Reduced respawn of wildlife to force nomadic survival.

[AverageGatsby]

Heyho!

First of all I just want to say i really like the atmosphere as well as the challenge, the pace and the potential of the game (but hey, otherwise I probably wouldn't be here and instead just rant on steam ) For statistics as I read that you monitor player feedback based on the difficulty the play: yes i do currently play on stalker, but that is not necesairily because i want the challenge but rather because i think the atmosphere increases.

The principle: Forced Nomad / thinning wildlife :idea:

I have just reached a point in my current sandbox where i can start sustaining more or less easily, and it is now that the plans i made are sadly falling appart. That is not because something happened which i did not expext, but because something which i expected isn't happening. I was planning ahead thinking i would establish myself around mystery lake life of the land and craft some decent clothing before being forced out as the wildlife is become more scarce, moving on in nomadic fashion towards the next region. Sadly the respawn is getting in the way of the idea and atmosphere. At some point surviving (especially based from Camp office) seems to consist of opening the door shooting a wolv, grabbing a few sticks and getting back inside. As said, I really appreciate the game already as it is. Obviously there are a few things that in my personel opinion could be ballanced differently but they are more than made up for. Nevertheless I feel like the whole idea of surviving, exploring, hunting and being hunted as well as the atmosphere in general could only improve by forcing the player to move on at some point.

EDIT: i am currently at day ~26 Obviously i don't know how the respawn actually works, but when i got my bow i cleared out 4-5 wolves. When i went back outside after spending roughly 3 days within camp office working on my new clothes i was prepared to move on (and still had meat left). But directly from the doorsteps i could already see 2 new wolves :?

TL;DR

The wildlife respawn (especially wolves) is way to high, and since at some point wolves==food the challenge and atmosphere of the game deteriorate. Greatly reduced respawn (expecially on the stalker setting) could force the player to explore and keep moving which I think would benefit the game imensely.

cheers,

an otherwise happy player of TLD

NB: Sorry for any typos

[shadragon]

I think I saw a suggestion for a series of sliders for a player to modify their game experience. Wildlife spawn frequency could easily become one of them. Environmental factors such as frequency/duration of storms, bitterly cold temperatures, stick/limb/coal spawn frequency, wolf / bear aggressiveness, etc. would all work with variable values. That said, they should not be allowed to be changed once set (say at character generation). Or not allow changes to take effect for 24h or something like that. 

Did I miss anything?

[AverageGatsby]

1 hour ago, shadragon said:

I think I saw a suggestion for a series of sliders for a player to modify their game experience. Wildlife spawn frequency could easily become one of them. Environmental factors such as frequency/duration of storms, bitterly cold temperatures, stick/limb/coal spawn frequency, wolf / bear aggressiveness, etc. would all work with variable values. That said, they should not be allowed to be changed once set (say at character generation). Or not allow changes to take effect for 24h or something like that. 

Did I miss anything?

Yea I saw that post too, and actually also a few others that were mentioning wildlife respawn. This was just the biggest issue for me and the first thing i posted when i came into the forums . Yea, sliders would be a nice solution, and given that the game revolves around permanent decisions/perma-death, no the player should not be allowed to change them once set.

[Wasteland Watcher]

Personally I disagree with less animals around and the reason is that, realistically,  with less humans around animals would swiftly proliferate.

I'm just glad that the global geomagnetic event has caused wolf packs to disband because it'd be amazingly difficult to survive with wolf packs around

That being said, optional slider controls are a good idea for a "custom" difficulty level outside of Pilgrim, Voyageur, and Stalker.

[stray_cur]

Very agree.  Lower wildlife respawn seems the simplest way to create motivation and give reason for players to shift 'bases' and explore -- which, as it stands, is only done for aesthetic reasons rather than survival.

It's gotta be implemented, as a slider option or otherwise... cause my interest is currently fading out of the long dark, for lack of real reason to leave any given location.  Easy fix!  

And then maybe we'd actually have to fish now and then... would be nice.

[AverageGatsby]

17 hours ago, stray_cur said:

Very agree.  Lower wildlife respawn seems the simplest way to create motivation and give reason for players to shift 'bases' and explore -- which, as it stands, is only done for aesthetic reasons rather than survival.

It's gotta be implemented, as a slider option or otherwise... cause my interest is currently fading out of the long dark, for lack of real reason to leave any given location.  Easy fix!  

And then maybe we'd actually have to fish now and then... would be nice.

Yea  it makes the game unbeatable as well in some way, there is always something to do, and if it's just planning how to transit into the next zone/ planning where to go, etc. Hunting will be more of a challenge and joy and oh my, I haven't even thought of fishing yet but I'll have to agree with you here too. In addition one could also be forced to get through rough weeks, where food in general is running low, chances to catch something could decrease the more you fish somewhere and one could even be forced to live from things like cat tails if one didn't start moving soon enough. Obviously the devs would have to consider changing rabbit snare mechanics as well in that case. And the whole thing could explode to be a big project/workload/further testing and stuff sooo....

It would add a real long term interest to TLD in my opinion and I'd love it, I don't know though whether such things will be implemented . It opens a whole new world into which I actually don't believe the devs want to venture.. but hey if I'm wrong here dear Hinterland let me know. I'd love it  

[Raphael van Lierop]

Suggestion noted.

[LucidFugue]

I find myself agreeing with the logic here.

I tend to be nomadic anyway, but I have noticed that even if you're eating daily, one or two deer and a wolf (or even vice versa) will tend to keep you in meat until they respawn.

This was even when I was expending a lot of calories gathering wood, which actually can become scarce between blizzards if you're keeping fires going frequently.

[FrozenLiquidity]

This is a step in the right direction, but a rather simplistic solution to a fairly complex problem.  I made a long post about it previously, but in short, the following may be a more appropriate and realistic solution than simply adjusting a respawn rate.

In short, wildlife should be more dynamic and susceptible to the actions of the player.  In gameplay terms, game should become scarce when over-hunted, wildlife population should decline in areas that players hunt and apply pressure to, while the populations in other areas should relatively flourish with the lack of that external pressure.  These areas should not be predefined locations, and should be far more dynamic than they are now.  For instance, when I leave to go set a snare or hunt I should not expect to a bear in a certain valley, or a pair of rabbits always occupying the same patch of ground.  This makes the game predictable, repetitive and frankly, boring.  I should have to hunt or search a bit to find what I'm after.  If I've caught too many rabbits at one location, I should not be able to depend on some arbitrary timer to expire before being able to return and hunt the same animals at exactly the same spot I've killed dozens of them before.  If local wildlife is exploited aggressively then there should be a long and slow recovery for that population to return to the same level.  Changes of this nature will encourage players to seek out and keep track of potential food sources, present them with important survival-driven decisions and make for a far more interesting long-term survival experience.  As it is now, people simply get themselves established and homestead until forced to do otherwise.

To understand why this change is needed and how important it is, simply look at the things the player needs to survive and their abundance:

• Shelter - Plenty of these around, all of them permanent.
• Firewood - Inexhaustible supplies available at your nearest wooded area.
• Water - Virtually unlimited as long as you have a way to melt and boil it.
• Food - The only thing in short supply, but routinely available at predictable locations.

If one were to simply change the dynamics of wildlife then the food source they represent suddenly becomes a driving force in the mechanics of long-term survival, leaving it to players to deal with it as they see fit, be it by adopting a more nomadic lifestyle and moving from place to place in order to exploit new food sources and let old ones recover, having a long trapline which requires a player to venture longer and further than they did before to eke out a sustainable supply of food, or branch out in to other sources of food.

I see this as one of the foremost changes that The Long Dark needs to make in order to create an authentic long-term exploration-survival experience.  

[LucidFugue]

I'm not sure it needs to be overly complex, but it might be difficult depending on how the respawn timers function at the moment. I think respawn timers are currently unique to the animals themselves (i.e. a property of the object). That allows them to run independently, but you'd want to override that to have a region-based population solution.

One way you could achieve what you are after by having a maximum amount of deer/wolves/bears/rabbits allowed in a given region. Then, a respawn timer for each region. A new animal is spawned in every x hours, up until the region limit is reached. You'd need a few more rules to make sure it spawned in a sensible location, the population levels between different animals was managed, and the timer was balanced so that an area the player was in became depopulated over time, but areas the player wasn't in weren't always running wild with game, making it a simple matter of transitioning between 2 main bases.

Randomising the spawn locations of animals is, I think, a bigger change. I support it, but I can understand why it isn't there. You definitely want to have determined spawns for story-purposes. It provides necessary consistency in the gameplay. Random spawns would only make sense in a pure sandbox. I want it for sandbox, but I think it's a bigger change, considering spawn timers have been tweaked before.

[SteveP]

7 hours ago, FrozenLiquidity said:

If one were to simply change the dynamics of wildlife then the food source they represent suddenly becomes a driving force in the mechanics of long-term survival, leaving it to players to deal with it as they see fit, be it by adopting a more nomadic lifestyle and moving from place to place in order to exploit new food sources and let old ones recover, having a long trapline which requires a player to venture longer and further than they did before to eke out a sustainable supply of food, or branch out in to other sources of food.

If animals become nomadic, then the survivor must also become nomadic. The question is how do the game get from one location to another? They wouldn't pass through caves or tunnels and definitely wouldn't venture onto the broken railway trestle! I suppose they could take the higher peaks where our player simply is not permitted to venture. Wolves would follow the deer so listening for wolf howls might lead you in the right direction.

Letting wolves form wolf packs ups the ante considerably. One would need to have progressed through the skill stages to develop several rapid deployment weapons as have been proposed and perhaps work in coordination with fire to prevent attack. It seems wasteful to have to kill an entire pack; but if you get the alpha wolf or take out the enforcers, the rest would flee and you could limit the collateral damage and potentially wasted meat/resources. If we had pebbles enough, we could also scare off a pack of hungry wolves. How do the wolves react to a shortage of food? At first they might take to tracking YOU!

There are definitely lots of directions this can go.

Remember that as we up the ante and add more aggressive behaviour, there has to be a corresponding strategy to deal with it. I like the idea of having the wolves start off relatively benign to let the new folks develop their survival skills and tactics before we toss them into the deep end with ravenous wolf packs. This game is strategy, not best eye-hand coordination. As pointed out, TLD appeals to a broader demographic including lots of folks in their 60s, men and women. I do like the idea of making the game more adaptive; in other words, heuristic; the game adjusts conditions as you acquire the ability to cope with the current level. If you die off, next time it gets a little easier.

[Packet802]

Yes please do this. It only makes sense that as you kill off wildlife in an area the population would drop.  In one of my early games before I had found a rifle and hadn't made a bow yet, I had 4 snares going catching rabbits because that's all I knew how to get reliable food. Had a bad first experience fishing on mystery lake and getting lost in a blizzard at night lol!  I caught so many rabbits outside of Trappers that I was getting worried I would wipe out the population in that area.  I was also starting to feel sorry for the little fellas!  

I've heard people on twitch and in the forums talk about bear spawn points, wolf patrol routes, etc.. This should be randomized as much as possible.  When a bear is killed have the spawn point restart in a different area after a random amount of time until he is killed again.  Have wolves, deer and rabbits appear less and less frequently in areas where they are being hunted.  And try to randomize things as much as possible so things are not predictable. 

[Raphael van Lierop]

Wildlife spawns are random within preplaced zones in the world. There are no "wolf patrol routes" but players may discern them even though they don't exist as such. This is the nature of a game with vastly interconnected systems driving a lot of emergence. In fact, wildlife population does drop due to over-hunting but perhaps not to the degree being discussed here. Bears behave differently than wolves because their gameplay intent is different. 

There is an assumption in this thread that the nomadic gameplay style is the preferred or desired style, and as such the systems should be tuned to drive this behaviour. In fact, the systems are currently designed and tuned to support both a nomadic, and a sedentary (which we call "hunkering down") play style. We like to see people form an attachment to their safehouse/homestead which is why we've made an effort to provide simple customization elements like item placement (which we plan to build on in the future). We also like to see people exploring the world. A lot of this exploration is driven by the need to acquire non-renewable resources. It's a balance.

Good feedback. Just keep in mind that your preferred play style may not be a preferred play style, possibly not the design intent, and our goal is not necessarily for the game to be all things to all players.

[Scyzara]

This thread here gives a pretty good overview about some popular playstyles:

Only 15 people voted so far, but most of them seem to prefer either a nomad or a homesteader playstyle. Hm, I think it might be possible to reduce wildlife respawn rates and make animals less predictable to find (which would probably lead to the impression of migration) without simulating a "real" migration.

In order to please the homesteader fraction, it's certainly not recommendable to depopulate whole maps. But in order to please the nomads (and presumably the explorers and the challengers), having animals spawn in the very same region in front of your doorstep every 3 days isn't optimal either. Maybe some kind of compromise could be found.

Raph, you wrote that animal spawns are currently randomized within preplaced zones. I think that's a good model in general, but the problem (at least from my own experience) is that I couldn't tell I ever experienced a real "randomization" because animals are hardly ever missing in a zone. (I know the designated zones where wolves, bears or deer may spawn, but they seem to be present in each potential zone at least 75% of the time - unless I killed them, ofc). It hardly ever happens that I find a spawn zone empty. And even if it happens, I know there'll most likely be a deer in the next zone half a km away. I hardly ever had to really go and search them for more than 2 rl minutes (at least not since the PV bug was fixed).

What I would love to see would be a model of hunting that forces you to walk greater distances to find your prey. Not sure if it's technically possible, but could you theoretically make animals spawn in less zones at once (e.g. only 2 of 10 potential spawn zones are really inhabited at once), but create permanent hoof or paw prints in the snow leading to the next inhabited zone? Not sure if the model makes sense for wolves (as these also serve as main antagonists), but I'd love to see it implemented for deer and bears.

Example: You live in trapper's homestead and want to go deer hunting. So you check the nearby valley and hills, but the deer isn't present near trapper's atm. Instead, you find some tracks leading to the tunnel collapse area because this is the closest location currently inhabited by a deer. Or if the next deer has spawned farther away, you might have to follow a longer trail leading you to to the clearcut area or the middle of Mystery lake. Such a hunting system might create the impression of animal migration and give people the feeling that hunting is mainly about tracking animals and less about putting bullets/arrows in their heads in front of your doorstep.

Especially if you combine this idea with longer respawn timers per zone so that each potential zone gets inhabited every once in a while and not always the same 3 zones. ^^

Would such a system force people to cover greater distances outside while hunting? - Certainly, but that's not necessarily a catastrophe for homesteaders. If you distribute the (few) currently inhabited zones evenly among the map (e.g. direct neighboring zones can't be inhabited simultaneously), there's a high chance that even homesteaders won't have to haul their prey over more than 1/3 of the map. And nomads/explorers/challenger's don't have a problem, anyway - they'll simply live in a shelter next to where they killed their last prey. 

Thoughts, anyone?

[Ohbal]

2 hours ago, Scyzara said:

Thoughts, anyone?

+1

I think you nailed it . 

 

[Vhalkyrie]

I don't think sandbox should force people to migrate.  There are nomad/explorer players (me) and homesteaders.  I think both are valid, and one or the other shouldn't be forced on the player.

I've said this before in other threads, however, I do think the wolf/bear respawn rate needs to be drastically reduced.  With the fast wolf spawns, I almost never need to hunt deer.  I just drive a deer into a wolf, then kill them both.  I now have food for several weeks.  Then when the wolf respawns, I kill the wolf so that it doesn't harass me constantly as I'm chopping wood, which gives me even more food.  I end up with an oversupply of wolf meat - I never need to set rabbit snares or hunt deer, except for pelts.

I understand they probably increased the wolf/bear count in order to increase the "danger", but the result is quite the opposite.  I'm always well fed.  If the wolf respawn was lowered, I would have to hunt deer, snare rabbits, or fish more often.  This would support either nomads or homesteaders.  Nomads, like me, will always move on to a different map out of sheer wanderlust to do something different.  I don't really need a motivation - I just decide one day that I want to go somewhere else.

That's just the way I play.  I'm not in favor of forcing the homesteaders to move if they have a happy home.

[LucidFugue]

Hmm.. I do like Scyzara's proposal, but I guess at this point I'm just advocating for slightly less chance that the same zone is repopulated again within the average time it'll take to eat the calories you would harvest from that area. I don't mind if there are more just over the next hill if we don't want to over engineer a solution to one piece of the puzzle. 

That way you can homestead all you like, but it's not as simple as chasing the same deer into the same wolf, killing the wolf, then harvesting both carcasses. It may have just been my luck, but I feel like by the time you're running low, they've respawned.  

[Raphael van Lierop]

We're working on some stuff that might address some of this feedback. We'll see what you think when it's in the public build.

[dbldrew]

I'm all for the idea of lowering the respawn of animals due to hunting pressure. But My question is those that want to force a nomadic gameplay are you looking to force movement in a map, or looking to be forced to go from map to map? I would be all in favor of in map movement. not sure on being forced to change maps.

 

[elloco999]

I don't want to be 'forced' to move at all.

I don't mind having to travel a bit to hunt (even if it's to the other side of the map) but if the sandbox is going to force me to move to another map every x days or something like that I will not like that very much.

[Raphael van Lierop]

Currently, the game doesn't really force you to adopt any particular play style, which is as intended. In particular, in the early game where you are more dependent on man-made resources (left behind), then the push/pull is to wander and gather resources to tide you over until you can find or make the tools you need to sustain yourself through hunting, etc. Once you have those tools, you are less dependent on the man-made environment (and resources that were left behind) and more self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency means being able to...take care of yourself, provide for yourself. So naturally, this means you are more mobile. And, also more able to survive in one place. At that point, the push/pull for mobility is more about player curiosity and the intrinsic sense of accomplishment for having seen the world. I suspect when you start encountering narrative collectibles and other stuff we're cooking up for you, you'll feel a stronger reason to explore the world, independent of the need to satisfy your own primal urges around food, shelter, etc.

BUT, personally I think it's important that the game allows for different play styles, and even a combination of them depending on where you're at in a game or even in your head. Sometimes you feel bored with one area and just want to mix things up a bit, so you embark on a journey to find another location you know about, or may have heard about from another player in a stream or here in the forums or whatever. I think that's pretty cool. Part of making a game that doesn't hold the player's hand is counting on players to make their own decisions about what they find compelling. I don't think it's the games job to necessarily make that decision for you.

[hauteecolerider]

1 hour ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

BUT, personally I think it's important that the game allows for different play styles, and even a combination of them depending on where you're at in a game or even in your head. Sometimes you feel bored with one area and just want to mix things up a bit, so you embark on a journey to find another location you know about, or may have heard about from another player in a stream or here in the forums or whatever. I think that's pretty cool. Part of making a game that doesn't hold the player's hand is counting on players to make their own decisions about what they find compelling. I don't think it's the games job to necessarily make that decision for you.

**Bold added by myself for emphasis

This right here is one of the biggest reasons I'm loving TLD - the fact that there is a role-play element here, even though it probably wasn't intended to be an RPG. This openness and flexibility in permitting a variety of game styles (even in one play through) holds a HUGE appeal for me. I don't play a game for the achievements (I couldn't care less about those, even though I am pleasantly surprised to get the Nightwalker Award recently), nor do I play it for the leaderboards. I'm just not competitive that way. When I play a game, I look for a story. Having written stories in the past, I happen to be very sensitive to certain story-telling elements - the tragedy of so much death, the desolation in PV and CH, the history of abandonment in DP - do you really think that whaling plant was abandoned just 20 days ago with that GM event? I doubt it. It feels more like economic factors played into its abandonment years before the GM. There's a whole history behind each map, and at present there is no way I'm going to figure all of it out. But I have some gist of what happened before, and I love experiencing each map's unique characteristics for the story value as much as for the immersive value. 

So sometimes I feel like hunkering down in one place for a while. Other times I feel like "Let's go down this path and see where it leads . . ." Unlike traditional RPG's, which kind of force you to pick and choose one class and play to that class's strengths, I really like that my life here is an open book, and I can choose how to write it from day to day . . .

[Raphael van Lierop]

22 hours ago, hauteecolerider said:

Having written stories in the past, I happen to be very sensitive to certain story-telling elements - the tragedy of so much death, the desolation in PV and CH, the history of abandonment in DP - do you really think that whaling plant was abandoned just 20 days ago with that GM event? I doubt it. It feels more like economic factors played into its abandonment years before the GM.

Very perceptive.

[togg]

You already said it (almost) all. It's great that the devs have already some polished (AKA, that doesn't force to a certain playstile) solutions for this, I've not played enormously but it's clear that too many wolves can become just boring.

I would only add that the mechanics that drive wolves movements should not be over complex, the game is incredible clean at the moment and I find it to be a virtue.

[stray_cur]

Thing about the sandbox is that it gets easier with time.  I think the point of this thread is to help curb that gradient - reduced respawn being one of the more 'natural' solutions.