Difficulty Choices added to DST good idea bad idea?

[minespatch]

15 minutes ago, Valak said:

I'd say having difficulty options would be a terrible idea.

Darkest Dungeon and Hollow Knight have difficulty options but unless you count Butcher's Circus, they're not Multiplayer.

[Valak]

1 hour ago, minespatch said:

Darkest Dungeon and Hollow Knight have difficulty options but unless you count Butcher's Circus, they're not Multiplayer.

Yeah, but they are more similar to a standard rpg game than don't starve, so it makes more sense for those games to have a difficulty option.

 

Don't starve on the other hand is more similar to Dark Souls in a way.

[oCrapaCreeper]

Uncompromising wilderness survival. That's the game, take that away and you don't have much left.

I already don't play DST for the sole reason the game is easier than its original singleplayer counterpart.

[Mysterious box]

1 hour ago, oCrapaCreeper said:

Uncompromising wilderness survival. That's the game, take that away and you don't have much left.

I already don't play DST for the sole reason the game is easier than its original singleplayer counterpart.

I mean no offense when i say this like at all but if you don't play dst how did you happen upon this topic or do you just like to stay informed? Again not judging just curious.

[CameoAppearance]

"There should only be a difficulty slider if the current settings are the easy mode and a harder one is added" seems against the spirit of the OP, which was mainly talking about newbies finding the game too difficult to learn without everybody dying by day 10.

What I'd personally do to give beginners a way to soften the difficulty curve for themselves is make new worldgen presets and move the preset picker to a more visible spot in the Host Game menu. World generation settings already allow hosts to customise their difficulty to a considerable degree even on consoles, but there isn't a premade 'easy' or 'tutorial' preset and I can't blame beginners too much for not knowing what all the individual settings do or being afraid to mess with them. (Technically there already is a preset that makes the game significantly harder, but Lights Out isn't necessarily the type of challenge that everyone clamoring for a hard mode wants.)

My idea of a beginners' preset would be something like this: more passive food sources (berries, carrots, mushrooms, rabbits), more flint and rocks, fewer giants, hound waves less often and with fewer hounds, shorter nights, less rain for when spring rolls around, fewer demands from the antlion in summer, fewer summer wildfires. Maybe fewer spiders as well, but silk and spider glands are important resources so maybe not. Shorter winter and summer could help as well. This is the kind of thing that I already do when I'm hosting servers for my inexperienced friends, and some of it is what I did in my solo saves when I was originally learning the game myself.

[oCrapaCreeper]

3 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

I mean no offense when i say this like at all but if you don't play dst how did you happen upon this topic or do you just like to stay informed? Again not judging just curious.

Because I've been on these forums since 2013 and this is the most active sub forum.

[wigfrids hat]

8 hours ago, CameoAppearance said:

"There should only be a difficulty slider if the current settings are the easy mode and a harder one is added" seems against the spirit of the OP, which was mainly talking about newbies finding the game too difficult to learn without everybody dying by day 10.

What I'd personally do to give beginners a way to soften the difficulty curve for themselves is make new worldgen presets and move the preset picker to a more visible spot in the Host Game menu. World generation settings already allow hosts to customise their difficulty to a considerable degree even on consoles, but there isn't a premade 'easy' or 'tutorial' preset and I can't blame beginners too much for not knowing what all the individual settings do or being afraid to mess with them. (Technically there already is a preset that makes the game significantly harder, but Lights Out isn't necessarily the type of challenge that everyone clamoring for a hard mode wants.)

My idea of a beginners' preset would be something like this: more passive food sources (berries, carrots, mushrooms, rabbits), more flint and rocks, fewer giants, hound waves less often and with fewer hounds, shorter nights, less rain for when spring rolls around, fewer demands from the antlion in summer, fewer summer wildfires. Maybe fewer spiders as well, but silk and spider glands are important resources so maybe not. Shorter winter and summer could help as well. This is the kind of thing that I already do when I'm hosting servers for my inexperienced friends, and some of it is what I did in my solo saves when I was originally learning the game myself.

couldnt say it better myself~

 

long days, no hound waves and more food goes a long way to help new players since the stress of each is reduced without beening removed entirely. setting the world to endless helps too since the new person may feel less guilt and stress over dying if they can just self-revive when they feel it would be an imposition to be res'ed by a telltale which means more time spent trying new things and less time piddling about at base

[Mysterious box]

10 hours ago, oCrapaCreeper said:

Because I've been on these forums since 2013 and this is the most active sub forum.

That's actually amazing this forum was what got me into actively participating in forums to be honest it's got a great community.

[AllFunNGamez]

17 hours ago, oCrapaCreeper said:

Uncompromising wilderness survival. That's the game, take that away and you don't have much left.

I already don't play DST for the sole reason the game is easier than its original singleplayer counterpart.

Right so then my idea of the game getting into Hard / Insane mod as you progress and kill Fuel Weaver for example would make sense would it not. This difficulty change would not just make the game easier it would make the game harder as well. 

14 hours ago, CameoAppearance said:

"There should only be a difficulty slider if the current settings are the easy mode and a harder one is added" seems against the spirit of the OP, which was mainly talking about newbies finding the game too difficult to learn without everybody dying by day 10.

What I'd personally do to give beginners a way to soften the difficulty curve for themselves is make new worldgen presets and move the preset picker to a more visible spot in the Host Game menu. World generation settings already allow hosts to customise their difficulty to a considerable degree even on consoles, but there isn't a premade 'easy' or 'tutorial' preset and I can't blame beginners too much for not knowing what all the individual settings do or being afraid to mess with them. (Technically there already is a preset that makes the game significantly harder, but Lights Out isn't necessarily the type of challenge that everyone clamoring for a hard mode wants.)

My idea of a beginners' preset would be something like this: more passive food sources (berries, carrots, mushrooms, rabbits), more flint and rocks, fewer giants, hound waves less often and with fewer hounds, shorter nights, less rain for when spring rolls around, fewer demands from the antlion in summer, fewer summer wildfires. Maybe fewer spiders as well, but silk and spider glands are important resources so maybe not. Shorter winter and summer could help as well. This is the kind of thing that I already do when I'm hosting servers for my inexperienced friends, and some of it is what I did in my solo saves when I was originally learning the game myself.

Honestly anything to help new players is great but another reason why I am talking about game progression would be to make the game harder for those veterans who have already mastered the game of DST and feel the game is just boring to them now. 100% of people only do mega base because there is not much else to do. I would love to be able to see worlds get crushed by them getting to insane difficulty and not be able to survive in Winter or Summer and be tested once again. But on the same idea have new players be able to start out small and work their way up with a bit more guidance or help. 

5 hours ago, gaymime said:

couldnt say it better myself~

 

long days, no hound waves and more food goes a long way to help new players since the stress of each is reduced without beening removed entirely. setting the world to endless helps too since the new person may feel less guilt and stress over dying if they can just self-revive when they feel it would be an imposition to be res'ed by a telltale which means more time spent trying new things and less time piddling about at base

But if you are new to the game how do you know what any of those things are? 

I am sorry I am keeping this post going , I really enjoy the game but lately I found myself falling out of the "Megabase" gameplay I really enjoy a challenge but I also hear a lot of "Well I would join you but the game is just too hard" or "No offence but Megabase bores me". So we are currently stuck at yes keep the game challenging and exclude those players who refuse to try again. Keep those players and then they get to a certain point where then they take a break from the game because they think its boring or repetitive. I feel like adding a difficulty tier would really enhance the game itself and make it harder but also more forgiving at the start. I would love to be able to get to Easy/Medium and then Set into Hard mode after killing the Fuel Weaver for the 3rd time and watch as Hounds evolve and destroy my base and I am forced to rebuild. 

At least this way if you are looking for a challenge it is there and if you are looking to Megabase you have the option to turn it off. I think DST has a lot of potential to evolve and get way larger but there needs to be ways of keeping people in the game for that to happen. I know this year has been awesome for DST but why not make it even better. Also before you say "THE OPTIONS ARE THERE GO CHANGE THE SETTINGS" changing the settings to your likings for a challenge feels at least to myself like I am manipulating the game just to get a bonus out of it. But if it is something the Dev's put in to challenge us and we cannot beat it then it feels like an accomplishment when it is completed. 

I hope you all are not overlooking the fact that I think DST is awesome I know it is I just want more people to experience it without only giving the game a few hours of a chance. 

[Notecja]

22 minutes ago, AllFunNGamez said:

Honestly anything to help new players is great but another reason why I am talking about game progression would be to make the game harder for those veterans who have already mastered the game of DST and feel the game is just boring to them now. 100% of people only do mega base because there is not much else to do. I would love to be able to see worlds get crushed by them getting to insane difficulty and not be able to survive in Winter or Summer and be tested once again. But on the same idea have new players be able to start out small and work their way up with a bit more guidance or help. 

How about if we could trigger (important, I bet not everybody does want such change) event to change hounds waves to something else - like to instead annoying monster meat delivery to get two or three glass vargs. Less useless teeth and small extra source of glass... Or randomly chance for something else than houds/vargs, something like bats from hamlet. But only after triggering something, like archieves and shadow war. We dont want newbies to run into stuff like this... 

[AllFunNGamez]

21 minutes ago, Notecja said:

How about if we could trigger (important, I bet not everybody does want such change) event to change hounds waves to something else - like to instead annoying monster meat delivery to get two or three glass vargs. Less useless teeth and small extra source of glass... Or randomly chance for something else than houds/vargs, something like bats from hamlet. But only after triggering something, like archieves and shadow war. We dont want newbies to run into stuff like this... 

I would love this! Varg's attacking you after a certain amount of time sounds awesome. 

[wigfrids hat]

1 hour ago, AllFunNGamez said:

snip

well, most of that reply had nothing to do with me or anything i talked about so i am not really sure why i got such a long reply but okiedokie

[AllFunNGamez]

18 minutes ago, gaymime said:

well, most of that reply had nothing to do with me or anything i talked about so i am not really sure why i got such a long reply but okiedokie

Sorry I probably did that completely wrong lol I think when you try to add more stuff it replies all to the same thing I am not sure. 

*not very forum savvy* 

[Baguettes]

Well, I'll just introduce everyone to the forgotten mode: No Sweat from Pocket Edition.

-Infinite res (endless world)
-Charlie, she just.. watches you travel through the bright night. (No complete darkness; all nights are bright as a full moon. Unsure about caves though.)
-Players take 30% less damage, passive
-No (RoG)Summer
-You won't die from freezing/starvation. They'll reduce you down to a minimum of 25% of your max health, no less.

Basically, most of the death threats are gone from the game entirely. Would be sort of a nice addition to.. y'know, beginners.
Of course, with no instructions/tutorials as how DS should be.

[Mike23Ua]

1 hour ago, Notecja said:

How about if we could trigger (important, I bet not everybody does want such change) event to change hounds waves to something else - like to instead annoying monster meat delivery to get two or three glass vargs. Less useless teeth and small extra source of glass... Or randomly chance for something else than houds/vargs, something like bats from hamlet. But only after triggering something, like archieves and shadow war. We dont want newbies to run into stuff like this... 

Probably because the game still has to be playable by a solo player.. I mean despite being called Dont Starve TOGETHER lots of people myself included.. find it hard to find people to “Together” with.

Now let me just start by saying I Don’t like people, I don’t trust people.. and if I want to keep a world for longer than a few days or NOT have other people telling me how to play my game it’s just best to password lock my room and then when people I trust want to play they know the PW and can join if they want..

But the moment they make the game impossible for a Solo player- is the moment I’ll go live in single player Dont Starve.

You guys want these “Harder difficulty levels” Meanwhile I’m finding it hard to survive the content that’s already in the game as a Solo player without team mates to help out.

A single group of birchnut guard trees can be a challenge to a solo player- that’s not even accounting for the 50 something broken clockwork monsters, 20 shadow splumonkeys, and endlessly spawning nightmare creatures you’ll have to fight in ruins area.

I get that the game wasn’t designed with single player in mind... but the more changes they do to dst the more reworks, the more content updates the more QoL changes & new characters: The less it feels like the Multiplayer version of Dont Starve: And the More it feels like Dont Starve 2: The Sequel.

Maybe now is a good time for Klei to look into content scaling (as in if you host a world that only allows one player things will be easier, but host a world that allows 6 it gets harder)

They can’t just design everything around having friends or other players.. not everyone has people to “Together” with.

I for one wouldn’t mind being able to have computer controlled A.I. Teammates (like having a Wendy who I can benefit off having her petal buff while playing as Wigfrid)

But those changes would probably be MASSIVE and take to long to develop so really it’s just better to design content so it’s still playable by a solo player: Rather than trying to add new features that better accommodate the multiplayer game to them.

[AllFunNGamez]

31 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Probably because the game still has to be playable by a solo player.. I mean despite being called Dont Starve TOGETHER lots of people myself included.. find it hard to find people to “Together” with.

Now let me just start by saying I Don’t like people, I don’t trust people.. and if I want to keep a world for longer than a few days or NOT have other people telling me how to play my game it’s just best to password lock my room and then when people I trust want to play they know the PW and can join if they want..

But the moment they make the game impossible for a Solo player- is the moment I’ll go live in single player Dont Starve.

You guys want these “Harder difficulty levels” Meanwhile I’m finding it hard to survive the content that’s already in the game as a Solo player without team mates to help out.

A single group of birchnut guard trees can be a challenge to a solo player- that’s not even accounting for the 50 something broken clockwork monsters, 20 shadow splumonkeys, and endlessly spawning nightmare creatures you’ll have to fight in ruins area.

I get that the game wasn’t designed with single player in mind... but the more changes they do to dst the more reworks, the more content updates the more QoL changes & new characters: The less it feels like the Multiplayer version of Dont Starve: And the More it feels like Dont Starve 2: The Sequel.

Maybe now is a good time for Klei to look into content scaling (as in if you host a world that only allows one player things will be easier, but host a world that allows 6 it gets harder)

They can’t just design everything around having friends or other players.. not everyone has people to “Together” with.

I for one wouldn’t mind being able to have computer controlled A.I. Teammates (like having a Wendy who I can benefit off having her petal buff while playing as Wigfrid)

But those changes would probably be MASSIVE and take to long to develop so really it’s just better to design content so it’s still playable by a solo player: Rather than trying to add new features that better accommodate the multiplayer game to them.

I think content scaling could be a good idea as well too. The only thing with that is if you have 3 people who are ready for a challenge they would not be able to have a challenge if scaling was a thing. I think overall it will be a while before Klei does anything drastic like this with their game. I have no idea their new plans for the next few updates but I would just love to see a lot of players who have been taking a break from DST to come back to it. 

I know at least for myself you see a huge influx of people playing DST when updates drop and then it quickly drops off after that so I think to really hold onto those players something would need to be added to keep them wanting more or feeling like they have unfinished business in the game itself. 

I have mentioned a sort of Endless Dungeon feel in DST but that idea quickly got shot down. However I truly think something similar to the Caves in Hamlet brought over to DST would thrive very well and open a whole new view on the World of DST. It would offer randomization and the feeling of what kind of creatures can we kill today or what kind of Treasure can we find in the caves today. Killing massive amounts of Hounds in a Dungeon and ending up in a room surrounded by wear pigs. Such cool possibilities. But yes this would all be too much for Klei right now to move onto when I am sure they have the next year planned out for DST.

 

[Chesmu]

On 1/29/2021 at 12:34 PM, ArubaroBeefalo said:

this is only a tag to describe the world you want to host, as far as i know, this doesnt change any mechanic

Lol what? all this time I was thinking it adjusts amount of mobs/happy fields on the gen. Damn

[SaphironX]

I’d say no to difficulties.
 

But for small parties or solo players I’d love to see boss health options (like 25% less, regular, 25% more etc) since some of us don’t play public and a 50,000 health boss is an awful lot of tedium.

but raid bosses, dragonfly or toadstool or the crab king or klaus etc.

Not so much deerclops or bearger.

[wons]

On 1/29/2021 at 7:17 PM, AllFunNGamez said:

I am not sure if new players are going to know how to go to the steam workshop

but other games also use steam workshop, so maybe the new player is already familiar with it? :P

[ArubaroBeefalo]

5 hours ago, SaphironX said:

50,000

Only toad bros and CK can reach that amount of health

Bosses in videogames are long fights and, in this game, it has more sense since there is events like weather, hound waves, frog rains, etc so shorter fights are waaaay less deep, exciting and difficult. If there is any boring fight is because of the method (cheese) used or because it should have more kind of atacks like DF which is repetitive (but his hp is totally correct by the amount of important loot she gives).

There is many ways of making these fights shorter, like in the boss hp topic are being mentioned, there is the portal to use wigfrid/wolfgang/wendy, winonas cathapults, hondious shotious, warlys foods, armys of mobs, gun powder, grinding blow/electric darts, etc.

Klei added the portal so we can change character if we get bored in long term world and to make the game EASIER for solo players so i dont think anything should be added when we have the PORTAL and WORLD GEN SETTINGS, just improve the settings so it works well to increase and decrease the difficult of the game without making a messy world.

Also i dont understand people who said "if you think that the game is easy use world settings" when most of tue options to make it more difficult cuts game content. Maybe i want to make the game harder but at the same time being able to experience the entire game? MAYBE

[Mike23Ua]

Dragonfly’s loot (cough cough the Gems) would have absolutely Zero purpose or use to a Beginner player who needs her to be Easier to fight- they Won’t know the purpose of those Gems.. 

The Dragonscale Furnace: which is a stationary Permanent source of both Heat & Light, would greatly assist that newer player in surviving Winter.

But the GEMS most of them are tied to a highly difficult to reach location in an underground cave biome that more then most likely requires the gathering of 36 Thelucite to repair to use.

Your expecting people who need lower max health bosses to KNOW the in’s & outs of what the loot they drop is good for: when in reality that’s just not the case at all.

There is Already a character choice players can pick that deals double damage, and moves faster as he deals double damage: If you really want EZ Mode boss fights- just pick Wolfgang.

[AllFunNGamez]

I will just leave this right here..... 

"Also
We’re taking additional steps to improve the quality of life for players throughout the regular updates as well. We have noticed some things that can be done to help a lot of players in different ways and we have a few changes we would like to try. From main menu changes to new world generation options, we’ve also been experimenting with ways to help new players to familiarize themselves with the game."

 

[.]

On 2/6/2021 at 6:53 PM, AllFunNGamez said:

I will just leave this right here..... 

"Also
We’re taking additional steps to improve the quality of life for players throughout the regular updates as well. We have noticed some things that can be done to help a lot of players in different ways and we have a few changes we would like to try. From main menu changes to new world generation options, we’ve also been experimenting with ways to help new players to familiarize themselves with the game."

 

This QoL is gonna change all game!

In the possitive way ofcourse!

[AllFunNGamez]

On 2/8/2021 at 8:42 AM, Slagger said:

This QoL is gonna change all game!

In the possitive way ofcourse!

I am so excited for it!

[Mike23Ua]

On 2/6/2021 at 9:53 AM, AllFunNGamez said:

I will just leave this right here..... 

"Also
We’re taking additional steps to improve the quality of life for players throughout the regular updates as well. We have noticed some things that can be done to help a lot of players in different ways and we have a few changes we would like to try. From main menu changes to new world generation options, we’ve also been experimenting with ways to help new players to familiarize themselves with the game."

 

This has me extra excited because the image shown is for world Gen presets- people are really under selling this.

I mean yeah I may be over hyping it too BUT If an Archipelago world Gen setting was to happen it would 99.9% be under that World Generation Tab that isn’t currently highlighted..

Other things I hope it addresses is being able to scale the game to be as easy or as difficult as you feel like playing it at the moment: For me one of the things that massively increased my enjoyment of this game was a previous QoL update that added Random Weather seasons & Season Lengths: No longer was I able to predict that winter starts on X day and ends on Y day- Random truly means Random... and in one of my worlds- I’ve had winter for over 100 days now.

There is so much that can be done with this lovely and highly promising looking menu of stuff- from making the game easier, to making it much harder... there’s ALOT that can be done here.

Im probably overhyping it.. but just the image alone shows the devs are now paying attention to what I always felt was being an underused feature.

This should in all honesty be the thing they focus on most..

Imagine options like healing options: Passively Restore Health Over Time while not in Combat, Default, Healing Tab Only.

personally any time an event like YoTC or YoTB is active I intentionally host a world where I completely disable any and all features that can interfere with my enjoyment of that limited time event: such as Winter, Deerclops, Hound Hordes, Mating Frequency, etc...

My point is YOU CAN DO THAT.. and it allows you to fully invest into the limited time event itself: Rather than having to deal with the rest of the games struggles on top of trying to figure out the event.

On PC you can probably use mods like God Mode or something.. but for console players: This menu full of stuff we can toggle on/off more/less of- This is the CLOSEST we will probably ever get to mods.

But in the same way I disable everything that could potentially interfere with the limited time event stuff: I can ALSO choose to host worlds where the weather seasons and season lengths are completely random and enemy waves happen more often.

Easy... or as Hard as you want it to be-

And I don’t know about all of you guys: But just seeing the image of the devs toying with this menu has me Hella hyped!

And even if this upcoming QoL does none of the above examples.. They still are focusing on it, and it’s something that they can come back to and continue to expand and improve the more content they add to the game maybe even make this a standard thing to update as part of each QoL update.