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[Gatleos]

Putting aside any personality clashes...

For those of you who are dissatisfied with the current state of the game, and the direction it's heading, how would you sum that up? And what changes would you make if you had the time and motivation?

[Rince Wind]

Putting aside any personality clashes...

For those of you who are dissatisfied with the current state of the game, and the direction it's heading, how would you sum that up? And what changes would you make if you had the time and motivation?

And the ability...

I last played quit a few weeks ago, and not for long because it was just tedious. So it is only the very beginning I experienced (multiple times ). But dirty clothes? I already need to do laundry in RL, I really don't see the point of doing it in this game. It just takes away from the point imo. If you want to restrict the clothes in early game just give the zombies less, and let a lot of it be in tatters because they don't give a fuck anymore if they rip it while climbing through that broken window or whatever, and standing outside 24/7 doesn't help either.

Realism for realisms sake doesn't make it a better game, there should also be a corresponding gameplay benefit.

[Greiger]

I'll admit that I liked the dirty clothes, but really only because I typically limited myself to not using zombie clothes anyway, usually because they weren't worth the time to repair, and in the early game the pre damaged clothes typically broke off too easily.  More people may like it more if there was a way to mass clean clothes.  One at a time is pure tedium, especially when cleaning lots of something small.

My problem is that usually when I come back to the game I see some cool new feature that I really really like.  Last two times I did, there was really nothing new notable.  Maybe a few new buildings, but I could mod that in myself if I needed more building variety.  Then I glance through the github and see a number of things simply shut down by kevin.  It's like he's scared to have another vehicle overhaul happen on his watch.  That ended up going badly for a few weeks, sure, but I feel the game was better for it after.

That whole shield rewrite thing I don't even think I would have noticed if it went in, but if Kevin is just deciding to shutdown things like that, where the code is already written, and it has clear benefits, what else has he shut down just because of the tiniest of risk?  It very much seems like nothing new and interesting is coming about because nothing new and interesting is allowed anymore.

[George_Chickens]

For those of you who are dissatisfied with the current state of the game, and the direction it's heading, how would you sum that up? And what changes would you make if you had the time and motivation?

Tedium, tedium, TEDIUM. I've mentioned it several times over the course of the thread, but there are numerous things that feel like they were half implemented, forgotten, and left in because "oh well" that just add layer upon layer of boredom before you can get to the goods. It was a huge problem when Whales left and the community took over, due to lack of cohesion, but now it feels like it's written in a big design document with red ink, stating "DON'T ABSTRACT ANYTHING, IF IT DOESN'T HAVE SIXTEEN STEPS WHEN IT COULD HAVE FOUR YOU'VE FAILED"

I also dislike how the design choices of the game feel to me like a means of railroading players into a list of orthodox playstyles. I used to play a treasure hunter build, where I'd try to get as many guns as i possibly could and super-deck them out with all the mods I could find, all whilst massacring zombies in my super tank. The decisions to make gun shops literally safer than ingame banks makes the former not difficult, but tedious (see a pattern here?), and the decision to turn it from an open game where you played how you liked to an ultra realistic survival sim means that the other has gone from needing 30 minutes of real life time to gather resources and 5 or so minutes to construct your vehicle, to taking over an hour because welding a single plate onto your car takes a great deal of ingame time, and you have to take breaks to find food and clean water.

I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy, but I feel as though the game has become a ton more tedious than from the times of Whales and early DDA, and I'd like to know if I'm just feeling misguided nostalgia or if I'm onto something.

Take, for example, resurrection mechanics and gun shops. Gun shops are locked up, but just in a way that adds a single, long step into getting into them, usually finding explosives or trying to fix up a car to ram it. As for resurrection, previously I'd kill things and burn them if I thought a necromancer was coming, but now I need to press S on every corpse so that it doesn't arise. I love the idea of zombies coming back up, but I really don't like its execution.

What I've said before mostly still stands, but I've really opened up to resurrections.

[pisskop]

Hacksaws get in.

Its not 'tedious' in this case, as it does prevent underequiped survivors from entering.  Or forcing you to choose what car to use.  I even add in a stone gun shop for that purpose: to stop ramming.

Tedium does take happen, but some of it is mitigated by the idea that endgame isnt what we, they are designing for.

Early and Mid game are actually the target for a lot of these new mechanics.  Perhaps some QoL features for endgame would be nice, but things like filthy clothing is distinctly aimed at early to mid game.

The mechanics overhauls is somewhat tedious, I do admit, but then again I dont really deathmobile any more.  A lot of the reason is due to the wheel jacks though.  Boom Cranes are rare.

[George_Chickens]

Its not 'tedious' in this case, as it does prevent underequiped survivors from entering.  Or forcing you to choose what car to use.  I even add in a stone gun shop for that purpose: to stop ramming.

My point is, you can still get in, neither is it particularly hard to get in, the problem is that the step is part of a larger chain that simply makes it an annoying pain in the arse to bother, and that seems to be prevalent in many aspects of the game nowadays. A lockpick, a hacksaw or a car can get in, and in the opening hours of the game, too. All the change has done is added a long, boring step of searching and searching before you can get in. I've taken to raiding basements for guns as a result, because it simply lacks the amount of pointless steps.

I say pointless tedium because it's easy to subvert, but takes an excessive amount of time to, and the alternative, easier methods even provide better loot and less steps to get said loot, when I'd assume gun shops would have a better selection than some crack dealer's basement.

[Silicoid]

The needing of a boom crane or a wheel jack to take apart cars.  You know what was people's favorite task?  Building cars, and they nerfed it to hell and back by adding faulty parts, limiting the mechanic skill, and adding even more rare items like the boom crane to put together deathmobiles.

Most of the development has been focused on making the early game more tedious, with such winners as windchill(making it hard for a new character to survive), dirty clothing.

Once you've cleared out an area, there is no need to defend it-I miss the random zombie bears, bears, and other things attacking.

I also miss acid rain-it made it so you needed some form of shelter with you.

[Darkmere]

Honestly they lost me around the time it was Decided On High that the same guy who could whip up a nuclear reactor for his car, handcraft a plasma rifle and lethal railgun, cook up an eye-watering variety of mutagen, and install his own bionic implants with amateur surgery just... couldn't make gunpowder. It was simply too unrealistic, completely shattered my suspension of disbelief.

I got shouted down for suggesting gameplay should trump senseless realism... and here we are.

[Akura]

And it doesn't help that someone with strong chemistry skills in real life actually can make (smokeless) gunpowder with the right equipment - the main ingredients are cotton, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, all three of which exist in-game if I recall. Black powder is significantly easier.

[scriver]

I like dirty clothes. Like the guy above I was already avoiding using clothes off of dead things before that change, but it felt nice for the game to reward me for it.

I don't see the problem when it's literally an option to turn it off when you start a new game. Besides the problem of the interface and how to find the options not being particularly intuitive/self clear, that is.

[Sheb]

I like dirty clothes. Like the guy above I was already avoiding using clothes off of dead things before that change, but it felt nice for the game to reward me for it.

I don't see the problem when it's literally an option to turn it off when you start a new game. Besides the problem of the interface and how to find the options not being particularly intuitive/self clear, that is.

Mee too actually.

[Majestic7]

Realism is fine if carrying it out in game is not tedious. Like I said before, just having one command "take care of your equipment" which would make your character clean clothes, clean guns and stuff. That's fine. Having to click something ten times is not. It is like you had carry out all the tasks in Dwarf Fortress manually. "Press button to smash the metal bar with the hammer. Hammerstrikes left to produce one dagger: 58".

[Random_Dragon]

Welp. One good change has at least prompted me to update my build: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/21555

I has an Arcana mod idea that involves this.

[Damiac]

Realism is fine if carrying it out in game is not tedious. Like I said before, just having one command "take care of your equipment" which would make your character clean clothes, clean guns and stuff. That's fine. Having to click something ten times is not. It is like you had carry out all the tasks in Dwarf Fortress manually. "Press button to smash the metal bar with the hammer. Hammerstrikes left to produce one dagger: 58".

This! So much this!

If you want to include overhead for equipment and such, that's fine! More challenge is always great, especially if it can be optional.  But nobody has fun pressing 100 keystrokes to do completely mindless tasks even if they appreciate that those mindless tasks do need to be done. 

I'd rather have a 'maintenance' time that you would spend before sleeping, or when performing a generic 'equipment maintenance' activity. Carry more guns and wear more clothes, the maintenance task takes longer, or needs to be done more often.  Keep less equipment that requires maintenance, or gain skill in skills that affect the maintenance you're doing, and it takes less time, or needs to be done less often.  Then it become a gameplay mechanic, something that can actually be balanced, unlike tedium.  Currently there's no 'challenge' or 'strategy' required for lots of these maintenance tasks (filling mags, eating, drinking, reading a book, washing clothes, maintaining firearms (is this actually a thing in the game now?), etc...

The fact that you can't make gunpowder just seems silly, as others have pointed out, when you can literally make a Plasma Rifle out of spare parts, create complex biotech out of corpses, and forge a high quality sword with a souped up charcoal grill and rusty scrap metal!

I know the dirty clothes thing was a big deal for some people, and if I recall correctly at first it wasn't really easy to disable.  I agree with most other people that the whole thing is just another unnecessary element of tedium, but if it's optional then who really cares.

[Random_Dragon]

I know the dirty clothes thing was a big deal for some people, and if I recall correctly at first it wasn't really easy to disable.  I agree with most other people that the whole thing is just another unnecessary element of tedium, but if it's optional then who really cares.

Thing is it wasn't optional at first, if I recall.