6+ months of agonizing "realism" nerfs have ruined this game

[gamejunky]

- That’s actually a fair point although at the time I don’t recall many people opposing the addition. It wasn’t highly requested either. I think most of us just watched curiously.

A lot of that is because the part of the playing community that actually bothers to give feedback is largely an echo chamber.

[Coolthulhu]

Vitamins were a bit of an unknown early on. It was less about echo chamber and more about “what if it turns out to be good”.

We had (still have) a problem with all food boiling down to 2 things: nutrition and permafood vs perishables. Vitamins were supposed to fix it.
But then we got realism into it and lost all hope of them achieving that goal, because realism demanded that scurvy happens only when you avoid fruit, all vitamins are common enough to be satisfied easily etc.

Game design is full of failures and fixes.
Here we have an important lesson: don’t name your things after real life ones if real life is horrible at those things. Because if you name it after the real life thing, realism may creep in and kill game design.

I’m not sure how to fix vitamins. Partial scrap? Major rebalance that disregards real life? Full scrap?

[Noctifer]

Can’t we just balance it in game and justify it lore wise that the requirements differ from real-life since the blob* that is in you is unknowingly leeching vitamins off you.

*The one that cause you to mutate in the first place.

[Mecares]

I would just switch from punish lack of vitamins and nothing if you do everything right to nothing if you do it wrong and reward healthy eating. Because then they feel like earning a reward instead of working to avoid punishment. Combined with a stealth nerf of the base condition of the player it could basically be the same game balance wise but with totally different feelings to it.

Players hate mali but love boni

[Zireael]

[quote=“Noctifer, post:343, topic:12504”]Can’t we just balance it in game and justify it lore wise that the requirements differ from real-life since the blob* that is in you is unknowingly leeching vitamins off you.

*The one that cause you to mutate in the first place.[/quote]

This is a good idea.

[User1]

Is there a solution to that? Is there a way to minimize the unpleasantness of 365-day years? Would all travel then become too fast? Could the map generator accommodate for more realistic intercity distances? Would driving become a chore, and if it would, is there a way around that? Would all characters reach their potential within a month or two? Crafting times could be increased to compensate. Reading times could be increased. There could be other timesinks to get the days of the long year flow by faster. Or would it cause too much processing and therefore slow down the performance? Is there a way around THAT then?

are we even playing the same game? do you seriously not consider the default settings for season length, city size and city spacing to be complete crap? the map generator needs to be overhauled anyway so modders can mod it and fix its problems. crafting times are a balance thing, do with them whatever you want as long as it doesn't suck. except for the unrealistic vitamin implementation, food usually isn't a problem so i guess increasing crafting time wouldn't matter much.

i agree though that vitamins in c:dda incentivize players to live healthier irl. shame that almost nobody uses them because the implementation sucks so badly.
the c:dda implementation probably even makes people think they need to buy multivitamins so it’s actually doing a bad thing for people’s health.

[jcd]

[quote=“User, post:346, topic:12504”]i agree though that vitamins in c:dda incentivize players to live healthier irl. shame that almost nobody uses them because the implementation sucks so badly.
the c:dda implementation probably even makes people think they need to buy multivitamins so it’s actually doing a bad thing for people’s health.[/quote]

Interesting angle.
Personally, it made me realize how lucky i am to have access to a huge food variety, even if i would be perfectly happy to live year round on meat/milk/bread/fruit (which is not too unbalanced now that i look at it)

As for the implementation, without getting into why it sucks and what could be done, i do believe that calibrating it for 365-day years would fix it.
However it would make the system practically a non-issue for people playing shorter games, but i guess this is correct. A survivor with a life-expectancy of 3 weeks cannot be expected to face serious problems due to vitamins. The real problem starts when the typical survivor life-expectancy is under 3 weeks, since this makes the vitamin system literally useless for cata. But from my perspective this change does make sense, since i play 30 or 91-day seasons.

[Pthalocy]

I am rather fond of AdonaiJr’s proposal, which includes a mix of both punishment and reward to incentivize the player to cook more than one type of meal. I agree that with so many recipes available, it gets silly when you’re surviving well enough to ignore 95% of the options. When one meal is most efficient and suffices, those options become meaningless beyond roleplay.

Don’t get me wrong, I love roleplay and use it regularly in my games. But it’s nice to have some features of said roleplay supported by game mechanics, even minimally. I am simply never going to make butter to put on toast if some survivor super stew is the best option.

[Taberone]

I’m surprised theres no “realism nerf” for getting shot/stabbed/beaten, since the injuries don’t really feel deadly enough outside of “Cause pain and take away hit points”. You can’t take a baseball bat to the head and suffer a concussion, get shot in the gut three times and die slowly over the course of five hours, have a knife wound bleed or get infected, and so on.

That probably won’t make for exciting gameplay, though. The constant bandage usage for every single time a bullet slams into you or a knife hits you would probably get annoying fast, and would probably draw comparisons to STALKER.

[SpadeDraco]

1. Seperate Foods into the 5 food groups

2. Give each group a distinct tangible buff or benefit that affects the player with “luxury food” like properly prepared pancakes with syrup and buttered toast offering the best benefits in their category.

3. Implement something similar to the old health system that focuses on variety instead of “food quality”.

4)???

5. Profit

Seriously, I don’t see why this needs to be “fixed” in a complex manner that involves a ton of meter management. If you want to inflict random douchery upon the player base then just add a mechanic that randomly gives food cooked with a low cooking skill a chance to give you food poisoning. There’s no need to force us to deal with the constant and completely unfun threat of accidentally getting too much of x vitamin. I will most likely continue to use the “simplified nutrition” mod well into the future, because even though the old health system sucked, it did not actively attempt to make the game less enjoyable to play.

[BeerBeer]

I’m surprised theres no “realism nerf” for getting shot/stabbed/beaten, since the injuries don’t really feel deadly enough outside of “Cause pain and take away hit points”. You can’t take a baseball bat to the head and suffer a concussion, get shot in the gut three times and die slowly over the course of five hours, have a knife wound bleed or get infected, and so on.

Future medical technology, baby! We’ll just rename the “first-aid kit” to “nano first-aid kit” or something like that.

This DoubleTech Snake-Oil emergency first-aid kit can rapidly treat over 99% of the various possible acute medical issues with unprecedented efficiency. Severe tissue trauma, wound contaminants, nerve damage or burn injuries are but a few ailments that this little box of wonders can treat. The only reported side effects are slight skin discoloration and the lack of hair follicles at the injury location. So try not to get shot in the beard.

[Random_dragon]

Technically it would reduce the whole “bandage all the things” issue if you went full realism. Yes, you’d be bandaging up a lot of bleeding wounds, but then you wouldn’t be able to use them to heal the damage itself.

It’d be even worse than in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., because at least in SoC bandages also healed you, and even in the later games first aid kits would heal damage too. If you went that far, you’d have to make natural healing take a stupidly long time, then have the non-scifi healing items not heal any damage.

[Noctifer]

[quote=“Random_dragon, post:352, topic:12504”]Technically it would reduce the whole “bandage all the things” issue if you went full realism. Yes, you’d be bandaging up a lot of bleeding wounds, but then you wouldn’t be able to use them to heal the damage itself.

It’d be even worse than in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., because at least in SoC bandages also healed you, and even in the later games first aid kits would heal damage too. If you went that far, you’d have to make natural healing take a stupidly long time, then have the non-scifi healing items not heal any damage.[/quote]
Actually,fit realism healing was a thing and the healing items were left alone it would be balance imo, that way you bandage up to not die and either rest until healed up, used you stocked heal items or go get some. Right now I don’t bother with first aid beyond infections and bleeding since sleeping will heal all wounds fast.

[Taberone]

[quote=“Taberone, post:349, topic:12504”]I’m surprised theres no “realism nerf” for getting shot/stabbed/beaten, since the injuries don’t really feel deadly enough outside of “Cause pain and take away hit points”. You can’t take a baseball bat to the head and suffer a concussion, get shot in the gut three times and die slowly over the course of five hours, have a knife wound bleed or get infected, and so on.

Future medical technology, baby! We’ll just rename the “first-aid kit” to “nano first-aid kit” or something like that.

This DoubleTech Snake-Oil emergency first-aid kit can rapidly treat over 99% of the various possible acute medical issues with unprecedented efficiency. Severe tissue trauma, wound contaminants, nerve damage or burn injuries are but a few ailments that this little box of wonders can treat. The only reported side effects are slight skin discoloration and the lack of hair follicles at the injury location. So try not to get shot in the beard.[/quote]

Just had an idea. Couldn’t we just have some degree of acceptable breaks from reality with the serious injuries and justify it with the blob somehow? I’ve seen the blob being used as a justification for some other suggestions people made.

Also, considering that First Aid Kits or taking a quick nap can heal damage to hit points regardless of what caused it in Cataclysm already, it probably wouldn’t be too weird to have serious injuries (If they ever make it in) being healed by sleeping/FAKs?

[Valpo]

We already do. As far as i know your fast healing rate is justified by the blob helping to repair damage to its host.
So us healing overnight is realistic in the cataclysm world.

[User1]

Since we’re already talking about how to make the game more realistic…
Cauterization actually increases the risk of infection, according to wikipedia. This should be fixed imho.

[Pthalocy]

Wow, now there’s an old debate I haven’t heard in a while.

The vague way I recall it, there was a lot of pros and cons either way - namely leaving cauterization as-is because making it realistic would be unintuitive to the mass player group who don’t know this factoid. Or something about the survivor’s knowledge being separate from the players. Or we should remove cautery entirely. Or it should be re-worked as a solution to severe bleeding rather than infection healing. I vaguely recall the cauterize wound function being re-worked so you had two very-long shots to push things in your favour, but for the most part you just fucked up your injury and caused yourself a lot of pain on top of the spreading infection.

…I’d like to think that cutting infected tissue out sufficiently, and then cauterizing what’s left over to stop bleeding might make sense if it’s caught early enough, but it still all comes down to whether or not you can avoid recontaminating your own injury in the process.

Has it seriously remained an unchanged function since this last came up like a year ago?

[Coolthulhu]

Has it seriously remained an unchanged function since this last came up like a year ago?

Yes.
It’s a pretty minor feature once you understand how infection works.

[Pthalocy]

Last time my guy got bit, I had him hunt around for disinfectant and lo, both wounds healed on their own before I could. Shrug! Either he’s really lucky, or the odds of recovery have improved since I last played.

[User1]

cutting out tissue gives even more room for infection. unless in cata infection can only come directly from bites and not through air or dirt.

also i don’t find it intuitive at all, i died of infection several times because it never occurred to me that something that clearly only stops bleeding on the surface would somehow kill bacteria deep inside the wound, and cutting out a chunk of flesh seemed even weirder, so i went to wikipedia because it just seemed such a strange idea and felt like cheating.