Did the gameplay become more tedious lately?

Game Talk The Bunker
101

[quote=“bahihs, post:99, topic:11418”]I think those of you who are complaining about the diversity of loot are all looking at this from the wrong perspective. Diverse loot is not the problem so much as abundant loot. (The latter is quite easily fixed too, just turn down the item spawn!)

The idea is, you shouldn’t be seeing all 75 pistols in one particular run. You shouldn’t be seeing 75 iterations of anything in one particular run, loot should be rare enough that the joy of discovery lies, not in finding the nth iteration of a pistol, but finding a pistol period. Turn down the item spawn and feel the utter elation of finding a second pistol that you can keep loaded.

Also keep in mind that it is a roleplaying game. Min maxing is all well and good if you are “gaming” but if you’re roleplaying, the different food matters, the different clothes matters, the different pistols matter.

One thing that would definitely help is to give each character a set of randomly generated preferences (for clothing, food, etc.) which, if fulfilled, gives a bonus to the happiness (or gives a penalty depending on the type of preference). This would not be terribly hard to code (since I imagine most of the existing random generation functions could carry over toward this task) and (if happiness is still as important as it used to be) would suddenly make all the seemingly extraneous details important and interesting. If fact this is already somewhat implemented with stuff like junk-food intolerance and stylish etc. but it could go much further.

So sure, you can be the power-armor-wearing, rivtech-weapon-toting, granola-eating, master-of-all, juggernaut, but sometimes its more interesting to be the guy who likes wearing t-shirts and jeans and risks tooth and nail for pancakes.[/quote]

This. VERY much this. ALOT of people hardcore roleplay CDDA, which is awesome because its such a great game for it. The guns play into this ALOT. There are something like 75 pistols, but most of them are IRL guns too that have history and background even if they are not all that special in game. This means it is more important to some play throughs than its stats. This goes especially for gun owners, and people with favorite guns from “that one video game that one time”

You will notice that the rivetech guns tend to be very much the opposite (for the most part) being just generalized sci-fi blasters because most of them don’t have any special relevance or meaning to anyone, unless they are based on something, and even then there is not 75 different iterations of said sci-fi gun because non of those extra versions would hold any meaning to anyone.

As bahihs said, if you are seeing too many of the same guns, you are probably good enough that it is time to turn the hordes up/on, density up, evolution up some, and/or the item spawn rate down.
(thats another thing I like about CDDA) It isn’t based on a resource deprived post apocalyptic world, but a resource rich one, but with giant moving hordes that might chase you away form your beautiful stash you just got going real well again. But you can play it as a resource survival too if you change the settings for it.

102

turning the item spawn rate down does a lot for the game.

all the stores you count on for items become less reliable, for one.
i cried inside the first time I broke into an empty gun store. :cry:

Books become resources to treasure, ammo something to scrounge, and tools a luxery found on random zombies or crafted.
more than once ive had to craft a knife or axe or even in one case a welder.

As the items go down, your reliance on zombies goes up. or you learn to do without.
I had a game recently where i was excited to craft a revolver shotgun becausr i was using a homemade survivor gun before that.

Tedium in this game is by and large avoidable, though. tedium tends to start whrn eople try to stretch their resources out and dotoo much with basic tools. but then again i build my own RVs and organize my loot so . . .

103

I really like this game and think the devs overall do a great job but I think there’s a trend lately to add suck, or at least iffiness, instead of goodness. Like why all the extra dialogs now? Complexity in content and mechanics is fine, but there’s no need for key spam due to excessive dialogs popping up for everything. It used to be every time I started a new run I’d encounter new stuff and be like, wow, this is cool. Lately it’s more, wtf/why is this?

Ex, if you just want to switch a weapon, or swap crowbar for weapon to smash something, it used to be so easy - you’d just wield your other weapon. Now you have to deal with a dialog every time - do you want to store or drop. Why? It seems like the old default worked great - just store the damn thing and there’s already several ways to drop things. What used to be a seamless action is now multiple steps. What was gained from this that is so much better? The basic action of swapping a weapon is a simple thing, even with the extra step, but if you switch dozens/hundreds/thousands of time in a given run thru the game, that extra dialog every time is a lot of seeing a dialog - vs…what? What’s the benefit?

Now there’s something odd going on with pudding? Does one of the devs not like pudding and want to make it so annoying to deal with that nobody eats it anymore? Do we really need a special dialog for pudding?

The ability to reload batteries/thread/whatever from nearby storage - that’s a great addition (even if you have to go thru a dialog if you have stuff on you and nearby). Clips, worn arrows and a popup about arrow selection with every shot, extra dialogs that seem to add nothing but extra keypresses…not my idea of good additions.

Sigh.

Tedium in this game is by and large avoidable

Depends how you define tedium as it applies to the game. I don’t consider building up my character, their gear, or going thru the content of the game tedious at all even after many play thrus. Stuff like clips (unncessary vs the typical abstraction in the game - eg melee), worn arrows and picking which to fire every shot, and all these extra dialogs that do nothing but slow down what used to flow so well - that I consider tedious.

The other point this author makes is options, which I think are a great thing and something generally awesome about this game. He can reduce items spawn and enjoy that. Others may not do it. but when some devs just spontaneously decides to impose their will on the game on make people play their way, that doesn’t leave much choice.

104

Swapping weapons takes time now. The dialog makes it so that you don’t waste 3 turns stashing the rifle when you want to pull out a knife.

It’s not the pudding, it’s a bug with the container. The default container isn’t sealable, meaning it’s a bucket now.
Could be hacked around, but the correct solution would be to tell apart sealed and unsealed containers, which would also help with cans (currently cans are essentially always sealed, even if you eat half of the contents).

105

Swapping weapons takes time now. The dialog makes it so that you don’t waste 3 turns stashing the rifle when you want to pull out a knife.[/quote]
Pulling up a dialog seems unnecessary–just have the player learn through experience to ‘d’ or 'D’rop the weapon and 'w’ield the other one instead of 'w’ielding a weapon while they’re already holding one.

106

I like the changes, the detail of the simulation is what makes this game good.
And yes, the game is harder now, as it should be. It takes longer to get to endgame now.