Poll: how much information should the game give to new players? Is DST too hard to learn?

[DegenerateFurry]

It's something that comes up occasionally, but not often enough: should Don't Starve Together be more accessible for new players by giving them more information and thus being easier to learn to play well? 

[nimzowitsch10]

part of the reason why most ppl stop playing DST is because of how little info is in the game.

It's a double edged sword cause you gotta figure everything out thru wiki but it is rewarding once u do figure it out.

imo they should just leave it the way it is. A tutorial mode would probably set back development another 1 year or something

 

[WilsonHiggs]

The game is beatean basically by learning how to make a thermal stone, pressing F after a monsters with 1 basic atack perform his hit and having light on you

Once you learn the basics is pretty easy to reach 2nd autumn. After that the player has the only challenge of beating bosses in a game with 1 single attack buttom and a combat system that rewards either knowing how much hits you need to perform before the enemy hits you or to grind enough armor and healing for the fight 

Sure, this is kinda a hyperbolic simplification but we arent playing a souls game or a hard platform game like celeste. This is a game about time managment and learning more than anything anything else, removing one of these 2 things just creates an oasis of success by doing anything skillful.

The game is considered hard because of the trial and error nature

[AriaMain]

I think bosses should have visuals for when they have low hp like AG and CK

Also Recipe book already shows the value of each food and it's a good commodation

[GenomeSquirrel]

I doubt  the above questions are more relevant than winter, as in,

how to I stop taking damage?

what do I eat now that berries are gone?

I made a fire, but I can't go anywhere?

 

But in answer to your pool

1 I think bosses that recover health are the only bosses that need a health bar, I don't care either way otherwise

2 Hurt boxes should be represented by some sort of sprite, what part of that isn't true to due design, and what part isn't true due to latency I have no idea

3 the meters are visible, information is adequately conveyed

4 i believe that mystery is a feature, the game lives and breathes through ambushes

5 As I said in 4, this is more of a surprise you with ambushes game than it is a hard game; I die less often than I used to because I make armor, but that isn't really a reward for cunning or reflexes

[Primalflower]

It's the sort of thing that would be impossible to put into action without intense work at the stage the game is at, but i wish it was a far, far more common thing for mobs, big and small to show some degree of damage depending on their health. It was and continues to be one of the coolest things about crab king, and i think it would be pretty engaging

[Cheggf]

If you go to more mainstream places like Reddit or the SCUD you will see so many posts by people saying the game is boring. The vast majority of the challenge comes from just lacking information, once you know everything the game is not difficult and all that's really left is creative things like megabasing, which most people (especially the type to download these mods) don't enjoy. To just blatantly reveal a bunch of intentionally obscured would not only look extremely ugly, but it would ruin the game. 

[Evelo]

Health bars are never needed for mobs. Ever. It is dead when it is dead. Coming from my years in WoW Raiding, I wish health bars and damage were hidden so greedy idiots would focus on the mechanics instead of doing everything to pump up their numbers.

Mob attack range is just cheating especially if it is easily given. If it is an area of effect for an ability (like Iceclops's Ice Throw), then sure. But as far as generic melee attack? No. If you can't dodge, you can always heal mid fight and wear tons of protection.

health/sanity/hunger knowledge is, fine. It really isn't that important. I don't actually know how much hunger, health, or sanity food gives. All I know is Wobster Bisque and Dragonpie for Health; Melonsicle, Vegetable Stinger, and Salsa Fresca for Sanity; Meaty Stew, Skillet, Dragonpie, and Pumpkin for hunger.

The lack of direction can be a huge turn off for the game. So giving better info on how to actually do stuff to progress through the game is nice, but it is pretty self explanatory for a lot of things:

Too cold? Winter Tab.
Raining? Rain Tab.
Too Hot? Summer Tab.
Hungry? Farm or Hunt.
You get the idea.

How to fight Fuel Weaver?
Yknow, do... the things?

[Semind]

Healthbars, not really. The scrapbook info and dummies give the player the relevant info to figure out how many hits they might have to plan for. At most, I'd like to see two things that aren't explicitly conveyed have some kind of in-game indication. Mobs that have damage reduction (so scrappy werepig and mush'd Toadstool, planar conveyance is good enough to me) have some way to identify your hits are less effective. And health regen. I was going into this point pretty much primed to say damage numbers popping up address both, but obv that kinda makes dummies irrelevant so I acknowledge some other option is probably preferred. Maybe there could be a suite of hit effects that correspond to different damage ranges.

Attack ranges, not so much, But what I do think would be an improvement is if the game communicated two things: the way attacks in the game kind of have AoE logic where it's more about whether you're standing inside a circle centred on the mob, so it kind of doesn't matter if it's visually attacking in the complete opposite direction of where you're standing. And also some way of seeing that an enemy's attack can even hit you to begin with, as targeting is also basically 100% opaque. I tend to consider that, in video games in general, if an attack doesn't register despite a clear and obvious intersection of bodies then it should be justified by something. Even games with dice rolls pass the bar in my book, just by calling out that an attack "missed". Overall, these are more like minor nitpicks than serious critiques, I wouldn't place them on the same level as the things I pointed out with the enemy health stuff. Not to mention, I can't really even conceive of how you could actually convey any of this elegantly. I wouldn't want to start seeing a "targeted enemy" icon or color overlays, since I still consider the game's art something that should be preserved and protected.

I wouldn't mind seeing one more level of specificity being added to the cookbook/scrapbook (does the scrapbook already have the specific numbers? I forget), since you mostly can glean the food numbers within 1-2 points of precision just by looking at the readily available gauge numbers. I find it pointless tedium to: hover a HUD element to see a number, memorize it, eat a thing, check the number again and do a quick difference operation. At best, there's an argument you can't glean every food number with any character, due to those who's capacity is lower than certain recovery values. But I don't really buy that that gives the current design its reason to exist.

[DegenerateFurry]

I really don't understand your views here. Why is it a bad thing to tell the player the health of what they're fighting? All it does is give you some very much needed feedback for how effective your actions are, saving you from the tedium and frustration of trial and error. The same is true for attack ranges - it's always better to have combat information communicated clearly to the player than to leave them guessing, especially at something as vague and prone to feeling inconsistent as attack range.
Granted, we don't need exact numbers (for example, DOOM: Eternal's destructible demons system, where the models of enemies change dynamically as their health gets lower to make it clear how hurt they are, does a great job of communicating it through a more diegetic method), but healthbars would be pretty easy to implement and wouldn't require a ton of work from Klei.

Do all of you who're saying that health bars would "ruin the game" or that showing attack ranges "is cheating" really think Don't Starve Together is such a boring and empty game that it'd really have nothing to draw people in with without the "challenge" of memorizing a bunch of random crap you probably read on the wiki and manually counting how many times you've whacked a boss? Really? Why are you even here if that's your opinion? 

Because I don't. I think this is a wonderful game with tons of depth and player freedom, lots of impactful choices and decisions to make both in and out of combat, and countless hours of replay value, but I think it's one where an unfortunate massive number of players never get to experience the joy of playing it beyond the first season because it simply doesn't give them the information they need to play it well enough. I love this game and I feel bad for everyone I've talked to who've said they own it, but have never gotten into it because it's too hard to learn - and that's a lot of people. I want DST to be easier to learn, and these changes would not affect veterans at all, especially if they were toggleable. The only one I feel would be unnecessary is food stat-related info, since that's already communicated pretty clearly by just looking at what happens to your stats when you eat them, and you can just kinda loosely categorize things mentally as "good health food", "good sanity food", "good hunger food", "good everything food", "mid", and "avoid" based on those results. 

 

To share my own experiences with DS/T: although I beat Adventure Mode shortly after it was introduced and all that back in original DS, when I came back to play DST (before skill trees or character reworks), I used to be a base-sitter noob for the longest time. I'd rely on food sources like berry bushes, would play Wendy for the ease of crowd control, and would avoid bosses. I avoided danger because I didn't have the tools I needed to learn how to actually fight properly, especially since nearly every mob in DST has a lot more (often double or more) health than in DS. I could kill Deerclops, usually, but that was about it. 

Then I installed Insight. With one mod, I got all the info I needed to learn how to kite, how much preparation would be necessary to win against a boss, and even how far I'd need to run when kiting. No longer did I have to guess if I'd still be within the melee attack range of something when I'm half a tile away from it - I could just hold my mouse over it and see how far I need to go. In a game like this, all of that information is vitally important, but with the way it is unmodded, you're stuck with trial and error or memorizing a wiki or guide to get it. 
You know what that mod did? It taught me how to play the game at a level that lets me see all that it has to offer. Now I can go in a vanilla public server - no healthbar mods, no attack range displayed, nothing of that sort - and do just as well as I do with them because, thanks to Insight showing me actual values instead of leaving me guessing and doubting myself or feeling cheated by the game, I have a far, far better sense of enemy health, my own DPS, and enemy attack ranges than I'd ever have developed otherwise. There's not a boss in the game I haven't killed anymore, and I actually like fighting them now. Well, most of them. I'd have never come to like this game as much as I do without first modding it to tell me more about what I'm doing, and there are tons of players who miss out because they didn't find a mod like that to make the game actually learnable solo without being a masochist.

[Evelo]

54 minutes ago, Semind said:

At most, I'd like to see two things that aren't explicitly conveyed have some kind of in-game indication. Mobs that have damage reduction (so scrappy werepig and mush'd Toadstool, planar conveyance is good enough to me) have some way to identify your hits are less effective. And health regen.

Those are great points. It doesn't have to give any numbers either. Maybe if they heal just some red hearts fly out of them. If there is damage reduction, maybe have them have an armor icon fly out of them. Could be cute and fit the 2d somewhat (very somewhat) papery art they got going on.

[layangan putus]

Trial and error in semi permadeath situation is a waste of time but it does really work for adventure mode which consists of 6 stages (mainly 5 stages). Just like real life, we learn first then apply our knowledge later once we're ready at least to some extent - Simulation does really help. The first and second wave of explorers in the past suffered from total annihilation against nature just because they were lacking vital information (eating bad mushroom, getting disease, beaten by the weather etc). The Constant is similar, it's like this weird unknown world which has different rules apart from magical flora and fauna. My point being usually the game would be good if it's intuitive enough to figure out through playing but if the dev want to preserve this first explorer experience but again once you've learnt enough, you'd be no longer the first explorer so what to achieve? I guess that's why exploration is a process for generations or a process for new players playing over and over again. As for fighting enemies, it's down to pattern recognition and execution but again does it really work in permadeath situation? It'd be frustration. Not even considering how playful the dev with useless thing scattered in The Constant so new players do really need to compare how various tools function. This gameplay loop is acceptable which is fun for perfect target audience but I can understand the permadeath may tick off the majority of new players although DST has rollback feature - It's just not intuitive enough to use and may contradict the consequence of simply playing or call it anti-save scumming. I just hope more people can experience the beauty of this game but again there are really some issues within game that prevent that - It demands commitment which is rare in most games nowadays.

[Evelo]

49 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Granted, we don't need exact numbers (for example, DOOM: Eternal's destructible demons system, where the models of enemies change dynamically as their health gets lower to make it clear how hurt they are, does a great job of communicating it through a more diegetic method),

Good example of not requiring health bars. This is acceptable because there is no measurable bar. Just "oh they must be getting low" which is acceptable imo. (maybe not for MMOs but for DST yeah that's fine)

51 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Do all of you who're saying that health bars would "ruin the game" or that showing attack ranges "is cheating" really think Don't Starve Together is such a boring and empty game that it'd really have nothing to draw people in with without the "challenge" of memorizing a bunch of random crap you probably read on the wiki and manually counting how many times you've whacked a boss? Really? Why are you even here if that's your opinion? 

That isn't my opinion on why I think it is cheaty. I feel through trial and error players should learn how to properly dodge/kite enemies. I have yet to check the wiki for number of attacks that are "optimal" I don't think wikis even state that. Could be wrong though. The main thing about it is knowing exactly how far something is diminishes the animations the devs have taken because more often than not players will focus on the indicators rather than visual (or audio) cues. But that's just like, my opinion man.

54 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Then I installed Insight. With one mod, I got all the info I needed to learn how to kite, how much preparation would be necessary to win against a boss, and even how far I'd need to run when kiting. No longer did I have to guess if I'd still be within the melee attack range of something when I'm half a tile away from it - I could just hold my mouse over it and see how far I need to go. In a game like this, all of that information is vitally important, but with the way it is unmodded, you're stuck with trial and error or memorizing a wiki or guide to get it. 

Cool. Glad you did that. That isn't the intended vision of Don't Starve however. So unless Klei decides to change their mind about that (which I doubt, but they seem okay making the game easier through power crept items so you never know) then no point in discussion besides saying, "Hey I'd like it if it was added." That way Klei is made aware of certain player desires. I enjoy polls like this to gauge the (rather small portion) communities opinions.

[DegenerateFurry]

2 minutes ago, Evelo said:

Cool. Glad you did that. That isn't the intended vision of Don't Starve however. So unless Klei decides to change their mind about that (which I doubt, but they seem okay making the game easier through power crept items so you never know) then no point in discussion besides saying, "Hey I'd like it if it was added." That way Klei is made aware of certain player desires. I enjoy polls like this to gauge the (rather small portion) communities opinions.

I brought it up because I'm trying to show people how much of a difference Klei implementing this could make in player retention. 

[Cassielu]

Telling players how many health they have isn't a bad thing, but health bar are.

Telling the player how far the mob's attack isn't a bad thing, but attack range circle are.

[gaymime]

ok so "very difficult" is what i chose but it was because i couldnt fight things for the first couple years and relied heavily on the wiki for all but the most basic stuff. the game is super challenging if you don't already play games that have survival gameplay mechanics(this was only my second game with a hunger meter that was not directly tied to hit-points with the first being the original sims) or if you don't play games with real-time fighting mechanics OR if like me it is a struggle to keep dozens of numbers sorted out in your head

 

that being said i play with a lot of newbies(sub 50 hours) and almost all of them struggle with the crockpot and the weather regardless of whether or not they are proficient with fighting and often need a lot of direct help understanding what to do. the fact that i regularly have people who wont eat any mushrooms raw or cooked and wont put them in the crockpot because they ate a raw green/redcap exactly once is proof enough that the game actually IS challanging and used to be way more of a mess before things like recipes and loading tips and the like were introduced

 

frankly i think it should be like a standard across the board to give players the option to turn on and off features that reduce difficulty. it is great to have games where learning is part of the fun and colours the play BUT it should not be inaccessible to people simply because they lack the great quantity of time it takes to recognize extremely subtle cues and/or are not able to play with someone who already learned the game from someone else

[DegenerateFurry]

18 minutes ago, gaymime said:

ok so "very difficult" is what i chose but it was because i couldnt fight things for the first couple years and relied heavily on the wiki for all but the most basic stuff. the game is super challenging if you don't already play games that have survival gameplay mechanics(this was only my second game with a hunger meter that was not directly tied to hit-points with the first being the original sims) or if you don't play games with real-time fighting mechanics OR if like me it is a struggle to keep dozens of numbers sorted out in your head

 

that being said i play with a lot of newbies(sub 50 hours) and almost all of them struggle with the crockpot and the weather regardless of whether or not they are proficient with fighting and often need a lot of direct help understanding what to do. the fact that i regularly have people who wont eat any mushrooms raw or cooked and wont put them in the crockpot because they ate a raw green/redcap exactly once is proof enough that the game actually IS challanging and used to be way more of a mess before things like recipes and loading tips and the like were introduced

 

frankly i think it should be like a standard across the board to give players the option to turn on and off features that reduce difficulty. it is great to have games where learning is part of the fun and colours the play BUT it should not be inaccessible to people simply because they lack the great quantity of time it takes to recognize extremely subtle cues and/or are not able to play with someone who already learned the game from someone else

Well said, this is pretty much exactly how I feel. All it takes is trying to get a friend who's not some uber-gamer into DST to realize that it is, in fact, quite a hard game to get into. I feel like people who've played it a lot (most of this forum) have forgotten that.

[gaymime]

Just now, DegenerateFurry said:

Well said, this is pretty much exactly how I feel. All it takes is trying to get a friend who's not some uber-gamer into DST to realize that it is, in fact, quite a hard game to get into. I feel like people who've played it a lot (most of this forum) have forgotten that.

or be like me and know multiple rubbish gamers x''D my best friend owns dst and REFUSES to play, they tell me almost every time i stream it that the game looks like a masochism simulator x""D

[asdsaax]

Imo the game kinda fails to communicate what it has to offer to the new players
because if you play it without any spoilers then you are left with equivalent of scratch game that has few points of interest
which is okay on the surface, but caves are literally downgraded version of that

personally I wish there was something in shadow manipulator that would hint at existence of ruins
to reward beginners for exploring crafting and fundamentals

Usually I have trouble getting my friends into DST because they have no idea what they are supposed to do and their gameplay turns into afk sustain sesh
but the game pretty much deserves that lost of interest and I share similar experience with the difference that I was extra invested because I wanted to try DST for very long time
 

[kikia]

1. The behavioral patterns of common mobs are mostly simplistic, and during combat with them you mainly need to monitor your own health. Therefore I don't see much necessity to display their health bars, especially since health indicators swarming the screen during group encounters would create visual clutter. As for bosses, all multi-phase bosses have clearly designed transition cues - Klaus summons krampus when reduced to half health in its first phase, Bee Queen stops actively approaching players after reaching half health... There are countless similar examples. These mechanics require experiential knowledge to grasp, meaning first-time challengers might feel confused, but once mastered, players can easily gauge boss health through behavioral patterns. While I don't oppose displaying boss health bars, I find the current implicit design more sophisticated.

2. No, that feels too abrupt and immersion-breaking... However, granting this functionality to specific equipment seems like a reasonable compromise. Like... WARBIS gear?

[DegenerateFurry]

3 minutes ago, kikia said:

2. No, that feels too abrupt and immersion-breaking... However, granting this functionality to specific equipment seems like a reasonable compromise. Like... WARBIS gear?

WARBIS is too lategame for something that'd mostly benefit new players. Barely anyone even gets to the rifts, it'd be useless by the time you unlock it. If it's restricted to an item, something that shows you attack ranges/enemy health should be something you can make in the first autumn without having to kill a single boss.

[kikia]

5 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

WARBIS is too lategame for something that'd mostly benefit new players. Barely anyone even gets to the rifts, it'd be useless by the time you unlock it. If it's restricted to an item, something that shows you attack ranges/enemy health should be something you can make in the first autumn without having to kill a single boss.

If there are many players with such demands, I wouldn't oppose it — in fact, I'd wholeheartedly welcome it. I, too, hope more people can enjoy the game.
But at the same time, DS should not lose too much of its distinctive flavor.

[-Variant]

The lack of information is an integral part of the learning curve...

HOWEVER: I think information should be available to be learned in less obtuse ways and more importantly, in engaging ways.

I've always HATED health bar mods. They take me out of the game. I can't stand seeing floating data telling me specific numbers/values at all times.
I'd be infinitely more okay with them if they were worked into the game somehow. I'd love if mobs showed damage/visually had cues showing lower health, like CK and AG. They're awesome.

An older idea of mine was to have a fun retro style health bar added to mobs you're highlighting with the Warbis Armor. Something like that would be fun. Doesn't have to be that late game or whatever, but that sort of idea.

Information isn't bad but I'd absolutely like it to be learned through playing the game. That's fun to me!

[DegenerateFurry]

4 minutes ago, -Variant said:

The lack of information is an integral part of the learning curve...

HOWEVER: I think information should be available to be learned in less obtuse ways and more importantly, in engaging ways.

I've always HATED health bar mods. They take me out of the game. I can't stand seeing floating data telling me specific numbers/values at all times.
I'd be infinitely more okay with them if they were worked into the game somehow. I'd love if mobs showed damage/visually had cues showing lower health, like CK and AG. They're awesome.

An older idea of mine was to have a fun retro style health bar added to mobs you're highlighting with the Warbis Armor. Something like that would be fun. Doesn't have to be that late game or whatever, but that sort of idea.

Information isn't bad but I'd absolutely like it to be learned through playing the game. That's fun to me!

While I'd love to see something where enemies look more damaged when they are more damaged, I don't see that as realistic since it'd be a ton of work for Klei. All the mobs they'd have to redraw...

Some kind of equipment item/helmet/etc you put on that shows you enemy health/attack ranges, though? That'd work, for sure, and it'd be a lot less time-consuming to implement. 

[-Variant]

5 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

While I'd love to see something where enemies look more damaged when they are more damaged, I don't see that as realistic since it'd be a ton of work for Klei. All the mobs they'd have to redraw...

Some kind of equipment item/helmet/etc you put on that shows you enemy health/attack ranges, though? That'd work, for sure, and it'd be a lot less time-consuming to implement. 

Oh yeah, absolutely, trust me I've dug around the game enough to know that the visual changes are absolutely not happening ahaha. Oh a girl could dream though.

But yeah, some upgrade, perk, item, tool, whatever could totally be a thing and it sounds fun to me.