[Poll] Would you like Klei to redo some character downsides?

[Evelo]

After reading through this post I saw a lot of people mention Wormwood as his downside is very impactful to the gameplay (I stated that myself as well). So I am wondering if the (forum) community would be open to Klei doing a downside "refresh" where they are more impactful or detrimental.

What characters would you like to have more gameplay changing downsides and how would you design it to promote or hinder certain styles?

[SSneaky]

This is why I feel like woodlegs could be a fun addition to DST.

A constant 4.8 sanity drain per minute at all times your not on a boat or dock would be wild.

Edited March 15 by SSneaky

[InkArts]

29 minutes ago, Evelo said:

What characters would you like to have more gameplay changing downsides and how would you design it to promote or hinder certain styles?

Wortox loses sanity for killing mobs by multiplying their innocence by 5

 

Does it make sense for characters to not receive sanity from prototyping/making character specific items?

[Mike23Ua]

Klei went through all the trouble of casualizing each and every single character, why on earth would they undo that by making downsides more impactful?

With that said- I think a harder game mode could give the characters harsher downsides.

I think it’s a Really really bad idea to offer up something called “Relaxed Mode” and then force people who want to play that into suffering worse downsides just “lol because”

But, in A “hard mode”  I’d fully welcome them.

Similar to how State of Decay 2 has both Green Zone, and Lethal Difficulties- And all the inbetween.

[GenomeSquirrel]

I don't think Wormwood has an interesting downside, I see him as min maxed in a different direction, easier paths to sanity and hunger but where other characters might find sanity inconvenient, Wormwood switches that with inconvenient healing instead. I know I engage in boss fighting much less often than regulars here, but I'm baffled people have a high regard for that ;particular downside. Wickerbottom can't sleep, so don't make a tent; Wigfrid can't eat berries, but you never needed them anyway; Wormwood has a smaller healing pool, just make a few of those instead. These aren't a surprise, just go mildly out of your way to solve the problem before the problem manifests, from night demons to winter to monsoons to allergies, same lesson DS has been reinforcing for a decade. This is also why I don't think there's much capacity for downsides to be detrimental.

[Yuuko]

I voted yes, but tbh its not appealing to start what is essentially ANOTHER round of re-freworkshs since we just finished the first round and started into skill trees...

In a perfect world Klei would have used the skill trees as a basis to re-do the characters from the ground up, letting you take disadvantages for points to spend on skills and putting much more of their kit in the tree rather than leaving everything of their base kit with the skill trees as simply a buff layer on top of it all.

[Cheggf]

17 minutes ago, Yuuko said:

I voted yes, but tbh its not appealing to start what is essentially ANOTHER round of re-freworkshs since we just finished the first round and started into skill trees...

In a perfect world Klei would have used the skill trees as a basis to re-do the characters from the ground up, letting you take disadvantages for points to spend on skills and putting much more of their kit in the tree rather than leaving everything of their base kit with the skill trees as simply a buff layer on top of it all.

Skill trees could have been an actually good addition to the game if there was a variety of options. Small buffs with no catch, bigger buffs with a drawback, there could even be some things that are just a drawback with no upside so you can make the character harder if you want to. But instead they just made skill trees a bunch of direct upgrade things with no drawback, most of them are extremely nonexistent like "number is now bigger", and you don't even need to unlock the upgrades on a per-world basis since you just start with everything. It's no surprise that most people have either exactly identical or at least very similar skill trees, everybody's just taking the best stuff since there's no alternative options which are interesting.

[grm9]

4 hours ago, InkArts said:

Wortox loses sanity for killing mobs by multiplying their innocence by 5

why nerf the least efficient character in the game

[InkArts]

4 hours ago, grm9 said:

why nerf the least efficient character in the game

Least efficient? Souls are really good. I understand if my suggestion is a bad one but I don't think that Wortox should be labeled as least efficient

[grm9]

Just now, InkArts said:

Souls are really good

no, they can't be stockpiled without wasting time on getting bees and it takes more time to get souls in comparison to food and they're worse and force you to fight nightmares even when you don't need nf and blue shrooms are better than souls for healing and everyone can use them except the character with infinite healing on cd and the character that gets healed by hitting almost anything and getting enough souls for teleporting often wastes more time than teleporting saves

9 hours ago, SSneaky said:

This is why I feel like woodlegs could be a fun addition to DST.

A constant 4.8 sanity drain per minute at all times your not on a boat or dock would be wild

killing nightmares isn't hard so it'd just waste a lot of time and force you to prepare more sanity foods for bosses with high negative constant sanity auras 

[InkArts]

1 hour ago, grm9 said:

no, they can't be stockpiled without wasting time on getting bees and it takes more time to get souls in comparison to food and they're worse and force you to fight nightmares even when you don't need nf and blue shrooms are better than souls for healing and everyone can use them except the character with infinite healing on cd and the character that gets healed by hitting almost anything and getting enough souls for teleporting often wastes more time than teleporting saves

I feel like your overlooking the multiplayer aspect of souls. You yourself don't have to kill for souls if I'm remembering correctly. So just team with a high offense character like Wigfrid or Wolfgang or with a crowd control character like Wendy or maybe Wormwood with their traps (though I'm not completely sure if these spawn souls). Wortox can then release the souls to heal his teammates.

(I might have all of my information wrong, please inform me if that is the case)

[grm9]

17 minutes ago, InkArts said:

(I might have all of my information wrong, please inform me if that is the case)

why talk about something you have no clue about? a lot of people play solo and if you're playing with others, you need to not only go to a place with mobs that spawn souls and don't take much time to kill, but also force others to be there or constantly go to them when they're killing something, which isn't possible unless you're going to constantly go out of your way for that or constantly stay with them

[InkArts]

2 minutes ago, grm9 said:

why talk about something you have no clue about? 

I was just stating the fact that my information could be wrong. Seeing as you provided no information to counter or discredit my information then do I really have no clue about the topic?

2 minutes ago, grm9 said:

why talk about something you have no clue about? a lot of people play solo and if you're playing with others, you need to not only go to a place with mobs that spawn souls and don't take much time to kill, but also force others to be there or constantly go to them when they're killing something, which isn't possible unless you're going to constantly go out of your way for that or constantly stay with them

Yes I understand that soul farming can be tedious. You have a point there. I feel like you could argue that about farming other things though too

[grm9]

29 minutes ago, InkArts said:

I was just stating the fact that my information could be wrong. Seeing as you provided no information to counter or discredit my information then do I really have no clue about the topic?

because it seems like you only played DS instead of DST, considering you talk about increasing WX's max stats using gears and thought that wolfgang has speedboost in mighty form instead of normal

29 minutes ago, InkArts said:

Yes I understand that soul farming can be tedious. You have a point there. I feel like you could argue that about farming other things though too

the problem isn't that it's tedious, but that it wastes more time than things that all other characters can use to do the same stuff wortox can except having to get lazy explorer if they don't want to dodge bone cage/want to skip atrium labyrinth without voidwalking

Edited March 15 by grm9

[InkArts]

19 minutes ago, grm9 said:

because it seems like you only played DS instead of DST, considering you talk about increasing WX's max stats using gears and thought that wolfgang has speedboost in mighty form instead of normal

Ok, but that doesn't mean I don't know anything about dst

[NoodlemanNed]

character downsides make the game more boring i think a better approach to making the game harder is through optional challenges. It allows people to be challenged when they feel like it without raising the bar of entry for new players getting into the game.

[Bearger Enjoyer]

On 3/15/2024 at 4:49 AM, InkArts said:

Wortox loses sanity for killing mobs by multiplying their innocence by 5

 

Does it make sense for characters to not receive sanity from prototyping/making character specific items?

This would be insanely tedious. I agree that Wortox's downside could be more interesting but this ain't it.

... To be honest, sanity downsides are pretty bland overall, and Wortox already has a -15/day tax on his best food item so that's even less interesting.

On 3/15/2024 at 4:09 PM, InkArts said:

I feel like your overlooking the multiplayer aspect of souls. You yourself don't have to kill for souls if I'm remembering correctly. So just team with a high offense character like Wigfrid or Wolfgang or with a crowd control character like Wendy or maybe Wormwood with their traps (though I'm not completely sure if these spawn souls). Wortox can then release the souls to heal his teammates.

(I might have all of my information wrong, please inform me if that is the case)

Generally relying on others to grab your souls is terrible because it is almost always faster to ham bat that beehive yourself rather than wait for Wendy to arrive.
It's more of an oppurtunistic thing you occasionally benefit from, rather than something you wanna seek out and strategize around.

On 3/15/2024 at 4:37 PM, InkArts said:

Yes I understand that soul farming can be tedious. You have a point there. I feel like you could argue that about farming other things though too

I'd say in his case it's a bit more tedisome because souls can't be stockpiled nearly as readily and run out extremely quickly via map hops, so you have to do the repetitive task super often.

What I *would* like however is a way to rework/reassign his 0.5x food multiplier downside. Maybe limit the amount of mortal food he eats in a day, but they have a higher value than they do now? Maybe eating too much makes you keel over? I don't know, I didn't put much thought into it yet, but 0.5x multiplier is pretty boring.

[. . .]

I regret saying yes because I realize that would mean character reworks 3.0 so NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[The Starver]

2 hours ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

sanity downsides are pretty bland overall

That is the main struggle I have with my mod characters, but as much as I try, it's either not meaningful enough, or it's waaay too unforgiving.

[Szczuku]

On 3/15/2024 at 5:05 PM, NoodlemanNed said:

character downsides make the game more boring i think a better approach to making the game harder is through optional challenges

You're wrong

There's a thread talking about mains and a good portion of forumites have stated that their mains are Wormwood, Wurt and Warly - characers with prominent downsides

You know what the "optional challenges" would end up being? More raid bosses. Were you around the New Reign arc? Almost all we got were raid bosses, optional challenges that players could take on and you know what ended up happening? The game became so stale, all you did was fight boss after boss and wait for their 20 day respawn because after surviving for one year there was nothing more to do than just fight those damn bosses

This game NEEDS more character downsides and challenges that aren't all about directly lowering the players health

[grm9]

3 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

The game became so stale, all you did was fight boss after boss and wait for their 20 day respawn because after surviving for one year there was nothing more to do than just fight those damn bosses

changing characters won't fix that and there's still nothing to do even before 1st summer starts usually 

Edited March 19 by grm9

[Cheggf]

On 3/16/2024 at 2:37 PM, . . . said:

I regret saying yes because I realize that would mean character reworks 3.0 so NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's okay, character reworks 3 is coming whether or not they're adding downsides. Then it'll be followed up with the skill trees reworks, then the second set of skill trees. 

[Q42]

4 hours ago, grm9 said:

changing characters won't fix that and there's still nothing to do even before 1st summer starts usually 

You can kill all bosses and exhaust rift content by day 55? Also, a large part of sandbox games is making your own fun, i.e setting goals for yourself and doing interesting things for fun instead of profit. I feel like this is an aspect of the game a lot of people miss out on; Don't Starve was never a linear boss rush simulator. Yeah, me and others like to play it like that sometimes but at its core its a sandbox game. If it's looked at as a pure boss rush experience, there will always be an issue of running out of things to do because you'll eventually reach the end.

[grm9]

2 minutes ago, Q42 said:

You can kill all bosses and exhaust rift content by day 55? 

except malbatross, frostjaw and rift bosses because all of those are boring and require a lot of time to access (e.g. waiting for bearger and going through malbatross RNG), yes

3 minutes ago, Q42 said:

Also, a large part of sandbox games is making your own fun, i.e setting goals for yourself and doing interesting things for fun instead of profit. I feel like this is an aspect of the game a lot of people miss out on; Don't Starve was never a linear boss rush simulator. Yeah, me and others like to play it like that sometimes but at its core its a sandbox game. If it's looked at as a pure boss rush experience, there will always be an issue of running out of things to do because you'll eventually reach the end

the point was that there weren't any updates that weren't related to bosses and added stuff that's fun to do even if you don't like megabasing imo

[m.VOODOO]

I just wish Wortox would get a skill tree :')