It occurred to me that maybe CDDA isn’t a game anymore. It’s a work of art. Same as DF, just bit more collaborative in nature (being open source). That’s why we might see these less-functional additions. I mean, it’s a vague theory that attempts to explain some of the phenomena in games in general.
be an open source game
be loved
> transcend into art
mutate and cross the threshold into art
be controversial
It’s art in the same way my drawings are perpetually a work in progress, never quite finished. It’s possible to overwork traditional art until you’re past the point of ‘perfect’, and that definition is different for literally everybody. Everybody gets something different out of the same piece, too. So, yeah. In that sense I think it bears resemblance.
We are definitely writing a game
Anyone heard of EA? Electronic Arts. They had a credo once, before they forgot about it and listened to too many bean counters. Anyways, they make games, and considered themselves artists struggling to showcase how games matter. They’ve fallen a long way (while growing) since then, but I would argue that games on the whole have transcended art, and become engineering. Due to their practical nature, which art does not. As my disappointing attempt to start a career in Architecture/Engineering showed me. Granted, entertainment is not normally much of anything other than an art form. But “true” art usually only serves to intrigue or provoke thought, not entertain.
Hmm… no that’s not right either… Eh whatever, someone please help me remember what I was trying to say here. I lost track somewhere in there.
EA Sports - Get in the Game.
Can’t say I’ve read the whole thread. So sorry if I’m rehashing a bunch of stuff that was already said.
From my point of view there’s a lot of improvements that have been made in the game, that I feel like people are forgetting about. We have better item stacking. The menu for trading with npcs is better and better looking than it was before. Arrow crafting doesn’t have all of those annoying middle steps that it used to have. There are musical instruments. There is a repeat until success/failure option for repairing items. NPCs can help you with crafting and construction. You can use bandages on your NPCs. NPCs heal when they sleep. There’s more vehicles, more houses, more zombie types. Wander spawn are working. Zombies mutate into scarier zombies over time. The list goes on and on.
Part of the reason I took a break from cdda was because I felt like there was such a push for realism over good gameplay, but coming back that’s not how I feel things have progressed. I see a lot of hard work done that I genuinely appreciate. Sure, it’ not perfect, but there’s enough improvements that I wouldn’t want to go back to 0.C. I think it’s easy to focus on the negative and disregard all of the real improvements that have been made.
Thanks for helping steer us back to the root of the topic, and also making a really solid case for the flip-side of this situation. We (imo) could still really do with an overarching story or sense of big-picture player progression and some very-clear endgame goals/content, but there’s been a lot of good come about this past year that can be easy to overlook when there are glaring frustrations in one’s way.
The game really has been made much easier to play. That kind of interface improvement can’t be glamorous to work on, but I really appreciate it.
Is it me, or are the equip times a little backwards compared to reality? It doesn’t take too long for me to pull out a binder or textbook from my backpack since they’re immediately visible and easy to grab, but it does take slightly longer to dig through my backpack for specific smaller items(Pencils/Erasers/Pens/Highlighters/Etc), since I have a good amount of them.
I’m guessing that the equip times are for some sort of balance against carrying a ton of guns with spare ammo and insta-switching to them once the gun you’re using runs dry, though. I know I’ve done that a ton of times.
maybe total volume used should affect wield time?
objects % of total volume? With smaller increasing wield/find time? No… that seems really obnoxious. Maybe claim smaller objects are kept in alt pocket(s)? and leave it the way it is? Or increase time penalty for small objects in low-light?
Well, a well organized and unclutter backpack is easy to use. Its easier to get smaller things from a bag when you know where it is.
I am suggesting that the more crap we stuff into a backpack, the harder it will be to take out other things.
In fact, maybe a good trait would be [organized] and [disorganized]. which increase or decrease wielding times by a percentage.
makes sense. But, is it a sign we shouldn’t since the idea came from this thread?
Nope.
Its gameplay. All gameplay. How many times do you switch weapons in combat? A lot like me?
Besides, this thread is a sign that we need more things with arbitrary values attatched. Less realism for more doomrl action.
[quote=“pisskop, post:292, topic:12504”]Well, a well organized and unclutter backpack is easy to use. Its easier to get smaller things from a bag when you know where it is.
I am suggesting that the more crap we stuff into a backpack, the harder it will be to take out other things.
In fact, maybe a good trait would be [organized] and [disorganized]. which increase or decrease wielding times by a percentage.[/quote]
I believe this is the “right” kind of realism.
That’s because the implementation does not add more clicks or inconvenience to use this feature. The game does the calculations on its own, while the player only decides to wield or not wield something. (and need not even know about the existence of this)
Not that i view it as a major point, but it could fit it well with a new backpack attribute, “base time to access” that would represent how easy/hard it is to organize stuff well, so that you can draw them out quickly at will.
Then again, it does not have much added value to the game i guess. Still that’s how to implement ‘realism’ stuff - Make them not to need much additional player input.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Yeah, I came back after a long break (since around when the last main release happened) and the improvements to the UI are impressive. Tasks that used to be incredibly tedious, like reading books or repairing/fitting/practicing on equipment, are now pretty much painless. Encumbrance has been improved a lot, scarves no longer gimp your movement speed, and there are several new enemy types that keep things interesting (and probably a lot more I’ve yet to find.)
The game is in a pretty good place right now, and feels very polished. There’s a few annoying bugs and some issues with skill progression being awkward at low levels, but it’s leagues ahead of the old days of spam reading a chemistry book for 15 minutes hoping it’ll give you the one recipe you actually need from it, automatically being a dodge god after like 2 days of fighting zombies, being utterly crippled with grief over killing like 2 zombies kids, or becoming a mutagen crafting expert chemist by boiling 50 gallons of water next to a river.
Those are all examples of good game design changes. All of those changes improved the game play. Not just improved it, but did so substantially from before they existed. None of those are what could be considered “realism nerfs” (which is a bit of a subjective term) to me and really further proves the point of how “realism” is a double-edged sword of where it can enhance or hinder game play depending on how well it is pulled off. Some realism is good, but not when it makes game play feel more tedious and time wasting. For example the changes that were added to vehicle repair times where if you bumped into a shrub you get to waste a whole day fixing the damage (maybe a bit of an embellishment, but you get the point) is a good example of “bad realism” for a game. At the same time you want vehicles to take a certain amount of wear over time to encourage careful driving and to maintain certain limits where the game would quit presenting a challenge.
To me a good indicator of when you have a “bad realism” feature is when it starts to make a game feel more like you’re enduring druge-work instead of playing. It’s fine that there is upkeep and it’s an important part of the game, but there is a good balance in there somewhere. I mean if all you do is hack and slash without upkeep then it becomes tedious like an action game, but if you have to spend too much time supporting the ability to hack, slash, explore, and progress then it feels more like a work/chore simulator at some point. This is often when you start hearing the term “grind” coined. I mean really any RPGlike game has some amount of “grinding”, but if they got it right, it never is perceived as “grinding” because the pacing was on the mark. Or another way to think of it, they’re best when they have a good balance of combat and non-combat activities driven along by some need to do both a certain amount, otherwise their is no point to them. It’s not easy to get the work (e.g., the amount of eating, drinking, and crafting you must do in order to support your survival and progression in the game) vs. reward tuned just perfectly that it is always fun to the player. There will be players that like more the upkeep aspects than others, but at the same time there ideally is still reward for them if they want to do more than necessary to maintain. They get ahead of the “survival curve” as a result and it pays off in other ways (i.e., it becomes more a question of play style and strategy in tackling the overall game). So somewhere there is a happy balance of what is required upkeep to just merely maintain basic progression throughout the game, and extra time put above that still has its rewards (like “extra credit”). It’s not easy finding those sweet spots, but it is more revealed through extensive play by players as it becomes clearer how things work out in practice.
On a side note: The main thing that really bugged me about the extended vehicle repair times was that it wasn’t very turn-based. It actually made the player sit there and wait in real time. In a turn-based game game time should never influence how much real time must pass. It simply instantly fast-forwards to the moment of completion (maybe pausing for player input if any important events come up in the process) and your cost is how many days, hours, minutes of game time had to passed to reach completion and the effects it has on resources etc. Though someone explained to me that the real-time waiting was more of an unintended side-effect of keeping track of and playing out events in the reality bubble (i.e., processing time for playing the “turns” of anything going on it).
The work you encounter in a game just needs to be fun.
And what is perceived as fun differs from person to person.
Take me. There is no feature that has been added to the game ever that i did perceive as tedium.