Bring the survival back with progressive difficulty

Game Talk The Drawing Board
101

For my part, I can understand hunting tying into the spawn-pools (indeed, that’s more or less how the current dynamic-spawn system works…just with a LOT more critters).

So with some ability for the player to get feedback (make a Survival roll at some point?), this could be worthwhile. The 10-point example, though, seems extremely harsh so it put me off the idea initially.

Zed-critters ought to be more/less independent of player actions–in fact, I’d say player kills ought to decrease the amount of zed critters, since you get zeds from non-processed deaths. Animals that die of age, injury, etc are the zeds, not player or other food-kills. :wink:

Let’s kick it around some more?

102

You gotta … like … open your miiIIIiind maaAAaaan. Don’t get so stuck on like … the little details … maaaaan.
Oops … sorry … looted a crapload of drug-dealer corpses in my newest experimental run-through.

… lol, I’m no coder. The most I’ve done is play with json files to fix issues with tiles breaking to new updates. So anything I babble in these threads aren’t grounded in coding reality, probably, and sure as hell can’t be implemented by me.

I’m a professional critical thinker and manager/project manager (well I’m supposed to be, my lack of current employment is what awards me the freedom to stalk these boards so much). I just spew ideas and kick around things … my numbers are always theoretical and hastily thrown together. So don’t fixate too much on the little points I guess … I try and stir discussion so someone with coding talent or whomever is actually in charge of the project might go “hey I like that” and run with it. :slight_smile:

… and yeah, wasn’t totally sure how the current spawn-pool system works. I just know woodland critters spawn way too much currently, and a more reactive “I hunted here alot, so I guess I gotta hunt somewhere else” system would force players out of their comfort zone a little more. I can literally stand on my front porch and pick off enough food for the day without going ANYwhere right now lol.

103

I still think it sounds like a system that encourages figuring out and gaming the underlying mechanic, rather than an intuitive one somewhat based in reality. Personally I’d like to see more predator/prey dynamics, and more wildlife interactions. Maybe if you kept hunting wolves and bears down, deer and moose become more common? Maybe if you left giant piles of meat outside you could attract scavenger animals easily? Something could also be done with smell, maybe.

104

Well, it IS a game. :stuck_out_tongue: A zombie apocalypse where you try and survive as long as you can. Though with enough added features and shutting cities off its becoming a zombie-less wilderness camping simulator. (Which I’d argue is a different game totally.) lol

Everything gets figured out and gamed sooner or later. I’d argue in rogue-likes that is the point really. You have to trial-and-error what doesn’t get you killed, what builds work better than others and fit your play style, how to play within the confines of the game, so you live longer the next character you make.

Just for example:

  • You can “figure out and game” the inventory/layering system to get insane armor levels allowing you to melee a brute or hulk down without a scratch and/or give yourself shopping-cart-size volume while negligibly encumbered.

  • … mutations are game-able now that there are recipes for all different things. With a little legwork and planning you can pick and choose what mutations you want.

  • … turrets only see so far, so they’re “gamed” by just killing them at night from 1 square outside their range. (This is/was being fixed thankfully.)

  • … also the whole shrub-warfare thing, where bushes make zombies into easily kill-able kittens. (Weirdly, didn’t you argue NOT to change that, despite it being a gamey/gamed thing?)

On that note, did you know that with a shopping cart and 2 melee skill and 2 dodge (that is at least the levels I earned so far, and am playing with right now … of which I started with 0 in all skills and earned what I got by night 1) you can kill any and all zombies without getting seriously hurt? (G)rab cart, push it in front of you … ram it into a zombie. It’ll climb onto the cart to get you. Swing as many times as you safely can (1 or 2 times maybe, with Quick you get more, even more with a fast weapon) … step back 1 step. The cart will move with you, the zombie will climb BACK on it, and you get free hits again. — is this a feature that should be fixed? … or a legitimate tactic? Is it gamey/gamed?

The list can go on and on. What is an “easily gamed” bad idea, and what is a good feature that players have just figured out? Someone will be smart enough to figure out everything, sooner or later. lol

105

The exploit/mechanic/gaming semantic debate is probably not the best one to bring up, it’s a matter of opinion and there’s probably no way around that. Regardless, I still think something that takes into account predator/prey dynamics and a general ecosystem works better, rather than a see-saw between animal deaths/zombie deaths.

106

[size=12pt](Minor Walking Dead Spoilers ahead!)[/size]

I’d see it like: There may be times when you can exploit your environment (or game something) and that’s great/fine, but as always ‘nature finds a way’. Like in The Walking Dead, they kill the zombies through the fence with no harm to themselves and that’s great, but eventually too many of them come and break through the fence. I feel every game mechanic in a good simulation (which is what the devs have said it is) should either have both a positive and negative (like drugs improve you but also become addicting), or be finite.

107

Just my opinion. the major reason i find this game extremely interesting compared to most rogulikes is that it DOESN’T have progressive difficulty! and that is a good thing!. you as the character choose when and if you want to explore places that are harder. Same thing goes with another game i like which is Unreal World RPG. Early stages is hardest, once you made a shelter and stockpiles and have best gear, etc it gets easier… but so is real life, life doesn’t get harder… jobs don’t get harder they tend to get easier… unless you get unlucky of course. But open world sandboxes are supposed to be like that!, let player find ways to make game more difficult for themselves if they choose, not force it on them.

What i think Cata should do is simply expand on more difficult areas to explore. we already have places like military bases which we know we have to be well prepared for before taking them on, simply make even more difficult areas to explore that hopefully are further away from spawn to keep newbies from spawning next to one.

I think one example idea is to have a town like from Walking Dead, completely surrounded by walls/gates run by dictator like leader/mayors who gun down any strangers who try to approach, if you can manage to kill the leader and military occupying the small town/village rewards can be great… you may also be able to sway remaining survivors who fleed etc. into joining you or kill them too… your choice…

but basically i think keep adding to world incentives that encourage players to push themselves and reward them, rather then force an artificial way of increasing difficult instead… that is unrealistic and if i wanted that i would go back to playing other typical rogue likes.

Also if we insist on an incremental increased difficulty then do so based on how far you traveled not based on time, etc. so for example further away from your initial spawn location you started in, the more difficult and crazy the monsters may get but also the greater the reward, this is another way i think it would not “Force” people and would be a compromise. This way those who want it harder just needs to go further, those who feel its too hard can stay closer to spawn and move in a more circular motion away from spawn rather then a straight line for a less steep difficulty curve.

108

In any RPG the base level of difficulty needs to expand, otherwise the player can just grind up endlessly until they can take on any challenge. This is done in traditional RPG’s by having weak monsters give little to no xp once you reach a certain level, or being more linear so the player just has to push forward.

However, I do agree that there should be reasons for the player to ‘push themselves’, the base level difficulty shouldn’t be such a challenge that the only thing you can do is keep up with it.

Take the polluted water example - over time, this would make getting water more difficult, so you’d need to seek out ways of purifying more polluted water. This pushes you onwards, but doesn’t make the game that much more difficult in the short term. Similarly, zombie evolution overtime raises the base level of monsters, so you’d have to be able to deal with that, but it could be on quite a gentle curve - again, pushing you forward to find/build new stuff, but not ramping up the short term difficulty.

109

Don’t you get bored though? The dangers in game become trivial, and can become so very fast. Especially if you get lucky with drops at start or find a library early you can become near infallible. Once you jump that first hurdle, what is there? After you can survive special zombies easily (which if you die to them a few times and learn mechanics you can easily adapt to accomplish VERY quickly in game) what is there to really do?

So I guess, that is why I really hope for progressive difficulty (even if its just a game mode) and an in-game purpose to living beyond “just survive indefinitely”. It is far too easy right now to become invincible and render all danger out of the game, and you’re left with a base-building, pile-of-inventory-management simulation. I feel like I’m making runs to town to buy groceries or mail things at the Post Office. It becomes an ASCII real-life simulator (like The Sims) and I shudder at the thought :wink:

110

There’s plenty of late game content to come with hordes and the great NPC update.

Right now the early game feels almost right (it’s a bit easy with a standard 6-point survivor) so I don’t think messing it up with stuff thrown in hastily is the best of ideas.

111

[quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:110, topic:4434”]There’s plenty of late game content to come with hordes and the great NPC update.

Right now the early game feels almost right (it’s a bit easy with a standard 6-point survivor) so I don’t think messing it up with stuff thrown in hastily is the best of ideas.[/quote]

I don’t think so at all, and I know most of the people I’ve introduced to it (some enjoy RLs and some not) have felt vanilla way too easy, for the reasons Dominae mentioned. Agreed though, things should be carefully thought out, but a few quick mechanics (harmless wildlife dying out more overtime, river pollution and less non-spoiling food) would help no end to give it a curve, rather than a sharp cliff.

112

Water pollution has to be very well thought out though.
Harken back to what i’ve said here:

If we do consider polluting rivers, there should be a way to recover them, so it’s not irreversible. If players changing them back is not ideal, then water sources recovering or something over time might be reasonable.

113

[quote=“Dominae, post:109, topic:4434”]Don’t you get bored though? The dangers in game become trivial, and can become so very fast. Especially if you get lucky with drops at start or find a library early you can become near infallible. Once you jump that first hurdle, what is there? After you can survive special zombies easily (which if you die to them a few times and learn mechanics you can easily adapt to accomplish VERY quickly in game) what is there to really do?

So I guess, that is why I really hope for progressive difficulty (even if its just a game mode) and an in-game purpose to living beyond “just survive indefinitely”. It is far too easy right now to become invincible and render all danger out of the game, and you’re left with a base-building, pile-of-inventory-management simulation. I feel like I’m making runs to town to buy groceries or mail things at the Post Office. It becomes an ASCII real-life simulator (like The Sims) and I shudder at the thought ;)[/quote]

Well that’s my hole point in letting player progress when they feel comfortable… to person above you… there is plenty of hack n slash rpgs that allow you to farm earlier content before moving to next… actually path of exile is a great example of this in later difficulties and is still considered one of more “hardcore” variants of hack n slash rpg, but there are even older rpgs that you can do same, what about the old final fantasy series, you could spend a ton of time building up perfect character before taking on that last boss or could challenge yourself and take him on earlier… or if you got bored of building yourself up. I love that path of exile because you almost have to at some point stop progressing like a wild man and farm earlier levels since there are so many road blocks like bosses that are extremely difficult if you haven’t spent enough time farming lower levels, but even still i get bored and move on to the harder levels for more challenge when i feel ready, sure if i farmed in lower level long enough there wouldn’t be any point at some point… but the way gear works in path of exile and the non-currency like system makes it so your always benefiting farming lower levels before moving on… it’s just a matter of how much patience you have and if it’s your first rodeo you’ll probably spend even more time then necessary preparing… but that’s the choice of player. In fact most people playing path of exile for new players make mistake of advancing too quickly and not keeping gear up and not choosing enough defense nodes in their passive tree which eventually forces them to slow down or even just start a new character and try again.

If someone wants to just stay at starter area and never move on… then so be it, but that would be pretty boring compared to exploring farther away places and harder complexes and getting better stuff and more of a challenge. With all the potential out there for better stuff… why stick around the easy starting area? I personally tend to move on faster then many players in other games because i want to force more of a challenge and not steamroll everything and been playing games non-stop since early 90’s of all genre’s so i tend to want more challenge faster, but at same time i want that choice… New players especially are going to greatly appreciate that then move on to harder areas faster and faster the more they play the game instead of doing the early stuff for so long after a while… especially in a rogue like and playing multiple times the early stages will start to get easier and easier and more boring so you’ll want to move on faster but going further from spawn or to harder complexes to get that better gear/items quicker… but that’s one of the joys of sandbox games, if designed right it allows for all sorts of different game play styles and allows player to challenge themselves at the pace they choose.

So what i’m basically saying is. i don’t like some of ideas posting here of artificially forcing more difficult game play just based on time in game, etc. but i wouldn’t mind seeing game play get more challenging the further you venture, or instead just making progressively more difficult complexes. You can do it one of 2 ways, make higher complexes drop better gear/materials which in turn gives you stronger character that in turn allows you to progress to even more difficult complexes… or make it skill based and just make it require more skill so that a well experienced vet player could still potentially infiltrate a harder complex earlier on and skip past the earlier content this way but this discussion probably for a different debate.

its also easier to forget how difficult games are for people who don’t play them as rigorously as us… it’s so hard to imagine how hard it is for younger/newer gamer to play games, I’ve have so many family and friends myself who like games or want to get into games but struggle like crazy even on the easiest games out there because they just don’t have the gamer type of mind yet. But a good designed sandbox can still be challenging early on but allow more experienced players to advance sooner or skip earlier constant faster to get to more challenging stuff on their own, and all their friends would can be jealous :slight_smile: but that would only push new players to try harder and learn faster knowing there is so much room for improvement… that’s exciting and keeps you coming back for more. But if you design a system that automatically increases difficult artificially, then your really limiting to who can play the game, newer players are likely to get more frustrated sooner, or not play game at all knowing they cannot play at their own pace, will think of game as being a more hardcore game that they won’t have time to bother with, etc. I’ve seen so many times other people not want to bother with a game because they think they don’t have the skills for it… but in sand box style games it’s like a perfect training ground for the less skilled gamer while still having a great challenge later for more skilled gamers.

sorry this is turning out waaay longer then i intended… but i’m pretty passionate about games… i feel like so many games out there fail because of not having the right balance, and sandboxes have that huge potential to get it right.

114

Do you find the changes GlyphGryph outlined in https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/4977 to be artificially inflated difficulty? Just wondering, so I can understand your point better.

115

“Zombie Immune Response” seems like a bad idea to me.
Unless you have the “mobs” able to feel such slaughters and have a chance to change course to move towards the area, that could work.

116

I don’t see how basing difficulty on ‘distance from the player’ is supposed to be less ‘artificial’ than basing it on time passed. It just means there isn’t any pressure, and without any pressure the game suddenly becomes a lot more grindy and a lot less rewarding than it otherwise could be.

Even a little bit of pressure, a slow buildup, means tension, it means risk. It gives the player a goal, even if they are on top - keep getting better, or you won’t be on top anymore and it ultimately gives the game an ‘end state’ where the player either transcends the growth in difficulty or is swallowed up by it.

What I’d like to see is an “optimal gameplay progression” that looks like this:
a0=2&a1=3x-x^2+.2&a2=4*(x-1.5)/2-(x-1.5)^2/3&a3=2*(x-2.5)-(x-2.5)^2+1.5&a4=1&a5=4&a6=1&a7=1&a8=1&a9=1&b0=500&b1=500&b2=-5&b3=5&b4=-5&b5=5&b6=10&b7=10&b8=5&b9=5&c0=3&c1=0&c2=1&c3=1&c4=1&c5=1&c6=1&c7=0&c8=0&c9=0&d0=1&d1=20&d2=20&d3=0&d4=0&d5=2.5&d6=1.5&d7=&d8=2.5&d9=&e0=&e1=&e2=&e3=&e4=14&e5=14&e6=13&e7=12&e8=0&e9=0&f0=0&f1=1&f2=1&f3=0&f4=0&f5=&f6=&f7=&f8=&f9=&g0=&g1=1&g2=1&g3=0&g4=0&g5=0&g6=Y&g7=ffffff&g8=a0b0c0&g9=6080a0&h0=1&z
(Load that here: http://rechneronline.de/function-graphs/ to see the result)

The blue line represents the player’s relative power and success, while the red line represents his lasting impact on the world (probably through supporting some sort of NPCs and building some level of structures).

So the game starts fairly difficult, but the player progresses steadily and accumulates power, becoming more capable of facing the challenges he’s encountering. At a certain point, however, his individual power isn’t growing as fast as the difficulty of the challenges, and his relative power starts falling. At this point, the optimal path is to accept the inevitable decrease in relative power and spend what you have in making investments - if you succeed, and overcome the difficult period long enough for those investments to start paying off, your power will increase again. OR you can choose to try to flatten the curve - but it means it will always be trending downwards.

Either way, your character should eventually begin to fail. At this point, it’s no longer about survival, it’s about leaving a legacy - while your individual relative power falls, the magnitude of your impact steadily increases. You are no longer playing so that you, yourself, can overcome any challenge in the apocalypse - you are playing to insure the survival of what you’ve accomplished and preserve the impact of what you’ve done.

Personally, I find that sort of approach far more interesting, far more fulfilling, than a traditional RPG inevitable and steady power creep.

Sure, in the end you might individually end up worse off than you were at the beginning, or even die - but if you’ve accomplished something, changed the world in some meaningful way, that is still a victory.

If you want the player to continually face new challenges and still be rewarded, without turning the game into an absurdist parody of itself with constantly elevating power levels, I think the best way to do that is make the rewards benefit someone or something other than your character.

117

Thats it … time to add in a "romance an NPC and have a kid, raise that kid, then pass the world onto them … feature!

(Sorry, I played some significant “Rogue Legacy” time this month.)

I like the “it is inevitable”/leaving a legacy way you expressed things, Gryph, though I assume that a bunch of “I want to live forever”/“this is a sandbox survival-crafting game where I should be able to build a big house and live in the woods safely” people may head-explode.

I just imagine, perhaps, a character going and saving a bunch of people … forming an NPC-faction of survivors and holding out somewhere for a while before they’re overrun. That character ends up dying. That NPC faction lives on in the game world now (well whatever survived of it). Their old base, now swarmed with evil, is an actual place in the world file.

The player’s NEXT character, who starts fresh in a city many miles away, will hear stories of players previous character, all they accomplished, etc.

It’d then give the new character something to do if they wanted … seek out that stronghold, find out what went wrong, and reclaim what was lost.

Kinda’ like succumbing to “Fun!” in dwarf fortress, then making an adventuring character, and going to your old fortress and trying to reclaim it.

118

I like all of those ideas except for Zombie Immune Response, it sounds a lot like sneaking in dynamic spawn into a non dynamic spawn game, making it kind of redundant.

You are also forgetting about one feature that eventually forces a player to move into another territory or subsist on some most basic resources. Loot depletion. There is just so much interesting stuff in any general area (especially with lower city\loot spawns) and after you pick all that, you slowly start running out of certain kinds of items. Move, or learn to deal with it.

119

I think you might be overstating the issue. If you mean the character is going to have to stop drinking grape soda and eating leftover pizza, and switch to hunting wildlife/digging for veggies and drinking from the river, most characters will happily do so, it doesn’t really affect me in real life. I mean, you’re not wrong, but most characters ‘learn to deal with it’ fairly quickly. All you really need is food, water, a safe bed, and maybe some rags to stitch into warm clothes for winter. In point of fact, most of the characters I’ve played move largely to find other things to kill, with loot as a secondary concern, rather than vice-versa.

120

Wel, things to kill of many kinds run out too. Hunting and purifying river water takes more effort than just looting a fridge. You run out of ammo, gasoline and batteries, which are required by all the cool stuff. Cool armor like kevlar breaks down eventually and you can’t fix it.