Is TLD a hunting game?

[mattyboi]

1 hour ago, Dug said:

I might be missing something from this discussion but whenever I take a heart/lung shot at a deer, in TLD, it drops where it stands. The one time it didn't was when I botched the shot and accidentally shot it in the rump.

This is very interesting to me. Does this work for you at all difficulty levels? Any difference between rifle and bow/arrow?

Most of my grievance is with the rifle, as it is much more clear where you are aiming. Although, I suppose with the bow/arrow it is easier to tell where your shot actually ended up...

[Docterrok]

A bear can take a shotgun blast to the face, and with bigger game, like hippos, headshots just piss them off. 

[Docterrok]

On 3/27/2017 at 2:46 PM, mattyboi said:

I've never had trouble with a deer bleeding out from a heart shot, but that's just my $0.02.

I love how you didn't say two cents, it made me giggle.

[wathman]

Just solve one unrealistic game mechanic by using a different one. If you get a body shot that doesn't drop the animal and it starts to run away, you can just whip out your deck of cards and play solitaire as it scampers off. This will bore the animal to death and cause it to die on the spot once you get out of your solitaire trance. 

[cekivi]

@Dug: When the new system was first implemented criticals (i.e. the animal drops where it stands) were only awarded for head shots. After a lot of vocal feedback (I started at least one thread myself) criticals were put back in for the torso. It should have a lower %chance than the head unless something was tweaked recently.

 

[mattyboi]

@wathman LOL, well played, but you'll still burn down your vital meters, however.

@cekivi Good work on that part. I've only ever scored a "torso" crit when the animal was facing me, which I figured the game must have recognized as a "neck" shot; haven't gotten one on a broadside yet. We'll keep trying...

[Dug]

22 hours ago, mattyboi said:

This is very interesting to me. Does this work for you at all difficulty levels? Any difference between rifle and bow/arrow?

Most of my grievance is with the rifle, as it is much more clear where you are aiming. Although, I suppose with the bow/arrow it is easier to tell where your shot actually ended up...

Difficulty: Voyager (not been brave enough to go further).

Rifle only (I am terrible with the bow).

[mattyboi]

1 hour ago, Dug said:

Difficulty: Voyager (not been brave enough to go further).

Rifle only (I am terrible with the bow).

Thanks for the feedback. I've got a Voyager sandbox I'll jump into and play around with it, though I've mostly use bow. The good news is I should have plenty of rifle ammunition, so I'll see if I can replicate your results.

[mattyboi]

@Dug Unfortunately, on the way back to Trapper's Homestead to pick up my rifle, I came across a bear. Shot it 5 times over the course of two hours; all verified hits, I could see the blood spots in the snow and the arrows sticking out of the bear. It still didn't go down, and I died from blood loss when it charged me. So...will restart a new Voyager and test out your rifle results lol.

[cekivi]

4 hours ago, mattyboi said:

@Dug Unfortunately, on the way back to Trapper's Homestead to pick up my rifle, I came across a bear. Shot it 5 times over the course of two hours; all verified hits, I could see the blood spots in the snow and the arrows sticking out of the bear. It still didn't go down, and I died from blood loss when it charged me. So...will restart a new Voyager and test out your rifle results lol.

Bears usually take 3-5 hours to bleed out in game. Shoot once, nap, then go looking for it  

[mattyboi]

1 hour ago, cekivi said:

Bears usually take 3-5 hours to bleed out in game. Shoot once, nap, then go looking for it  

This was an interesting situation. I was heading back to Trappers Homestead from Muskeg. I cut through to the broken cabin by the deadfall area, and then head uphill to walk along the crest of those hills, because the bear had been spawning pretty regularly for me in that little den by Trappers and I wanted to see if he was there since I need one to wrap up my bedroll; and if not, there's usually a deer over there and my pants needed some mending so I figured I'd at least get the deer anyway.

So I come up to the hill top, and it turns out both the bear and the deer are down there in that little bowl area (along with a few rabbits). The way I usually hunt this area is I climb down the fallen tree on the side of the hill so that the bear can't get to me. So I skirt the hill top, climb down the log. Low and behold, the bear scares the deer straight in my direction. So I plug the deer with an arrow, he takes off running the other way, and ends up dying about 10 feet from the bear cave. So now I realize I have to kill the bear too at some point if I'm ever going to get that deer.

When the bear wanders over my direction, I hit him with an arrow. He tries to charge me, but he ends up getting stuck under the fallen tree where I'm standing, so I just lean over the side and pump two more arrows into him, thinking at some point he'll just go over. Finally he gets himself unstuck from the tree, but he's still running around moaning and doing his usual bear thing, and I keep thinking he's gotta be one shot away from dying. I was already pretty low on condition because I lost my body heat coming out of muskeg, and if this was my main sandbox I probably would have just walked away and waited for him to die. But this was an experimental sandbox and I wasn't really excited about the idea of trying to find firewood and thaw out two carcasses at most likely different locations, so I figured I'd just go for it. Climbed off the log, hit him with a fourth arrow. He doesn't go down; instead he stands up on two legs to charge me. I reload and hit him with a 5th arrow while he's charging. That doesn't stop him either, and then it was all over.

[cekivi]

@mattyboi: How the mechanics currently work is that there is no bonus for cumulative damage. Each shot resets the bleed counter (sigh) and your critical chance is re-rolled with each hit. Since the bow and arrow has a lower hit chance than the rifle it is not unlikely for several shots to not result in an instant kill.

[mattyboi]

1 hour ago, cekivi said:

@mattyboi: How the mechanics currently work is that there is no bonus for cumulative damage. Each shot resets the bleed counter (sigh) and your critical chance is re-rolled with each hit. Since the bow and arrow has a lower hit chance than the rifle it is not unlikely for several shots to not result in an instant kill.

Ah, thanks for the info. 

[selfless]

There is cumulative damage.  Bleeding timers are preserved.   But the mechanics are very simple (coding) and can be confounding.

A bear can be wounded only 10 times with the bow/rifle before dying, but there is a chance of not wounding it if you hit it on an edge (see grazing).  So each wounding shot should cause about 10% damage (except head shots may do more since it is very hard to not kill one after three hits to the head).  

Critical hits cause 100% damage and are more likely in the head (about 25% likelyhood for bears) while being impossible in the lower legs.

Bleedout timers are location based not damage based.  Shooting and animal in two different body areas will result in the faster bleeding area's timer being applied to the first shots delivery time.  Heads bleed fastest; feet bleed slowest.  Bleeding does not cause damage; only instant death when it runs past its time.  (EDIT: Changing maps allows animals on unoccupied maps to despawn leading to the incorrect observations that bleedout timers sometimes reset.  Actually, the bleeding animal was removed from memory and the map just spawns all new animals upon your return.)

Ballistics for the rifle do not exist; bullets do not exist.  Rather, the first object in-line with the sights of the gun immediately registers a hit when the trigger is pulled (but only if it is closer than about 50 meters, beyond max range nothing ever registers a hit).  Ballistics for the bow and flaregun are very simple, not being affected by wind nor losing killpower with range. 

Its been a while since I edited this but enjoy: http://thelongdark.wikia.com/wiki/Hunting

[cekivi]

Thanks for the correction @selfless. I was under the impression that there was no cumulative damage since I once unloaded 4 shots into a bear's torso and it still took several hours to bleed out. 

[selfless]

4 hours ago, cekivi said:

Thanks for the correction @selfless. I was under the impression that there was no cumulative damage since I once unloaded 4 shots into a bear's torso and it still took several hours to bleed out. 

Bleed out confuses many.  We tend to assume as the animal bleeds, it gets weaker.  This is not the case in TLD. 

A bear that was shot in the feet nine times will still take the same amount of time to die as A bear shot once (exactly 8 hours).  And that bear shot only once still has 90% condition remaining at hour 7 so can absorb another 8 such shots.

PS There are only 4 distinct hit areas currently.  Head and neck are one.

[selfless]

Also, only the outer skin of the creatures exists in the game world.  You may assume they have internal structures, but they do not; they are just balloons since their visual is all that is fundamentally required. Hits are then detected on the skin since that is the only thing being rendered.  

Detecting which shots penetrating that skin would also continue through some critical internal center and awarding the damage effects based on such would require much more complicated systems and logic than currently exists.

[cekivi]

11 hours ago, selfless said:

Detecting which shots penetrating that skin would also continue through some critical internal center and awarding the damage effects based on such would require much more complicated systems and logic than currently exists.

Not much more logic/work. It's already being done to a small extent with the different hit boxes in the game (torso, head, legs). If you added guts, heart, and lungs you'd be set.  

[Wasteland Watcher]

On 3/24/2017 at 8:47 AM, togg said:

A videogame is not a simulator.

The closer TLD is to a survival simulator the more my interest in it grows.

I do not know if I am in the minority regarding my opinion. I know what I like and I have the bad habit of spending with no inhibition when it comes to that.
The thing that caught my attention about TLD is that of all the other games out there, this one has more stringent and unforgiving survival mechanics.

If I wanted some 'easy mode' video game I'd be playing one of the other countless shooter or action games out there. Fortunately The Long Dark stands out as something different.
 

[dbldrew]

The whole hunting mechanic is just irritating. Shoot a deer in the body and it just runs like a spaz crisscrossing its trail over and over again so making it impossible to follow a blood trail.

 

What should happen is the deer bolts off and runs a distance and then beds down.. if it is not a vital shot it will take hours to die.. if you come up on it and its still alive it can bolt again. It should run slower if it is wounded making it easy pray for wolves.. so do you sneak up and try to get another shot in before a wolf finds it and devourers most of it or wait for it to die so you dont spook it into a wolf area?

 

But how it is now just running like crazy is not a good game mechanic..

[Docterrok]

If they based it off cabellas 2004 hunting sim it would be a million times better.

[cekivi]

On ‎2017‎-‎04‎-‎08 at 6:57 PM, dbldrew said:

But how it is now just running like crazy is not a good game mechanic..

Yeah... I have to agree with you there. The first instinct is to run but afterwards a wounded animal will stop and try to rest.

It's gotten to the point where I always try to hunt near cars or shelters so I can sleep for the 1-2 hours for the bleed out counter to run down.

[Crocket]

11 hours ago, cekivi said:

It's gotten to the point where I always try to hunt near cars or shelters so I can sleep for the 1-2 hours for the bleed out counter to run down.

Yea, totally agree. It's a shame because it feels so cheezy. But once you score that hit and watch the animal start running away, the prospect of losing your arrow, or not being able to locate the meat because it runs so damn far (with an arrow in its leg!), is too much. So, a quick game of solitaire it is... Improvements to the persistence of blood drops to allow tracking could help.

[cekivi]

6 hours ago, Crocket said:

Improvements to the persistence of blood drops to allow tracking could help.

Based on my conversations on the forums blood drop persistence seems to be a problem unique to the PC. Most of the X-Box players I've talked to haven't experienced it.

[Wasteland Watcher]

On 4/13/2017 at 7:23 AM, cekivi said:

Yeah... I have to agree with you there. The first instinct is to run but afterwards a wounded animal will stop and try to rest.

It's gotten to the point where I always try to hunt near cars or shelters so I can sleep for the 1-2 hours for the bleed out counter to run down.

Hi Cekivi, nice to read your tips and guidance again

Currently if you sleep an hour or so after shooting an animal, it will be at the location you last saw it when you wake?