I remember when I first heard about cataclysm, the mood system was spun to sound more like “you need to find ways to keep yourself from breaking and going insane” than “take drugs to gain XP”.
I think the game could be a lot more interesting if there was a real need to keep up your mental health. The loneliness would definitely be something that would take a toll on a survivor. You might have to have occasional interaction with NPCs. To hold you over you could talk to yourself. And if you still don’t find anybody you could draw a face on a beachball and talk to it…
If your character gets too lonely and depressed they could start suffering minor hallucinations, suffer insomnia, or even temporarily lose control and they’d wander for a minute outside in a fugue.
Not entirely within context, but a “Mental Health” stat could be nice. It could act much like the the hidden health stat does now, with the risk of gaining penalties and diseases if it’s too low, and it could even adversely effect physical health if it get’s out of hand (body is a plaything of the mind, and all that). The obvious way to have this stat incremented/decremented is through morale.
Anyway, more directly to the OP, not everyone would care too greatly about lacking any contact with others, and at the same time there are others which crave attention to unhealthy degrees. So at the least, we should have a traits which reflect those things as such. Can’t really comment on how serious prolonged isolation could be, and thus how it should be reflected in game, so I’ll leave it at that.
Morale boosts/penalties based on how well you get along with NPCs should probably be a thing once NPCs are better implemented. I think a morale boost from playing with a tame dog would be nice, too.
I second this, something like a “Loner”/“Introvert” and “Extrovert” trait. (Need better word for this)
A loner won’t feel loneliness as all while an extrovert will grow restless as he goes on without meeting others, suffer a morale drop, however if he do meet someone his morale will receive a big boost.
So to sum it up:
Loners don’t suffer from loneliness and have a so-so morale (regrading the lack of social interactions).
Extroverts suffer from loneliness but will receive morale boost if manage to find companion(s).
