Should DST be harder? If so, in what aspects? If not, why?

[Flip Face]

Maybe there could be a 50% chance of a killer bee leaving a hive, when you walk past them, or when you stand 9 seconds in front of them.

Evil flowers after X days could bloom in Killer Bee Hive.

[Psychic Chicken]

DST should NOT receive significant difficulty changes for earlygame imo. It's difficult in a really fun way for new players as is. Lategame could use some more challenges that aren't required to be seeked out though imo. After a few years, there should be naturally spawned bosses at least as difficult as Klaus or maybe even Dfly. Or, maybe on year 3 and beyond, summer could get some huge difficulty increase so that it's actually fun and interesting doing nothing but surviving in summer after raiding the ruins?

[reallychina]

1 hour ago, Psychic Chicken said:

DST should NOT receive significant difficulty changes for earlygame imo. It's difficult in a really fun way for new players as is. Lategame could use some more challenges that aren't required to be seeked out though imo. After a few years, there should be naturally spawned bosses at least as difficult as Klaus or maybe even Dfly. Or, maybe on year 3 and beyond, summer could get some huge difficulty increase so that it's actually fun and interesting doing nothing but surviving in summer after raiding the ruins?

You are 100% right. This is the biggest DST issue and i believed it's what stopped it from being a very popular game.

Early and mid game difficulty is fine. Endgame difficulty is a joke. Killing the most important bosses makes the next fight much EASIER.

This goes completely against any game design logic. Any normal game ups the difficulty lategame to provide incentives to keep going.

Each boss iteration should've been HARDER (not necessarily more HP, but much higher damage, faster casting, more powerful heals, higher speed etc). Each iteration should reward a LARGER statue. Seasons should get harsher, hound waves should be extreme, and requiring careful planning and massive investments (houndiuses etc). 

 

IF someone does not like this, it could be turned off, as worldgen already offers plenty of options. But this should be the DEFAULT game.

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, Psychic Chicken said:

DST should NOT receive significant difficulty changes for earlygame imo. It's difficult in a really fun way for new players as is. Lategame could use some more challenges that aren't required to be seeked out though imo. After a few years, there should be naturally spawned bosses at least as difficult as Klaus or maybe even Dfly. Or, maybe on year 3 and beyond, summer could get some huge difficulty increase so that it's actually fun and interesting doing nothing but surviving in summer after raiding the ruins?

What is the purpose of making you wait around doing nothing for 30 real life hours? If the content is a good idea to add and a fun addition why gate it so hard? To troll public players so they can never see it?

1 hour ago, reallychina said:

You are 100% right. This is the biggest DST issue and i believed it's what stopped it from being a very popular game.

Early and mid game difficulty is fine. Endgame difficulty is a joke. Killing the most important bosses makes the next fight much EASIER.

This goes completely against any game design logic. Any normal game ups the difficulty lategame to provide incentives to keep going.

Each boss iteration should've been HARDER (not necessarily more HP, but much higher damage, faster casting, more powerful heals, higher speed etc). Each iteration should reward a LARGER statue. Seasons should get harsher, hound waves should be extreme, and requiring careful planning and massive investments (houndiuses etc). 

 

IF someone does not like this, it could be turned off, as worldgen already offers plenty of options. But this should be the DEFAULT game.

Minecraft and Terraria are the most comparable games to this (and Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time) and neither do anything like what you're saying.

[jan Mele]

1 minute ago, Cheggf said:

What is the purpose of making you wait around doing nothing for 10 or 30 hours? If the content is a good idea to add and a fun addition why gate it so hard? To troll public players so they can never see it?

A change based on the world's progress would solve both this and allow people to play at their own pace with standard world configs

[Psychic Chicken]

7 hours ago, Cheggf said:

What is the purpose of making you wait around doing nothing for 30 real life hours? If the content is a good idea to add and a fun addition why gate it so hard? To troll public players so they can never see it?

Bc that's the time at which there's nothing left to do in summer. Or year 2 if it's an experienced player. Maybe it should start a bit earlier but either way, there could always be alternative ways to access the enemies/bosses/items or whatever too.

Also, to be clear, when I said "after raiding the ruins", I wasn't stating that as a requirement, but talking about how summer currently has nothing left to do after you've already raided the ruins.

[Frosty_Mentos]

I want future next challenges and updates introduce more advanced enemies but I generally don't want to have the game any harder. I think it's fine. Unless new generations as new modes.

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, Psychic Chicken said:

Bc that's the time at which there's nothing left to do in summer. Or year 2 if it's an experienced player.

"Nothing left to do" is a subjective and empty statement. I could rush BQ and dfly in the first autumn then come to the conclusion that there's "nothing left to do" since the other fights are timegated or I don't feel like doing them. I could be on year 6 and come to the conclusion that there's plenty left to do because I keep doing side things like farming and fishing and making a bunch of contraptions like varg farms and such.

If you want something that scales based on time you've got hound waves. There's no reason to add anything based on time. 

[Lumine04]

3 hours ago, Psychic Chicken said:

Bc that's the time at which there's nothing left to do in summer. Or year 2 if it's an experienced player. 

Maybe for you, theres tons to do in this game. I love making so many little things and completing small creative quests, Im year 4 and theres still tons to do non-progression wise! This quote may stem from you possibly only thinking bosses is what needs to be done.

[Mike23Ua]

I think the game is too easy in certain areas, while also being too hard in other areas.. and that’s mostly okay- except for when it’s too easy you want more challenge.. and when it’s too hard- you stop caring to try and do it.

For me DST is significantly easier than DS and it’s DLCs but that mostly boils down to a few key factors- New harsher weather seasons, new mobs and mob behavior patterns, Random encounters with Snakes/Scorpions/Piko Squirrel/Pog.

I mean even something as seemingly pointless as Pangolden (a Hamlet dlc mob) walking around sucking up pond water and spitting it back out in a new location would keep the player actively searching for the newest location of their pond water.

This is a feature already present within the Hamlet expansion but DST doesn’t feel as advanced as SW/Hamlet in features and gameplay ideas.

I think it is very important to note that when someone says DST is too easy that they don’t necessarily mean they want a mode where getting hit once = Game Over..

too easy could simply mean: I can build a massive garden full of food in a game called Dont Starve where every mob within the game is trying to Don’t Starve- So it only makes logical sense that a starving nearby Pigman or Rabbit would attempt to raid my Garden for food.

DST needs to step OUT of its 2013 Formula the franchise was founded upon and truly make some ground breaking changes to actually feel like a DS game made for year 2022/2023..

That is nearly a TEN YEAR difference in the games and yet.. it feels like the franchise hasn’t advanced much at all.

Dont get me wrong, reworks are absolutely amazing, and the QoLs have been excellent, and of course the newer updates all continue to add to the game- but I think at some point… people are going to start wanting new weather seasons/Reworks of existing seasons, new mob behaviors, new gameplay mechanics etc all of which will make the game harder.

As just an example: if a simple change was made to the way the nightmare hands attempt to steal your Campfire by relocating or dodging the player trying to push them away- That right there alone is new gameplay to a “too familiar” gameplay mechanic that’s remained the same since 2013..

[goblinball]

Making stuff harder does not necessarily make it more fun. DST does not need to be any more challenging than it is rn.

[Lumine04]

Just to reiterate. Im asking what aspects should be harder if any, and why or why not. Not necessarily that I think the game is too easy or that hard = fun.

[Theukon-dos]

On 5/6/2022 at 5:01 PM, Mike23Ua said:

~~snip~~

I belive I've talked about this before, But it seems that post was deleted. So as a reminder

World gen options are NOT a replacement for "Higher Difficulty". They're a band-aid. They might immediately make things harder. But they rarely; if ever; solve the root of the problem.

You could turn down berry bushes and carrots. But that would really only hurt your chances in the early game.

You could turn down spider nests. But so long as you have any nests at all, you can still get spider eggs from a T3 den and replant them for infinite meatballs; and turning them off completely hinders the availability of Silk and Glands. Something that a player might not feel necessary. 

You could turn up shadow creature spawns. But that doesn't make the sanity mechanic interesting. It just throws more enemies into an already easy-to-manage mechanic.

Ultimately, World options are simply not an effective way to manage a game's difficulty in any meaningful way. And shouldn't be treated as such.

 

Now then. Back to the topic at hand. This is actually a rather interesting question.

For starters, people have been asking it for nine bloody years

What do you think of Don't Starve's difficulty?- Klei Entertainment Forums

But moreso, I think it's a fairly nuanced question overall that doesn't have a simple yes or no answer.

 

See, what's really interesting about Don't Starve (Together's) Difficulty is that the vast majority of it comes from a single source. That being knowledge. While there certainly are some other ways to improve, such as getting a feel for the kiting. Execution of plans tends to be a lot easier than figuring out those plans in the first place. For example, Winter is hard because you need to stay warm. But once you learn how easy and forgiving the kiting pattern of Beefalo it becomes easy to make a Beefalo hat for high insulation. It becomes even easier when you realize that you can lure the Beefs away one at a time with a bell or food. And then for staying warm, it's an investment until you learn that you can cheaply and quickly heat up just by burning a tree and playing chicken with the fire.

This is where making the game harder becomes tricky. If, say, Snowstorms where added to make Winter more difficult. Than an experienced player would already be well-equipped too tackle the challenge. A new player is going to have to learn how to deal with them in addition to having to learn how to deal with the cold in and of itself.

 

So ultimately, the game's in a situation where the difficulty plateaus hard when you know what you're doing. But the difficulty of the game also can't be raised any further without heavily disrupting an already fickle learning curve.

[Spep]

I would absolutely love if killing some bosses for the first time did more than just make insert game mechanic here irrelevant, for example killing klaus causing blizzards to start occuring randomly, killing AG making more types of nightmare creature spawn when insane, etc.

The only downside i can see from something like this is making crab king or toadstool a net negative to fight, considering their drops are... useful for megabasing at best.

[reallychina]

1 hour ago, Theukon-dos said:

 

So ultimately, the game's in a situation where the difficulty plateaus hard when you know what you're doing. But the difficulty of the game also can't be raised any further without heavily disrupting an already fickle learning curve.

 

The difficulty can be raised for the endgame without afffecting new players.

 

A new or casual player will struggle with winter, nightmares, lack of food etc.

 

Once he can survive a year or a couple of years and/or killing main bosses (fw and ag) then the difficulty should go up. So for example year 3 becomes harder, mobs deal more damage. Or each celestial kill makes it harder.

[Psychic Chicken]

21 hours ago, Lumine04 said:

Maybe for you, theres tons to do in this game. I love making so many little things and completing small creative quests, Im year 4 and theres still tons to do non-progression wise! This quote may stem from you possibly only thinking bosses is what needs to be done.

I'm at day 1096 and still am having fun doing lots of different things. That's not really what I'm talking about. Maybe I worded it wrong, but for some newer players who just learned how to survive past summer, they have to go out of their way and search what to do next.

When I said 2 years for an experienced player, I mostly meant the restrictive wildfires. It's not challenging, it just restricts what you can do. Non-renewable resources like reeds can burn down if you're exploring (ironically they fixed that example in specific), and you're forced to base in a specific location or spend your time in caves. Saying there's nothing to do is an exaggeration, I'll admit, but it's still a little restrictive which is only annoying when it doesn't provide a challenge

[goblinball]

14 hours ago, Spep said:

I would absolutely love if killing some bosses for the first time did more than just make insert game mechanic here irrelevant, for example killing klaus causing blizzards to start occuring randomly, killing AG making more types of nightmare creature spawn when insane, etc.

The player should not be punished for killing bosses lol

[Mike23Ua]

11 minutes ago, goblinball said:

The player should not be punished for killing bosses lol

I don’t know I’ve played a few games where I can disagree with this statement- examples being Borderlands, Dead Island, and State of Decay 2- where once you encounter and defeat an enemy type in their introduction “boss/mini boss” battle- they then will start spawning into the game world as random and frequent common enemy types.

I loved how after beating Borderlands you unlocked New Game + and all enemies were now Boss Variants with unique effects.

Or how you got the one cutscene introduction of a new zombie type in Dead Island and then they start appearing everywhere.

[Lumine04]

3 hours ago, goblinball said:

The player should not be punished for killing bosses lol

Terraria does this perfectly, there is a chance it could be replicated here, no?

[goblinball]

4 hours ago, Lumine04 said:

Terraria does this perfectly, there is a chance it could be replicated here, no?

There is a difference between killing WoF entering hardmode and “making more nightmares spawn when you kill ag”.

Besides, terraria’s execution of this is far from perfect. I’d say terraria does this poorly, actually. The transition to hardmode is a rocky one, filled with a bunch of dumb stuff such as: biome spread, 2/3 of ore armors being utterly useless, enemies doing ridiculous damage (especially in higher difficulties) naturally spawning pirate invasions, hardmode V generation sucking 90% of the time in more ways than 1, etc. 

[ALCRD]

26 minutes ago, goblinball said:

There is a difference between killing WoF entering hardmode and “making more nightmares spawn when you kill ag”.

Besides, terraria’s execution of this is far from perfect. I’d say terraria does this poorly, actually. The transition to hardmode is a rocky one, filled with a bunch of dumb stuff such as: biome spread, 2/3 of ore armors being utterly useless, enemies doing ridiculous damage (especially in higher difficulties) naturally spawning pirate invasions, hardmode V generation sucking 90% of the time in more ways than 1, etc. 

Only thing i agree with is the biome spread. Rest is ok.

Also Pirates and Mechs don't spawn naturally unless you break altars. So you have some time to prepare. (Yes its perfectly doable to get decent gear against Pirates and Mechs before breaking a single altar)

[Mysterious box]

I feel like the biggest issue for me personally with dst is alot of it's combat difficulty feels artificial  it's usually centered around fast moving high damage enemies or hordes rather than mechanics key word being usually.

Despite the great fear of change I feel like uping the difficulty would be fine people will adapt and it's not like it'll suddenly go to crazy hard.

Also we reealy need the main island to be more populated as well.