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

Game Talk The Bunker
481

I’ve found it’s better to increase the fuel value of batteries, since that handles the storage side of it too - it’s no good to have a solar car that charges all the way up during the day and runs itself dry at night with engines + headlights. On that:

  • Electric, gas, or both should be viable options for cars. Electric is quiet, gas is fast to fuel. It seems like the weight of storage batteries prevents their use in small, quiet scout vehicles and the inability to make a proper solar field for something larger basically squeezes electric cars out of any niche until you have a dozen quantum solar panels to use. Enabling proper hybrid-electric cars would probably help a lot here.
  • An auto-pulp option for corpses would be nice, or even just a more clear map view of still-viable corpses. After a big fight it’s annoying to wander around with the ‘V’ menu looking for all of the corpses scattered about.
  • Increased power and resources should be seen as a way to present new choices or unlock new options, not something in need of nerfing. As a pair of examples, dealing with excessive player armor by letting hulks and brutes throw them for damage anyway is good. Dealing with unlimited solar power by making UPS charging stations 10% efficient is not - it just makes the process more annoying and doesn’t enable any new interesting interactions.
482

What I really want is a bigger, meaner, electric engine. Something like a “huge electric motor” that you can use to power a real tank, and probably another their of power cells or a honest to god nuclear reactor for it.

I loved my giant death rig, it was hilarious once I finished it.

483

[quote=“amimai, post:482, topic:12504”]What I really want is a bigger, meaner, electric engine. Something like a “huge electric motor” that you can use to power a real tank, and probably another their of power cells or a honest to god nuclear reactor for it.

I loved my giant death rig, it was hilarious once I finished it.[/quote]

You can edit electric motors in the .json files to do whatever you like. And there is a microreactor in game, but it’s very rare.

484

Stopped playing around a year ago, or roughly a little more than half a year. Anyway, stopped because of getting caught up in other games, plus some post-recovery thing for surgery… ahh, if only healing the bod was as easy as the game.

Anyway, I’m playing right now. Dunno about vehicles, so can’t really give an opinion. As for filthy clothing, I kinda dig it, though for most part I kind of feel that it’s lacking. Like, can’t put my finger on it, it just feels that there’s something missing.

As for gun magazines, I dig them. They’re nice, though I recall reading that initially magazines were rare so it’s understandable why people would be irked.

All in all, so far I don’t really mind the changes. Like, I haven’t really noticed anything yet that frustrates me in terms of in-game tedium.

485

That’s something that’s always bothered me a little bit. Things seem to get changed for realism purposes only if they make things harder or more tedious. Like it takes over three in-game days to craft enough long string to make a rope, which is probably realistic. But it sure isn’t fun. Meanwhile, any “realistic” hardware store would carry thousands of yards of rope and chain, but having that in the game would make things more convenient so it’s a no-go. Realistically, even a cheap walmart rifle is accurate to at least a thousand yards, and 00 shotguns are accurate to around 1000 feet. The in-game ranges are a tiny fraction of that.

I’m not complaining about those mechanics in game, because I like the challenge. But it does get a little weird when something very fun is nerfed in the name of realism when so many other wildly unrealistic mechanics are accepted.

486

Now, you see why I’ve dumped unending amounts of snark and said the whole “realism should compliment gameplay, not detract from it” thing a hundred times?

Because more often than not, the devs don’t do that. They prioritze realism that just makes life harder, and give less focus on elements of realism that make things easier.

I’ve lost track of all the times I’ve been annoyed by something in-game and realized how trivial it’d be to work around a given situation using real-life logic.

487

[quote=“Random_dragon, post:486, topic:12504”]Now, you see why I’ve dumped unending amounts of snark and said the whole “realism should compliment gameplay, not detract from it” thing a hundred times?

Because more often than not, the devs don’t do that. They prioritze realism that just makes life harder, and give less focus on elements of realism that make things easier.[/quote]

I generally agree with this sentiment. I take no issue with Mr. Granade’s vision of making a survival sim - but at the end of the day, what we still have here is a game, complete with zombies, quantum teleporting cybernetic implants, and extradimensional horrors. By definition, it is never going to be completely “realistic”.

And as a game, it seems important that the pursuit of realism needs to be tempered by good old fashioned game design principles. New features should ideally work towards the goal of a unified, consistent, and rich player experience. I posted in another thread a few months ago that games like Cataclysm and Dwarf Fortress are fun because their depth of gameplay and attention to detail serve to immerse the player, and give him/her a sandbox in which to create fun and compelling stories… even (nay, especially) the more absurd and ridiculous ones that may not be entirely “realistic”, per se. Realism and detail need to give the game character, not just provide arbitrary obstacles for difficulty’s sake.

I've lost track of all the times I've been annoyed by something in-game and realized how trivial it'd be to work around a given situation using real-life logic.

I remember when filthy clothes were first introduced. I thought it was interesting. It made sense. It was realistic. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to get them clean, until I dug around and looked it up. Oh, I need to craft a washboard, and soap, and need an ass-load of water… but I’ve got a jug of bleach, and a toilet full of water… why can’t I just dunk this filthy t-shirt in a toilet full of bleach water and be done with it? It was a gameplay obstacle that was “realistic” - and yet completely unrealstic in how restrictive it was. There was exactly one way to skin this cat, even if true “realism” would dictate that to be absurd, and that a creative person could easily come up with an alternative besides the one solution the game offers. Because it is a game, inevitably limited by how much can be coded into it. Therefore, a dev needs to be judicious about what sort of things get added: by ensuring that they complement and integrate with other features already existing, and that they enhance rather than detract from the player experience.

But anyway, those are just my thoughts and I’m frankly not entirely sure why I’m contributing them. This discussion has gone in circles for 33 pages. Mr. Granade seems pretty set in his ways, and as an open source, free project, the impression I get is that the development process is kind of like herding cats anyway. I understand the devs have no real obligation to any of us and that CDDA is basically a hobby that happens to get posted on the internet. Still, I hope I don’t presume too much to think they nevertheless take enough pride in their work to want to create something that is enjoyable and high quality.

488

Any examples you can provide? Always looking for new use cases.

489

Now that i think about it, it’s like drawing, the more realistic you draw, the more easily the flaws are seen. I guess we should make a thread to list off all the little workarounds real life would easily have to compete with the game’s small logic flaws.

If enough are said here, i’ll try to compile them all for easy viewing. Though obviously not all will be solved or solved instantly, as devs are most probably working on bigger stuff.

Already saw the clothes one. It’s one i have said so myself. We all already discussed it though, so please tell new ones!

490

The whole “can’t use bleach for laundry” thing the last poster brought up is a good one.

And then there’s a couple things I regret not doing when I was adding stuff to More Survival Tools, namely not making it possible to deconstruct fire rings, since it’s literally just a circle of rocks.

I also recall that there was once discussion on the idea of being able to chamber a round into guns that realistically allow it, a feature that came up back when magazines were painfully rare. That was vetoed for two reasons. The first was it might be a hassle to code, and I can get that. The second was that allowing magazine-fed guns to be used as single-shot rifles somehow detracts from game balance. Several months AFTER that discussion, I find that statement kinda laughable. It does kinda highlight the earlier sentiment, that the devs tend toward realism that makes the player’s life harder or more tedious, and don’t push as hard for realistic gameplay if it makes things easier on the player.

And the other poster earlier also mentioned things like how rare rope is in hardware stores compared to reality, using it in contrast to how realistically time and material-consuming it is to make your own. The “Walmart rifle has better range” nitpick I can understand, because we can’t really DO realistic ranges with reality bubble and dispersion math getting in the way. But I do solidly agree that a shotgun not even having range comparable to a pistol is a bit annoying and unrealistic, given it leads to not even being able to shoot across most rooms in a house.

491

“I also recall that there was once discussion on the idea of being able to chamber a round into guns that realistically allow it, a feature that came up back when magazines were painfully rare. That was vetoed for two reasons. The first was it might be a hassle to code, and I can get that. The second was that allowing magazine-fed guns to be used as single-shot rifles somehow detracts from game balance. Several months AFTER that discussion, I find that statement kinda laughable. It does kinda highlight the earlier sentiment, that the devs tend toward realism that makes the player’s life harder or more tedious, and don’t push as hard for realistic gameplay if it makes things easier on the player.”

I would note that some firearms also don’t allow you to do this, because they have what is called a magazine disconnect in them. Basically they won’t fire without a magazine in the firearm. This is mostly seen in pistols, and it was originally designed for safety purposes, say some idiot ejects the mag but doesn’t clear the chamber before showing it off as ‘unloaded’.

492

For me, the realism generally represents tedium that could easily be handwaved away.

For example:

[ul][li]Having to manually drag a crane into place. The cases where it is tedious outnumber the cases where it can be exploited for unrealistic effects by at least 50 to 1.[/li]
[li]The whole idea of having weapon replicas with same name as originals. Counts as failed realism because of the justification that you can’t see that it is a replica. Counts as tedium because you have to read materials/description/statblock to figure out that it is a replica.[/li]
[li]Item damage, which turns into tedium relatively fast. I tried to fix it by giving it a meaning and extending the time it takes for it to get meaningless, but I don’t think I succeeded at fixing the problem (though I did manage to improve it a bit).[/li]
[li]Filthy clothing. All of it once you find first stack of soap and water source. Afterwards it’s all tedium.[/li]
[li]Any time I hear anyone suggesting gun cleaning. Fortunately it isn’t in yet.[/li][/ul]

The problem is implementing restrictive ideas, then relying on the player to un-restrict them. Or restrictive ideas that only seem restrictive at first, but turn out to be trivial to work around.

There are ways to implement potentially tedious ideas well, but from my experience, the realism is not implemented with care for it being done well, just at all.
For example, gun cleaning implemented as daily cost of an unit of gun cleaning goo preventing accumulation of penalties (requiring more goo to undo once accumulated or allowing less-than-daily cleaning setting) would be fine: would restrict the number of guns in use, require no player action other than setting up cleaning once, and would have a real in-game cost.
But DDA realism style would instead look like this: gun randomly accumulates penalties, requires manual cleaning action per every gun (possibly with nested menus), but allows using very cheap craftable gun cleaning substance, possibly just a plain rag. Possibly with gun penalties being hidden from plain sight so that player has to calculate them from other visible signs. This would add nothing to the game except keypresses and math done out of the game.

493

Huh.
Were rare mags really so bad?
Playing an experimental from mid-march now, and I’m tripping over stanags.
Makes makeshift mags rather pointless if you can grab 2-3 factory-made off the first MP squad you happen across.

494

[quote=“GrizzlyAdamz, post:493, topic:12504”]Huh.
Were rare mags really so bad?
Playing an experimental from mid-march now, and I’m tripping over stanags.
Makes makeshift mags rather pointless if you can grab 2-3 factory-made off the first MP squad you happen across.[/quote]

The mag issue was back last year, when the whole thing was first introduced. 95% of weapons straight up didn’t spawn with magazines if they needed them, and enemies rarely ever dropped them. It was pretty bad. Once magazines became reasonably common (Weapons having them, decent drop rate from soldier zombies and the like) it was all good.

And yea, STANAG’s out the Wazoo is pretty common, but that’s accurate. Standardized mags for the most common rifle patterns in the US should be everywhere :P.

495

I don’t want to be excessively negative and salty over ideas, but…yeah. That is exactly what I fear gun cleaning would look like if implemented.

This is why I get leery of so many realism-focused suggestion nowadays, because there’s been a trend of not implementing them sanely. I can certainly go objecting to a suggestion and say “no, there’s high risk of the implementation falling flat” but this tends to get me yelled at.

496

The problem isn’t that you give feedback or have concerns, the problem is you post meaningless one line objections to things that provide no actual feedback. If you’re going to criticise an idea, state specific concerns you have, and ideally a way to avoid the problem or improve the idea.

497

Some kind of automation (and especially NPC-based automation) system seems like it could open up a lot of space there. I’d love to be able to come back to my base or vehicle with the remains of the three wolves and a moose that tried to murder me on my way through the forest and say “preserve this meat and put it in the food pile”[1] rather than needing to fiddle through a few rounds of batch-craft dehydrated meat / reload tool / drop. It would also be great (and provide something of a purpose for NPCs) if I could drop a pile of meat in front of an NPC with some cooking skill and say “preserve this meat and put it in the food pile”. With a system like that even “you need to clean guns each day”[2] could become a character-time cost rather than a human-time cost, which seems much more acceptable.

In general, I think that ‘realism’ tweaks that result in better player immersion (hunger/thirst/fatigue/stamina, for example) are good, and (as you said) changes that result in the human needing to keep track of things outside the game or tedious repetition (like vitamins or filthy clothing) are not. And, where possible, it seems like externalizing changes to allow people to modify them (like the recent externalization of fuel energy values) is best of all.

[1] Having designated a preferred tool / recipe for preserving meat and a particular zone as the food pile, of course

498

Right. I’ve already since elaborated my concerns in the specific suggestion thread, in that particular case. :V

499

Seriously? Bleach is not detergent, you can’t wash clotes with just bleach. This is exactly the kind of suggestion that gets rejected out of hand, not because it would help the player, but because it doesn’t actually work like that. Making various kinds of detergent reasonably common has the same outcome and reflects reality.

Sure? It’s a pile of rocks, so I’m not sure how that helps the player.

I don’t know who said anything about balance, if you’re attributing that to me you need to provide a link, because I definitely never said that. If anything it’s the opposite, it’s pointless to implement it because it’s so incredibly ineffective.
Also, it doesn’t really work, as has been pointed out, quite a few guns have interlocks that make this impossible, others have a breech that makes it impossible, and even if it does work it’s terribly impractical to reload.
The only compelling reason to even want this feature was if magazines were going to continue to be rare as hell, and the easier solution was to fix magazine spawning, which is what we did.

It’s funny how people only mention how common things should be when it’s something that’s really valuable. Get me some good resources on how common various items should be and I’ll happily apply them to te spawn lists, but “I can’t find foo so it should be more common” isn’t a compelling reason to adjust things, obviously players will keep asking for rare and valuable things to be more common.

I agree, this needs to happen and is just something we haven’t gotten around to, but overhauling the range model of the game isn’t something I’d characterize as “trivial”.

The majority of your examples either don’t follow real-life logic or don’t help the player :stuck_out_tongue:

500

True, there are some flaws in those examples, those were mostly the ones that came off the top of my head. Some of them, like the “soap and a washboard is unrealistically the ONLY option for laundry” is still a realism failure, just the first idea that struck me related to that was a bit derpy. :V

Seriously? Bleach is not detergent, you can't wash clotes with just bleach. This is exactly the kind of suggestion that gets rejected out of hand, not because it would help the player, but because it doesn't actually work like that. Making various kinds of detergent reasonably common has the same outcome and reflects reality.

Some other containers that could be used as wash basins would be a better small step in the right direction, as would finding other logically valid options for soap.

Sure? It's a pile of rocks, so I'm not sure how that helps the player.

As for the More Survival Tools example that’s just a general minor regret of mine really. It’s related to the general annoyance of a LOT of constructions making no sense to require a hammer and screwdriver to take apart though. Unfucking that would be realistic and convenient for the player by ensuring that they can dismantle stuff they shouldn’t need those tools for.

I don't know who said anything about balance, if you're attributing that to me you need to provide a link, because I definitely never said that. If anything it's the opposite, it's pointless to implement it because it's so incredibly ineffective. Also, it doesn't really work, as has been pointed out, quite a few guns have interlocks that make this impossible, others have a breech that makes it impossible, and even if it does work it's terribly impractical to reload. The only compelling reason to even want this feature was if magazines were going to continue to be rare as hell, and the easier solution was to fix magazine spawning, which is what we did.

As for the chambering a round thing, I’d need to find the discussion about that, but I could’ve sworn that game balance was ONE of the things brought up in it. I do think that the idea still has a niche, but it isn’t as essential now that magazines aren’t so rare.

It's funny how people only mention how common things should be when it's something that's really valuable. Get me some good resources on how common various items should be and I'll happily apply them to te spawn lists, but "I can't find foo so it should be more common" isn't a compelling reason to adjust things, obviously players will keep asking for rare and valuable things to be more common.

Regarding rope, it isn’t really valuable. It’s just a big pain in the ass to make. If that’s value it’s fake value. It isn’t really used in a ton of recipes or constructions, but when it’s NEEDED it becomes annoying to obtain. I think the poster that cited “very common in hardware stores” was mostly just giving that for the sake of contrast with how tedious rope is to make. The idea that, with respect to ropes, how you obtain it’s realistic in ONE way but unrealistic in another, and used it as an example of how realism only seems to get priority if it’s to the player’s detriment.

I agree, this needs to happen and is just something we haven't gotten around to, but overhauling the range model of the game isn't something I'd characterize as "trivial".

This one I’m afraid you missed the point of. My point there was that shotguns have awful in-game range RELATIVE to pistols. I don’t think the range system needs an overhaul just to make shotguns not be melee weapons. :V