Simulation, Gameplay, Narrative

[Vorpal]

So yeah. I personally think there needs to be a refocus on survival. It’s not a distraction from the fun stuff, it’s one of the defining characteristics of the game! The need for food, clean water, shelter and not-getting-killed-at-night are the driving mechanics of the game, and the other stuff slots in around that, but shouldn’t supersede it.

I think the simulation aspect is higher than almost all other games out there - there are multiple different types of ammo, the cars have separate engine sizes, etc - but I get what you mean with survival. A water purifier and a bee hive will keep you full of food, and once you have shelter there’s no more drive to survive.

Once rotten meat can’t be cooked, it’ll be harder to create enough food to last the winter, but I don’t think that’ll add much difficulty. By the time you’re stocking up a pantry, food isn’t really a problem. Stocking up is just to save time from hunting, which is fairly easy. One water purifier and 100 batteries goes a long way for water. Looted MREs and canned goods can easily get me to that point. Finding the water purifier is just luck really.

Roaming mobs could make shelter less reliable, especially if they could smash walls, etc. Would be a hard balance to get between too often, too powerful, etc. Currently a moat seems a bit too effective.

Fighting for survival is fun, but it becomes tedious in the end game. The end game of super soldiering yourself and making a death truck is also a fair bit of the appeal to me, and having to go hunting twice a day would just be annoying. What survival elements do you think would bring the most fun in?

Personally, I’d like to somehow see more weather effects beyond having to stay inside or downstairs. If cold became more of a problem ala Unreal World it’d be quite interesting, but I can see it becoming just another random weather occurrence that stops you going outside.

[Rivet]

Making winter a time where you’d have to worry about keeping warm on your trips to scavenge and ensuring you have sufficient stocks to outlast the cold season would add an entirely new and awesome recurring stage of survival.

Perhaps you’d freeze to death in a fire-gutted ruin, unprepared for the freeze.

Or perhaps you’d flourish while the bluster brought out fattened wildlife with thick winter coats. Remember those nasty noob-eating bears and bees and plant monsters are probably hibernating and most of the zombies are probably frozen solid until the thaw comes.

As it stands we got scads of nice warm clothes and the skeleton of a temperature and warmth system already in place. I’d love to see our brief winter mean something to us more than what the weather indicator spits out it would add so much immediate depth.

Fighting for survival and skinning wolves for their pelts suddenly takes on a new timbre when it means the difference between living and dying of frostbite.

(edited for formatting)

[Vorpal]

Weather effects would be a great way to add to the feel of a hostile world.

Making them worse in winter would be a good way of making the long term game harder, and giving the player a reason to stock up.

Cold would be a great way to add in problems from weather that aren’t just death from above like lightning/acid is. It could also make being wet very bad.

Personally, I’d like to see the “getting wet” thing a bit more avoidable than just with a raincoat, a hoodie or leather jacket should help a lot.

OTOH I live in Australia so know basically nothing about cold and wet.

[Rivet]

I second that notion as well. Unless it would require some sort of massive overhaul it would be nice if the ‘wet’ status took into account what you were wearing above and beyond a raincoat - a jacket and a hat can count for a lot in the rain.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

For the record, my main priority for Cataclysm is making it a survival game, not a survival simulation. If gameplay and simulation come to odds with each other, gameplay is going to win out every time.

That being said, there’s definitely room to increase the challenge of survival, I’m slowly trying to work my way away from the current system of having infinite resources, but before I do that there needs to be a way to replenish them, y’know? Before I make liquor stores spawn with 3 bottles of tequila and nothing else, I need to give the player the option of growing some grain and making their own alcohol.

Another problem is the time of the setting, Cataclysm takes place the day after the apocalypse, there’s no logical reason for all the food to be rotten and all the water to be dried up a-la Fallout, especially considering the format of the apocalypse ingame. If I was going to do anything more hardcore for survival, I’d strongly consider a bit of a genre shift, make the game take place a few hundred years after the apocalypse, or make the military have tried to contain the infection with carpet bombing and nuclear armaments. Something that would let me really tear up the world and give it a reason for supplies to be rare.

I second that notion as well. Unless it would require some sort of massive overhaul it would be nice if the ‘wet’ status took into account what you were wearing above and beyond a raincoat - a jacket and a hat can count for a lot in the rain.

I changed rain a while ago, I think anything with a warmth above 3 or so now protects you from rain, so a leather jacket will negate the penalty altogether, or should do.

[Shades]

Before I make liquor stores spawn with 3 bottles of tequila and nothing else, I need to give the player the option of growing some grain and making their own alcohol.

Although I tend to only work on code in rare bursts, farming is one of the things on my npc improvement todo list so should turn up soonish in a form you can pull.

Cataclysm takes place the day after the apocalypse, there’s no logical reason for all the food to be rotten

Without cooling, or another form of preservation, food goes bad fairly fast. And that is before we add acid rain into the mix.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

That’s for things that aren’t tinned or sealed. Most of the food in my pantry downstairs for example will be edible for the next 40 years or so if left undamaged.

[Shades]

That’s for things that aren’t tinned or sealed. Most of the food in my pantry downstairs for example will be edible for the next 40 years or so if left undamaged.

True, and the average supermarket has a enough stuff in it to last a few dozen survivors for a long time. Then again have you ever tried growing crops, your gonna need a while of food before you can start producing your own.

Anyway this is one of those gameplay > realism things no? scarcity makes a challenge, and challenge is fun.

Although I’d have said hunting needs to be made harder, it’s easy even at low skill levels to get all the meat you need hunting and butchering.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

Yeah, so food is going to be artificially scarce, and this will be a wondrous scientific future where crops grow to harvestable quantities in a week. And for hunting, I’ve been mulling over a few things to increase challenge.

[GlyphGryph]

Why don’t we just say the zombies ate all the food with their insatiable appetites? And the rats helped!

And this explains why its so much easier to find drugs than food - the undead have no interest in drugs. So a supermarket would be almost bare, but a liquor would still be fully stocked and it would make sense! (I see no reason that every resource needs to be equally scarce, and I’d love to make alcoholism an easy way out that ends up biting you in the ass later)

Also, the Evacuation, which is a concept me and kevingranade have discussed, certainly contributed (expect mentions of that in game soonish).

[kevin.granade]

Giant cockroaches with mandibles that double as can openers, in fact the only thing keeping the cans of food safe from the cockroaches is the zombie infestation!

Food-stealing cockroaches are continuing to climb my list of priorities, thanks for the idea gtaguy.

[GlyphGryph]

I think I’m gonna start a suggestion thread for this.

And… done.
http://www.cataclysm.glyphgryph.com/smf/index.php?topic=127.0

[jimy]

Why do we need farming actually?
We already have unlimited food (hunting) and water (rivers etc.).

IMHO it’s just a waste of ressources but I’m just one person and don’t speak for the majority.

[GlyphGryph]

I agree mechanically - I think farming just-for-being farming is pretty much a waste of effort.

However, I was sold on the idea by the possibilities of farming-gone-wrong. The wonderous wonderous possiblities.

[kevin.granade]

Farming IMO falls pretty far on the simulationist side of the game. You ask yourself, “what would I do in this situation”, and for some people one of the things at the top of the list is secure food supply -> farming. So it’s something that some people find jarring due to its absence.

You can say the same thing about building a shelter for yourself in the current incarnation of the game, all you need to do is find an abandoned house in the woods and you’re pretty much set for shelter, but some people really want to go build a house/fortress for themselves…

Arguably a fortress vehicle is a different kind of thing, the existing vehicles are pretty much not satisfactory.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

Yeah, right now there’s not much reason to settle down in an area and defend it, the main style of gameplay is build deathmobile -> Laugh all the way home. Having farming, something which forces players to sit down and stay in one place for a length of time incentivises it for people who might not want to otherwise, and gives something to do to people who already settle an area (such as me)

[Binky]

[quote=“Benedict, post:6, topic:118”]I dunno… I feel like the simulation aspect of the game is actually pretty low.

I mean how often does a player actually struggle to meet day-to-day necessities? …[/quote]

Benedict, that post is my favourite thing on the internet as of now. The most vitrolic hatred towards expansions has never before been quite so well expressed.

In terms of ‘survival vs. gameplay’ I REALLY would like it to be much much more survival than the crazy, wacky, insane stuff. In my opinion survival IS gameplay, and it’s what raises cataclysm far above any other zombie game. The idea that ‘survival isn’t fun’ is only the case if some repetitive (and easy) action has to be completed to meet the bare necessities.

[system]

I want farming so I can eat something other than squirrels. And to brew moonshine… For fire-involved purposes.

[Benedict]

In my opinion survival IS gameplay, and it’s what raises cataclysm far above any other zombie game.

Word.

It’s why everyone’s dream zombie apocalypse scenario isn’t about facing the raging hordes, it’s about comfortably kicking back and living through it all whilst popping a cap in the odd passing Z when you head out for more crack and biscuits.

[blue_jay]

Just wanted to add my two cents. What cataclysm does, which most mainstream games do not, is create narratives instead of simply retelling one. When describing it to friends, I don’t call it a game. It is a zombie survival simulator. I think that the realism of the game, and of any game, is what allows the player to create a story within the fictional but still predictable framework of the game engine. Because games like cataclysm, fallout, dwarf fortress and morrowind aren’t just one game. Each character is a new game, a new story about people taking different paths, and ending up in different places. Not one of X predefined paths which were laid out by developers, but one of a nearly infinite number of paths, limited only by the imagination of the player, and the games ability to create a world which responds realistically when the player exerts his will on it through his character. Realism is the relationship between the players expectations and the game’s reactions. Because I expect houses to burn down when I throw an unlit molotov and then a lit one. I expect zombies to go blind when I spray them in the face with spraypaint. I expect a city of this size to have some form of agriculture. Nearby. I expect a lot, as a player… I’ll end this by saying thank you, thank you for creating one of the greatest story factories I have seen.