I agree on this, but I also think that the player should always have options when it comes to survival. If all resources for survival in the world are limited and non-renewable, that pretty much puts a limited lifespan on the player, even if they do everything right. If you overhunt, you should be able to move to another place to find food or farm for your food. If your river gets tainted, there should always be some way to get water. A funnel for rainwater, perhaps, or at least finding another untainted river.
Cataclysm is not a static world, and really, such a world should have the basics for survival in replenishing supply, even if it may not be easy to get it. Moving your base to another forest when your regular animals run out or protecting your crops from raider NPCs are scenarios i’m envisioning here. Instead of how it is now where animals walk to your front door endlessly and ask to be eaten, or a theorhetical scenario where there’s a limited amount of food in the world and once you run out, you’re screwed.
Really, I don’t want to wake up one cataclysm morning and discover that every river in the world’s tainted and every animal is now an inedible zombie, and the only option is to die when my stockpile of food runs out. The game at its current state should not impose an ineffable, unpassable time limit upon the player as a function of time. I’m ok with things getting harder, but the world becoming unsurvivable over time is a bad idea.
I’ve been playing a lot of Ur-Quan Masters since I got introduced to it on IRC, and a key feature of that game is that the universe’s resources are limited, and you’re on a time limit. Eventually, the game becomes unwinnable if you dawdle, and you need to move from star to star in order to find new planets to mine for resources in the time you have. Ur-Quan masters has a well-developed plot. You are trying to accomplish actual goals before the time limit approaches, and the sense of urgency helps a whole lot once you realize there’s a time limit.
Cataclysm, on the other hand has no real game-ending goal. There’s no “You won the game!” page or final confrontation that you can win. To give the player a world that becomes unsurvivable regardless of player action in such an open-world game as this is an awful idea. If the player has to find new and inventive ways to survive, that’s good. If the player has to deal with threats that get worse over time, that’s good too. But if the world becomes unsurvivable no matter how many fungaloids you murder, how many towns you purge, how many times you march to the nether and close the portals, how much incredibly advanced equipment you craft and how many challenges you take on and win, that’s bad.
