Jump to content

Toggle/Opt out for certain mob visuals


Recommended Posts

Toggle sounds like a good option -- the option for players to set Horror Hounds to "none", like most mobs. 

However, I really, really, REALLY hope they do not get removed entirely from the game. I'm on the other side of the spectrum; I adore these horrific versions of monsters I already loved. I want to see more body-horror / grotesque designs, so I hope that players like me also have the option to leave them in our game. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, YouKnowWho said:

It's just an example. No need to build up a strawman here.

It just felt too inaccurate and over the top to be comparable, and that made me kinda upset, since I'm personally affected by this. I apologize for being so aggressive.

 

1 minute ago, YouKnowWho said:

Besides, I'm not even arguing against a toggle. Everybody should be able to enjoy Don't Starve, it's a great game. But making a change everybody has to deal with to the base game is a lot more detrimental than something simple like a toggle or a mod. 

I wasn't trying to say you were. I'm okay with a toggle. But it's still in beta, too, so it doesn't have to be in the game in the first place. It's not as extreme as asking them to remove hounds and pengulls entirely. It's just these horrific versions that could be changed.

 

3 minutes ago, YouKnowWho said:

And, well, though it may sound silly, people like the gory visuals. 

And a lot of people don't to an extreme degree. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, butlerkitties said:

You're not losing anything except some gorey visuals. It's also like, two new sort of skins of mobs. It's not "oh we've changed everything in the game". It's "we've removed(or changed) two disturbing skins of mobs". Your exaggeration isn't even accurate. It's really not that extreme of a thing to change compared to the distress or genuine discomfort it causes. 

The thing that gets lost with a change in art style is tone. Mechanically the game would be the same, but the atmosphere and experience would be different. The fact that some people were strongly affected by them is a testament to how well these two mobs set the tone.

I do think there should be a toggle as it’s the fairest option for both sides—Just because I personally prefer the darker tone, doesn’t make it less upsetting for others

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Torrents said:

Toggle sounds like a good option -- the option for players to set Horror Hounds to "none", like most mobs. 

However, I really, really, REALLY hope they do not get removed entirely from the game. I'm on the other side of the spectrum; I adore these horrific versions of monsters I already loved. I want to see more body-horror / grotesque designs, so I hope that players like me also have the option to leave them in our game. 

This.

I love the new creepies, and a lot of other people do.

So I'd rather them be on by default and be manually disabled, either in world gen, or a cosmetic change.

It'd hurt to see them removed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, butlerkitties said:

It just felt too inaccurate and over the top to be comparable, and that made me kinda upset, since I'm personally affected by this. I apologize for being so aggressive.

Thanks, and sorry too. I'll try thinking my words a little more carefully next time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Personally I find the noises the new spiders make about a million times worse, but I have the benefit of being able to turn the volume down.  DS/T has always had horror elements to it (Remember that little history lesson in the ruins where people's skin fell off, or the end of Adventure Mode?  Even the eyebrella and spider glands are gross as heck if you think about them too hard.) so I'm not terribly surprised to see critters like this added.  It just pulls things from "if you think about it this is super creepy" to "here's a blatantly creepy thing."

A client-side toggle seems sensible, though I'm not sure how someone would know to use said toggle until it was sort of too late.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm honestly really impressed how mature most people have handled this topic. So kudos.

This is definitely a tricky one. These creatures are certainly grotesque at a level that has not been previously seen in Don't Starve. It's not just Shadow Monster transformation, it's body horror. However that seems to be the purpose. Nothing else gives me the same vibe. As earlier mentioned Klaus is eerie, but it's not... repulsive. These creatures are very "out of this world". Which fits thematically considering the island is a chunk of fallen moon, and we're getting closer and closer to "Them". In that sense I personally would not wish to see them universally changed—which is convenient for me as I have a decently high gore tolerance and would rank these rather lower. However, this was not always the case so I certainly empathize.

It's mostly been nailed down here that a toggle would probably be the most sensible and agreeable option, with that I don't disagree—it unfortunately runs the problem of fan-created content sporting these "default" horrors, but that can wind up for as the content-creator's problem in regards to audience.

I wouldn't be surprised if more creatures in this vein were added as it seems to be the Island's theme, so it's important they nail down the issue quick before it becomes more a problem for some of the player-base.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, YouKnowWho said:

It's just an example. No need to build up a strawman here.

Besides, I'm not even arguing against a toggle. Everybody should be able to enjoy Don't Starve, it's a great game. But making a change everybody has to deal with to the base game is a lot more detrimental than something simple like a toggle or a mod. 

And, well, though it may sound silly, people like the gory visuals. 

Agreed, I most definitely do not think the dev team needs to scrap these awesome designs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm surprised there isn't already a worldgen toggle for the scary skinless hounds, but the lack of one seems like it could be because the beta only just launched a couple days ago and they overlooked it or decided it could wait, rather than a deliberate design decision to make everyone either deal with horror hounds or mod the game to remove them. Taking Shipwrecked as a point of comparison, it had no worldgen customization when it first dropped (and stayed that way for a few patches) but when the customization patch went live it gave you the ability to turn off Prime Apes, poison in general AND most of the mobs or terrain features that cause poisoning, both the presence of the volcano generally and dragoon eggs in particular, palm treeguards, and flooding; just about everything I saw people complain about dealing with during the Shipwrecked beta can be turned off.

It's not particularly rare for people to be upset or nauseated by gory-looking monsters even if they're okay with non-gory dark content, and the horror hounds really are a lot more gruesome than any visuals previously included in the game. Maybe it would be a useful yardstick of DS's tone to point out that it was rated E10 in the PS4 edition and T for the Switch edition; abstract, offscreen, briefly mentioned, or fantastical dark elements usually get a lower rating than blood and guts.

(Even the whale corpse just kind of looks like it went from a deflated and off-colour dead version of the live mob to a pile of disconnected guts and chunks of meat in a plume-of-steam visual effect, which I'd consider less gory. Also it's easy to avoid it in Shipwrecked by just not going whaling, or indeed turning whaling off; I've never had time for whaling in between trying to set up a base, find the volcano so I can throw things into it, and avoid dying from poison/insanity/lightning/etc while exploring.)

I think comparing the vaguely defined origins of the relatively natural-looking tallbirds -- after all, we don't see Maxwell doing some kind of gruesome Frankensteinian experiments on live birds to make them, who knows what his experiments even looked like or involved -- to on-screen body horror monsters is apples and oranges, and even things like Klaus's admittedly unsettling stitched-shut eye are a lower level of body horror than skinless zombie hounds or skeletal pengulls with organs trapped in ice.

Having said that, the horror hounds don't seem as unavoidable as they've been claimed. They only spawn on the lunar island, and even then hounds seem to have about a 25% 50% chance* of the corpse persisting and reanimating rather than a 100% chance, since the first hound wave I sat through there had four hounds and only one reanimated. I was trying to attract horror hounds by eating glommer goop to drive myself insane on the main island and skipping the time between hound waves with console commands, and I fought hounds until my fingers got sore but not a single one of them had a persistent corpse. There are also no hound mounds on the lunar island and hound waves can be disabled separately from hound mounds if you want to spend a lot of time on the moon but still have access to hound teeth.

Pengulls I don't think can be avoided except by turning them off entirely (it was also an unpleasant surprise that they immediately and without provocation tried to murder me) but the ones on the main island are still normal even when spawned by insane players; scary mutant pengulls only spawn in the lunar biome.

*a friend showed me the actual code; apparently I just got lucky when only 1 in 4 hounds reanimated.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's funny in a way, linking it in this discussion seems like it could cause some distress based off the overall perspective so... not sure if their is some sort of "spoiler" tag I can use to not reveal the image to much. Im sure you can find it in one of the other forums like the one that data mines the images. ill try to find a link to it. 

But in my honest opinion of the subject... Klei entertainment has stated that is loves this community and its willingness to cooperate, its general excitement for new things, and experiencing the world they have created. since they said that they wanted to release the updates in a non-dlc format to avoid separation of players, there is no doubt in my mind that the designs will be acknowledged in some way so as not to upset those with a... "uncomfortable disposition" towards these mobs, and this is a good thing seeing as how this most likely is not the end of these "Horror mobs". We are more than likely to see more monstrous versions of beast and critters. (im a bit exited for this... just a little...). 

WARNING: for those of you who find the new mobs mutated skin variants to be unpleasant, do not click here, this is for clarification purposes only.   

Spoiler

hound_mutated.png.d2ef54a6af3c2e0bbfabb395852b9f82.pngpenguin_mutated.png.39d9fc1bc5bc665cf7a4d97fea69418a.png

WARNING: for those of you who find the new mobs mutated skin variants to be unpleasant, do not click here, this is for clarification purposes only. 

Although now that I look at them... I can understand the discomfort, I'm not bothered but I see where others are coming from.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, CameoAppearance said:

It's not particularly rare for people to be upset or nauseated by gory-looking monsters even if they're okay with non-gory dark content, and the horror hounds really are a lot more gruesome than any visuals previously included in the game.

THANK.  YOU.  Yes, that's exactly what I was hoping somebody would say--that it's possible to like dark stuff, dark tones, even specifically Lovecraftian stuff* without liking _gross_ stuff.  I don't know what it is, but there's something specifically about body horror which just ICKs me faster than anything.  Even when it's cartoony, such as Klaus having _a chained MOUTH ON HIS STOMACH_, or obviously fake, such as that horrible Photoshopped picture with the holes in the fingers, and if you look that up it's your own darn fault.

For me, with the hounds, it's not so much that they're _skinless_, as that they look like their already-huge mouths (seriously, when a hound dies, what you see is MOUTH TONGUE TEETH vestigial body attached underneath) go _all the way to the backs of their bodies_.  That doesn't look like ribs to me. They're SEPERATE PIECES, top and bottom...so they look like TEETH!  They even overlap like teeth when the horror hound dies...

Actual skinless wouldn't be so bad; it'd just look like one of those Inside-Out-Man things, with the muscles showing and such.  Regular zombie look wouldn't be so bad.  THIS is drawn in such a way that I can't tell whether it's (relatively) normal bone structure or EEEEEWWW WHAT IS THAT GET IT AWAY IT SHOULDN'T BE ALIVE!, and that's what gets me.  _If the bone parts inside the torso weren't SEPERATED_, it'd be a normal falling-apart zombie and would be so much better.  (I mean, we're all used to zombies by now.  I don't even LIKE them and I've still got several bits of media I DO like, that happen to _contain_ zombies, such as Organ Trail, Plague Inc. Evolved, the Rebuild trilogy, the anime Zombieland Saga, and the Discworld and Xanth books.)  But this looks like they have an already huge mouth.....and then even more mouth, going even _further_ back into the torso.  It's like they're completely _made_ out of WANTING TO EAT YOU.

All I know is, if I run into one of those things in my game I'm NOPEing away from the computer as fast as possible...and there goes the run, 'cos, ya know, unpauseable online game.  Whoops.  (Or, even if I shut the game down _properly_ right away, there STILL goes the run, 'cos I ain't continuing that particular world, knowing I'll be immediately greeted by THAT once it finishes loading...)

...Notorious

*I've got Darkest Dungeon in my Steam library, guys, including the "Colour of Madness" DLC, which is directly based off "The Colour From Out of Space", a story that freaked the CRAP out of me. 

Spoiler

It's got animals and people slowly turning to dust WHILE STILL ALIVE, mutating horribly and going insane, screaming and screaming and SCREAMING in agony for _days_ while people who theoretically COULD help them just sit there and listen, so...I think I'm justified in being creeped out by it, regardless of the story's age.  Literal.  NIGHTMARE!  FUEL!  I have never yelled "Why.  Don't.  You.  LEAVE?!!!!" at a page so hard in my life.

But I've still got that content in a game that I actively play, and, in fact, I also _crossed over_ the two games on purpose when I downloaded and used the "Darkest Forge" mod.  Heh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, Lium said:

Not necessary. If you're genuinely some kind of mental case and get upset over this, the content is in fact optional.

There's no need to be like that. These are paying customers who deserve to experience the same content as me and you without fear.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, CaptainChaotica said:

Actual skinless wouldn't be so bad; it'd just look like one of those Inside-Out-Man things, with the muscles showing and such.  Regular zombie look wouldn't be so bad.  THIS is drawn in such a way that I can't tell whether it's (relatively) normal bone structure or EEEEEWWW WHAT IS THAT GET IT AWAY IT SHOULDN'T BE ALIVE!, and that's what gets me.  _If the bone parts inside the torso weren't SEPERATED_, it'd be a normal falling-apart zombie and would be so much better.  (I mean, we're all used to zombies by now.  I don't even LIKE them and I've still got several bits of media I DO like, that happen to _contain_ zombies, such as Organ Trail, Plague Inc. Evolved, the Rebuild trilogy, the anime Zombieland Saga, and the Discworld and Xanth books.)  But this looks like they have an already huge mouth.....and then even more mouth, going even _further_ back into the torso.  It's like they're completely _made_ out of WANTING TO EAT YOU.

 

Looking at it, it's not skinless or anything. It's just hairless, with some cysts and bloating in the skin. Ya' know, mutated.

It's eyes are blind/dried out and for the most part, it's just a regular hound. The mouth seems to be about the same size, just you can see more of it.
These things are so cool, I think it's just a hairless hound.

 

Side note not directed at anyone: These Hounds aren't like Wolves or anything, but they're actual Hellhounds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create a reskin mod if you don't like the ones in the game. It's a survival horror after all. I'm not against the toggle but this seems like extra unnecessary work for the dev team if they ever wanna create "scary" creatures. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My only hope that Klei doesn't find this too much trouble than its worth and goes the way of Warbucks and just removes the horror theme from the game.  Because whether or not you think its too unsettling (I don't think it is, I think its no more unsettling than a telltale heart, a human beating heart, or exploding whales), unless they add the config option (I'd prefer worldgen option) for it, you're going to make one side upset over the other.

I'd personally hate to see this whole horror idea go down the drain and would like to see where it goes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Da Capo said:

There's no need to be like that. These are paying customers who deserve to experience the same content as me and you without fear.

No, they don't. If a game has content you don't like, don't play that content, it really is that simple.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

42 minutes ago, Skorne said:

No, they don't. If a game has content you don't like, don't play that content, it really is that simple.

No it isn't that simple. This trend of design (exploding whales aside) is new to the game. They paid for the product just as you and I did before this stuff was included, being unable to experience the new stuff due to psychological reasons of all things would be quite unfair. Do you think a gore/disturbing content toggle is an unreasonable request? It's clear that the Horror Hounds and Pengulls won't be the end of this design trend, which I like, but try to see things from other people's perspective. People would be happy if the toggle just made them look like different coloured Hounds/Pengulls anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Da Capo said:

No it isn't that simple. This trend of design (exploding whales aside) is new to the game. They paid for the product just as you and I did before this stuff was included, being unable to experience the new stuff due to psychological reasons of all things would be quite unfair. Do you think a gore/disturbing content toggle is an unreasonable request? It's clear that the Horror Hounds and Pengulls won't be the end of this design trend, which I like, but try to see things from other people's perspective. People would be happy if the toggle just made them look like different coloured Hounds/Pengulls anyway.

Well you just said it, this is extra content, if they don´t like it make a mod or disable hounds and pengulls or don't go to the moon isle at all. Remember that our triggers are our responsability

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Klei is trying to do something new here are clearly its a love/hate relationship. If this really is the most terrifying thing you have ever seen then wait for some client mod to retexture them into normal mobs. Klei is not only doing something new but something rarely seen in their game and its very interesting to see what is next.  Are the zombie mobs necessary? Probably since there will be some reason explaining it, It also adds to the effect of walking in an alien land and not knowing what to expect and how it changes the normal mobs from the constant. I feel like a lot of people are over reacting due to what, a hairless hound with extra teeth and a walking ice cube full of flesh and bone? I'm not saying it isn't scary but its the tip of the ice burg (no pun intended) when it comes to this stuff. So like said before; Either do whatever it takes to not encounter those mobs while still enjoying the new content or wait for a retexture client mod that will help all you sleep at night.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Santosario said:

Well you just said it, this is extra content, if they don´t like it make a mod or disable hounds and pengulls or don't go to the moon isle at all. Remember that our triggers are our responsability

Perhaps these people have no mod experience. It's not wrong to request that the developers add a toggle, even if they decide not to and people have to take matters into their own hands, which they of course will. But a toggle would be a more inclusive solution that would easily allow people to experience the new content without relying on mods. Nothing wrong with trying to be inclusive (especially since a toggle means they would NOT be removing the awesome designs.)

Yeah, they could just turn hounds/gulls off, but they shouldn't really have to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ngl, i've no idea why people are being dinguses about this. if there's a toggle for this sort of thing, it'll probably bring in more people that are otherwise disturbed by body horror.

a toggle isn't really going to harm people that want the zombie stuff in there, they'd just have to set it to ON.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Please be aware that the content of this thread may be outdated and no longer applicable.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
  • Create New...