Please change Pearl outcome

[Radicaljoe]

6 hours ago, cropo said:

Eh, imo that's even less of a reason to agree with the dislike of moving the plot forward. They're builders, just change where and what you build to innovate. I don't think having a pretty little isolated island with pearl is worth preserving if the alternative is a new quest that drives the plot forward. 

See, but you can totally progress the plot without destroying the island. Like, he doesn't say her island is special for any reason other than "it's land I want." He just want's an isolated island in case the experiment fails and it can't chase him around the mainland.

[JuanpisATM]

They should put the new battle arena on the islands that are separated from the main lunar island. In my opinion, those islands have no functionality. This way, they would give them a purpose and leave Pearl Island alone, which I personally also like to decorate.

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, pyroisshy said:

moon quay island is just a bad fit for her, add her to the ice fishing hole or make a new island entirely

Hold on now… is it? There’s an “unstable portal” on moon quay that’s just swirling around spitting stuff out of it. You don’t think that Wagstaff possibly explained to Pearl that once we kill whatever is hiding under her plugged up sinkholes that this portal will be able to stabilize and take her to a whole new realm of existence where her and crab-king can live happily ever after?

[Bumber64]

8 hours ago, cropo said:

Have we been playing the same game? Don't Starve from the very beginning has rewarded the player for excessive acts of cruelty. Engaging with pigs in a friendly manner is far less effective than pinning them up, recruiting them for terrible pay, making them fight each other, and picking up the very meat that drops from their dead bodies to feed yourself. Fashioning weapons and armor out of their skin.

That's "WTH, player?", not "WTH, hero?". You're never forced to do those things to progress.

Even if you needed pig skin, you could get it from a pig/merm war. They're happy to kill each other.

Haven't played the beta yet, but what's the survivor's motive here? Considering even WX's amusement towards the suffering of organic life is outweighed by their hatred of Wagstaff?

Edited May 24, 2025 by Bumber64

[cropo]

6 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

That's "WTH, player?", not "WTH, hero?". You're never forced to do those things to progress.

Today, now that we know the ins and outs of the game we don't. Back when the game first released there was a pretty clear intention to have the player learn that the only way they're going to stand a chance is if they desecrate the native population of the constant, dig into the ground which was not renewable at the time to avoid any potential hazards and replace it with man-made structures. You see a lot of complaints that the game is no longer as hard as it used to be, as a consequence we don't really have to learn how to utilize exploitive tactics to survive anymore. The point is though that the intention, and the way the game was designed, still shows these elements and is something you need to understand when getting into the game.

 

 

6 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Even if you needed pig skin, you could get it from a pig/merm war. They're happy to kill each other.

The only way you can reasonably get pigs and merms together to kill each other at a rate to sustain yourself in a survival sense would require you to purposefully relocate pigs to cause fights with them, you're still a war-profiteer and inciter of violence.

 

 

6 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Haven't played the beta yet, but what's the survivor's motive here? Considering even WX's amusement towards the suffering of organic life is outweighed by their hatred of Wagstaff?

Other than the WARBIS armor we were given, skill tree lunar affinity perks, spark ark, and the hope that doing what he says will allow us to escape the constant, not much.

[abrocator]

18 hours ago, cropo said:

Have we been playing the same game? Don't Starve from the very beginning has rewarded the player for excessive acts of cruelty. Engaging with pigs in a friendly manner is far less effective than pinning them up, recruiting them for terrible pay, making them fight each other, and picking up the very meat that drops from their dead bodies to feed yourself. Fashioning weapons and armor out of their skin.  

A game where you can play as a sad little girl, who uses her dead sister to fight all of her battles for her, and can now be empowered by ritualistically killing small and defenseless animals that have been captured.

A game where the main protagonist can cut down a tree, and his examine quote of the stump is "Take that, nature!".

A game where you can play as a child forcing his own spider "friends" to engage in mass war with each other purely for culling their numbers and grabbing the meat.

A game where we desecrate cultural and ancient statues with weapons similar to native tribes, purely for the precious minerals that we then take to their ancient religious altar in order to reproduce and abuse their innovations?

We're drawing the line at evicting an obnoxious crab lady who makes us go on the most annoying fetch quest ever? That's suddenly where everyone is collectively calling morality into question and triggering their traumas? We can't have Wagstaff be evil because telling her to leave her house and safely relocate to another island is "too realistic"?

Really disappointing to read these posts.

It unironically is completely different. Yes.

One is about what you do in the game. Another is the plot itself. The plot is not about factory farming pigs.

You could have a farming game where you raise and slaughter pigs. Then you have a sidequest where you raise a pet. It turns out to be a great pet, well-trained and obviously likes you. Now your next quest is to euthanize it. Seems far-fetched right but we have to make a wacky experiment which requires the heart of this very rare animal.

You kill pigs all the time bro. But changing the quest (the plot) from one about companionship to organ harvesting changes everything.

(That you build a house in order to kill her husband is another can of weird worms)

[cropo]

1 hour ago, abrocator said:

You could have a farming game where you raise and slaughter pigs. Then you have a sidequest where you raise a pet. It turns out to be a great pet, well-trained and obviously likes you. Now your next quest is to euthanize it. Seems far-fetched right but we have to make a wacky experiment which requires the heart of this very rare animal.

This is completely ignoring whether or not this hypothetical farming game is thematically designed through art and gameplay communication that the player should have expected this outcome. If Klei had their way, players would be able to cannibalize each other; you can't just seperate the art, themes, messaging, and game mechanics all meshing together to tell a story and present a theme and then be shocked when a character is inflicted with those very themes.

[WhackE]

11 minutes ago, cropo said:

If Klei had their way, players would be able to cannibalize each other;

I'm like really lost with this conversation you two are having, but I want to clarify Klei did have their way actually, and they actually dont want players eating each other they thought it was 'too macabre', I'm not sure if you know about Long pig, but was basically player meat that was left in the files for modders to use.

[Theukon-dos]

On one hand, I can definitly respect Klei for actually trying to do something with the story.

On the other hand, I will say that having to Evict Pearl definitely feels like it was done more for shock value rather than any actual narrative purpose. Is there any reason he would have actually chosen that island other than just "We want to show players how mean he is"?

Also sending her to the Moon Quay? Seriously? Pearl living near that island is already something that can ruin a world for a good few players on account of the fact that it makes you vulnerable to pirate attacks when sailing over to her. Her actually being on the Moon Quey is so, so much worse in that regard.

 

Actually hey, why not have the best of both worlds and make Wagstaff evict the Powder Monkeys instead? Have him approach you and say he needs space for his new experiment and asks you to pick a spot on the open ocean, preferably away from anything you visit often. So you do that, and sail over to the location you picked expecting to see his experiment, but instead find the monkey pirates on a shoddy little houseboat, which now becomes their base of operations for purposes of determining how likely you are to get raided. And if you go back to the Moon Quey, you find Wagstaff doing whatever it is he does on Pearl's Island.

 

While I do know that the Moon Quey is another popular place to build, I think it would still be a far better option than Pearl's island. Players get rewarded for doing the lunar questline by being able to put the pirates in the middle of nowhere, but Wagstaff still comes off as a massive jerk for dislocating them and Pearl gets to stay well enough alone.

[Milordo]

1 hour ago, Theukon-dos said:

Actually hey, why not have the best of both worlds and make Wagstaff evict the Powder Monkeys instead? 

Jeez, I didn't thought about it before but it makes more sense moon quay island because it is wagstaff island!!! He did the experiments there and brought us the most terrible mechanic designed ever in Don't Starve!!  No, but really! It's more logical to him returning there with the weird portal open!!!