There’s no point in catering to new players

[goblinball]

There. I said it.

im not saying this because i need “muh uncompromising survival game” back or whatever, idc about that. DST is a relaxing farming base building game for me, not a stressful survival one. I am NOT part of the uncompromising survival crowd I’m making this very clear.

I’m saying this because there’s nothing you can do to prevent new players from quitting. No amount of skill trees or easy modes or whatever will make starving while insane and at 5 hp fun for them. DST is a hostile, anti-beginner game at its core. The “barely scraping by in winter only to have deerclops destroy your base you’ve spent hours building” experience IS the beginner experience, and frankly, I can understand why this would cause ppl who aren’t masochist to quit.

DST just isn’t for everyone, and  that’s fine.

[Mike23Ua]

I’m just going to assume that you did not actually play Dont Starve when it was released on Mobile smartphones, the game wasn’t a popular top app success immediately, it was only once Klei updated the game to have a “No Sweat Mode” that the game ever actually gained enough popularity to be an Editors top Choice highlight in the mobile App Store.

Why? Because the cast of characters with funky playstyles, a game with wacky mobs & an attractive Artstyle is just appealing.

There is no shame in wanting a more peaceful experience when playing the game, and Klei provides options for doing exactly just that.

But at the exact same time, people who actually want a harder, less compromising experience should be able to choose that too.

Look at Lego Fortnite, Minecraft, & even the recently released Palworlds for Inspiration- These games all give players options on how they choose to play.

You can go full out hardcore survival experience, OR you can choose to maybe not need to deal with hunger drain or darkness or whatever.

If Klei only wanted the game played on “Default” they wouldn’t have put in the extra development time and resources to give players other methods of playing the game & that is What this community ultimately needs to come together and realize.

Edited February 6 by Mike23Ua

[goatt]

DST as a game itself doesn't need to "cater" for new players since it came out.

But now the game wants more players, it's targeting new audience who wouldn't be so interested before, so the game has to bend its original designs and philosophy to make itself more appealing at first sight.

This includes:

1. less obscure, an in-game wiki. (Farm hat)

2. less obscure, another in-game wiki. (Cook book)

3. less obscure, another in-game wiki. (The annoying hinty wiki)

But those are only for UI and UX, not for game play.

 

What changed in gameplay was to address community complaints and feedbacks, such as

1. hound waves too repetitive

2. farms too bad

3. character-related complaints

Those aren't to cater to the new players, but to cater to old fans.

 

Also, I believe there is a huge audience in China, which we know very little about.

I think we really can't say if it's worth it. I think Klei can decide what is the best for them.

Game development involves core loop, human psychology, etc. A UI and UX change may affect how some of the core loop works and how the game feels in general. For example, in this case, you have something to look forward to, besides the frustrating failure.

(I personally find wikis are very annoying.)

[Popian]

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

If Klei only wanted the game played on “Default” they wouldn’t have put in the extra development time and resources to give players other methods of playing the game & that is What this community ultimately needs to come together and realize.

Giving options is nice and all, but it's something better in moderation because it has to be disclosed somewhere.

Having an instruction manual's worth of settings to read through would be quite overwhelming and take away from the identity if it gets to the point that one isn't sure what they're getting into. This is something that mods and servers with many mods have to deal with, even if they started simple (and there isn't anything wrong with having people who have stayed to learn all the ins and outs of old content).

If there is uncertainty about whether a setting is worth adding, it may help to ask whether it's important or consistent in any way.

[loopuleasa]

There is always a point

The best devs consider everyone, while keeping a consistent vision

[Catuna_]

9 hours ago, goblinball said:

DST is a hostile, anti-beginner game at its core. The “barely scraping by in winter only to have deerclops destroy your base you’ve spent hours building” experience IS the beginner experience, and frankly, I can understand why this would cause ppl who aren’t masochist to quit.

they've added options and the ability to customize your experience as much as you'd like... I don't understand this argument, you can turn off any threat you don't want to face if you wanted to. This is a sandbox game and there's something for everyone. You can also look at DST's steamcharts to see that it has been gaining players on steam alone the last couple months with each update. Klei has always been the type to try and satisfy every party and that'll never change.

[ALCRD]

1 hour ago, loopuleasa said:

The best devs consider everyone, while keeping a consistent vision

This very often ends up being a losing battle for the devs

[loopuleasa]

24 minutes ago, ALCRD said:

This very often ends up being a losing battle for the devs

I didn't say you have to please everyone, just consider everyone

[ADM]

That's a very selfish message : | You shouldn't be gatekeeping the development line of any game from leaving more graspable or optional paths for beginners to take. 'We' had it our ways back then and we loved it, today even if this is behind us people can totally experience it the same. But if they fail at it there is other chances for them and I'm glad I got to met more people of this community because they had more options to keep going instead of... oh yeah you should totally give up !

[DegenerateFurry]

I do agree that attempting to pander to new players by making the survival elements of the game less difficult would be a mistake, but I don't think skill trees do that, and the "easy modes" you can enable in the settings are a good compromise since they're completely optional and aren't the default. I do think it'd be nice if they gave more information to the player, though, or at least the tools to get it, such as a bloom meter for Wormwood or a temperature meter, or even healthbars for bosses. We have that on PC with mods, but from what I've heard, console players don't have that luxury. 

[ALCRD]

1 hour ago, loopuleasa said:

I didn't say you have to please everyone, just consider everyone

What's the difference?

[-Variant]

3 hours ago, ALCRD said:

What's the difference?

Everyone has input. Everyone has feedback. Some are nice about it, others aren't.

Hearing everyone out gives you more perspective. It's easier to design things when you hear the concerns of everyone, even if you know for a fact that you can't please everyone. 
Sometimes folks outside of the crowd you're attempting to cater to have good points your target crowd might not bring up, being observant is very important in an industry like this. 

[goblinball]

6 hours ago, ADM said:

because they had more options to keep going instead of... oh yeah you should totally give up !

If a player wants to give up, then they should give up. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Reggie “if it’s not fun, why bother?” quote before, and that applies here. 
Normally I’m a fan of accessibility options in games, but in extreme cases like these where a large part of the game is its difficulty I don’t think they really work as well. The game is just not nearly as rewarding, intense, or fun to play when you make compromises on the difficulty.

At least in the case of smth like celeste the assist mode there allows players to experience a great story they’d otherwise miss. But DST isn’t really like that; there’s not much else except for the gameplay. It’s like if you gave Baba Is You a skip button; the whole point of the game is the overly challenging puzzles, it doesn’t have much to stand on if you take those away.

Edited February 6 by goblinball

[ShadowDuelist]

I think the wiki aditions mostly adress the fact that the game did not explain anything by itself, and figuring out all by yourself (like, how to fight celestial champion, or fuelweaver) would consume a tremendous amount of game time, which is beyond the scope of the game’s exploration and “trial and error” theme at that point.
 

Most people without youtube videos, twitch, forums or external wikis would just exist surviving and killing raid bosses, without ever knowing how to unlock many other stuff, and it wouldn’t be their fault but the game’s original design not porting well to a multiplayer game that is much more massive and expansive.

The relaxed mode is also fair to make getting into the game’s core mechanics easier, so you can eventually jump into the “real” vanilla game or even harsher game settings.

Other than that I don’t think they can add much more to “make the game easier” and from now on the game should probably focus on adding more content for those who already know how to play or getting the hang of it. So I think the devs adressed proper design issues more than trying to gather new players out of dumbing down their game.

As a side note when you fresh install the game, it recommends you to try the game alone at your pace first, before jumping into MP, yet i keep seeing daily fresh install people jumping into day 100+, summer and moonstorm active, asking “what do i have to do in this game”.

That’s not really the game’s problem ultimately, you do not start learning from scratch any game by jumping into the highest difficulty setting. If they decide the game is too hard, in those scenarios it’s the players fault and there was nothing any game could do really. 
 

[Jakepeng99]

18 hours ago, goblinball said:

There. I said it.

im not saying this because i need “muh uncompromising survival game” back or whatever, idc about that. DST is a relaxing farming base building game for me, not a stressful survival one. I am NOT part of the uncompromising survival crowd I’m making this very clear.

I’m saying this because there’s nothing you can do to prevent new players from quitting. No amount of skill trees or easy modes or whatever will make starving while insane and at 5 hp fun for them. DST is a hostile, anti-beginner game at its core. The “barely scraping by in winter only to have deerclops destroy your base you’ve spent hours building” experience IS the beginner experience, and frankly, I can understand why this would cause ppl who aren’t masochist to quit.

DST just isn’t for everyone, and  that’s fine.

They just need to add a battle pass that will make everyone feel forced to play and turn the game into a chore.

[GenomeSquirrel]

I never could recommend this to friends.

 

Do I try to convince them it’s fun to idle trees in all seasons but autumn ? While to some the reaction to draining HP is an excited panic, to others it’s an eye-rolling dismal and uninstalling.

 

Do I give away the solutions? Is there any game left after you’ve solved the seasons? 

 

I’m not going to pretend I think this game handles combat well. I think it handles cheese extremely well, and I consider that a great thing, rewards cunning and experimentation. But like the seasons, giving it away does remove the from the experience.

[Guille6785]

I think a lot of people confound "giving the game a more lenient curve" with making the game easier as a whole

While people have had this notion that since the beginning of RoT the game has started catering to new players, this was already like 5 years ago and yet since then the only major ways in which the game has gotten easier in general is by some characters (like Wendy) being made easier to play in their reworks (FYI not all characters were made easier for new players, some arguably got harder such as WX and Wickerbottom, Wendy is mostly an outlier in this) and by nerfing hound waves I guess. A lot of other stuff that people cite that made the game "easier" is stuff that was already in the game even before it initally came out (like increased food compared to DS and cheap easy revives) or stuff that a new player would never encounter anyway (like the extra food in the lunar island, a new player is never going to find this anyway)

I'm personally all for making the learning curve more fair, so far DST hasn't had major reductions in difficulty as a whole unlike what some people would want you to believe, and the game has always struggled with having mostly fake difficulty instead of a real learning curve

[Cheggf]

There's no point in catering to anyone except new players since they're the only players who still play this game :steammocking:

[Retepeter]

rememeber when bait used to be believable?

[_zwb]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

There's no point in catering to anyone except new players since they're the only players who still play this game :steammocking:

Funnily enough this could be true to soem extend, since the late game is rather boring

[Mike23Ua]

15 minutes ago, _zwb said:

Funnily enough this could be true to soem extend, since the late game is rather boring

All of the “Year of” events as well as the MidSummers Cawnival have been content you could set up and enjoy in less than maybe 5 or 10 minutes of starting a game world.

Why? Because if Klei had locked it behind having to kill a 27,500hp boss or activating rifts first- very very few people would actually experience it.

In my entire time of playing DST on Xbox I’ve only ever joined 2 random servers where someone had actually progressed the game far enough to activate Moon Storms.

I think that it’s safe to say that if content is overly obscure, then less players actually get to experience that content.

Should everything be super easy to do? Well uhh.. no, not exactly… but- It also doesn’t hurt to have new early game content, instead of everything being tied to the late game.

Take for example the saw horse- I have several friends who ONLY play games to decorate a pretty base, because of this- They find games like Minecraft, Lego Fortnite, Palworld, Conan Exiles etc to be engaging and fun, because they can very early into the game start making a pretty base.

Even the dang Hamlet DLC for Solo DS allowed for fast access to building cute homes.

DST However.. wants players to go into caves, at low sanity, kill a shadow monster sitting on a ruins chair, obtain a blueprint, go find pearls island, build a ancient chair on her island- And THEN you get to build pretty base furniture.

This only makes this part of the game engaging and exciting for players who enjoy exploring the world and dangers of DST, but it will obviously be significantly less appealing to my pretty furniture loving friends- Then something like say Palworld where they only need to chop a few trees and gather some fiber to build pretty decorative dining tables and flower pots.

I draw the conclusion that DSTs base building creativity is therefore limited almost exclusively- to players who already know how to play and survive a good bit in the game.

So my friend who wants to build a cute base? Yeah she’s gonna choose Palworld over DST.

for obvious reasons..

[goblinball]

2 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

 

I think a lot of people confound "giving the game a more lenient curve" with making the game easier as a whole

 

 

I know, I never said that klei has been making the game easier or that it’s “not uncompromising” anymore or anything, just that there’s no point in making it more beginner-friendly, wether that’s less difficulty or an in-game wiki

if a player is going to get frustrated and rage quit when they die on a normal world, they’re going to get frustrated and rage quit when they die on an easy mode world with countless learning resources shoved down their throat. 

Edited February 6 by goblinball

[Notecja]

This game is for anyone who wants to play it and enjoy it. Like technically every game. Also everyone of us was a beginner, in one or another way. I think it's good that people have alternative choices than to check fandom wiki, or even switching game to internet browser anytime they want to check something. We also have huge workshop, which can offer real easy mode, with infinite respawns in firepit or extra inventory slots (which I used in my beginning days with other people who were learning game and we had fun). It's a sandbox game after all, not Dark Souls or Elden Ring.

[CaptainGold1]

19 hours ago, goblinball said:

I know, I never said that klei has been making the game easier or that it’s “not uncompromising” anymore or anything, just that there’s no point in making it more beginner-friendly, wether that’s less difficulty or an in-game wiki

if a player is going to get frustrated and rage quit when they die on a normal world, they’re going to get frustrated and rage quit when they die on an easy mode world with countless learning resources shoved down their throat. 

I fundamentally disagree with this statement because it misrepresents why and how a lot of people play games.

People usually rage quit when they feel something is not "fair." A lot of things in DST can feel unfair to a new player because they don't know how they work. Getting one-shot by a bishop because you were too curious and got too close to the funny statue will feel unfair to someone who doesn't understand how clockwork bishops work. After all, how would you know it was going to kill you? Getting one-shot by a bishop because you knew how they work and yet decided to walk up to it without armor will feel more fair. After all, you willingly took a risk with the necessary knowledge and it didn't work out.

Additions that help new players learn will make the game feel more "fair" while compromising none of the game's difficulty or features for those who already know. And also, probably not being all that hard to implement, anyways. The scrapbook system is great, I just wish it didn't require inspection for mobs and instead registered them immediately so new players don't have to get close and probably die trying to learn things.

And, the argument that attracting a new player base is unnecessary is an argument fundamentally unhealthy for the game's lifespan. If you can't figure out why yourself: You need new players to prevent a game from dying and keep it fresh, especially true of multiplayer games. Period. End of story. Also, without attracting new players, Klei makes far less income, which then means no more fun content updates for anyone, including the experienced ones.

[Reecitz]

28 minutes ago, CaptainGold1 said:

I fundamentally disagree with this statement because it misrepresents why and how a lot of people play games.

People usually rage quit when they feel something is not "fair." A lot of things in DST can feel unfair to a new player because they don't know how they work. Getting one-shot by a bishop because you were too curious and got too close to the funny statue will feel unfair to someone who doesn't understand how clockwork bishops work. After all, how would you know it was going to kill you? Getting one-shot by a bishop because you knew how they work and yet decided to walk up to it without armor will feel more fair. After all, you willingly took a risk with the necessary knowledge and it didn't work out.

Additions that help new players learn will make the game feel more "fair" while compromising none of the game's difficulty or features for those who already know. And also, probably not being all that hard to implement, anyways. The scrapbook system is great, I just wish it didn't require inspection for mobs and instead registered them immediately so new players don't have to get close and probably die trying to learn things.

And, the argument that attracting a new player base is unnecessary is an argument fundamentally unhealthy for the game's lifespan. If you can't figure out why yourself: You need new players to prevent a game from dying and keep it fresh, especially true of multiplayer games. Period. End of story. Also, without attracting new players, Klei makes far less income, which then means no more fun content updates for anyone, including the experienced ones.

No need to waste your time typing; they're talking nonsense anyways.