PC Now that You have played Alpha 19, What do you like or dislike?

[BFT2020]

For me, the injury system is a little too random to be Fun. It has all kinds of right elements, but the overall feeling is .. "Well, that happened. Randomly. Now I'm <slightly slow> for half a day and there's nothing I can do about it." It doesn't really change much, there's not much you can do about it before or after, and the things you Can do are passive and a little un-intuitive (keeping full health, passive armor improvements).

Not that I can offer a solution to the issues, it would require making decisions about the game that haven't been made, like "what is it trying to be" ...

I seem to recall (but as I am getting older I tend to forget things) that A19 was the introduction of the critical hits / injuries system, but the plan was to fine tune the system for later Alphas so it would be less random and more tied to the type of zombie attacks / events so it would make more sense.

I agree that some things were not really intuitive.  I was hording vitamins in a previous playthrough just to use them after I got fatigued, but didn't realized until recently that I can take them proactively to prevent infection and fatigue prior to it occurring (this was me not reading the description very well).  So now I have another use for them if I got extras on hand.

 

[meganoth]

How can getting hit be fun? Talking about HP loss. It isn't Fun, but it's what makes the game. Without it, well, you might kill a few zeds because they're annoying, but.. you get the point.

For injuries/debuffs, they need a function, and a gameplay.. if someone complains that a debuff system isn't "fun", they might not have the entire Game Theory under their belt, but they feel like something is wrong about the system.

For me, the injury system is a little too random to be Fun. It has all kinds of right elements, but the overall feeling is .. "Well, that happened. Randomly. Now I'm <slightly slow> for half a day and there's nothing I can do about it." It doesn't really change much, there's not much you can do about it before or after, and the things you Can do are passive and a little un-intuitive (keeping full health, passive armor improvements).

Not that I can offer a solution to the issues, it would require making decisions about the game that haven't been made, like "what is it trying to be" ...

Passive? If I'm not overlooking anything, all except one injury are incurred by zombie hits and the exception is the broken leg which is incurred by jumping down from great height. Both look like you can actively prevent them from happening.

Also except for one injury there are specific (though boring) remedies that either remove the condition or dramatically shorten the time until the injury goes away. If you don't know, just call up the inventory, then klick on the injury on the left side and you can read exactly how that injury can be treated.

 

[theFlu]

Passive? If I'm not overlooking anything, all except one injury are incurred by zombie hits and the exception is the broken leg which is incurred by jumping down from great height. Both look like you can actively prevent them from happening.

Also except for one injury there are specific (though boring) remedies that either remove the condition or dramatically shorten the time until the injury goes away. If you don't know, just call up the inventory, then klick on the injury on the left side and you can read exactly how that injury can be treated.

"Though boring" is one bit that disagrees with "fun" And I know the remedies and how to find them, but it's good info to repeat on the forum....

Sure, you can avoid getting Hit quite actively and that's pretty key for the entirety of the game play. But that game mechanic is already achieved by the standard HP system. The injury system doesn't really add anything interesting to that.

- The same armor that reduces your damage taken reduces your chances of getting injured. No clinical difference. You don't even get to make significant decisions there, since the effect sizes on armor pieces are tiny.

- "Not taking injuries while at full health" just makes medicating early a little more important, but medicating early is a good idea already.

- Breaking a leg from falling... yeah, agree there, completely under the player's control. This one I was thinking about after that previous post, with regards to the severity of the injury:

IF every injury was the result of a "proper failure" by the player (not just a vulture spawning around a corner and making a silent swoop on you), the injuries could be made really punishing. The leg breaks for example, if the only way to get a broken leg was to fall a couple stories, I wouldn't mind having to craft a Crutch to equip as a tool and hobble along at 40-60% speed with it, and at 10% speed without, for a game day or two. (Sure, I might moan, but it Was my own darn fault.) But if it happens randomly when the game throws a spidermonkey at my face, it's a different story.

The somewhat random combat injuries (concussions, lacerations, fatigue) are all pretty insignificant and easily cured, but only if the RNG has smiled upon you prior - which makes them a non-issue after day.. 3? Not much you can Do, just how lucky you've been all around.

 

[meganoth]

One detail about combat, the probability you get injuries from getting hit is pretty low but rises fast if you are hit multiple times in a short time frame. So there is a mechanism that punishes you for careless behaviour.

Now my opinion is that injuries and remedies can not be made very interesting at all. Just like hunger or temperature, those are mechanisms in every survival game to provide a sink for the items you find and craft. You do stuff, your hunger increases, you eat stuff and the hunger goes away. That is about all that can be done with hunger basically. Not fun or interestingly involving in any way, its just what you do and have to do in a survival game.

 

[theFlu]

Not fun or interestingly involving in any way, its just what you do and have to do in a survival game.

That quite a pessimistic take, and to be honest, I think it defeats itself neatly. There's a whole genre of survival games that revolve around those mechanics, and a group of people seem to enjoy the games. If the mechanics were completely uninteresting, then they would've been cut from the genre; so I'd argue they must have some kind of internal intrigue.

And whether we see them as "just a mandatory part of a weird genre" or "interesting game play", since we have them - and I assume "must have them" - then it stands to reason to make them .. significant? As interesting as possible for the very least.

As for your example of hunger, TFP have created 4 mostly separate (but somewhat interdependent) solutions for food; buying, farming, hunting, looting. Cooking combines them all, sure, but each of the components is largely self-sufficient if you adjust your game play around it. They're doing their best to make it interesting, and I'd say the current system is pretty good. It mostly suffers from becoming practically obsolete with high tier recipes and a visit to Bob's Boars with no spoilage.

 

[meganoth]

That quite a pessimistic take, and to be honest, I think it defeats itself neatly. There's a whole genre of survival games that revolve around those mechanics, and a group of people seem to enjoy the games. If the mechanics were completely uninteresting, then they would've been cut from the genre; so I'd argue they must have some kind of internal intrigue.

No, they are the necessary ingredients, sort of like the dietary fiber equivalent for a game

They fill the game with things to do, they provide objectives, context and dangers, they fill the time, but they are not in any way a fun endeavour alone.

And whether we see them as "just a mandatory part of a weird genre" or "interesting game play", since we have them - and I assume "must have them" - then it stands to reason to make them .. significant? As interesting as possible for the very least.

As for your example of hunger, TFP have created 4 mostly separate (but somewhat interdependent) solutions for food; buying, farming, hunting, looting. Cooking combines them all, sure, but each of the components is largely self-sufficient if you adjust your game play around it. They're doing their best to make it interesting, and I'd say the current system is pretty good. It mostly suffers from becoming practically obsolete with high tier recipes and a visit to Bob's Boars with no spoilage.

But searching for the remedies is a different part of the game. That part, like looting, hunting, buying, is mostly interesting and it works for food the same way it works for remedies. I don't see that the OP has been lamenting that he finds it boring to look for antibiotics in medicine cabinets or a hospital. He talks about the penalty being boring or unfun.

 

[theFlu]

sort of like the dietary fiber equivalent for a game

Lol, talk about coincidences.. you're literally talking to a guy who hasn't eaten fiber for two and a half years.. carnivore ftw

But searching for the remedies is a different part of the game.

Yes, sure, exactly... the remedies produce a solution to a challenge, the injuries Are the challenge... except they're not really challenging and the remedies are basically the same, "loot a couple med boxes". Improvements could be made..

How would I make some of these more interesting? Well, I'll draft something on the spot.. (poor quality warning)

Laceration... doesn't drop your max health, but makes you bleed sporadically on it's own. Quite often even, so you might even need to pull down curtains from your environment to control the bleed. This would "color" your environment a little different, you want to know where the cloth is. Make the suture kit calm it down to what it is now; getting hit will cause bleeds with the high chance of tearing you stitches and putting you back to square one. Duration couple hours without sutures, half an hour with.

Bleeds.. let them bleed. Slow loss of life, but at least a couple minutes long without bandages. Gives a nice sense of urgency since you know you'll have to deal with it; note that cloth is essentially everywhere, you'll just need to grab it. This means you'll really want to stitch that laceration.

Scrapes... they lower your max health, one of these might be useful .. but I would make this the one that you can instantly heal.. it's not a bleeder, and if you cover the scratches with cloth and antibacterials, you're pretty much golden. Unless you want to go for a "swapping bandages" mechanic, but that seems a little overkill.

Concussion.. I'm not even sure what it actually does, I could check, but .. ehh. Make it blur your vision sporadically, dependent on your stamina state.. the lower the stamina, the blacker it goes and the longer it lasts. (You know you're not supposed to strain yourself with head trauma) Making it cause trouble navigating and fighting. The effect goes away temporarily with pain killers, but the debuff doesn't. Getting hit has an increased chance of stunning you whether or not medicated.

  - side note, make driving into a tree on a motorized two-wheeler actually hurt ...

Fatigue .. why is this a combat injury? Tighten the screws a lot on the food supply, make being hungry cause increasing fatigue over time.. needing some Real Good foods to slowly recover. Vitamins help, maybe a lot, maybe just temporarily. Yes, you may be starving all the time, but you don't have to make it completely debilitating; being well fed would then be a buff for the early game until the inevitable overabundance kicks in.

Sprains .. they're all right as is, could use a little love, but we can't choose to use "the other hand" for the blade for obvious reasons.

Broken bones, might copy the idea from earlier.. make it fall-only, require a cast and a friendly NPC to set, and require a crutch to move decently for couple game days. Maybe maybe maybe you can inflict one on the second-to-last hit to land (as in, on any hit that would kill you if doubled in effect).

That's not a huge improvement on anything, but might demand your attention and affect your game play in reasonable ways...

 

[meganoth]

Lol, talk about coincidences.. you're literally talking to a guy who hasn't eaten fiber for two and a half years.. carnivore ftw

Yes, sure, exactly... the remedies produce a solution to a challenge, the injuries Are the challenge... except they're not really challenging and the remedies are basically the same, "loot a couple med boxes". Improvements could be made..

How would I make some of these more interesting? Well, I'll draft something on the spot.. (poor quality warning)

Laceration... doesn't drop your max health, but makes you bleed sporadically on it's own. Quite often even, so you might even need to pull down curtains from your environment to control the bleed. This would "color" your environment a little different, you want to know where the cloth is. Make the suture kit calm it down to what it is now; getting hit will cause bleeds with the high chance of tearing you stitches and putting you back to square one. Duration couple hours without sutures, half an hour with.

Bleeds.. let them bleed. Slow loss of life, but at least a couple minutes long without bandages. Gives a nice sense of urgency since you know you'll have to deal with it; note that cloth is essentially everywhere, you'll just need to grab it. This means you'll really want to stitch that laceration.

Scrapes... they lower your max health, one of these might be useful .. but I would make this the one that you can instantly heal.. it's not a bleeder, and if you cover the scratches with cloth and antibacterials, you're pretty much golden. Unless you want to go for a "swapping bandages" mechanic, but that seems a little overkill.

Concussion.. I'm not even sure what it actually does, I could check, but .. ehh. Make it blur your vision sporadically, dependent on your stamina state.. the lower the stamina, the blacker it goes and the longer it lasts. (You know you're not supposed to strain yourself with head trauma) Making it cause trouble navigating and fighting. The effect goes away temporarily with pain killers, but the debuff doesn't. Getting hit has an increased chance of stunning you whether or not medicated.

  - side note, make driving into a tree on a motorized two-wheeler actually hurt ...

Fatigue .. why is this a combat injury? Tighten the screws a lot on the food supply, make being hungry cause increasing fatigue over time.. needing some Real Good foods to slowly recover. Vitamins help, maybe a lot, maybe just temporarily. Yes, you may be starving all the time, but you don't have to make it completely debilitating; being well fed would then be a buff for the early game until the inevitable overabundance kicks in.

Sprains .. they're all right as is, could use a little love, but we can't choose to use "the other hand" for the blade for obvious reasons.

Broken bones, might copy the idea from earlier.. make it fall-only, require a cast and a friendly NPC to set, and require a crutch to move decently for couple game days. Maybe maybe maybe you can inflict one on the second-to-last hit to land (as in, on any hit that would kill you if doubled in effect).

That's not a huge improvement on anything, but might demand your attention and affect your game play in reasonable ways...

Basically everything here amounts to: heal the injury or you get some annoying hindrance (like the vision blur, I can guarantee you very few people will describe it as fun. I've seen such an effect in a mod).

The hindrances you have chosen may be more realistic, the effects more detailed, and there is no question they would increase variety. But I don't really see an increase in fun (granted that that is in the eye of the beholder). Where do you see a more interesting mechanic, something to entertain and challenge your brain, a non-trivial decision to make?

Maybe Fanatical_Meat chimes in, he (as the one who brought this up) might be able to say whether any of this would be more fun for him at least.

 

[ShellHead]

It seems like the injuries work well from a “big picture” perspective, they create long term ramifications for overextending in combat or exploration. Might be worth bumping up the escalation element, give each of the injuries more levels so they become more debilitating if you don’t take care of them quickly or play more carefully while you have them? This is how it works anyway so adding some more degrees of intensity could make it more engaging.

i think focusing on making each of the different afflictions more unique would just make it more irritating when you have multiple and make getting back to good health harder, which would actually make people more likely to just take the xp penalty and die to get out of them quicker.

my 2 cents anyway, i like the system currently but i’m down for having worse high end effects too.

 

[Roland]

Mega is right that healing injuries and eating and drinking is mundane. Sure...changing up how those things work WOULD be more fun....at first. But within a few weeks of playing with the new way they would become mundane too. How to make it fun? Change it again. 

Other than changing how these things work to make them feel fresh and new again, there is no way to make them feel interesting long term. No matter what you do, healing, eating & drinking are common repetitive tasks that become mundane and rote pretty quickly. This doesn't mean they are hated tasks or that we should remove damage, hunger, and thirst-- but unless the developers want to change things up every update to keep them fresh, whatever it is they land on (which if it is different than what we have now will sound cool and fun) will eventually become just as mundane to what we have now.

Same with scavenging. They could add a minigame to opening containers that would definitely feel fresh and fun compared to the timer we watch right now. Would that minigame still be fun and amazing in 6 months or would we wish we could just skip the minigame and get the crap we actually want out of the cupboard....?

 

[theFlu]

How to make it fun? Change it again.

While getting used to is part of the boredom, I was trying to make those changes Active. As in, whether you know how to treat the injury or not, and whether you use a cure or not, it will change your behaviour in the game. Or punish you for not respecting it. I see that as more fun; if you can achieve a "playable injury", now you have a little more complexity in the game.

Minigame for cupboards? Nah, I'm good, way too common an event and would just be annoying. Minigame for lockpicking? Beats staring at a safe for 20 secs with nothing to do ... wouldn't be amazing in six months, but it would be Better in six months assuming you can save some of the time.

 

[beHypE]

Mega is right that healing injuries and eating and drinking is mundane. Sure...changing up how those things work WOULD be more fun....at first. But within a few weeks of playing with the new way they would become mundane too. How to make it fun? Change it again. 

Other than changing how these things work to make them feel fresh and new again, there is no way to make them feel interesting long term. No matter what you do, healing, eating & drinking are common repetitive tasks that become mundane and rote pretty quickly. This doesn't mean they are hated tasks or that we should remove damage, hunger, and thirst-- but unless the developers want to change things up every update to keep them fresh, whatever it is they land on (which if it is different than what we have now will sound cool and fun) will eventually become just as mundane to what we have now.

Same with scavenging. They could add a minigame to opening containers that would definitely feel fresh and fun compared to the timer we watch right now. Would that minigame still be fun and amazing in 6 months or would we wish we could just skip the minigame and get the crap we actually want out of the cupboard....?

While true, this can be said for anything in the game; why bother updating the game at all if everything eventually becomes "the same ol'" anyways ?

Not saying the system is perfect or couldn't be enhanced but Valheim nailed the food mechanism pretty well if you ask me. You can just ignore it and run around with 25hp or you can use junk food for easy locations, but at the same time when @%$# hits the fan you better have robust meals in your belly. And quite frankly they could (and probably will) add many more recipes with more buffs than just total health/stamina values.

This is probably what is missing in 7 days to die. You can get by with bacon and eggs the whole game and there's really no incentive to diversify your food intake unless you're running out of eggs (or meat, but we all know that doesn't happen).

 

[Roland]

why bother updating the game at all if everything eventually becomes "the same ol'" anyways

Because overhauling every system over and over again just to keep them fresh for longtime players is not the way to design a game. You have to settle upon a design and stick with that and accept the universal truth that eventually people will get bored of your game and move on to another one. 

Hopefully your own sequel...

Valheim has a good system but if every game uses the same system then there really is no escape from the boredom. Playing Valheim gives a fresh perspective on food and hunger so it is fun until it gets boring. If 7 Days adopts that system then people migrating to either game are going to be like...."Oh this same thing?"

 

[beHypE]

I'm not saying 7 days should port over Valheim's system, obviously. I also understand food is just a side system because the genre requires it, and not by any means where the game tries to shine. Then again it wouldn't be a shame if it was a bit more complex than a bar you have to fill so the game leaves you alone, so to speak. 

 

[meganoth]

I'm not saying 7 days should port over Valheim's system, obviously. I also understand food is just a side system because the genre requires it, and not by any means where the game tries to shine. Then again it wouldn't be a shame if it was a bit more complex than a bar you have to fill so the game leaves you alone, so to speak. 

There is a reason the complexity in 7d2d is in building and not eating. Hunger is a very onedimensional trait

 

[theFlu]

Complexity in building? You shovel some mats, maybe show them to a magical Mixer, and then stack blocks on one another..? There's no complexity there. And why would there be, it's just a mandatory part of a base-building game?

(It's about 90% joke, don't get yer panties in a twist... )

 

[Maharin]

Hunger is a very one dimensional trait

True, but nutrition isn't.  Requiring someone to eat a variety of foods (meats, veggies, fruits, etc.) and vitamins on a regular basis would make things harder for sure.  But whether that would be fun or not is a personal thing.

 

[Roland]

There is a reason the complexity in 7d2d is in building

*was…

 

[ShellHead]

True, but nutrition isn't.  Requiring someone to eat a variety of foods (meats, veggies, fruits, etc.) and vitamins on a regular basis would make things harder for sure.  But whether that would be fun or not is a personal thing.

We have a little bit of that in the buffs different foods grant, both the stamina increase and unique bonuses.

gives a bit of interesting management, when you’re a bit down on the hunger gauge do you eat higher end foods to keep the buffs rolling even though it’s overkill or do you top up with lower grade stuff and sacrifice the stronger buff?

what i find is that these kind of maintenance systems aren’t necessarily interesting in and of themselves but that they can create interesting dynamics with other systems.

 

[hotpoon]

Not saying the system is perfect or couldn't be enhanced but Valheim nailed the food mechanism pretty well if you ask me. You can just ignore it and run around with 25hp or you can use junk food for easy locations, but at the same time when @%$# hits the fan you better have robust meals in your belly. And quite frankly they could (and probably will) add many more recipes with more buffs than just total health/stamina values.

This is probably what is missing in 7 days to die. You can get by with bacon and eggs the whole game and there's really no incentive to diversify your food intake unless you're running out of eggs (or meat, but we all know that doesn't happen).

I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion Valheim's food system is the worst I've seen in any survival game.  Not only is it silly to me that you have to eat 3 different foods, but there comes a point where your health and stamina bar have shrunk quite a bit, but you can do nothing about it because your 3 foods aren't flashing yet. Really don't know what they were thinking, and you're the first person I've heard that enjoys it. Everyone I've spoken to thought it was ridiculous. I'm not saying you're a freak. We all like different things. It just still surprises me some times that the thing I absolutely detest is something someone else could love. I don't envy the devs trying to choose the best system. 

Personally I still think 7 Days to Die's old wellness system was the best. It gave an incentive not to die, and to cook the best tier meals.  My circle of friends enjoyed it and were surprised when the Pimps swapped it out. The new system is just ok. I can live with it. I think I would have been more accepting of it, if I hadn't experienced the old system first.