Cataclysm: Easy Days Ahead (AKA, DDA is way too damned easy)

[ClaytonRISING]

I couldn’t disagree with the OP more on this one. Even if you’re finding the standard setting easy, there are things you can do. Give yourself less points at the start. Turn on black road. Set zombie spawns through the roof. And remember, this game has no end, you can’t ‘win’ Cataclysm, everyone dies eventually. The challenge is seeing how long you can survive it all. I for one find the balance of difficulty/realism to be quite fine.

Black road? OK, now I have to punch a bunch of zombies to death at the start.

Less points? I play on default anyways, but OK. I don’t start with as much stats/skills/stuff…so I easily go out and power game them all up.

Zombie spawns higher? Alright, more zombies but I still have no reason to even fight in the first place.

@ EkarusRyndren in order of replied:

1. Rogue Likes are supposed to be hard. You know, it’s kind of a staple of the word “Rogue Like”.

2. “until I get my OP death-car-of-doom-and-destruction built, that doubles as a house, I don’t have to fight anything.”

3. I’m looking for a challenging survival rogue like. What are you here for if you’re not looking for a challenge? Go play Garry’s Mod if you want to build cars lol.

4. A few things? You can be a martial arts master while wearing full power armor. Need I say more.

5. You’re comparing CDDA with a shitty Romero film (was it even made by Romero?). The game isn’t supposed to be The Sims 3; it’s set in an apocalypse. You should have to worry about your small food supply perishing…not getting in your fridge and grabbing one of the hundreds of food items you have.

[Binky]

I couldn’t disagree with the OP more on this one. Even if you’re finding the standard setting easy, there are things you can do. Give yourself less points at the start. Turn on black road. Set zombie spawns through the roof. And remember, this game has no end, you can’t ‘win’ Cataclysm, everyone dies eventually. The challenge is seeing how long you can survive it all. I for one find the balance of difficulty/realism to be quite fine.

Agreed, you can give yourself no points, skyrocket the cities and spawns and you’ve got a more difficult game (or get a mod to do similar stuff). It’s a good point, but that’s not the default and seems a bit of a lame way to increase the difficulty.

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:20, topic:4220”]Well you are thrown i-ll eqquiped,you remaining i-ll eqquiped is another thing entirelly.

Anyway i enjoy the game more like its now over the false difficulty that we used to have.

Do you guys remember how hard was it to find a pan/pot to boil water? an axe? a welder?

It was no very fun IMO[/quote]

I disagree, having to find those things was great - you actually had to go searching around for them which increased the danger/excitement tons in my opinion. Now I can build everything I need out of stuff in my immediate vicinity, and can just find an end house somewhere to get the rest of the stuff I need to last indefinitely and get my skills up to a level where I can just bulldozer everything.

As much as I hate to say it, I really do think CDDA suffers from quality control a bit. There seems to be a lot of ridiculous stuff that goes in with no thought of balance, and I know it’s still very much in beta and so on, but still, I’d prefer a lot, lot less content and a more balanced playable game

[John_Candlebury]

As much as I hate to say it, I really do think CDDA suffers from quality control a bit. There seems to be a lot of ridiculous stuff that goes in with no thought of balance, and I know it’s still very much in beta and so on, but still, I’d prefer a lot, lot less content and a more balanced playable game

I cant but agree with this point, a lot of things that are added ore either to into the side of: it is a worthless thing or this thing is so awesome that there is no point of using anything else. But nerfing the spawns from the more realistic ones we have to something more gamey wont help with that

[Anonymous]

[size=8pt]One thing this game could benefit from is a working stamina system. Where you can’t fight a hundred zombies and still have the energy to carry 400 volume of stuff back to base.[/size]

[Binky]

[quote=“Binky, post:22, topic:4220”]As much as I hate to say it, I really do think CDDA suffers from quality control a bit. There seems to be a lot of ridiculous stuff that goes in with no thought of balance, and I know it’s still very much in beta and so on, but still, I’d prefer a lot, lot less content and a more balanced playable game

I cant but agree with this point, a lot of things that are added ore either to into the side of: it is a worthless thing or this thing is so awesome that there is no point of using anything else. But nerfing the spawns from the more realistic ones we have to something more gamey wont help with that[/quote]

I don’t propose it gets to the point where it was at with the ‘not being able to chop down anything as it was impossible to get an axe’ stage, but possibly DDA needs to break with the old lore and get set a few months later rather than days.
I know this is nigh-blasphemy, but think about it - most of the food would have perished/been looted, decay could have set in a bit more, and it’d make it more of a survival game rather than the sims with a few non-threatening zombies.

[ClaytonRISING]

I think a loot spawning scale option would be a huge plus to this game.

That and controlling the amount of OP weapons that are contributed, like was mentioned.

[KA101]

OK, either a “stuff-spawns” scale comparable to the zed-spawns scale or a Low-Stuff mod would be reasonable ways to make the game tougher for experienced folks and those who want more survival-problems.

More importantly, it lets Cata cater to players who enjoy blasting away with high-powered Stuff, as well as players who enjoy having to scrimp and scrounge. w00t.

[EkarusRyndren]

-snip-

1. But it’s not part of the definition of the game. “The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization and permanent death.” (admittedly, pulled from wikipedia but still.)

2. You could just chill in the shelter until you drop dead from starvation. Or sit in the woods until a bear removes your head. What’s your point?

3. You can survive on the road or in the game. I choose to stay on the roads because I have two choices if I don’t: Turn on Dynamic spawning, which makes it impossible to secure a safe area to live out of. Or, fight wildlife once I’ve cleared out a town. By driving around it brings zombies, artifacts, etc, etc to me.

4. I could go on for days about stuff that needs balanced but again, you’re welcome to offer up your own rebalancing on GitHub, I’m gonna try staying off it till december. XD

5. I’ll grant you that it was a bad movie but my point is people like nice things. Even in bad times. In reality you would not be content to wake up, go scrounge food from a dirty dumpster, come home and have “Cooked Meat” for the billionth time since the cataclysm started in your cold, damp tent on the edge of town. You’d want luxury. You’d want something nice to come home to, even if it’s a bed, a TV, some ice cream. whatever. Not to mention having a refrigerator doesn’t keep food “good” forever even in reality. (Hell currently in game they’re just a box, there is no refrigeration) You’re arguing the removal of a preservation method, you might as well remove sausage while you’re at it.

As far as the first point is concerned. Black Road is more a “hardcore” thing than a balancing method. Less points is again meant to be used by experienced players who want a harder challenge. Turn on skill rust if it isn’t already on and deal with decaying skills. Lastly, you’re arguing over the function of the game again, SURE you could choose not to kill zombies. But zombies spawn in all the areas where non COOKED MEAT spawns. Sure, you could sit in the wilderness and hunt the millions of player-seeking wildlife and eat COOKED MEAT day, after day, after day, after day, and drink boiled rain water, but that’s not fun. Risking going into the cities for supplies is fun. But with NPCs off, no one else is looting anything that spawns in the cities. Hell even with them on they still don’t loot the things you’d expect them to.

I suppose a sort of “patch” would be that after the world spawns in any area that the player hasn’t “been to” yet a certain percentage of things (pulled from a list?) de-spawn over time (to represent other survivors cleaning out the area) but other than that and the Item Spawn Rate adjuster you’re complaining about how easy it is for you personally.

[size=8pt]One thing this game could benefit from is a working stamina system. Where you can’t fight a hundred zombies and still have the energy to carry 400 volume of stuff back to base.[/size]

…We could probably use this, it’d sure as hell make Melee and CQC a less than desirable option…

[ClaytonRISING]

If it were made in to a mod it wouldn’t be productive.

[Rivet]

Roguebasin
Wikipedia

Both define Roguelikes as featuring:

(usually) ASCII display, random generation, turn-based gameplay, and (usually) permadeath.

Roguelikes are not necessarily defined as being difficult because that’s one of those things where your mileage may vary.

There’s a lot of folks on the forums here who routinely complain of not being able to survive past day one. Congratulations on being good at the game, but let’s not crank the difficulty up for everyone across the board just because you think it’s too easy. Besides, if you want it to be harder try playing with different enemy spawn factors; if that’s still ‘no reason to even fight in the first place’ then you might need to ask yourself why you’re playing to begin with.

[ClaytonRISING]

I’m sorry that you guys are getting so butt hurt that some of us would enjoy a survival game and not a Dead Rising sandbox game.

[dwarfkoala]

For one, the refrigerator does not preserve food forever. It reduces food rot to 1/5 from what I heard last, not make it so that you can put meat into it on day one and have no problem eating it in winther.

For two, i’d like a loot spawn scaling factor. I’ll go make an issue for it so the idea gets better visibility.

[John_Candlebury]

And an equally big amount of us would enjoy not making the game artificially hard but rather wait until realistic features up the difficulty.

[EkarusRyndren]

I’m sorry that you guys are getting so butt hurt that some of us would enjoy a survival game and not a Dead Rising sandbox game.

I’m sorry that you are getting so butt hurt that some of us would enjoy the game as is. I think Rivet put it best:

There’s a lot of folks on the forums here who routinely complain of not being able to survive past day one. Congratulations on being good at the game, but let’s not crank the difficulty up for everyone across the board just because you think it’s too easy. Besides, if you want it to be harder try playing with different enemy spawn factors; if that’s still ‘no reason to even fight in the first place’ then you might need to ask yourself why you’re playing to begin with.

[ClaytonRISING]

“artificially hard”

There was an apocalyptic event; you’re not going to be the only person that loots. Even without working NPCs, the world shouldn’t feel like it was preserved for you.

[quote=“Clayton, post:31, topic:4220”]I’m sorry that you guys are getting so butt hurt that some of us would enjoy a survival game and not a Dead Rising sandbox game.

I’m sorry that you are getting so butt hurt that some of us would enjoy the game as is. I think Rivet put it best:

There’s a lot of folks on the forums here who routinely complain of not being able to survive past day one. Congratulations on being good at the game, but let’s not crank the difficulty up for everyone across the board just because you think it’s too easy. Besides, if you want it to be harder try playing with different enemy spawn factors; if that’s still ‘no reason to even fight in the first place’ then you might need to ask yourself why you’re playing to begin with.[/quote]

I’m not getting butt hurt; I’m offering suggestions on how to make the game more of a survival game and less of, well, Day Z.

And fighting only because you “want” doesn’t make since. It’s supposed to be survival game, surviving shouldn’t be an option.

[Anonymous]

[size=8pt]It is my opinion that zombies should not pose the only real challenge/threat to the game.[/size]

[EkarusRyndren]

I’m not getting butt hurt; I’m offering suggestions on how to make the game more of a survival game and less of, well, Day Z.

Last time I checked I didn’t spawn into the new world and get murdered by a passing player.

Unless you count wild animals.

[Nickboom]

Before anything else let me just say this. 5. 5 days you where away from the town. When the cataclysm happened many MANY died with out any reaction time. Then some others died from other things and hardly had any time to loot. If anything I would say turn the loot amount to about 3/4s and thats it. Now I think the problem is that zombies and towns should be early game stuff. We need a lot more late game stuff to go bash our heads against in bad attempts to beat it.

[ClaytonRISING]

[quote=“Clayton, post:35, topic:4220”]I’m not getting butt hurt; I’m offering suggestions on how to make the game more of a survival game and less of, well, Day Z.

Last time I checked I didn’t spawn into the new world and get murdered by a passing player.

Unless you count wild animals.[/quote]

My point was that there is no emphasis on surviving in Day Z, and fighting zombies is an option not a requirement…in a…zombie…survival…game…
Also, keeping foodstuffs is stupendously easy.

[John_Candlebury]

[quote=“Clayton, post:35, topic:4220”]“artificially hard”

There was an apocalyptic event; you’re not going to be the only person that loots. Even without working NPCs, the world shouldn’t feel like it was preserved for you.[/quote]

Sure we can say that but the things the Npcs “looted” cant just dissapear, you should be able to find those stashes, and preferably fight with NPCs for them, but this is not possible as of now and just removing stuff because it was “looted” without adding the stashes nor the angry NPCs is making the game artificially difficult.