Almost a year later, rifts are still not worth opening; the circular logic behind the late game

[EatenCheetos]

The reason you open rifts is to get special equipment that helps you survive the rifts. There’s no reason to open them aside from purposefully making things more difficult.

The goal of survival games is either to escape, or to survive as long as possible. Seeing as there’s no way to escape the Constant, the goal of the game is to survive as long as you can. With this in mind, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to experience the new content.

I propose that if rifts aren’t going to lead to an endgame, then at least continue the difficulty ramping so the new content is eventually required in order to survive. 

[Mike23Ua]

Unfortunately a good bit of DST is entirely optional, and if you want to cut things to the barest of bones: You never need to even leave the surface biomes or build a boat to survive in DST.

And I could tell Klei exactly where and how this is flawed, but I highly doubt anyone would ever take me seriously.

See for example: Imagine if Deadly Brightshades did not spawn from opening Wild Rifts & instead those just started naturally invading your bases at some point in the game, AND AND!!!! The only way to get rid of the Brightshades would be to craft a Poison Spray, A Poison Spray… that can only be found from killing a Venomous Lava Scorpion in an EXTREMELY HOT Volcanic Biome that requires building a boat and sailing through rough waters to obtain. But of course in Order to even step foot on this Volcanic Biome to start hunting the Venom Cure the player needs extreme temperature resistant character perks or clothing. This means.. Killing Dragonfly for ScaleMail Armor or Wigfrids mostly useless fireproof scroll.

Do you understand and see what I just did here? I made a threat that isn’t optional, the player can’t just “choose” when to activate it, and I gave that threat a deeper gameplay loop by tying a required Boating Trip & Boss Fight Loot.

The sad part about all this is it isn’t even my idea… Klei did it BEFORE with both the Hamlet and Shipwrecked DLCs.

I don’t understand why DSTs gameplay loop has to be entirely optional & not actually survival based at all….

[Uedo]

25 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

The goal of survival games is either to escape, or to survive as long as possible. Seeing as there’s no way to escape the Constant, the goal of the game is to survive as long as you can. With this in mind, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to experience the new content.

I think that's why they're activatable, if you're finding it fine to survive with the default experience then you'd activate the rifts. The concept of an event that pushes a survival game into a different strand of difficulty or access isn't that uncommon. The implementation is a little questionable, but I don't think it's been hard to understand why Klei have gone for this feature.

5 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Unfortunately a good bit of DST is entirely optional, and if you want to cut things to the barest of bones: You never need to even leave the surface biomes or build a boat to survive in DST.

And I could tell Klei exactly where and how this is flawed, but I highly doubt anyone would ever take me seriously.

See for example: Imagine if Deadly Brightshades did not spawn from opening Wild Rifts & instead those just started naturally invading your bases at some point in the game, AND AND!!!! The only way to get rid of the Brightshades would be to craft a Poison Spray, A Poison Spray… that can only be found from killing a Venomous Lava Scorpion in an EXTREMELY HOT Volcanic Biome that requires building a boat and sailing through rough waters to obtain. But of course in Order to even step foot on this Volcanic Biome to start hunting the Venom Cure the player needs extreme temperature resistant character perks or clothing. This means.. Killing Dragonfly for ScaleMail Armor or Wigfrids mostly useless fireproof scroll.

Do you understand and see what I just did here? I made a threat that isn’t optional, the player can’t just “choose” when to activate it, and I gave that threat a deeper gameplay loop by tying a required Boating Trip & Boss Fight Loot.

The sad part about all this is it isn’t even my idea… Klei did it BEFORE with both the Hamlet and Shipwrecked DLCs.

I don’t understand why DSTs gameplay loop has to be entirely optional & not actually survival based at all….

You asked for 'Wild rifts' that spawn 'new creatures'.... 

[Yuuko]

Mostly yes, but not quite.

There is a reason to open rifts - the rift gear is very useful for its perks, and repair kits are very nice.  The luxury items you can get like bearger bin are amazing.

The problem is that the rifts are endless, and in your face.  imo the perks of all of the things we get aren't worth the annoying aspects of BS plants constantly spawning in plants, glass rain for no reason, and some other problems.

As you say - you cannot escape and it doesn't really impact your ability to survive, but I don't think either are really the goals of the game.  imo the goal of DST is to make the world comfortable.  The world starts pretty rough.  Most early game stuff is high maintenance, and resource intensive.  As we play we get either lower maintenance or less resource intensive strategies.  Things like refuelable bone armor, resources farms, etc.

The problem is while rifts gives us less resource intensive things in rift gear, repair kits, bearger bin etc they kick UP maintenance a lot which kinda contradicts everything.  Suddenly we have a constant chore of clearing BS plants, and need to build a whole distraction trap for them - not as a resource farm, b/c bs plant mats are already too common - but just to get rid of the task.  The zombosses come with more tedious tacked on extra fights, they're fun the first few times but get old fast.  The weather effects are pretty bad too, with cave ins on the surface and acid rain in caves.

 

I think the main problem is all of this is just kinda tacked onto the end, like some NG+ nonsense.  NG+ stuff is bad.  The world should just be the world.  These should have been incorporated from the start and woven into the existing patterns of harassment and inefficiency that we'd eventually overcome in time to build a more comfortable world.  The end game of DST should always be comfort, not some spiteful loop of new harassment. 

Edited March 26 by Yuuko

[goblinball]

41 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

There’s no reason to open them aside from purposefully making things more difficult.

what about opening them because they add new fun stuff

[EatenCheetos]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

See for example: Imagine if Deadly Brightshades did not spawn from opening Wild Rifts & instead those just started naturally invading your bases at some point in the game, AND AND!!!! The only way to get rid of the Brightshades would be to craft a Poison Spray, A Poison Spray… that can only be found from killing a Venomous Lava Scorpion in an EXTREMELY HOT Volcanic Biome that requires building a boat and sailing through rough waters to obtain. But of course in Order to even step foot on this Volcanic Biome to start hunting the Venom Cure the player needs extreme temperature resistant character perks or clothing. This means.. Killing Dragonfly for ScaleMail Armor or Wigfrids mostly useless fireproof scroll.

 

That would be so awesome, and healthy for the game too.

Imagine if Ancient Fuelweaver was somehow required to fight for whatever reason (necessary loot, stop an apocalypse, etc; take your pick). Then players would have to engage with the Moose Goose, ruins, Ancient Guardian, Shadow Pieces, Bee Queen, and Mactusk.

Same goes for Celestial Champion. Players would have to engage with sailing, Pearl, Crab King, lunar island, ruins, moonstone event, ancient archives, moonstorms, and Wagstaff. 

The average DST experience would have so much interesting content built in to the standard goal of survival.
 

 

Edited March 26 by EatenCheetos

[Szczuku]

This is why I believe Klei should've ditched the "Ask player for permission" aspect while they still had the chance. Instead of Wagstaff and Charlie asking for rocks the rifts should auto-start once you defeat CC/AF

That way there would be no "there's no reason to open them" since your opinion/choice would be out of question. They'd be worth opening because you want the loot of CC/AF

[EatenCheetos]

42 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

This is why I believe Klei should've ditched the "Ask player for permission" aspect while they still had the chance. Instead of Wagstaff and Charlie asking for rocks the rifts should auto-start once you defeat CC/AF

That way there would be no "there's no reason to open them" since your opinion/choice would be out of question. They'd be worth opening because you want the loot of CC/AF

Even then, both those fights are completely optional. They really need to be required in some way.

Maybe after day 100 there’s night events (Darkwood style) that spawn temporary rifts near the player, or an apocalypse happens (DS Hamlet style) that can only be stopped by choosing a side in the everlasting lunar vs shadow battle, idk. 

The point is, players spend the early game preparing for the next hurdle: winter, Deerclops, spring, summer, and then it stops. Nowhere in that core experience do you have to do any of the recent lategame content. What’s to say adding more hurdles isn’t a good idea?

Maybe after summer, the previously mentioned ideas start to take form, and the sequence of hurdles continues. Require that the player experience the new content in order to stay alive.

[Maxil20]

I don’t really see that, personally. Rift content brings a lot of challenges, yes, but it also beings a lot of extremely helpful rewards, a lot of which are especially valuable in the lategame. From a repairable tool/armor set, to the polar bearger bin, to the infinite stack chests, there are a lot of reasons to try tackling the rifts.

Yeah, you’re not required to open them to survive forever, but that’s like saying you don’t ever have to beat the wall of flesh in terrarria and experience all of hardmode because you can thrive in a pre-hardmode world. Most players will open the rifts to snag the new content which also assists in survival, apart from the noticeable difficulty increase.

Edited March 26 by Maxil20

[Sir Noel]

2 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

I don’t really see that, personally. Rift content brings a lot of challenges, yes, but it also beings a lot of extremely helpful rewards, a lot of which are especially valuable in the lategame. From a repairable tool/armor set, to the polar bearger bin, to the infinite stack chests, there are a lot of reasons to try tackling the rifts.

Yeah, you’re not required to open them to survive forever, but that’s like saying you don’t ever have to beat the wall of flesh in terrarria and experience all of hardmode because you can thrive in a pre-hardmode world. Most players will open the rifts to snag the new content which also assists in survival, apart from the noticeable difficulty increase.

The main thing for me is that rifts are the endgame. Using the Terraria example, I would say it's more like Post-ML content. Like, yeah it's cool to have this stuff, but there's not really much to use it on now that you've basically accomplished everything (I guess you could also use it for an easy FW if you did CC first?). There are the new bosses which are fun, but after that... not much else. Unless you are going for a long-lasting world, which is fair, but I've never really been that kind of player.

This isn't really a big deal to me though since I think we will be getting more beyond these events anyway... and also maybe I don't want to think about DST having a true final content update. 

[Yuuko]

17 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

Even then, both those fights are completely optional. They really need to be required in some way.

Maybe after day 100 there’s night events (Darkwood style) that spawn temporary rifts near the player, or an apocalypse happens (DS Hamlet style) that can only be stopped by choosing a side in the everlasting lunar vs shadow battle, idk. 

The point is, players spend the early game preparing for the next hurdle: winter, Deerclops, spring, summer, and then it stops. Nowhere in that core experience do you have to do any of the recent lategame content. What’s to say adding more hurdles isn’t a good idea?

Maybe after summer, the previously mentioned ideas start to take form, and the sequence of hurdles continues. Require that the player experience the new content in order to stay alive.

That's what I'm thinking - like if they took the seasonal weather, bosses, hound attacks, etc and reworked that into what became an escalating destructive influence around the world - spawning from MoonQuay on the surface and the Atrium Gate in the caves - which happened regardless of your actions.  Start them maybe after the first year, and escalate them enough to threaten a world-ending by year 2 if you weren't prepared for it, that is something!

One of the biggest issues with tacking this on as an "end game" is that it necessarily needs to solve all issues it brings!  Like we get planar enemies, but instantly need planar gear to match it, b/c this is end game.  We get acid rain, but instantly need to have acid rain protection, b/c this is end game.  Lunar hail, cave in boulders, etc, basically because this is "end game" we need answers to everything so it makes adding a new thing kinda pointless.

The difficulties of the game and advantages that overcome them should be disconnected.  We should be questing to overcome certain defeat so we can feel rewarded when we win the race, instead we're looking at a popup dialogue "Hand Wag the thing the boss just gave you to hand him to unlock the next tier of gear (with nuisances)" like it just doesn't feel good in the end...  Its a bad presentation.

[arubaro]

Nah, the best and cheaper gear (one of them is a helmet that nullifies 3 survival mechanics), 2 op ranged weapons, a scythe to quick harvest, ruins pickaxe killer, aoe hands off rain protection, bearger bin, better fuel to charge shadow items, an item to freeze in time plants, aoe cheap bombs, fuel-less flingomatic with extra perks and more to come arent worth for the cost of slightly increase the difficulty (actually the game becomes easier with things like BS helmet, staff and howlizer)

Gladly klei will listen and bring offscreen wildfires to make the game funnier 

Edited March 26 by arubaro

[Ohan]

Rift content is mostly great so far. No idea what ur talking about 

[loonreaper]

I disagree with this. While it can depend on what character you're playing I think the rifts make it a lot easier to survive on a whole.  One or two deadly brightshades carefully placed at the edge of your base will 100% kill all late-game houndwaves extremely easily. If you practice it a little you can even use brightshade staffs with deadly brightshades to kill bosses. A brightshade helm, sword works pretty well for most characters except for someone like Wanda. It's essentially a rechargeable dark-sword and the bright-shade staff makes AFW trivial for any character which gives you easy access to bone armor, which is something I do sometimes when rushing AFW on a console. Not to mention you get a pretty useful long-ranged weapon and a significantly better portable fridge after you beat the lunar 3. 

[Well-met]

3 hours ago, Szczuku said:

This is why I believe Klei should've ditched the "Ask player for permission" aspect while they still had the chance. Instead of Wagstaff and Charlie asking for rocks the rifts should auto-start once you defeat CC/AF

That way there would be no "there's no reason to open them" since your opinion/choice would be out of question. They'd be worth opening because you want the loot of CC/AF

excellent point tbh

[grm9]

3 hours ago, Szczuku said:

This is why I believe Klei should've ditched the "Ask player for permission" aspect while they still had the chance. Instead of Wagstaff and Charlie asking for rocks the rifts should auto-start once you defeat CC/AF

That way there would be no "there's no reason to open them" since your opinion/choice would be out of question. They'd be worth opening because you want the loot of CC/AF

removing ways to play the game is detrimental and usually doesn't affect people that ask for that and even if it does, they could've just chose the thing that they want to force everyone to choose, this wouldn't even affect me since i always turn rifts on after killing FW and CC and everyone else can do that too if they don't like playing with rifts turned off after CC or FW, there's no need to force people to play the game the same way you do, that only affects people negatively

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I don’t really see that, personally. Rift content brings a lot of challenges, yes, but it also beings a lot of extremely helpful rewards, a lot of which are especially valuable in the lategame. From a repairable tool/armor set, to the polar bearger bin, to the infinite stack chests, there are a lot of reasons to try tackling the rifts.

Yeah, you’re not required to open them to survive forever, but that’s like saying you don’t ever have to beat the wall of flesh in terrarria and experience all of hardmode because you can thrive in a pre-hardmode world. Most players will open the rifts to snag the new content which also assists in survival, apart from the noticeable difficulty increase.

I mean, be honest about it.. aside from some mutated upgraded versions of already existing bosses, and some not very fleshed out new weather mechanics- IS there a lot of challenges you get from rift content?

Anything prior to the actual Rift opening up is incredibly irrelevant because what should count is what happens after that.

And so far with BOTH Lunar & Shadow Rifts, all I’ve seen is one new weather effect and 2-3 new easy to fight mobs.

And the rewards you get from rift content far far faaaaaarrrrr outweigh the challenges.

[Maxil20]

3 hours ago, Sir Noel said:

The main thing for me is that rifts are the endgame. Using the Terraria example, I would say it's more like Post-ML content. Like, yeah it's cool to have this stuff, but there's not really much to use it on now that you've basically accomplished everything (I guess you could also use it for an easy FW if you did CC first?). There are the new bosses which are fun, but after that... not much else. Unless you are going for a long-lasting world, which is fair, but I've never really been that kind of player.

If we are going to compare it to Terraria 1.1 (the update that introduced hardmode), I would say they are pretty similar at the moment, with a few armor sets, some new enemies, and the "final" opponents being the mech bosses as opposed to the mutated ones. Once you got hallowed armor and your mech weapons, you pretty much experienced all of what hardmode was at the time.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and expect DST to add a fully fleshed out hardmode equivalent for a very long time, but I do see them progressively chipping away at it with future arcs. I personally wouldn't mind that, since a lot of the content Klei has added for years has been heavily focused on having many things to do at the beginning of the game, so an incentive to push a world further is nice. It just has to have more incentive/reasons to get there, of course.

 

 

17 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

I mean, be honest about it.. aside from some mutated upgraded versions of already existing bosses, and some not very fleshed out new weather mechanics- IS there a lot of challenges you get from rift content?

Anything prior to the actual Rift opening up is incredibly irrelevant because what should count is what happens after that.

And so far with BOTH Lunar & Shadow Rifts, all I’ve seen is one new weather effect and 2-3 new easy to fight mobs.

And the rewards you get from rift content far far faaaaaarrrrr outweigh the challenges.

Technically, this is actually something they have worked on in the beta. Acid rain can heavily influcnce quite a few existing mobs now. Depth worms in particular get a dramatic increase in damage and movement speed, in turn for taking more damage, and quite a few mobs are like this. If you also want to know what Pain feels like, carry ~20 nitre with you during an acid rain in the caves. You will know when you see it.

It seems like they plan to do the same for the lunar rifts in terms of the hail influencing existing mobs on the surface, it just didn't make it into this beta. In my opinion, this is an interesting way to influence challenge of existing content without needing to make dramatic changes, as a result.

I would also say it is a bit ill advised to say all prior rift content is irrelevant. The devs clearly want players to care about this given how post rift gear is not a massive boost to the point it trivializes all content pre rift, especially the current raid bosses. It gives you quite an advantage, but you usually still want the support of other items when tackiling fights like those.

[EatenCheetos]

1 hour ago, grm9 said:

removing ways to play the game is detrimental

Restrictions make survival games more fun and are the heart of the genre. I’m tired of this “let people play the way they want” mindset. 

Imagine if, for example, Deerclops wasn’t a thing and I suggest that the exact same mechanic gets added. People would complain that it’s too restrictive to force players to prepare for a boss in the middle of winter.

Letting players do what they want all the time forever is kind of the antithesis of the genre.

Edited March 26 by EatenCheetos

[Reecitz]

6 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

If we are going to compare it to Terraria 1.1 (the update that introduced hardmode), I would say they are pretty similar at the moment, with a few armor sets, some new enemies, and the "final" opponents being the mech bosses as opposed to the mutated ones. Once you got hallowed armor and your mech weapons, you pretty much experienced all of what hardmode was at the time.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and expect DST to add a fully fleshed out hardmode equivalent for a very long time, but I do see them progressively chipping away at it with future arcs. I personally wouldn't mind that, since a lot of the content Klei has added for years has been heavily focused on having many things to do at the beginning of the game, so an incentive to push a world further is nice. It just has to have more incentive/reasons to get there, of course.

 

 

Technically, this is actually something they have worked on in the beta. Acid rain can heavily influcnce quite a few existing mobs now. Depth worms in particular get a dramatic increase in damage and movement speed, in turn for taking more damage, and quite a few mobs are like this. If you also want to know what Pain feels like, carry ~20 nitre with you during an acid rain in the caves. You will know when you see it.

It seems like they plan to do the same for the lunar rifts in terms of the hail influencing existing mobs on the surface, it just didn't make it into this beta. In my opinion, this is an interesting way to influence challenge of existing content without needing to make dramatic changes, as a result.

I would also say it is a bit ill advised to say all prior rift content is irrelevant. The devs clearly want players to care about this given how post rift gear is not a massive boost to the point it trivializes all content pre rift, especially the current raid bosses. It gives you quite an advantage, but you usually still want the support of other items when tackiling fights like those.

Not to mention, although this is a term some people don't really understand, but patience is a virtue. I can certainly see how, at the moment, rift content in its current state doesn't seem to make sense, but as time goes on, more things will come together. 

Speaking of the new lunar hail mechanic, it's apparently impactful enough to not make it in this update due to being unfinished, and they seem to know better now than to release it half-baked like previous scenarios. 

[EatenCheetos]

7 minutes ago, EatenCheetos said:

Restrictions make survival games more fun and are the heart of the genre. I’m tired of this “let people play the way they want” mindset. 

Imagine if, for example, Deerclops wasn’t a thing and I suggest that the exact same mechanic gets added. People would complain that it’s too restrictive to force players to prepare for a boss in the middle of winter.

Letting players do what they want all the time forever is kind of the antithesis of the genre.

So in the context of this thread, I do think that players should be forced to experience the Ancient Fuelweaver fight and/or the Celestial Champion fight, as well as the rift content that comes after it. 

Edited March 26 by EatenCheetos

[goatt]

I never thought of the rifts this way before. But it kinda makes sense.

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

Restrictions make survival games more fun and are the heart of the genre. I’m tired of this “let people play the way they want” mindset. 

Imagine if, for example, Deerclops wasn’t a thing and I suggest that the exact same mechanic gets added. People would complain that it’s too restrictive to force players to prepare for a boss in the middle of winter.

Letting players do what they want all the time forever is kind of the antithesis of the genre.

I don't think "restrictions" is really the right term here.  We want options or the game play will get repetitive, and there is little value in sharing the game with others if they're just going to do exactly what you did.  Options and variance are beyond essential!

What you are really talking about are ultimatums.  Hound attacks, deerclops, etc.  When people talk about options being taken away they aren't complaining about having to fight a boss, they are complaining about having to fight a boss "this specific way."

Lock & Key design is about specific viable interactions, and can be fun for some games - but DST was based on Emergent Gameplay design.  We're given tools and obstacles and purposefully given NO specific instructions.  Slotting CK with all purple gems, freezing geysers with ice staves, and beating up claws is not "the way" to fight him.  Using a weather pain to clear wovens is not "the way" to handle them.  These are just "a way" that became popular to many people.  Regardless of Klei's desired designs going into these recent highly scripted, extremely restrictive, and absolutely repetitive fights they are tacking all of this on top of a foundation of emergent gameplay design, and are only fighting against themselves to try and change it at this point in time.

Nothing about ultimatums conflicts with Emergent Gameplay design.  DST lacks ultimatums because it sought to be a more casual and friendly experience.  It was designed to allow players to play together FIRST, and challenge them second - which is why most bosses just wait for you to engage them.  I agree with @Szczuku that the main conflict is the non-forced nature of these challenges.  When that change was made I was under the impression that it was a temporary measure until this arc was more fleshed out.  I think it would be better to just force-start rifts on defeating CC and AFW no matter what.  The rifts already front-load you with planar gear via simple fights like bright shades, nmwp, and the trio.

Even then its not an ultimatum because it still hinges on defeating CC and AFW.  A better option would be to ALSO have the portal activity start independently, like at the 1 year mark.  If you haven't completed CC or AFW by this time they'll activate anyway and give you that push.  Only you won't get the crafts, only the spawns.  Add the Bright Smithy and Shadow Plinth as blueprints dropped from CC and AFW, or make them craft-able only from a post CC Moon Quay portal and repaired Atrium Gate.

Edited March 27 by Yuuko

[EatenCheetos]

1 hour ago, Yuuko said:

A better option would be to ALSO have the portal activity start independently, like at the 1 year mark.  If you haven't completed CC or AFW by this time they'll activate anyway and give you that push.  Only you won't get the crafts, only the spawns.  Add the Bright Smithy and Shadow Plinth as blueprints dropped from CC and AFW, or make them craft-able only from a post CC Moon Quay portal and repaired Atrium Gate.

This is perfect, Klei should take notes.

[JazzyGames]

For the first time since Taking Root I can say that the rifts are absolutely worth opening in long-running worlds. Tons of valuable late-game content and tools to deal with the added threats. I honestly can’t imagine a 1,000 day world without both rifts activated; the spark ark items plus new chests, new weapons/armor, and embalming spritz make the late-game fun and enjoyable for me in ways that I haven’t experienced in DST in a very long time.