Difficulty curve and danger level
Cryselle
Canada Join Date: 2017-01-03 Member: 226011Members
Canada Join Date: 2017-01-03 Member: 226011Members
So, I picked up this game kinda on a whim during the steam winter sale, and while sandboxy survival games (and early access in general) really isn't normally my thing, I found myself enjoying this particular game immensely. I do, however, have a bit of a gripe.
Specifically, it feels like enemies in general (and therefore the game) tends to flip almost immediately from exceedingly deadly to almost harmless. The best example of this is reaper leviathans, which are massively terrifying in the beginning when you're bare or in a seamoth... and then practically ignored late game in the prawn suit and cyclops. There's never really a point in the game where you're actually dealing with them as a hazard in any significant fashion unless you intentionally decide you want to play stasis-rifle tag with one.
The upshot of this is that I found the beginning of the game to be, by far, the most fun. Stalkers (when you have a knife and fins) feel dangerous and capable of harming you, but something you can deal with if you don't overreach and get yourself into a bad spot. Later enemies were larger and scarier... but significantly less threatening in practice and didn't feel like they were impacting what I wanted to do nearly as much. I would dearly love the ocean to continue to feel like something I need to survive, rather than getting comfortable with perfectly safe trips from A to B to collect the reasonably limited amount of most late-game resources needed, and that means good reasons to get up close and personal with things that want me dead while they're still capable of harming me. Right now you could play up to the active lava zone without ever actually seeing a reaper leviathan, and there's never a reason to have any meaningful engagement with one.
Specifically, it feels like enemies in general (and therefore the game) tends to flip almost immediately from exceedingly deadly to almost harmless. The best example of this is reaper leviathans, which are massively terrifying in the beginning when you're bare or in a seamoth... and then practically ignored late game in the prawn suit and cyclops. There's never really a point in the game where you're actually dealing with them as a hazard in any significant fashion unless you intentionally decide you want to play stasis-rifle tag with one.
The upshot of this is that I found the beginning of the game to be, by far, the most fun. Stalkers (when you have a knife and fins) feel dangerous and capable of harming you, but something you can deal with if you don't overreach and get yourself into a bad spot. Later enemies were larger and scarier... but significantly less threatening in practice and didn't feel like they were impacting what I wanted to do nearly as much. I would dearly love the ocean to continue to feel like something I need to survive, rather than getting comfortable with perfectly safe trips from A to B to collect the reasonably limited amount of most late-game resources needed, and that means good reasons to get up close and personal with things that want me dead while they're still capable of harming me. Right now you could play up to the active lava zone without ever actually seeing a reaper leviathan, and there's never a reason to have any meaningful engagement with one.
Comments
Since you're new, I estimate you haven't visited UWE's Trello page yet? Warning for spoilers and mind that nothing is a guarantee, but you might like the roadmap's card for Silent Running Cyclops tech in February. The Cyclops never was meant to be guaranteed safety, so the current situation is simply the current situation. Same for bases, but if anything more is done on them it'll be after V1.0 in May.
Wishes for more reasons to go into reaper territory exist in the community, but there aren't any known plans to make those places more functional atm (give or take more minor precursor leftovers).
Once cyclops is nerfed and bases can be damaged I'll probably not really play anymore. Cyclops is my one and only base these days anyway.
While I hadn't seen the Trello page yet, the card for Silent Running Cyclops would require the Cyclops to be more interesting to me in the first place. I do have a ton of thoughts on the vehicles and their balance, but havn't posted them since I'm new and don't want people to be all "What's with this chick?" by having a 2 page manifesto in my first 10 posts. =D
While I agree with you to a point, there's a huge difference between "This area is too annoying for me to bother with" and "I really want to enter this area, but I'm legitimately afraid of dying if I do". While you don't want to make a game feel punishing to the players, there's a lot to be said for the adrenaline spike of "Oh damn, I might die here" moments if they're not overdone. Eventually you're going to hit the point where you know all the threats, know how to handle each of them, and feel pretty comfortable with your ability to do anything you want to do, and that's okay. But getting to that point is the game, in a nutshell.
Sure you feel spectacular swinging around Lava zone with your grappling arm, up until warper teleports you out of your PRAWN suit which then falls into lava and if you got disoriented enough you could lose it right there and then, which would also probably kill you unless you have something else parked nearby. Or just happened to lug around enough resources to make a thermal reactor and a module to hide in.
I certainly don't look for an Ark-like game where everything is super aggressive and does tons of damage as well as chases, but the enemies should be more threatening nonetheless. The feel more like bees in all honesty. Don't bother them, they dont bother you. Even if you do it'll only sting a little.
GR and 1st BKZ work just fine for that (or at least, they did up to Bones).
I kind of like that, it makes them feel like actual wildlife instead of mindless aggressors. But, then again, I usually side with the "easier" arguments on these discussions.
I have to go bother stalkers all the time, and sand sharks simply love to sit on places I want to be. The crab snake felt almost perfect my first time into the jelly shroom caves, they were scary looking, common enough to be a threat, but not so common or so dangerous that I wasn't able to do the things I wanted to do down there once I figured out what they were about. Those three, to me, made the ocean interesting in the early-mid game. I would dearly have loved a moment where I really felt I needed to work around the reapers similarly to how I had to accept the fact that I was going to get out of my sub and get things done in crab snake territory. And that was key. Going past crab snakes in my seamoth wasn't too big a deal, they couldn't hurt it much, it was the need to make myself vulnerable in their area that created tension. I never got that with reapers.