Summer Gameplay Too Tightly Mirrors Winter

[Axegace]

The ambient temperature mechanics of summer in the current version of the DLC just feel a little flat. I've dealt with this already in winter. Gotta get a hat and make a (cold)fire. Plants stop growing. Endothermic fires are freakin' cool (PUN) and I LOVE wearing a giant ice cube on my head, but they don't play any differently. It doesn't feel like a novel challenge. It feels like a reskin of winter.

 

Some ideas:

-Endothermic fires produce hazardous waste that needs to be disposed of.

-Summer locust plague (I suppose there's potentially some kind of GIANT coming, so maybe not?)

-Mirages: they could mislead you and approaching one lowers sanity...perhaps exploring them while insane could be rewarding in some way.

-army ants (or FIRE ants): Nests active in Spring and Fall. Display behaviors similar to spiders, except they completely strip a radius around their nest. Dormant in winter. In summer, they march, spreading along all the roads on the map. Natural enemy of spiders?

 

Anyway. Beta has otherwise been very fun and I'm excited to see what else is coming down the pipe! I love that my home province has such an awesome game company!

[taciturn]

I kind of agree. Winter and summer are similar in tasks and challenges, cold is replaced with heat, which to a human is two very different things, but in this game's mechanics turns out to be more or less the same.

 

Im not sure what would be required, because the game's challenges is about 

1) Getting food 

2) Avoiding death by monstesr

3) Constructing

4) Gathering

5) Managing inventory

 

The addition to Summer and Winter is:

1) Avoiding hunger due to sparse food production

2) Staying tempered

 

What if Swamps changed their behaviour in this season? The dryness makes it calmer and the mermen or what htey are called, stay inside, but the swamp will also open up for something exciting. Perhaps tentacles retract? Perhaps a new fruit or plant sprouts? 

 

 

I like the idea about some kind of migratory animal - but that'll be pengulls all over with a reskin - and the mirages. Let there be Adventure connected to mirages! They can fool your vision, but also lead to new experiences or discoveries that are closed to you for the other 3 seasons. 

 

Ideally each season should have a gameplay goal or challenge that would remind us of why seaons matters, 4 seaons, 4 different challenges, not the same two flipped on the temperature scale.

[Sporb]

I agree that the temperature mechanics are very similar for summer and winter, but I think that these seasons are more different than you realize. Food isn't nearly as scarce in summer as it is in winter, with bee boxes continuing to work, for example.

Also, while resources are scarce in both seasons, in summer you can still fertilize plants or use the ice flingomatic to keep them producing, while in winter nothing regrows ever. That, combined with things randomly bursting into flames, means that summer seems to be more about protecting and preserving your resources, whereas winter is about living with limited resources.

But, yeah, it would be nice if overheating and freezing to death were differentiated more from each other. They both kill you in pretty much the same way and they are both prevented in pretty much the same way.

One possible solution that's been suggested is that, in summer, it could cool off more in the evening and at night. Being nocturnal would be a way to deal with the heat that is completely different from how to survive the cold. The one thing I don't like about this is that it would make summer easier, and I don't think that's necessary.

Maybe the heat during the day should be increased to compensate? I dunno.

[Cozyhut3]

I haven't gotten to summer yet, but the overheating mechanic sounds fine to me. What I think summer needs are new, exciting, and most importantly, different challenges than Winter. Winter has freezing? Summer has overheating. Winter has deerclops? Summer has dragonfly (soon). Winter has MacTusk? Summer has...

 

...

 

Zilch. 

 

But don't give summer a lousy MacTusk reskin and behavioral changes! As a later season in the cycle summer could even have harder challenges than winter. Wildfires are a good example. But what about Phoenixes that have a chance to spawn from burning items in certain biomes? Small ones. They have certain a certain attack patterns, like soaring up into the sky, remaining visible but immune to melee combat, and then landing, setting everything on fire in a small radius around it?

 

...Etc. Just my two cents. Didn't mean to make this my own thread.

[joe331]

If they tune it and summer becomes safe to do activities around morning, sunset, and dusk while at peak of sunlight you still need to protect yourself from heat, that would be great. There's unique challenge but different from winter much.

[brummbar7]

I always support new creatures.  I thought Klei had said before beta started there were going to be more creatures who had their own agendas and were going to be actually pursuing them. I was pretty excited by this but so far I haven't seen anything like that except the catcoons, but they don't compete with the player in any way, their agenda pretty much consists of fighting and dieing.  So that kind of disappoints me so far.  But, creatures are art intensive so I understand that we probably won't get a lot of them.

 

I guess to me the spontaneous combustion mechanic differentiates seasons a lot.  Things are still so buggy I can't tell if I'm going to pursue a seasonal base strategy or not.  I think summer is also differentiated by having a positively cooling item (the ice hat) as opposed to winter where you can only slow the freezing, so that's nice, but if you don't plan ahead far enough to stock up on ice, you're probably going to have a very rough time of it, whereas winter you (used to anyway - currently bugged I guess) can get by with a last-minute heat stone and rabbit muffs if you didn't prepare well.  Also regular fires require much more common resources than endothermic fires.    The notion of a nocturnal summer seems kind of superfluous to me, as the nights are very very short, and you won't really be able to get a lot done.