stratvox

I am very much liking the direction the new maps are going in, esp. wrt their complexity. The serious minimisation of loading screens is really great; it's nice to be able to look out the window to see what's going on. It would be fantastic to see that done to some of the older maps, so that we can look out the window from say the Farmhouse and see if the bear's coming down that path or not. I have finally gotten around to exploring ZoC this past week or two (my gaming time is being severely limited by personal and professional circs of late) and I have very much enjoyed goating around including finding myself extending myself too far along the cliff face near where the cave that goes to FA is located, which was a serious white-knuckler, worse even then some of the cliffs in AC. The travois is a really sweet piece of kit, and from a gaming perspective is very well balanced I think. Really useful when hunting large game, somewhat useful when moving house from within a region (depending on local geography), and of limited usefulness when changing regions, depending on the intervening terrain, and that there is such a great variety of such is really great; for example, I tried using the travois to haul some forty kilos of gear from PV to BRM via Keeper's Pass, which, as it turned out, is not so great; I anticipated the multi-trip portage through the cave, but hadn't really considered that the travois would be useless for the vast majority of Keeper's Pass North, plus on the other side and as it turns out trying to do a multi-run through that river near the old substation is fraught with peril... and timberwolves. Really great gameplay (and yes, I died; not quite in harness but I think my body's less than a hundred meters from where I ditched the travois and tried to run). I like the transponder stuff too. I think if you create another Tale though it might be all right to consider having it be almost more a case of disparate messages/mementos found that start to reveal their connectedness as more of them are found; once a critical mass is put together it can then push the player to the start position on following the breadcrumbs that lead to whatever they lead to, rather than using the transponder to guide the player. Make it a little vague and able to get muddled up in (ooh, I bet if I go *here* I can find this thing ... well hell, that was a big nope, where is it?) etc etc, though tbf my level of progress in buried echos is absolutely minimal; right now I'm just getting a handle on the place and want to figure out my ideal happy hunting grounds in ZoC before I take it on in earnest. I also think a combination of transponder plus also needing (and I mean really needing) to reason things out at different steps along the way can make for some great gameplay, and I sincerely hope we'll get to see this with more stuff in the future, maybe in TLD 2: The TLDening.... Not so fond of the glimmer fog; that's not so much about the affliction (which I think could actually be beefed up a bit; it's pretty inoffensive as those things go) as it is about the filthy filthy visibility. Visually, I love the new regions, though I kind of miss what I call the Mystery Lake terrene, i.e. the old art style rocks found in Lower Great Bear. The gas mask's filter is awesome, and it just occurred to me that I've gotta try the Vintage effect with the Gas Mask on, just to check it out. I do kind of think that with these very mountainous regions that are getting created, the game should be more willing to allow players to fall to their death, esp in regards to say for example crawling around on the promontory in BI... but of course that's not a TFTFT thing. If I'm crawling around a mountain precipice in a blizzard I think it should be pretty likely that I can blissfully walk off that hundred metre cliff because I just didn't realise that that edge was The Edge, whereas right now most of the time that's impossible because of barriers. The mine infrastructure is top notch (ie concentrator, conveyer, head building, etc etc). I like that it looks like there are places that can become basically inaccessible once the air canisters are used up, and I also wonder if it might not be a crafting process to go from charcoal to using a can or pot and heavy hammer to make activated charcoal to being able to "recharge" air canisters for the mask, maybe using a special workbench for it in the mine that has the required tooling to work on the canisters or something to make it harder to make new canisters. The hand coverings, carcass harvest animations, and so on are all a MASSIVE MASSIVE win for immersion; I was actually surprised by how much it mattered. I'm kind of hoping that you can end up wrapping up the game by maybe Christmas this year; I feel like you could quite possibly create an incredible experience with this game using Unreal 5 for TLD 2; no need to mess with the art style, textures, etc, but from what I can see about how unreal manages distant vistas and light that that alone could be a massive massive upgrade, though of course I have no idea what would be involved in trying to recreate the maps in a new engine. TLD 2 with the current world and an ongoing process of new region creation over time is definitely something I would pay money for. While it would've been nice if the original schedule could've been closer (we're four months past its completion time and I kind of think we're supposed to get two more updates?) but overall I'm quite happy with it.

I dunno, I'm pretty open opportunity to regions. I mean, I'll run around and pick stuff up in the early game, but I am quite happy settling down for weeks at a time in a particular spot before moving on to another one. In my current run I've spent 39 of my 86 days in Ash Canyon, the hunting has simply been unreal in here (two moose bagged so far). I expect I'm going to be moving on soon, though; my current thinking is to take the mine back to Timberwolf, hit the summit, roll down to Mountaineer's the fast ouchy way, and then light out for the far territories.

I see you found the killer ptarmigan of Caerbannog. RIP Will. Stepped out of Angler's at just the right sec for this one: I was up on Stone Shelf the previous morning. A day full of promise.

I think Hinterland's been tinkering a little bit with the animal AI, which is a good thing, because generally it's not really that great.

The key to bear hunting is to be somewhere the bear can't get to. I almost exclusively hunt with the bow (I will use a rifle in a pinch but generally I prefer to use the bow). I like rock faces as a place to hunt from; you manage to get up on one and then edge yourself down a bit along a cliff over a place you know the bear will pass, then crouch. When the bear is close, you stand up, draw, and fire. Since it can't reach you it will flee, and once it flees it's immediately safe to get down and go about your day. Come back the next day and start looking for the carcass so you can do the things that need to be done. I basically use the same technique to hunt moose, though you will have to stay there and keep pounding arrows into it until you get it to drop; that can take quite a few arrows if you're rolling badly on the crits. For example, the moose on the bridge in DP I like to get up on the cliff next to the waterfall and fire arrows; from that location you can fire over and over again at the moose in total safety. Good practice for your mid-range archery. The one thing is ... you're gonna be there all day. All day. Hit it, it runs, wanders back to bridge, drop one right at its feet, it runs, gotta wait for it to get back to the bridge, put another one into it, it runs, lather rinse repeat.

Oh I think that product's on its way out.

I understand the studio's moving to UE5. Personally, I'd like them to finish up because I would really love an amped out version with no loading screens. No need to change the gameplay, the maps, the graphics and resources, just have it so it's all a big seamless world inside the region. You can see they're going that way to a certain extent with the cottages in FA. I would hope that they're considering re-implementing the world in UE5. Being able to get the kind of LoD qualities that UE5 would bring into TLD, plus the ability to potentially build much larger worlds that are level complete in all one map for each region (i.e. no loading screens, you just open the door and walk in, and can look out the window in the morning to look at the weather and be able to maybe look out through that side window in the camp office to see whether that deer's in the yard again). I'd pay money for that. Oh, and better animal AI. I love the world they've built. It'd be great to see what they could do with some of the new capabilities in their new engine. Plus not only would I buy it but I'd also uninstall the old one so that Unity couldn't try to charge 'em for it retroactively with that hare-brained scheme of theirs.

It's called the travois.

Well, yes, but that's the kind of tradeoff that makes the game: that weighs a lot more but can be maintained indefinitely; this will weigh less but eventually wear out and break.

The big one is chopping holes in the ice; that shizznit is infinite ETA: though I suppose the heavy hammer which is infinitely repairable does in fact fit that bill.

Great to see you again!

This is the way. Just keep moving around. The peripatetic life is the right life in TLD. Gotta move on every few weeks.

No, they've said they will, and while I know it takes a long time sometimes, Hinterland has been very good about getting there eventually. Also, I suspect the mod support is coming after they're done adding new game APIs to support their stuff (both Wintermute and the various Tales in Survival).

In the final analysis, the best place to refer to to figure out where your save game files are is https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020342871-Locating-your-Saved-Games-Folder

You're gonna get junked on that, and then you'll be looping around the regions looking for moose sign.

You should report this to the support portal.

Nice! I'll look forward to getting into it tonight.

Well, you're going to hear crickets because this is not a support channel, and I bet you're the only person experiencing this. I mean, I too have a hard time even understanding how TLD could do that. TBH that sounds like a major fault on the part of the OS; there's no way a program being run by a non-admin user should be able to shut down the network. Is your mac also up to date with fixes? There have been some major security problems found and fixed in the global tcp/ip stack which has also resulted in all vendors putting out updates to close the bug; it may be that you need to update your computer's operating system. As for the support portal, I've used it extensively. You can usually expect to wait a while before they get back to you. However, it all gets logged. Good bug reports are key; if you're able to show good evidence with a clear description to reproduce the problem, it's a lot easier for them to fix it. If you want to get help from Hinterland, here's the support portal for TLD: https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us. Click on "report an issue" in the top bar and fill out the form. Post any video to youtube or something and link to it in the comment box instead of uploading directly, but you can hammer up quite a few debug screenshots etc. I think it tops out at like five per report, or maybe eight? Been a while.... anyway. Put in your bug report there along with anything you can think of to demonstrate the problem; screenshots showing networking errors while tld's running for example. It must be quite frustrating; losing internet access during the game would be a complete show stopper for me. Is it possible it's running TLD in some kind of virtual machine or something weird like that?

Wood matches also weigh a LOT more than the cardboard ones do.

I tried that not too long ago (Keeper's with a travois). Ended up leaving a TON of stuff at the trailer. I may go back and get it at some point, but I have other things I need to do first. Keeper's is not a good fit with the travois.

ISTR that wolves always grabbed the decoy and ambled away, fwiw. I don't think that's a behaviour change.

Got it cranking in the headphones and the kids I work with (almost all the devs here are in their 20s) are totally puzzled why I'm head-banging away at my desk....

A little Can Con for all of you:

I've been using BR and BRM for Broken Railroad and Black Rock Mountain, respectively, mostly because it was usually BR here before BRM was introduced. That said, BRR and BRM make sense as ways to refer to them post Ep. 4.