What is the 1 thing you dislike most in The Long Dark?

[Maikleeps]

Overabundance of loot in stalker.

+1

[Jolan]

I can't heat water. I can boil it, I can melt it, I can make tea... but I can't just heat it.

[Dave3Dguy]

You are in a frozen sub-zero environment, yet it is apparently impossible to freeze meat????? Come ON guys.

[Salty Crackers]

Non-respawning plants like OMB.

[Schamoo]

Wolf behaviour ruins the game

[cekivi]

Well, I have a number of things I dislike equally

• A wolf can still attack you after being hit by a .303 round (it would be very, very dead)
  
• Clothing wearing out way too fast
  
• No purpose for cured leather (why can't I use it to repair my animal hide clothing?!?)
  
• Whetstones wearing down to nothing way too quickly
  
• Matches degrading way too fast
  
• Not being able to freeze meat.

Although if I had to pick just one thing to dislike the most it would definitely be the need to "headshot" animals for an instant kill (no sane hunter does this).

[Hatchet]

Not being able to sneak!

You can sneak but i hardly can, you know why? Because it's giving me instant motion sickness :'(

Food poisoning so random i don't even dare to bite my own fingerskin anylonger.

Getting food poisoned from a 67% fish i found in a fridge and cooked then getting food poisoned the day after that from a 88% wolf meat i just cooked at the first time i decided to sleep for longer than 8 hours (10) i woke up with 17% health.

Running a marathon every night.

Getting very thirsty when sleeping, i think everytime you sleep you don't really sleep you go outside and run a marathon, that's why you're so thirsty all the times, not to mention the hunger.

[ianicus]

not being able to look in certain directions without the screen going black in buildings is pretty game breaking, thats what I dont like...oh and not being able to play a game I paid for.

[The_Angry_Vet]

Lack of common sense.

[turkeytim4]

Running out of things to do.

--(Playing stalker level, on day 360 or so) The first 150 days or so were pretty intense. Searching, gathering, making, etc. But now it's just surviving. I've got 45 bullets, a dozen arrows, and plenty of everything else. I'm guessing I could stretch it out to a thousand days probably? But even with how much I love the game, just surviving is a bit tedious at this point.

[Burning Bridges]

There is not much I dislike to be honest. Some of the newer features like wood harvesting are absolutely fantastic.

What this game lacks is a tool to make maps. With so many hours of gameplay it's not hard to visit every square meter and once you have seen all there simply is no magic anymore.

In the future I would also want more options to customize houses. Carry an oven to a house without one, close the roof in the mountaineers cabin, place extra containers and so on. With so many great ideas at your hand it feels a bit too much deus ex machina that you cant move a rucksack that lies 50m from your house, or close the open window, or climb on the roof and repair it with some planks.

[AverageGatsby]

generally too short respawn time.

Otherwise fully agree here:

There is too much wildlife.

Stepping outside the Mystery Lake Camp Office, it's all too common that I see 1-3 wolves and deer. And there's more of them around every corner. After 30 days on voyageur, I haven't killed a single deer and yet I have 10+ deer skins, because there are so many wolves and deer that they're routinely being hunted for me. In fact, almost all of my hunting is accidental, defending against wolves, or killing wolves to get to the deer they killed. I've never hunted deer.

This saps the meaning out of hunting. The few times I seriously went looking to kill something was with bears. The blood-trail mechanic and animals bleeding out is great. It's fun to track down a kill, it's satisfying to go through a longer hunt and reap the rewards. This is lost when the world is teeming with so many wolves and deer that 'hunting' means stepping outside any random building and looking around, with a high chance of finding a wolf already snarfing away at a deer.

My solution would be to decrease the amount of wildlife and increase the time it takes for them to respawn.

Make the player roam a map in search for game, relocate to other houses or maps. If at all possible, I'd love for deer to have tracks, or signs of spots they prefer to visit like eaten tree bark. Allow deer to be baited, perhaps I might even start using the hunting perches as hunting perches.

Have less wolves, but make them roam an entire map, either solitary or in packs. Wolves that patrol around on 10 square meters of ice are weird and non-threatening. A roaming loner with the strength of Fluffy that can show up anywhere or a widely patrolling pack are a lot more fun and dangerous.

This is more a quality of life thing: decrease the amount of meat every animal drops, but increase the amount of calories their meat offers. This would make cooking less of a lengthy chore and eliminate the absurdness of eating 2-4kg of meat every day. You'd have to do some testing to balance total calories from animals with the effort of finding them though.

[ADirtyHookahHose]

Brandishing your torch is one LMB click. I think it should be hold LMB.

Too many times I brandished my torch when I'm just trying to pick up a stick or something else small.

[AverageGatsby]

Brandishing your torch is one LMB click. I think it should be hold LMB.

Too many times I brandished my torch when I'm just trying to pick up a stick or something else small.

:idea: True!!! and that shouldn't be to much of a change!.

Now, btw is there any way to show once agreement with a post without reposting/quoting?

[Jolan]

On 10/20/2015 at 6:57 AM, druffzilla said:

What does that mean?

I also thing item degradation as it is now sucks and is one of the biggest flaws in the current gameplay but decay is real, everywhere and everytime, it should just start in the beginning of the game and not once you pick something up...

The item degredations seems a bit fast - as an example I have a whet stone that belonged to my great grandmother - still works fine and its used often.  I also have matches from years ago that still work fine (except that one batch that under the roof leak of course), and the sleeping bag degredation doesn't seem to matter if its 1 hour or 1 day, etc.  Some of this is game mechanics I suppose but it just seems odd for some things.

[Raphael van Lierop]

I'd love to see this discussion somehow turned into a poll -- voting on the most common "dislikes".

[TheCanadianLoonie]

My least favorite thing is that you can never live forever,  eventually you will walk outside run out of arrows our your gun breaks down and that one bear is just waiting for some eats and comes up and kills you.

[Jolan]

tiny white dot against snow

 

[SteveP]

1 hour ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

I'd love to see this discussion somehow turned into a poll -- voting on the most common "dislikes".

that's easy enough; one person just takes the comments and tries to summarize into a list of issues. There is some factorization and consolidation to do. I think that's a job for the OP but anyone could do it. We have support in the forum for polls now don't we? What I'm hearing though, reading between the lines, is you need a metric to identify the frustrations of the game and then a way to somehow rank those across the spectrum of target audience. I'm not sure that the folks active on this forum are demographically representative of the target audience but perhaps the gripes are representative.

Another approach might be to poll the actual game users somehow; collect their free form input and then massage it somehow to deal with the volume of responses, perhaps by building a stochastic tree. I say tree because it's less the nouns and verbs but the relationships of them. Dang, where is that artificial intelligence engine when we need it!? What would you get? "wolf kill me" or "wolf combat" or "I want to heat water" The real solution is to dig deeper and ask why do you want to heat water? Is it to take a bath? Why is taking a bath important? well it probably is important given our cultural assumptions. We mustn't smell bad because other people will dislike me. Instead, we have to get at the roots of need here. I would perhaps say, I need to heat water with bark and dirt in it to mask my scent so I can hunt more effectively so that I can get food so that I don't die from starvation and etc.

Now I suppose I could just ask why to every request and ferret out the reason. Or maybe we could train people to do that.

Using the Scrum process we need to understand the value and cost. We need to understand what gives people reward when they play a game. I think we need challenges so that there can be reward from resolving the challenges.

We also see people expending a lot of effort to tidy and arrange things. They want things to be neat; neatness has its intrinsic value of saving time when we need to find things because we don't want to waste time searching for stuff. I use lockers or containers to sort items by class (food, tools, resources, medicine) So maybe another idea is we need portable containers of fairly large capacity. I dunno. Just following the analysis here. Portable containers wouldn't be my first priority. I would be looking for things that help me out and entertain me. Things (mechanics) that let me create useful items and aesthetic items (perhaps for trade assuming that barter is going to become a thing)

I think the availability of containers is an attribute of buildings; you have to choose a base that has containers and other more important qualities such as access to firewood and game and fishing huts as well as travel corridors to provide shelter from wind and predators. One of my top priorities in choosing a base is the crafting table. I dislike the crafting table at the fishing camp on CH because it's outdoors and you can't seem to get much work done there because of weather and wolves. The Quonset in CH has bed, crafting table, fire barrel, tool resources, two doors and plenty of wolves and a bear as well as access to the fishing huts and open ground for deer hunting assisted by wolves.

[SteveP]

On 2016-01-28 at 6:40 PM, Jolan said:

I can't heat water. I can boil it, I can melt it, I can make tea... but I can't just heat it.

What is it about hot water that is useful? It's not a bad idea but I want to understand your reasoning.

Hot water is useful for making rawhide; removing the fur and hairs. It's useful for bathing because hygiene makes us feel better about ourselves and is an important long term survival goal to fight malaise and also to keep down bacteria and perhaps body odors. It could be useful as a weapon; "here wolf, have a face full of boiling water!"

I do like the idea of letting the player do things that are mistakes, time wasters. This helps reinforce the essential lesson that thinking is the most important thing for survival. To quote Charles Morse from the movie "The Edge":
 

Quote

Charles Morse: You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame.

Stephen: What?

Charles Morse: Yeah, see, they die of shame. "What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?" And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives.

Robert Green: And what is that, Charles?

Charles Morse: Thinking.

Turn these negatives into positives and put them on the wish list!

[Raphael van Lierop]

2 hours ago, SteveP said:

that's easy enough; one person just takes the comments and tries to summarize into a list of issues. There is some factorization and consolidation to do. I think that's a job for the OP but anyone could do it. We have support in the forum for polls now don't we? What I'm hearing though, reading between the lines, is you need a metric to identify the frustrations of the game and then a way to somehow rank those across the spectrum of target audience. I'm not sure that the folks active on this forum are demographically representative of the target audience but perhaps the gripes are representative.

Another approach might be to poll the actual game users somehow; collect their free form input and then massage it somehow to deal with the volume of responses, perhaps by building a stochastic tree. I say tree because it's less the nouns and verbs but the relationships of them. Dang, where is that artificial intelligence engine when we need it!? What would you get? "wolf kill me" or "wolf combat" or "I want to heat water" The real solution is to dig deeper and ask why do you want to heat water? Is it to take a bath? Why is taking a bath important? well it probably is important given our cultural assumptions. We mustn't smell bad because other people will dislike me. Instead, we have to get at the roots of need here. I would perhaps say, I need to heat water with bark and dirt in it to mask my scent so I can hunt more effectively so that I can get food so that I don't die from starvation and etc.

We generally have a pretty good sense of what people like and don't like about the game.

My comment was more specific to this actual thread -- moving from the short 5-word constraint into something even more focused. It would be relatively easy to select the 5 most common "dislikes" in this thread and then invite people to vote on those, more to satisfy my curiousity. 

[Raphael van Lierop]

On February 27, 2016 at 8:04 AM, Jolan said:

The item degredations seems a bit fast - as an example I have a whet stone that belonged to my great grandmother - still works fine and its used often.  I also have matches from years ago that still work fine (except that one batch that under the roof leak of course), and the sleeping bag degredation doesn't seem to matter if its 1 hour or 1 day, etc.  Some of this is game mechanics I suppose but it just seems odd for some things.

If everything in the game can last forever, there are no interesting choices left for you to make. Finding one whetstone would be enough to satisfy that need. Eventually you would find enough single items of everything that you would have very little need to explore and search for more. Exploring and searching for more is the "gameplay engine" of The Long Dark. For the game, it's more important that you are faced with interesting choices than with realistic decay rates.

[Raphael van Lierop]

2 hours ago, SteveP said:

I do like the idea of letting the player do things that are mistakes, time wasters. This helps reinforce the essential lesson that thinking is the most important thing for survival. To quote Charles Morse from the movie "The Edge":

You likely know this but this is one of the quotes we use in our "survival quotes" load screen. Not the least because I am a huge fan of David Mamet, but also The Edge was an inspiration/influence on this game, and that is one of my favourite quotes from the film.

[SteveP]

10 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

You likely know this but this is one of the quotes we use in our "survival quotes" load screen. Not the least because I am a huge fan of David Mamet, but also The Edge was an inspiration/influence on this game, and that is one of my favourite quotes from the film.

I also like this one:

Quote

Charles Morse: What one man can do, another can do.

 

[Jolan]

11 hours ago, SteveP said:

What is it about hot water that is useful? It's not a bad idea but I want to understand your reasoning.

Hot water is useful for making rawhide; removing the fur and hairs. It's useful for bathing because hygiene makes us feel better about ourselves and is an important long term survival goal to fight malaise and also to keep down bacteria and perhaps body odors. It could be useful as a weapon; "here wolf, have a face full of boiling water!"

heating water is the fastest way to warm your core in an emergency situation.  If you're sliding into hypothermia building a small fire won't stop the slid fast enough (because its heating the atmosphere and then your outside where there isn't much blood any more), building a small fire and heating water and drinking it will.  Ideally, you put a calorie ladden warm (not boiling hot) fluid into you but just water will do.  It would use the same mechanic as hot coffee, tea, etc. though I'm not certain about the calorie add.  I wouldn't put it in there, but I don't know why its there for coffee and tea.  Maybe a mechanic? 

Here's a quote from the AMC to give you an idea where this came from.

• If the victim is alert enough to hold a cup, give warm, but not hot, liquids to drink. Sugary drinks, such as warm Tang or Jell-o, are especially helpful. Never give food or drink to an unconscious victim — he or she may choke.