After 350 hours, my wishlist


ArmagedDan

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I'm sure this is wishlist thread number 50,000 or so, but I spent a lot of time mulling it over, and thought I'd drop it in here anyway.  I ran some searches and a lot of my thoughts have been brought up before, some more than others.  I tried to keep feasibility and balance in mind wherever possible.

 

Items:

  • Compass - points towards the "top" of the map; .10kg.  Anyone who's gotten lost in a blizzard or fog out on the ice of Coastal Highway or Mystery Lake knows how welcome it would be, but you're trading weight for something only conditionally useful.  If it's too powerful as-is, make it one of those heavy military jobs at .25 kg.  Might not be possible depending on the nature of the geothermic event.
  • Salt - A big dark-blue cylindrical container that is totally we-promise not a Morton salt box.  It contains 10 uses, at .10kg per use, and never degrades.  When you use it, the Use With context menu appears, listing all cooked Venison or fresh hides in your possession.  Using it with a fresh hide knocks two days off the curing time.  Using it with cooked Venison creates Salted Venison (at the same condition as the original Cooked Venison), which makes you twice as thirsty as regular venison, but keeps twice as long.
  • Binoculars - Would use a similar zoom function to aiming the rifle, but more pronounced.  It would be useful for seeing if those distant weeds have cattails or if that blob over there is a wolf, but it should really be a luxury item, clocking in at a considerable weight for what it does (.50 or even 1 kg).
  • Sinew - if your Repair and Carcass Harvesting skills are both at least level 3, a new harvest option appears from deer, Sinew.  Harvests at the same speed as gut and requires a hunting knife. The bone needle and sinew thread this makes forms a single-use sewing kit, but with -5% repair success.  An end-game option for after manufactured sewing kits have run dry.

 

Gameplay:

  • The ability to pick up Rabbit carcasses as an item, to harvest later.
  • Hunger should affect exhaustion rate (if it doesn't already, I haven't noticed it if so).  I am 100% guilty of abusing the hunger mechanics for long-term games, where you purposely starve all day, then eat only before bed to recover the few condition points you lost.  That would remain, sure, but now with the penalty of having your abused, starving character tire out more rapidly - making it more of a tradeoff.
  • Meat left outside on the ground having a chance to disappear overnight if the player isn't nearby, as unseen scavengers grab it.  There was a "Meat Storage" thread about it recently that contained my first-ever forum post.  :) 

 

Out-there suggestions that require way too much coding to be serious requests, but hell, since we're here:

  • Maple sapling + cured gut + hunting knife = Survival Spear.  Can be thrown with a short range like a heavy arrow, or clicked at the last second when a wolf lunges at you to intercept it, injuring and pushing it away.  Cannot be repaired.  Can be harvested for Reclaimed Wood and a low-condition hunting knife (or scrap metal).
  • Ability to drag carcasses to better locations for harvesting.  Many times, I've wished I could pull that wolf and his former deer meal closer together, near one campfire.
  • If you enter a building while a bear is charging you, you have a chance of him smashing into the building - essentially what happens at the start of The Hunted part 2.  It'd be neat to have a chance of the animal actually spawning in your house, but at the very least the damage should make the building at least 1 degree colder.

 

Non-game Merch Suggestion:

  • Every time I drink coffee in-game I think I'd like to have a Hinterland mug, like the one depicted.  There IS one on the merch store, but it's the wrong shape!  The real-world body is cylindrical, while the model in-game is what I believe you'd call a "bistro style" mug, tapering to a narrower base.  I cannot explain to you why this is important to me, but it is.

Keep on trucking on a fantastic game, Hinterland.  This is one of my all-time favorites, on Steam or otherwise, and man I got my money's worth hundreds of hours ago.  :)

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Nice post and well thought-out!  Thanks for sharing your thoughts.  A few responses:

I'm pretty sure the compass would be messed up by the geomagnetic event, so I don't expect that as a possibility.  

As for sinew, why not just use fishing tackle as a sewing sit replacement like we do now?

Hunger does affect exhaustion now (I've seen it in my Interloper games), but I think it could be much more pronounced.  As is, I think you have to go an entire day without calories before it starts working, and it's pretty easy to reverse.

I happily agree with everything else, even the mug.  I've thought about buying a TLD mug from the store, but I agree that I rather wish it was the one from inside the game.  That would be satisfying somehow!

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4 hours ago, Best_Leopard said:

As for sinew, why not just use fishing tackle as a sewing sit replacement like we do now?

That's a good point.  I suppose it's theoretically possible to run out of scrap metal, but it would be a ridiculous number of years into the game. 

 

4 hours ago, Best_Leopard said:

Hunger does affect exhaustion now (I've seen it in my Interloper games), but I think it could be much more pronounced.  As is, I think you have to go an entire day without calories before it starts working, and it's pretty easy to reverse.

I never actually noticed, probably because I do generally eat before sleeping to recover condition overnight, even on interloper (thank god for cattails).  It's cool that there is a nod to this concern, although it sounds like it could be made a little more severe.

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"Gameplay:

  • The ability to pick up Rabbit carcasses as an item, to harvest later."
  • Ability to drag carcasses to better locations for harvesting.  Many times, I've wished I could pull that wolf and his former deer meal closer together, near one campfire."

Totally agree, we should be able to drag heavy carcass, at least to find a wind-protected place to harvest quietly.

And of course transport entire rabbits.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Binoculars are at the moment the only thing I'm curious about if it would be a good addon to the game.

The ability to move carcasses would take out (quite) some of the difficulty, since it would reduce the chances to get surprised by blizzard.

Picking up rabbit corpses would make them too easy source of food. At the moment one can just place his/her traps in a circle and harvest them all by one campfire, so the only risk is that blizzard coming by. I think it should not be removed.

The salt idea is tough one, and only the devs could say have they thought about already and made their decision or not.

Wolves are now, I think, at their optimal: they pose a threat in early game, but after gearin up some clothes and a knife, they ain't that bad - they give you the hit and sometimes bleeding, but nothing major problem. If they could be staved off by yet another method (including bow and rifle), I think it would give too much advantage for the player.

 

Compass.. Never! (also, for new players, I strongly suggest that you don't use maps from google, if you wish to get the full experience of this game. Once you go for the maps (other than quick-spotting a way to another region, perhaps) the game will lose significant part of it's lure. Getting lost and fighting the cold, wind and starvation is the essence of this game.

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+1 for the following:

  • sinew
  • rabbit carcass carry
  • survival spear
  • carcass drag

Logs and branches would be fun to drag too.  It might not take too much more work if carcass dragging was a feature.

Another possible mechanic for using survival spear in melee would be to set the spear, then use an aim mechanic to intercept a charging animal.  You could then purposefully make this aim mechanic really awkward to up the difficulty.  Aiming left/right may cause the spear tip to droop, since you need to keep the anchor for your spear steady.  This might be accomplished by using a polar coordinate system instead of the standard x-y Cartesian.  Your anchor might slip, causing a quick jarring animation and setting your point of aim somewhere random near where you were pointing.  This animation should feel like you almost just slipped on the ice, but you caught yourself at the last minute.

Actually, I need to go back to read someone's post on trips, falls, and impact injuries.  The jarring mechanic could work similarly to sustaining a sprain or break.  I feel there should be more interrupts to the player's control of his character when things go wrong.

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