Should "irradiated" status really be visible without any special equipment?

[Tamior]

Right now personal dosimeters are effectively moot because any character can just look at the status screen and get a pretty good idea of how irradiated he or she is.
Moreover, you can instantly detect that a given area is contaminated when you get the irradiated status.

The question is: exactly why is “irradiated” status not hidden from players without appropriate equipment?

[Hof1993]

Bleeding gums nausea and hair falling out are always good indicators.

[Tamior]

Except that’s really not how the game works. You get notified via status screen right away, days before your first hair would have actually fallen out. And it’s not just symptoms, it straight up a status with a number.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

Yeah, sure, but, you know, how does the character know they’re infected? How does my guy know the exact weight and volume of every object he encounters? o_o I think some things merit the suspension of disbelief because it’s a game.

[Tamior]

It literally tells you in the description how the infected wound looks at each stage and it’s pretty obvious. How the character can tell a “deep bite” from a normal bite is a good question, but this has more to do with the fact there currently isn’t ANY in-game equipment to help you analyze your wounds. With radiation there are all kinds of dosimeters, badges and detectors.
As for weight and volume, any person can tell relative weight and size of an item, and relative values would have worked about the same.

P. S. I do support making status of bite wounds hidden from survivor BEFORE they actually become fully infected, by the way.

[Junknown]

I’m pretty sure radiation used to be hidden from the player like you describe back in the stable 0.C. I don’t exactly know why it got changed to the way it is now, which seems not only unrealistic but somewhat unnecessary too considering how hard it is to accidentally get irradiated in the core game

[Litppunk]

hmm some things would be too infuriating for new players who are still jetting a handle on controls and such. A, oh by the way you were basically dead 3 days ago, thanks for continuing till now and wasting all that time. Might be a bit too infuriating.
I imagine that is why, although Fuzzying up the info a BIT more might be nice by the sound of it.

[Tamior]

Fungaloids still exist last time I checked. As do flaming eyes.
And both of these are an order of magnitude more of a “you were basically dead 3 days ago” BS than invisible radiation would have been.

[Fris0uman]

A solution could be :
Replace info about Illness with clear display of symptoms, maybe even a few messages in the log, add a Examine Self action that allow you to see the different illness if you have enought and the required equipement.

This way if you’re new you should still get enought info from the log and @ Screen to tell you’re sick from something and try to correct it, and healing would be more involved.
But veteran player might still be able to tell what’s going own just from the symptoms and then everything else becomes useless tedium…

[Tamior]

Right now low doses of radiation effectively just lower player’s health. And health is a semi-hidden parameter by design: you only get a general idea of your overall health level when you wake up.
As such, low to medium doses of radiation SHOULD be asymptomatic. I. e. you can examine yourself all of want, there would literally be nothing obvious to find.
Other conditions may or may not need some tweaks of their own, but I see no reason why radiation sickness can’t just go with the actual symptoms that are already implemented in the game without having an extra “irradiated” status (that the character can inexplicably detect).

I would be ok if how early a character can detect symptoms would be a function of perception (it’s an almost useless stat that desperately needs a buff), but you still need to have actual SYMPTOMS before any can be detected. Right now the character can literally detect the irradiation itself, loooong before any symptoms have developed.

[ecchi_squid]

Well weight and volume are perceptions. Mainly used in how much you carry. It’s not like it has any other useful applications. But anyone can see how much space something occupies or how heavy something is. Plus it’s the best method for organizing inventory.

[mr_sep]

There are ways to either hide it, or provide a covert status like “sick” - “You feel sick. You spit blood coming from your gums. Your hair come out. You feel nauseous. You suspect something is seriously wrong with you.” Those can be provided in stages of severity. You can set multiple stages if you want. It’s JSONized for simplicity. Not sure if possible, but I believe it’d be even possible to switch the status to more precise if you are trained in first aid.

[psyxypher]

P. S. I do support making status of bite wounds hidden from survivor BEFORE they actually become fully infected, by the way.

Considering infections are fatal unless treated, I think this a terrible idea.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

My initial point, though poorly expressed was ‘I think some information is necessary to enjoy the game, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense’.

Specifically, I used infection as an example. Would a real-life person know that, failing to cauterize a wound twice, they are instantly infected? No, but the player needs that information and so it gets relayed.

I also mentioned weight and volume. Yes, can you approximate those things in real life? Sure. Do you? No. And don’t pretend that you do. Go to your bedside table and say ‘this occupies 2.5 liters of space’. o_o

But that information is necessary for gameplay reasons. This line of thinking extends to things like knowing item durability or limb health. Would you have a vague idea? Sure, but we need to quantify that in some way for the ease of the player. This applies to radiation, as well, in my opinion.

Radiation is ‘more hidden’ than a lot of information in the game, and I think it needs to be relayed to the player in some capacity, at some point. Yeah, it would be more immersive to always require a radiation badge or whatever to get that information, but this will also lead to ‘feelsbad’ moments for players that don’t understand what is happening. I think it’s easy for some of us to forget that we know more about the game than the average joe. For a new player, dying or becoming sick due to radiation without being aware of it at all would be immensely frustrating.

TLDR: It needs to be a balance between relaying pertinent information and immersion. You can’t have all of one and none of the other. Just my opinion.

[darktoes]

One thing to keep in mind is that there’s only a handful of actual “symptoms” in the game, and just having your character randomly throw up tells you exactly nothing about what’s actually going on. It can mean radiation, a fungal infection, poison, all kinds of things. The player needs to be aware, to some degree, of what’s wrong with their character so that they don’t spend days tracking down every type of medicine and taking it just to find out they were dead from the start.

IF irradiation is changed to not show up in the status by default, I’d say it should show up based on the players first aid skill. At decent levels the character can tell what’s actually going on with themselves, and then the player can use that to treat the problem. It doesn’t need to give a detailed readout, just say things like “probably radiation sickness” and “probably parasites”.

[Tamior]

Considering infections are fatal unless treated, I think this a terrible idea.

How exactly can a character (with no medical training) immediately tell when cauterising a wound has purged all infection, and when it hasn’t?
I’m ok with giving player some information about the status of his/her wounds, but it should at the very least be delayed (i.e. it takes several hours to assess the effectiveness of treatment) and/or be based on first aid skill.
Also, don’t get me started on “bite infection being potentially lethal”. Fungul infection IS 100% lethal and, unlike deep bites, you can get one just by walking pass a tree in the forest that was concealing a fungaloid. Yet fungal infection is still a thing.

[Tamior]

My argument is that the current “irradiated” status is very OPPOSITE of radiation being hidden at all. It’s the most overt thing ever.
I agree that the player should be given SOME notifications when severe enough radiation poisoning is in effect, but those should either be symptoms-based, or at the very least required high perception to notice right away.
That, or use specialized radiation detection equipment. That is actually pretty plentiful.

[Tamior]

Information based on skills (and stats, and traits) would be preferable.

But at the very least “irradiated” status shouldn’t be displayed immediately, but rather only after some effects became apparent.

[kevin.granade]

Yea this is a bug, this was always intended to be a hidden attribute.
I think it used to be an explicit “radiation dose” variable in the player class and it got refactored to be an “effect”, which made it visible.

[darktoes]

I remember before it was made visible, and there was regular threads on the various channels about “my character keeps puking and hurting wtf is wrong?” and most of the time they were just spectacularly irradiated but had no idea, and no idea where they got it from.

I’m not wholly against making radiation level invisible to the player, but I do think there should be some way for the player to know when they’re suffering from radiation sickness.