is surely a good thing, but it needs to have a kind of limit. Right now no one really complained about how long it would take to farm logs (one of the biggest chores), but what would happen if Klei going to introduce a machine with no downside and could massively produce logs required very little input resources. You might not live without it after trying it and would never go back to the old way. But surely it will change your game experience in a big way

This is the reason many people won't play in a server with a lot or some ridiculous mods (beside of lag issue). Promote or allow some of ridiculous mechanics with no downside will kill the diversity of gameplay, and you'll get bored in the end. This issue isn't new and not only apply to this game. Convenience is king, yes 

For sure, I don't know which should be considered "normal" experience (good enough) for most of the people, and which are out of "limit". But my real concern here is despite the data, Klei won't likely to pull people back to what they feel as "normal" (less convenience way)

 

 

 

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12 hours ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

Exactly this. If I'm going to have people join me for a big boss fight I'd like to have full bundling wraps of fresh healing foods that I've taken the time to acquire and prepare. No one wants to wait around for 30 minutes as I dry out 40 jerky so everything's fresh. This game already has few moments of excitement. Let's not add more menial tasks to do 10000 times.

Still, no real difference with pick bundling wraps with full, fresh food you've been prepared 15 days ago instead of 200 days ago. It's not like bundling wraps will be removed from this game...