Is it too late to add a new core survival mechanic to the game?

[LanOrhan]

Hi everyone.

With the latest updates especially, I feel like the game is going in a direction that is fundamentally different from its original design. I must confess that the latest additions to the game feel way too out of reach for me, and they a little bit alienated me from the game.

My question is, perhaps it has been asked before, is it too late to add something like, for instance, a "thirst" mechanic, or maybe a "tiredness" mechanic to make sleeping viable? (just some examples off the top of my head) There's been a consistent focus on mid to late game to challenge the players. I feel like adding another layer of basic survival challenge, not necessarily something too difficult to deal with, might be a breath of fresh air to most players.

Anyway, had to get that out of my chest. Still love the game, probably will go for the new content when I have the time -with a lot of rollbacks *sigh*- but I would love to see something that affects the game in a more basic sense. I feel like it needs this.

[Axoshlotl]

tiredness would slow the game down, all it would add is required periods of just waiting for that meter to go back up to full. all the current mechanics work because they all affect each other, low sanity leads to getting hurt possibly, low hunger leads to dying, but eating also affects all 3 stats. thirst would work, but probably be too similar to hunger for it to impact anything. its complicated to balance all of these, but my suggestion is having some big attacks lower your maximum health, making bosses more punishing. plus it could work with requiring sleep, having it be healed by sleeping instead of booster shots.

[chaosmonkey]

38 minutes ago, Axoshlotl said:

all it would add is required periods of just waiting for that meter to go back up to full

Was going to bring this up myself. Having a mechanic that requires the player to wait around doing nothing isn't particularly challenging, and it's certainly not respectful of the player's time.

[Primalflower]

1 hour ago, LanOrhan said:

maybe a "tiredness" mechanic to make sleeping viable?

sleeping is good already

[Mysterious box]

1 hour ago, Primalflower said:

sleeping is good already

While I do agree I do wish they handled sleeping like the uncomp mod where hunger drains rapidly but your stats also recover quite fast.

[Primalflower]

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

While I do agree I do wish they handled sleeping like the uncomp mod where hunger drains rapidly but your stats also recover quite fast.

its too fast for me. I quite like how sleeping gives me a few seconds to think about my next move since i don't always have access to the pause button. but to each their own 100% here.

[Evelo]

All the survival mechanics are boiled down to health ultimately.

If you hunger is empty, you lose health and die. If you are too cold, you take damage and die. Say in the darkness for too long you get hit by Charlie and take damage to your hp.

Then sanity was added. If your sanity is too low shadow creatures spawn to come kill you. Which targets your health.

Then summer was added in RoG, the inverse of winter. Get too hot, you take damage and die.

Ocean was added. If you fall in you lose a portion of your max hp. (except wanda)

Adding things that actively damages the player contributes toward the survival, even if they aren't that interesting: Deerclops, comes to destroy some of your structures or even kill you. Bearger comes to steal food from your fridge. Antlion throws sinkholes everywhere maybe destroying your structures, damaging you, etc. Acid Rain does damage. The Hail does damage

If anything is going to really fundamentally change our survival I think it would either have to heavily involve the health as we have it now (which Klei is doing currently)
or have a new feature that is a second health bar of sorts. Imagine, if you will, that starving doesn't damage you over time but instead you just died at 0 hunger. I am pretty sure there is a reason why Klei chose to have starvation do damage over time rather than just kill you instantly. However I don't know. I didn't work on DS back in the early 2010s

[IAmAFurrz]

the core of the game is set, what youre asking for is not an outside mechanic to have to deal with, youre just asking for a new meter, which, if the only way to deal with is sleep, will not make the game more interesting or fun, its 'more challenging' as it just throws your time out of the window. a 'thirst' meter is just hunger 2.0 it doesnt add anything, its not innovative or anything you can make interesting

[Mike23Ua]

I’d like some new actual “survival” mechanics, something that will feel brand new such as for example: an Island that’s full of Quick Sand & constantly sinking into the ground, The player would need to use a “struggle to break free” type of jumping to prevent sinking into the Sands.

Sinking could do a variety of things, such as Slow a players movement speed down the deeper they’re sunk into the sand. Or Hide ambush mobs like Sand Worms & Desert Scarab Beatle to surprise attack you jumping up out the sands. 
A player who sinks in to head level starts “drowning” in sand and losing health.. 

Idk I just want something NEW.

Another idea I’d like to see brought into the game is a giant Icey Glacier where players and mobs will slip and slide across the ground like players do landing on ice in Fortnite, I just think it would be funny to need to time how far I slide towards or away from mobs to effectively attack them.

This Glacier area could have brand new gameplay mechanics such as having mobs or set piece loot frozen in chunks of ice requiring heating up to thaw the ice out.

I’m just really ready to experience something new with DST and I just don’t think “Sleeping” is going to scratch that itch- Unless Klei Removed every other way to restore Sanity and tied your craziness exclusively to lack of sleep & things that can drain sanity levels.

[CameoAppearance]

Yeah, it is too late to add a new core survival mechanic. It's been 10 years. They talked about adding thirst and decided against it before they even finished the singleplayer Reign of Giants development cycle.

[Golden Daemon]

im more interested in having old mechanics revisited rather than introducing new ones.

Sanity is one of the worst stats in the game right now because it doesnt fit very well with many parts of the game and feels very unfulfilled in terms of  its potential realization.

Sanity was introduced to the game as another survival meter that the player had to keep an eye on and was meant to be a near death sentence the moment it ran out (players got insane and shadow creatures appeared to kill them).

Back then shadow creatures were a menace and killing them was not as easy (either due to lack of all these new items or the skill/knowledge gap that is present between players then and players now)

Right now as it stands, the shadow creatures are only a nuisance and an annoyance at most, meaning that all they do when they appear is to force the player to drop what they were doing before and deal and then return to their previous task without being interrupted.
IMO fighting shadow creatures is not engaging or particularly fun (its just the same kiting from start of the game all the way to day 5000).
Even the hounds get more interesting over time with addition of gem hounds and vargs and number changes, but shadows are the same all the way to the end.

As for their reward , nightmare fuel, it feel like it was meant to be a rare resource that could allow us to power certain powerful magical items, that is why it was tied to one of the supposedly rare and deadly creatures of the game (shadowcreatures) but nowdays in most servers there is such an abundance of nightmarefuel from all the shadows killed that people tend to stop picking them up anymore, specially considering that in dont starve together, unlike the single player, there are many more instances of shadows spawning due to seperate sanity meters.

with how easily sanity can be increased and decreased, switching between the two states is not a longterm survival goal

I really wish sanity could get an overhaul, repurposing it into something that can work with the new game and its new metas.

They could work sanity into a mechanic that would act as a world difficulty meter rather than a mob summoning threshold with annoying sounds and visuals that get tiring the moment they lose their novelty(which most players opt to disable via settings or mods).
What i mean is doing more of things like rabbits turning black during insanity (dropping monster meat and beards rather than their normal drops), expanding it to other mobs and creatures (as an example, things like hounds ressurrecting into horror hounds could be a sanity thing, or spawning , making them change their patterns and behaviors and drops , making them more dangerous to fight but also more rewarding.
currently all the interactions items have with sanity are things like increasing sanity overtime or decreasing.
it the only things with a bit more unique interactions with sanity that i can currently think of are night armor and the new dreadstone armor.

Specially since the new updates seem to like to turn the already existing creatures of constant into their more dangerous variants ,sanity rework seem like a very good fit for facilitating usage of such mechanics while at the same time making dealing with sanity less of a chore and more of an engaging aspect of the game that allows people to control the degree of difficulty of their game while in the same server that uses the same settings (no more people crying out loud that certain new additions are ruining their game because they have no control over it or that adding such content is dividing the player base).

[yvvt0379]

16 hours ago, LanOrhan said:

a "thirst" mechanic

Then WX-78 will be broken, since it's not waterproof.

[Golden Daemon]

3 hours ago, yvvt0379 said:

Then WX-78 will be broken, since it's not waterproof.

To be fair even the food he eats doesnt make any sense (why can webber eat monster meat but wx cant?)

I personally would like to see some more extreme differences between characters. 

Make wx run on electricity rather than biofuel!

[LanOrhan]

19 hours ago, Axoshlotl said:

tiredness would slow the game down, all it would add is required periods of just waiting for that meter to go back up to full.

 

18 hours ago, Primalflower said:

sleeping is good already

 

14 hours ago, IAmAFurrz said:

if the only way to deal with is sleep, will not make the game more interesting or fun

 

13 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I just don’t think “Sleeping” is going to scratch that itch

 

Guys, those were just poorly thought-out examples off the top of my head. I am not trying to say let's revamp sleeping mechanic, or add a new meter. You needn't dwell on that.

 

15 hours ago, Evelo said:

All the survival mechanics are boiled down to health ultimately.

If you hunger is empty, you lose health and die. If you are too cold, you take damage and die. Say in the darkness for too long you get hit by Charlie and take damage to your hp.

Then sanity was added. If your sanity is too low shadow creatures spawn to come kill you. Which targets your health.

Then summer was added in RoG, the inverse of winter. Get too hot, you take damage and die.

Ocean was added. If you fall in you lose a portion of your max hp. (except wanda)

Adding things that actively damages the player contributes toward the survival, even if they aren't that interesting: Deerclops, comes to destroy some of your structures or even kill you. Bearger comes to steal food from your fridge. Antlion throws sinkholes everywhere maybe destroying your structures, damaging you, etc. Acid Rain does damage. The Hail does damage

If anything is going to really fundamentally change our survival I think it would either have to heavily involve the health as we have it now (which Klei is doing currently)
or have a new feature that is a second health bar of sorts. Imagine, if you will, that starving doesn't damage you over time but instead you just died at 0 hunger. I am pretty sure there is a reason why Klei chose to have starvation do damage over time rather than just kill you instantly. However I don't know. I didn't work on DS back in the early 2010s

I see your point. HP bar is what ultimately the player is trying to preserve, but I don't think having a second health bar of sorts is gonna make it any more interesting.

It's just that the core mechanics of the game just feels a bit outdated, and it might end up breaking the game completely to try and tweak them at this point. But adding more and more end game content does not feel like what this game needs. Or maybe I'm getting too old to catch up with all that stuff, I haven't even played the content in the last two updates.

4 hours ago, Golden Daemon said:

im more interested in having old mechanics revisited rather than introducing new ones.

Sanity is one of the worst stats in the game right now because it doesnt fit very well with many parts of the game and feels very unfulfilled in terms of  its potential realization.

Sanity was introduced to the game as another survival meter that the player had to keep an eye on and was meant to be a near death sentence the moment it ran out (players got insane and shadow creatures appeared to kill them).

Back then shadow creatures were a menace and killing them was not as easy (either due to lack of all these new items or the skill/knowledge gap that is present between players then and players now)

Right now as it stands, the shadow creatures are only a nuisance and an annoyance at most, meaning that all they do when they appear is to force the player to drop what they were doing before and deal and then return to their previous task without being interrupted.
IMO fighting shadow creatures is not engaging or particularly fun (its just the same kiting from start of the game all the way to day 5000).
Even the hounds get more interesting over time with addition of gem hounds and vargs and number changes, but shadows are the same all the way to the end.

As for their reward , nightmare fuel, it feel like it was meant to be a rare resource that could allow us to power certain powerful magical items, that is why it was tied to one of the supposedly rare and deadly creatures of the game (shadowcreatures) but nowdays in most servers there is such an abundance of nightmarefuel from all the shadows killed that people tend to stop picking them up anymore, specially considering that in dont starve together, unlike the single player, there are many more instances of shadows spawning due to seperate sanity meters.

with how easily sanity can be increased and decreased, switching between the two states is not a longterm survival goal

I really wish sanity could get an overhaul, repurposing it into something that can work with the new game and its new metas.

They could work sanity into a mechanic that would act as a world difficulty meter rather than a mob summoning threshold with annoying sounds and visuals that get tiring the moment they lose their novelty(which most players opt to disable via settings or mods).
What i mean is doing more of things like rabbits turning black during insanity (dropping monster meat and beards rather than their normal drops), expanding it to other mobs and creatures (as an example, things like hounds ressurrecting into horror hounds could be a sanity thing, or spawning , making them change their patterns and behaviors and drops , making them more dangerous to fight but also more rewarding.
currently all the interactions items have with sanity are things like increasing sanity overtime or decreasing.
it the only things with a bit more unique interactions with sanity that i can currently think of are night armor and the new dreadstone armor.

Specially since the new updates seem to like to turn the already existing creatures of constant into their more dangerous variants ,sanity rework seem like a very good fit for facilitating usage of such mechanics while at the same time making dealing with sanity less of a chore and more of an engaging aspect of the game that allows people to control the degree of difficulty of their game while in the same server that uses the same settings (no more people crying out loud that certain new additions are ruining their game because they have no control over it or that adding such content is dividing the player base).

You have some interesting points. It wouldn't be too far fetched to ask for some change on certain sanity mechanics. They are ancient, and there is a new boy in town called lunacy and all that lunar stuff to act as its counterpart.

The world difficulty is quite difficult to implement though, since there will be people with different sanity levels at the same time.

[IAmAFurrz]

'more endgame content' is not what this is, this is the NEW end game content, and very much likely not the end. the old end game is not the end anymore. its pre harmode, in terraria terms. 

[Golden Daemon]

12 minutes ago, LanOrhan said:

The world difficulty is quite difficult to implement though, since there will be people with different sanity levels at the same time.

not really, for example as i mentioned, hound turning into horror hounds after death would only happen when an insane player kills the hound (or when the hound dies around one) rather than all the hounds everywhere in the world turning into horror hounds.
a better example would be the current shadow creatures.
they only attack players who are at a certain sanity level. other players have the option to help them but they are not required to or even interrupted by them.

Things like brightshades or even environment mechanics that affect the entire world like the currently implemented hail could be something that only affects the players at that certain sanity level while other players may not even notice its effects or know that its happening (this is just an example).

Bosses could start using new moves or enter new phases when they are aggroed on or damaged by insane players, for example ancient fuelweaver already does this to some extent but its very limited (his insanity stun effect).

The game would get multiple layers into itself that get added into on another the lower (or higher in lunacy's case) one's sanity is without interrupting other players wishes and needs.

But im not saying the game should ONLY get harder, it should also become more rewarding too, most magic items should work better at lower sanity to compensate for the increased difficulty and bosses and mobs should drop new loot exclusive to this new harder variations too.

though i have to say sanity gain/loss should become a much more gradual thing (or even locked behind certain requirements at certain thresholds) to make this changes work, since currently players can swtich between sane and insane at will with ease.

[LanOrhan]

34 minutes ago, IAmAFurrz said:

'more endgame content' is not what this is, this is the NEW end game content, and very much likely not the end. the old end game is not the end anymore. its pre harmode, in terraria terms. 

Sure, they're expanding. Call it the new end game, more end game, hard mode or whatever you want to; but it's still at the very end after a certain threshold. Not experienced as a core mechanic from the very first moment you step into the Constant. I am not completely against the new stuff, but it hinders the overall experience of the average player IMO. There should be some love for the very basics. Not necessarily something completely new, maybe some tweaks here and there.

[sudoku]

I like the current implementation of sleep being used as a sanity and health restoring method. That leaves it entirely up to the player if they want to utilize it - because lets face it sleep is a mechanic that is boring and uninteractive - its a pause in gameplay and there isnt really any reason to force the player to do it.

thirst on the other hand, ...well its simply just a bit too redundant to the hunger meter - gameplay-wise it would be near identical to hunger meter management just in a different coat of paint.

I personally feel like the best way to add new mechanics is in a supplementary manner as they have done in the past with wetness, temperature, enlightenment, poison. Basically mechanics that act more like status conditions that affect our hunger/sanity/health in positive or negative ways.

 

[Wonz]

Existing ones already could use some work. All that insulation stuff just to be beaten by torching trees and thermal stone in winter or watering can and thermal in summer. In spring  what feels wrong is gaining 99% wetness protection would still be as good as 0, while it's raining you must have 100% to start getting dry no matter how big fire is around.

Cooling down or heating up to desired temperature takes up to 70 seconds and that's very boring time and that's a big reason it's so painful to join other season than autumn. I don't have time for that I have 2nd shift in 2 hours, must do laundry, shopping, cook, clean the house. This prevents the gameplay from being dynamic enough.