A Walk Down Memory Lane

[PetulantPansy]

So the wolfgang rework... how did things ultimately turn out?

A brief refresher:

The wolfgang rework beta was released in late November/early December 2021. There was obviously a lot of heated debate around the character especially since he lost his speed bonus when in his mighty form. Some suggestions during the beta were implemented and it was release in mid December 2021. This version of wolfgang was challenging in many ways. Criticism piled up over the holidays and into the new year. It was finally re-reworked and this was released alongside the March 2022 QoL update.

 

So how is wolfgang now? He's probably one of the best survivors in the constant. 

- Top 2 resource collectors [maxwell is better at mining rocks but tree guards eat the minions for lunch, woodie is effectively dead especially after this upcoming wicker rework, wurt is really good but it takes time to assemble a merm gang]

- Top 2 fighter [2x damage, enough said]

- Best seafarer [faster rowing speeds make him great for exploring whats out there in the ocean; with more meaningful ocean content, this actually matters way more now]

 

So you get all this and what's his downside?

- Higher sanity drain (won't be much of a problem if you get a tam your first winter)

- he's slow (if you wear a piggyback, you pretty much can't use the walking cane - either hold cane and lose mightiness and take the piggyback speed penalty, or don't hold cane and you're just normal walking speed. I do want to expand that this doesn't actually matter in team settings. If you have a wanda and lazy deserters, you can teleport anywhere quickly. You can also fight with a cane since smacking stuff increases mightiness. 

 

While a lot of the criticism after the initial wolfgang rework was merited, it's unfortunate that this pressure ultimately resulted in a ridiculously strong survivor without any serious drawbacks when you're in a team. When people ask questions like: "are you going to play X after their rework", my response is: "yeah looks cool but can this survivor accomplish anything near what wolfgang can accomplish in his first year?"

This is effectively the penalty of making survivors "OP". It just makes other survivors far less attractive. Pre-pre-pre-pre-prerework wolfgang actually required skill to play. I never played him because he was actually challenging, but his downsides seemed fair for the upsides he brought to the constant. Wolfgang rework v1 was still challenging and his shortcomings seemed to justify his upsides. Some tweaks were needed but he was largely fine. This current version of wolfgang is just max efficiency at everything that needs to be done in the constant with the exception of walking quickly. Noobs like me who struggled with the OG wolfgang now think he's a total breeze to play. Hound waves are a total joke when he's in mighty form. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I guess reworks are supposed to improve the attractiveness of survivors and the ultimately wolfgang product did that. However, I have to say that he's pretty unbalanced at this point. 

 

Why did i bother to write all this? Just a casual reminder that player suggestions are valuable and important to Klei's development process, but give them some space to carry out their visions for the character refreshes and DST overall. It's going to be sad if we force the devs to make these unbalanced characters that ultimately make the game less challenging and fun. 

[Mike23Ua]

I read your entire post, but I also remember sometime back when people started crying X character was unbalanced and OP or broken that I made a comment in one of those threads stating that i think it’s a good idea to make every single character easier to pick up play and enjoy, even the so called challenging ones (so here’s hoping Maxwell actually gets a health buff..)

Klei can welcome the players in with ease of access such as reduced crafting costs, lessened drawbacks on survivors, making the entire game overall easier- and then LATER they can snatch the welcoming mat out from under your feet by introducing harder game modes, new mobs, harsher weather seasons, punishing downsides (locked behind the above mentioned harder difficulty)

Now why am I bringing all this up? Because when I suggested this, the post got like reacts from at least two Klei developers.

Which means their whole plan could very well be to make the game more appealing and easy to pick up/enjoy- and then later add new content that satisfies that survival itch.

Currently with the massive nerf to Moon Quay curse and pirate raids I’m not feeling my survival itch being scratched… but I have faith that Klei won’t let me down when it’s all said & done.

[Copyafriend]

1 minute ago, Mike23Ua said:

 

Which means their whole plan could very well be to make the game more appealing and easy to pick up/enjoy- and then later add new content that satisfies that survival itch.

Currently with the massive nerf to Moon Quay curse and pirate raids I’m not feeling my survival itch being scratched… but I have faith that Klei won’t let me down when it’s all said & done.

Maybe so, but theres a very distinct if slow power creep going on. Every properly reworked character got a power boost. If we added a character from basegame now, they would be a useless weak character compared to the current cast. I am not sure i see this as wholly bad, because they’re definitely not too too too rediculous yet, and like you said it is a nice boon to new players.

 

mike ive said this a hundred times i’ll say it again. You cant play a game for over a thousand hours and expect it to still be challenging in its base state. Dont starve is a HARD game. Most people die in their first 10 days on their first several playthroughs. Winter is even more brutal unless you really know what you’re doing. Farming has helped a LOT for newer players but theres players still regularly die before getting to their first spring. Its hard, really hard for how popular it is. But you know the constant fowards and backwards at this point. You see a tallbird and think “free meat” when it can three shot you. the first major boss of the game that kills all but the most prepared of players with double health from his solo incarnation? A mild annoyance you need to handle for its drops to make spring easier. You know the game fowards and backwards, and you can adapt to each update way faster than klei could ever put them out. 
 

what survival mechanic do you really think they could add to meaningfully challenge you at this point? I mean id like the world to evolve after the first year too, but itd be more to see things change, not because thered be much of a challenge left. It’s a game of collect the resources i need for x boss, kill x boss, move on. Or building a base ofc. 

[Chesterxito]

21 minutes ago, PetulantPansy said:

So you get all this and what's his downside?

- Higher sanity drain (won't be much of a problem if you get a tam your first winter)

that and less max sanity

the sanity downside is practically nothing as he has 200 max. sanity and pets being stupid easy to get (specifically talking of kitcoons and peeper)

also lunar island 

I mean, anyone can abuse free vegetables and glass cuters if they're lucky enough to find it, but wolfgang abuses it the most with the rowing speed and carrying heavy objects.

x2 dmg + early glass cutters is waaaay too good

[Capybara007]

i wouldnt mind wolfgang being "oVeRpoWeReD" if he had a fun downside, since the latest reworks they dont bother with these at all

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, Capybara007 said:

i wouldnt mind wolfgang being "oVeRpoWeReD" if he had a fun downside, since the latest reworks they dont bother with these at all

"The latest reworks" aren't bothering with downsides? The old reworks are things like freezing very slightly faster if it's winter and you're not using a thermal stone, or dealing less damage but not really because your ghost makes you deal more damage. The new reworks are all actually adding downsides to the characters. Strong damage from rain, summoning shadows when you read at 0 sanity, more sanity loss and the ability to actually enter wimpy form, etc.

There are like 3 characters with notable downsides. Klei does not seem to like making characters with big downsides, probably because people don't like playing as them. The hard characters have a very low pickrate despite what you might think from seeing "This rework sucks, where's the downside?" posted 30 times every single refresh. 

[Mike23Ua]

8 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

"The latest reworks" aren't bothering with downsides? The old reworks are things like freezing very slightly faster if it's winter and you're not using a thermal stone, or dealing less damage but not really because your ghost makes you deal more damage. The new reworks are all actually adding downsides to the characters. Strong damage from rain, summoning shadows when you read at 0 sanity, more sanity loss and the ability to actually enter wimpy form, etc.

There are like 3 characters with notable downsides. Klei does not seem to like making characters with big downsides, probably because people don't like playing as them. The hard characters have a very low pickrate despite what you might think from seeing "This rework sucks, where's the downside?" posted 30 times every single refresh. 

It’s not just about that.. most Pc players will look into the games files or read the wiki, or watch a ton of YouTube videos to understand all the in’s and outs of literally every single thing- most console players don’t have that much time or patience to learn.. which means: a character with a bunch of pros/cons you need to watch a tutorial video for will most likely not get played a lot- meanwhile the simple ones have a higher pick rate.

Now personally as a Wendy main I deeply miss the danger involved in playing as Wendy- and by that I mean when Abigail dies her flower use to drop in the exact location Abigail dies in forcing Wendy to either attempt to retrieve it or craft another. I also Miss circling around Abigail and running enemies towards her to kill them (rabbits, anything that tries to run away) you had to run the enemies into Abby’s AoE. Which believe it or not: actually teaches a Wendy player valuable things such as- How to run a Rabbit into a grass trap if you have no bait for it.

Now after her rework you just turn Abby on Auto-Attack Mode, which also has its own pros and cons.. such as: If you forget to turn off riled mode while going through a bee hive biome or Beefalo Savannah.

I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing to phase out or significantly lessen downsides, however I would enjoy some more survival based content outside of that- (new weather seasons, optional difficulty settings etc..) for example: maybe I want to toggle a setting so that I can play as any character (not just Wormwood) to get the eating foods won’t heal you effect?

I feel it’s time DSTs difficulty was adjustable beyond just the character we choose to play as.

[Primalflower]

54 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

most Pc players will look into the games files or read the wiki

mann i usually dont wanna point it out but most pc players aren't the caricature that you portray in paragraphs like this. I know you're dead set on not using a PC for dst, but it hurts whenever you will consistently essentially use stereotypes in this way.

[Frashaw27]

51 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

t’s not just about that.. most Pc players will look into the games files or read the wiki, or watch a ton of YouTube videos to understand all the in’s and outs of literally every single thing- most console players don’t have that much time or patience to learn.. which means: a character with a bunch of pros/cons you need to watch a tutorial video for will most likely not get played a lot- meanwhile the simple ones have a higher pick rate.

I deadass want you to explain to me how playing on a different platform means you suddenly can't learn from watching youtube videos or reading the wiki on a device like a phone. While I will accept that there are a handful of things that may be intrinsically different between the ports, like being unable to analyze the game files directly, there's nothing different that stops you from learning the best recipes for Warly or how to beat Dragonfly without walls as that type of information permeates throughout any platform the game is played on (that's up to date). You've made the weirdest broad generalization as I don't understand why you think that playing the game on a xbox suddenly means that you're too lazy to do research.

That aside, simpler characters don't automatically mean the character has a higher pick rate. Wolfgang's system can be dumbed down to "Use Dumbells or do things that relate to muscles to grow/maintain your strength. Not doing that makes you weak." That's so simple to understand, and yet that doesn't relate to him being among the highest picked characters. The highest picked characters are often ones that you need to put the least amount of effort into surviving with consistently, which is fine, but that doesn't mean that simple characters are more picked for the reason that they are simple.

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

It’s not just about that.. most Pc players will look into the games files or read the wiki, or watch a ton of YouTube videos to understand all the in’s and outs of literally every single thing-

The majority of PC players don't do this. At most I will hear from a friend (or someone on these forums) about specific inner-workings of mechanics, or check the wiki for clarification on something... neither of which are exclusive to playing the game on PC. What stops a console player from doing that? This is a weird post, Mike, it seems as if the implication is that people who play video games on consoles are inherently dumber, which I do not feel good about at all.

[Mike23Ua]

4 minutes ago, meow meow meow said:

The majority of PC players don't do this. At most I will hear from a friend (or someone on these forums) about specific inner-workings of mechanics, or check the wiki for clarification on something... neither of which are exclusive to playing the game on PC. What stops a console player from doing that? This is a weird post, Mike, it seems as if the implication is that people who play video games on consoles are inherently dumber, which I do not feel good about at all.

Well- most games OTHER than dst puts its patch notes or at least links to its patch notes directly on the main menu of the game..

With DST if you don’t come on THESE FORUMS or read the Wiki then you don’t have information about the game- that WAS until Klei decided to add loading screen tips: Which obviously was added to the game to help players learn whom can’t be bothered with scouring the internet for tips and information.

I really don’t see what you guys are complaining about, PC players will more likely look into the code or use console commands to test throughly how X feature works- loading tips however are there for the people who WON’T do that.

[Capybara007]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

"The latest reworks" aren't bothering with downsides? The old reworks are things like freezing very slightly faster if it's winter and you're not using a thermal stone, or dealing less damage but not really because your ghost makes you deal more damage. The new reworks are all actually adding downsides to the characters. Strong damage from rain, summoning shadows when you read at 0 sanity, more sanity loss and the ability to actually enter wimpy form, etc.

i actually meant to say that reworks at all dont bother with downsides

by how you are mentioning it sounds expremely impactful when in reality it affects nothing, like why would you read your book at 0 sanity, you just top your sanity and keep reading

look at wanda's downside, a downside that also has an upside tied to it, its interesting, its deep and it affects you through all the stages of the game

look now at the downsides from the reworks, either non existent, avoidable, or mediocre

[maxwell_winters]

1 hour ago, Capybara007 said:

look at wanda's downside, a downside that also has an upside tied to it, its interesting, its deep and it affects you through all the stages of the game

In my opinion the best downsides belong to Wanda, Wormwood, Warly, Wigfrid, Wurt, Webber, Walter and Wortox. Not every downside is super strong, but they still taunt them through the entire game. There are items that make them less harsh, but they don't negate them completely. You can't make a mask that would allow Webber to befriend pigs. There aren't any boss drops that would prevent Walter from losing sanity when low on health. There aren't any hats that would make Wigfrid, Warly and Wurt forget about their diet restrictions.

New Wicker's downsides are completely obliterated in the mid-game. Reading books on zero sanity doesn't punish you on the Lunar Island at all. Penalty from spoiled foods can be prevented by bundling wraps. And Salt Box keeps products fresh for much longer. 

As for the reworked WX, he would be a 10/10 balanced character if Klei lowered his base stats to 100. Rain and freezing penalties are fine but still not enough, in my opinion. Weather-related are kinda weak. So what if a character has a harder time in winter or spring? It's only a quarter of a game year.

[Noaa]

In almost every rework Klei has tried their best to exacerbate a character's weakness, or at least maintain it. 

While it would be ideal for each character to have a playstyle defining drawback, I don't think Klei feels comfortable adding those kinds of things to an existing character because it could seriously harm the enjoyment of that character by people who currently main or play that character. 

What is the goal of a rework? I feel like it's to make characters more fun and interesting to play for both people who currently play the character, and people who do not currently play the character. 

Klei feels very comfortable giving quality of life changes to characters to make them less annoying to play, new tools for the character to play with, and just making any weaker characters stronger with a rework. 

In regards to balance, Klei usually does try to make a current character's downsides much stronger during a refresh. But clearly they do not like adding entirely new playstyle defining drawbacks. I think Klei doesn't want to alienate current players of the character. And current mains for a character would probably be extremely divisive if you added a huge drawback that wasn't there in exchange for more power. 

I think it's important to realize that Klei is in a bit of a difficult spot. With the release of Wanda and Walter, you can see that they still are interested in giving very interesting drawbacks to new characters. But they seem very hesitant to give them to older characters getting a refresh and I don't blame them for that. Creating an interesting drawback that wouldn't draw a lot of criticism from the current playerbase for the character would be extremely difficult.