Unfurn Changes To The Game

Game Talk The Bunker
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There was a thread like this a ways back and sadly, it seems like the same stuff is happening again.

What is with the changes to the game that add suck and tedium that aren’t fun?

Things like first aid kits and bandages doing nothing? (could be a bug, I see it was a bug recently that was supposedly fixed).

Things like plague nymphs and the need to burn everything on top of smash/butcher everything.

And there seems to be more in the works.

According to reddit this is more torture added in the name of realism and like the first thread discussed, zombies, planar beings, learning how to fabricate vehicles from scratch in a few days of reading, and almost everything IN the game is not realistic. It’s a game. GAME.

How about instead of random people making changes to the game that make it miserable, they make mods for this instead so this kind of stuff can be optional?

A lot of people love this game but there seems to be a minority of develops that want the game to be some kind of sadomasochistic bundle of suck that’s no longer fun.

These kinds of comments “Wow. It’s like every single update to this game kills my love for it even more” are the exact same thing that came up last round of this kind of stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/9014zo/dang_they_nerfed_my_favorite_start/

(As a side note I happened to have the same issue, where first aid kit no longer cleared infection with bad day start and I was ok with that if it slightly sucks - day just got worse.)

It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way because for a while some common sense reigned but apparently that’s going out the window again.

Maybe y’all should do a poll that asks, who wants max (selective) realism (selective since the vast majority of the game has zero to do with reality) that adds tedium and who wants a game that’s enjoyable to experience (with enough hints of realism and no lack of challenge to make it a game people love and return to for years).

Sigh.

As always - there’s tons and tons of changes and additions to the game that are good. And hey, map gen finally got fixed and I can finally post again, not that that’s necessarily a good thing.

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How about instead of random people making changes to the game that make it miserable

I think any game change must be approved by Kevin (or any other senior dev?). So no changes are random no matter who made it.

Also this fun/unfun thing is very dubious cause different persons may have different opinions about this subject.

I did not play this game for a couple of months, can you please explain these things to me:

Things like first aid kits and bandages doing nothing?

…cause yesterday i (in the newest experimental) successfully treated my bite wound with a first aid kit (or was it a disinfectant?)

pague nymphs

And what is it?

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Personally, I thought the plague nymphs were kind of neat. I haven’t actually played with them yet but if they’re not too overwhelming I think they’re fun.

There was a recent change to make medical equipment heal over time instead of instantly, so you should have a status effect of “bandaged” or “disinfected” which will slowly heal you. If not, sounds like someone made a whoops.

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The changes to first aid are some of my favorite to date. I don’t look at it as tedium, it personally fits with my ideal sort of game. I look at Fallout New Vegas and think that they had the right idea. First aid and other benefits should be applied over time. You don’t eat a bunch of aspirin and think ‘I should have 0 pain within 5 seconds’. It’s a gradual effect. That style painkiller is something that’s been in the game for a long time and no one was crying about that.

I also view this as a way to layer in new items, creating an actual progression to first-aid and healing. Before it was more or less instant heals if you had the items and you could get nanobots as the end all be of all self-repair.

Now I see an opportunity to slip in additional healing items that bridge the gap between ‘takes many hours to repair’ and ‘repairs instantly’. Expanding items is a way to grow the depth of the game, keeping it interesting for people who’ve already seen just about every item.

Anyway, reading your comment mostly just hurt my brain because it was mostly negative without being constructive. You basically insulted a bunch of us players as well as the people who made this game you get to play for free. Throwing in a ‘hey there’s good stuff, too’ on the end doesn’t change that you just crapped in the forum.

It rubbed me wrong.

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Can you explain please what is the plague nymphs (i never saw them yet)?

Btw, first aid change sounds really good. Never liked this instant HP bonus from the first aids.

UPD: Ok, i gathered that they’ll appear when something is spoiled. So let it be a spoiler for me.

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Honestly, I’ve seen more baby animals than I’ve seen plague nymphs. Going around and butchering all the zombies at home base - which is really the only place I’m consistently at long enough that I care whether or not plague nymphs spawn there - is no big deal, and if I’d been half-smart I’d have been dehydrating all that tainted meat instead of burning it, because now I need it all for mutagen crafting.

But seriously, in 65+ days of play, I’ve seen a lot of fawns and baby birds, and almost no plague nymphs, out in the wild. It’s really just not an issue.

The only recent changes that have been more than mildly annoying were the autodoc requirement (because you don’t find nearly enough anethesia kits) and the vehicle descriptions crash, and I fixed that within hours of it being reported so most people are hopefully unaware of it.

Most of the other recent changes have been great. The new labs, for instance, are totally wonderful. Exploring a lab is no longer a tedious exercise in getting lost and hacking turrets - it’s a challenge, because there can be a hulk or zombie grenadier lurking just about anywhere.

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In my opinion all changes to Cata are great and very beneficial. Cataclysm is a post-apocalypse SIMULATOR. Simulators usually are not fun-oriented just like Ił-2 Sturmovik, Silent Hunter, ArmA, Combat Mission, Operation Flashpoint. Silent Hunter focuses on “boring” patrols which are based on real convoys routes from World War II. Sure, it would be FUN to base those patrols on fake convoys routes due to the fact that Silent Hunter would be more arcade, less demanding but on the other hand it would change Silent Hunter into submarine shooter… So if someone wants to play a casual submarine game he should play Silent Hunter 5 which is unrealistic as (but fun).
In my opinion Cata should be as much realistic as possible. There are games like The Long Dark, DayZ, Wasteland, Fallout, The Forest, Don’t Starve, Miscreated, Rust etc for those who want a fun game. The only thing in Cata that I do not like is the setting. Now Cataclysm is soooo complex that it may need different setting. I wish Cata could be based on a rather big military confilct between humans and zombies / monsters in which we participate as refugees, scavengers, soldiers etc. Worlds in which civilization is not wiped out would feel much more RPG-like. Features like traders, outposts, infantry patrols, military bases would be great and very “fresh”. I know that developers stick to their plan but after another two or three years of Cata’s development, the need for setting change may be present

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I’m not sure if I’d really call C:DDA a simulator, all things considered. It’s nothing like IL-2 or Arma. There’s a lot of realism, but realism is never added if it doesn’t contribute to the game in some way. At the end of the day it has to be fun or people won’t play it.

I completely disagree that C:DDA needs a new setting. Having more factions and survivors around would be nice and seems to be on the to-do list, but I don’t think the main setting itself is ever going to be changed. I’m really not sure what your proposed setting would add other than making it some weird combination of This War of Mine and Arma.

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UnReal World was released in 1992 and it is still under development. After four years of development developers have changed their plans. “High-fantasy monsters were replaced by animals, item assortment was biased towards everyday tools, villages grew smaller and less medieval - and finally, cultures were replaced with the first four cultures of Unreal World”- it is the information from official UnReal World site. Since 1994 it is an open world game. In 2016 quests system was ready to be released. I remember this change- it was astonishing for many players. Sure, UnReal World could be developed to this day as the most complex dungeon crawler. But why? Why should developers stick to the setting which puts various limits on them? I did not say that Cata will need a new setting. I said that Cata MAY need a new setting in the future after addition of tons of new features. It is only my dream

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Would it be possible to set-up a ChangeLog that would be really visible ? Because the changelog in the launcher is pretty good but the launcher is not a mandatory part of the game.

What I mean is that if you don’t keep up regularly whith the devloppement, you suddenly find out that first aid kit is not an insta heal anymore, that you broken cbm can t be removed and that monsters spawn from rotting stuff and you don’t know why. It can be frustrating

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Here’s the direct changelog from Jenkins:
http://gorgon.narc.ro:8080/job/Cataclysm-Matrix/changes

No idea why the link isn’t put up in more places. it really should be.

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Unfortunately, 80+% of the changelog entries are obscure or meaningless. Even if you read the changelog, you can’t find the change that nerfed first aid kits. Or at least I can’t.

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“#7570 (16-Jul-2018 06:42:46)
Replace instant healing with slow healing effects. (#23757) (commit: b622362) — kevin.granade / githubweb”

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Yea, you kinda had to be following the game for awhile to know about the first aid shenanigans. Kevin wanted to change it from insta-healing to healing over time for A WHILE. then vasyan? changed it to such. Personally I don’t mind. An easy way to find out about changes would be to type in something releveant in the “search or jump to” field in the top left of the cdda github repo.

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you can see code changes, PRs involving what you searched, and issues

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here is the original PR

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Yeah, reading through the change log, nothing about “Replace instant healing with slow healing effects” necessarily means a change to first aid kits, much less removing the ability of first aid kits to remove infections.

Which is more or less my point about the changelog entries being vague.

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Well I took “healing” to mean all healing items, which would include first aid kits. And first aid kits curing infections was kind of silly since I’ve never seen a first aid kit with antibiotics in it.

I agree that particular change was vague in that it didn’t actually mention infections, but they’re usually pretty good.

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You might be referencing that they no longer un-infect bites, which was mistakenly merged, but we’re looking into addressing that now. In short, that’s a bug.

Why do you care what reddit thinks? It’s not exactly a reliable source of information.

Because that makes it worse, not better. That way leads to hard to find bugs triggered by obscure combinations of options, and game balance never settling down because it’s different for everyone.

Too bad :shrug:
Again, maybe you shouldn’t take hyperbolic reddit comments so seriously.
Even you state that the specific problem isn’t an issue for you, so what’s the problem?

Then what? Kick everyone I disagree with off the forums? Develop a game I don’t myself like because a bunch of random people on the internet said so? Feedback from players is critical, but if you want to change something about the way the game works, you need to convince people that your way is best for the game, and meming “fun over realism” over and over again isn’t doing that.

You might want to stop and think about why these changes are being made while assuming good faith on the part of people making the changes, because the more you repeat that, “people are breaking the game on purpose because they hate fun”, the more you’re demonstrating that you have no idea what people’s actual motives are, and alienating the very people you need to convince if you want to change anything.

new setting

BrightNights was an attempt to do this, as was DinoCataclysm in the distant past. The problem is, it needs it’s own maintainer, and those are in really short supply.

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Honestly, the only new change I personally dislike is the huge inventory clutter brought by preserved items having a spoiling time (and six in-game years is a REALLY long time for this to have any practical meaning).
People have been saying this game is becoming unfun since forever, and it seems the only way to not spoil Cata for some is to only add new weapons, armor and locations.

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The improved attack range for ranged weapons, new construction descriptions, new vehicle part descriptions, faction camp, and the various minor QoL changes all seem to have gotten very positive reception. Unambiguous improvements are liked. It’s the ambiguous improvements that get huge feedback, usually unwarranted for the actual gameplay effect.

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