The True Difficulty of Nomad Challenge!


Deathdealers747

Nomad Challenge Days Reduced  

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So, I don't know about everybody else, but for me, this Nomad Challenge is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo hard. Now, keep in mind, this level of difficulty is not due to the "challenge" presented, but rather the challenge within the challenge, which is: Boredom! Seriously, guys, I think you should reduce the time required to be inside of the specific building down from 3 Days to 1 Day (or less). It is soooooooooooo easy to do on Voyager difficulty that I'm getting very bored from it. I'm receiving absolutely no challenging aspects of this so-called "challenge".

In fact, I'll be able to complete 2 more Achievements (Silent Hunter and Happy Harvester), while, simultaneously, completing this Nomad "Challenge".

Am I the only one who thinks that the number of days inside of the buildings should be reduced!?

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If I want to vote "no" to Question 1, I can't answer Question 2 and then it won't register my vote at all.

I agree that the Nomad Challenge is hilariously easy, but I don't think it's got anything to do with how long you have to stay in each location. It's just because there's too much loot, and you therefore never have to do any 'survival' tasks like fishing or hunting, or crafting. I'd like it better if you had to stay three days in each place, but that you had to spend the three days actually 'surviving', rather than just eating, drinking and passing time in bed

Edited by Pillock
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10 hours ago, Deathdealers747 said:

Now, keep in mind, this level of difficulty is not due to the "challenge" presented, but rather the challenge within the challenge, which is: Boredom! Seriously, guys, I think you should reduce the time required to be inside of the specific building down from 3 Days to 1 Day (or less). It is soooooooooooo easy to do on Voyager difficulty that I'm getting very bored from it.

I've never completed the Nomad challenge for the same reason. It just feels incredibly pointless to stay in a location for three days in a row - it's too short to create a real main base (= going hunting for fur clothes, creating bigger stocks of meat or water), but on the other hand it's too long to just sit idle and pass time waiting.

I totally understand this challenge is not meant to be difficult, but I support the idea to decrease the time you have to stay in a location to only one day (or even less). Whoever needs to stay longer (to recover from wildlife attacks or whatever) might still do so without any disadvantage, but the rest of players wouldn't have to waste time waiting for some timer.

 

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14 hours ago, Deathdealers747 said:

In fact, I'll be able to complete 2 more Achievements (Silent Hunter and Happy Harvester), while, simultaneously, completing this Nomad "Challenge".

I got the Pacifist achievement from doing Nomad, by mistake! As I said, there's so much loot that you never have to actually bother killing anything, and you still have more food and water than you can carry between the locations.

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It seems fine to me. The challenge feels designed as a grand tour to show new players a variety of locations across different maps. If you already know all the locations well, or use external maps during play, then it's obviously not that difficult. I think Pillock has the right idea about loot, though. Nomad is mostly about scavenging, there's really no need to get into any of the crafting to make it through the challenge. I think all I crafted were old man bandages.

As far as boredom while waiting inside a location, I either perform an activity (cooking, harvesting, mending, sharpening, cleaning) or use the pass time function on the radial menu. If there was no way to accelerate time then yes, it would be boring to sit inside waiting to sleep, but that's not the case.

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18 hours ago, Pillock said:

If I want to vote "no" to Question 1, I can't answer Question 2 and then it won't register my vote at all.

Hm. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that. Unfortunately, I can't change it, either, because it'll reset the poll results (8 people voted so far).

6 hours ago, Pillock said:

I got the Pacifist achievement from doing Nomad, by mistake! As I said, there's so much loot that you never have to actually bother killing anything, and you still have more food and water than you can carry between the locations.

I can't get that achievement - it's the hardest for me to get. I do everything that I can try to do for it, but even on Voyager it's insanely hard for me to get. The primary reason being: The Wolves. I already killed one on Day 2 in the Nomad Challenge, because it attacked me like an idiot - didn't even go after my TWO meat drop decoys! Remember, if you fight back from a Wolf fight, then you kill the wolf, 100% of the time. So, Pacifist can't be acquired then. If you don't fight back, then you drop down to 15% life (from 100%) and you risk him returning for a second fight.

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I think it might be made more interesting by extending the time you need to spend in each place, rather than reducing it. Maybe 7 days or something? That way, you probably would use up the loot food/drink before being able to move on, and be forced to make a base in each place for a short time.

Also, the ability to play it with Stalker settings would make it much more appealing to players who know where the stop-off locations are before they start. I appreciate it's designed to introduce newer players to the idea of exploring all the maps, but it doesn't tell you this in the description. I made the mistake of leaving this challenge unattempted until the point where, unknowingly, it would no longer be any fun for me - if there had been a clearer indication that you ought to play this before you are confident playing on the higher difficulties, so as to maintain the fun aspect of the challenge, I would certainly have played it earlier.

Edited by Pillock
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1 hour ago, Pillock said:

I think it might be made more interesting by extending the time you need to spend in each place, rather than reducing it. Maybe 7 days or something? That way, you probably would use up the loot food/drink before being able to move on, and be forced to make a base in each place for a short time.

Also, the ability to play it with Stalker settings would make it much more appealing to players who know where the stop-off locations are before they start. I appreciate it's designed to introduce newer players to the idea of exploring all the maps, but it doesn't tell you this in the description. I made the mistake of leaving this challenge unattempted until the point where, unknowingly, it would no longer be any fun for me - if there had been a clearer indication that you ought to play this before you are confident playing on the higher difficulties, so as to maintain the fun aspect of the challenge, I would certainly have played it earlier.

Yeah... This is the same problem that I'm having right now. The higher difficulty challenges and Sand Box modes are more appealing to me. 

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@Pillock I love pushing that to a week in each place and would add taking your idea one step farther, each challenge could be accomplished at each level.....some would be not as big a deal but others, yeah significantly harder. It would be a nice change of pace for players between builds to try and test those things out too.  

 

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My problem is the fact that some of the place make zero sense to hang out for that many days.  As an example, why would I set up in the Crossroads store when one of the buildings with a bed makes more sense.  etc I was thinking the nomad challenge would be about moving rather than staying put.  Maybe keep the challenge of staying in one place for a few days with sub challenges of finding other landmarks in the area.  Or accomplishing some sort of task specific to the area.  

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I think the challenge is to get you used to each map and strategic spots on the map. Most people attempt it early on. Your stay in each place says NOTHING about consecutive days or hours.... just total time.....use the time you are at some of the spots to explore and rest there only. that way you get your hours but accomplish other things along the way. just an idea.

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For each location there could be a journal (like in the hut in the new mountain map), where there is a route on a map and you have to go there and pick something up and bring it back to the location. Like it could be a deerskin from a deer carcass or it could be 5 rose hips etc

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm finishing it off, only Mystery Lake locations to go. Having the wait ability is great. I wouldn't have been able to stand it without that. 

I can see how it is encouraging exploration, and it works well in some maps like DP and TWM where there is a lot to do in the map and you've only got a few days there. 

But for ML and PV you're going to be cooling your heels quite a bit. 

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  • 2 months later...

So I just forced myself to finish this challenge (because I didn't want the half-finished savegame to be lost once the new testbranch hits). And it was seriously no fun, but only felt tedious.

I think this challenge would be ten times more engaging and fun if the 3 day-staying period in each location would be removed or at least decreased to only one day. Because what happened for me on every single location was that I reached it, looted it and afterwards spend three full days alternating between passing 15h of time and sleeping for 9 hours. At least 75% of my real life time while playing this challenge was filled with watching the "pass time" screen. And sorry, but that's as boring as it gets.

I think I melted some water about three times alltogether, but apart from that I found more food and drinks than necessary in each location.

To make things worse, only the time actually spend directly in the indoor location counts towards the achievement. So if you try to play in a somewhet "active" style, and go e.g. hunting or exploring you don't have to stay in each location for three days, but rather for a whole week in order to spend the 72h indoors. One may argue that I might possibly have tried that approach because it would suit my playstyle better and I can hardly deny that. (I decided against it because I seriously lack the time to play TLD for dozens of RL hours during the next few weeks.)

I do, however, not believe that a challenge called "nomad" should be about staying somewhere for extended periods of time anyway. It should be about the feeling of travelling and being on the move. And that's exactly the feeling this challenge does not convey to me at all in its current state. Simply because you currently spend 25% of your rl time actually travelling and 75% time looking at the pass time screen.

Sorry for this unprettified honesty, but the Nomad challenge is (in my opinion) not only the most boring of all challenges, but - and that's much worse - goes against its own spirit, at least for me.

Edited by Scyzara
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On 2/13/2017 at 6:01 AM, Deathdealers747 said:

I can't get that achievement - it's the hardest for me to get. I do everything that I can try to do for it, but even on Voyager it's insanely hard for me to get. The primary reason being: The Wolves. I already killed one on Day 2 in the Nomad Challenge, because it attacked me like an idiot - didn't even go after my TWO meat drop decoys! Remember, if you fight back from a Wolf fight, then you kill the wolf, 100% of the time. So, Pacifist can't be acquired then. If you don't fight back, then you drop down to 15% life (from 100%) and you risk him returning for a second fight.

A number of players have reported they were able to obtain the Pacifist achievement despite being forced to kill a wolf in self-defense. Apparently, self-defense doesn't count against you, because you weren't the aggressor.

So maybe, you just assumed you couldn't get the achievement and gave up too soon?

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On 5/7/2017 at 5:39 AM, JAFO said:

A number of players have reported they were able to obtain the Pacifist achievement despite being forced to kill a wolf in self-defense. Apparently, self-defense doesn't count against you, because you weren't the aggressor.

So maybe, you just assumed you couldn't get the achievement and gave up too soon?

I can kill 20 wolves and still get that achievement.  Only if you actually kill them in a fight does it block the achievement.  If the wolf bleeds to death from damage sustained during a struggle you still get the achievement.  I've gotten this achievement at least a dozen times (I like to reset my achievements and see if I can get them all in a single play through).  Your journal will say you killed a Wolf, but it doesn't count unless you deal the deadly blow.

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54 minutes ago, grimreefer24601 said:

Only if you actually kill them in a fight does it block the achievement.  If the wolf bleeds to death from damage sustained during a struggle you still get the achievement.

Thanks for the clarification.. that's good to know.

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There is too much loot in the nomad challenge for sure. It would be best to have goals at each location. But it's a great challenge for new players not really one for the extremists here. If they had allowed you to pick your level it could be better

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Perhaps the challenge is too specific in terms of requiring x days spent in a named indoor location. 

Spending 12 total days in Mystery Lake seems more reasonable than 3 days each in Carter dam, camp office, trappers and the lookout. Yes, you could conceivably camp out in the one place for 12 days and not explore, but that might actually require some planning/resource management to do. 

 

I've found that while I tried to move between locations and mix things up, none of the travel hours count towards the goal, so ultimately you are better off waiting indoors, potentially putting yourself at risk of cabin fever just to secure the challenge requirements. 

 

That really doesn't reflect any sort of nomadic gameplay.  

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I think the new Cartography gameplay will make quite a difference to the Nomad Challenge, for new players. If they take advantage of it and are diligent at updating their map, they'll be able to use the 'gaps' in their map to guess at where the unvisited locations are, rather than stumbling about in a more random way to find them.

This could well make the challenge more interesting in that way for them, and give more of a sense of exploration achievement. But for experienced players who know the maps already, it will never present any kind of "challenge'' at all, and will always feel like a waste of time and a chore, unless the amount of available loot is significantly reduced.

Perhaps the best solution would just be to change the description, so that it's clearer about the purpose of the challenge and the level of the difficulty, so that people don't wait until they know the maps like the backs of their hands before they attempt it?

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