Please separate animal difficulty from survival difficulty

I do not like the aggression of the wolves. However, in order to play without that aggression, I have to also give up challenging survival gameplay.

The Silent Hill games broke difficulty into two separate configurations: puzzle difficulty and combat difficulty. I'd like to see something similar done in TLD: combat difficulty, controlling the aggression of the wolves and bears, and survival difficulty, controlling the effects of the cold, calorie loss, and injury.

(In a perfect world, of course, you'd just put all the tuning values into an ini file and let us tweak them individually -- without leaderboard access in a re-tuned game, of course.)

Try to learn the behavior of the wolfes. If you became familiar with they behaviors/reactions you will find out that they aren't as aggressive as you think. I done the same. I find out that my behavior cause them to became aggressive most of the time.

Oh, I understand the wolves. I just don't find that part of the game as much fun as the cold/hunger mechanics. So I play on easy for a quiet contemplative game... but I really miss the hunger and cold tuning values from the harder difficulties.

Players request this over and over again thratchen. Sure, it points to a deeper, core design issue, but let’s not worry about that for now.

All I can tell you, paraphrasing the developers, they are constantly working on wolves, so even if your suggestion for this kind of mixing and matching - a sensible one compared to others - is unlikely to be added anytime soon, if ever, how wolves behave will change. So it’s probable that in future patches wolves’ AI will be, hopefully, different in a way that's more fun and enjoyable for everyone.

This and the fact that at least one major change in gameplay is inbound, if not two.

Deterrence or impossibility of hibernation, which I don't see possible with a minor tweak here and there, the developers' wording was something along the lines of "pretty big changes", whatever that means. So while these will probably not affect wolves in particular, if the entire game will feel different, every player will reevaluate everything, including wolves, because we’ll experience them in a different context than we do now.

Then, NPCs, survival AIs, whatever. If they will be like anything we expect, two arms two legs, moving across the maps, major change to gameplay. You can imagine, if there will be an NPC running around, supposedly surviving, or trying to, they will interact with wolves, so now every discussion about wolves is out of context.

Because, sure, wolves get changed, or a more granular level of difficulty is added. Say you pick easy wildlife, hard supplies, what about the AIs? Suppose you pick hard wildlife to give the AIs a harder time, wolves eat them more often. Get what I'm saying? There’s no way to know right now.

Other than this, sure, like I said, very sensible way to be granular, instead of something similar to Don’t Starve, which is impossible to do in TLD, at least this year.

God knows, TLD has a lot to learn from Team Silent, and mixing and matching difficulty like that is just one of them.

The thing is, I like the cruel and vicious survival difficulty, and were all the tuning constants exposed in an ini file or xml, I'd just tweak 'easy' to be 'easy++' and call it good.

I strongly feel like there are two different games here, and I'm perfectly happy with the way wolves behave. It's just that I don't always want to play that game. Sometimes I want to play the game where I struggle to find food and shelter. They're clearly distinct game systems; as a game designer, I know the challenges of tuning intermingled systems, but I'm confident in saying that wolf aggression has no overlap with the rate at which the cold, hunger and thirst bars tick up, and they're not intermingled.

I didn't want to turn this into a 'change wolf tuning' conversation, because I can see from how frequently I come across those threads that it's contentious. I just want to play the easy-mode game with hard-mode cold. (Honestly the first thing I did was search for a mod to do just that.)

+1, I would also like to see this happen.

I totally agree with this. WHY? Because some of us are married and are in full time work...

I personally haven't had a problem with Wolves, I make sure I'm quite stealthy around them.

BUT

I read some of the comments on this forum and I think - 'these guys are nuts' - asking for harsher more challenging gameplay. I mean I don't want to play this game for 5 + real time hours per session to get anywhere on it!

I think difficulty should have a check list of things to turn on or off, so people can customise the experience to suit them. I mean I don't play on the easiest difficulty because wildlife won't attack you (that's no fun!) but there are things about medium difficulty that are maybe a bit too harsh at present for my skill level at the game, as I'm just starting to get to grips with the game and consider myself a novice!