New Survival Mode
zetachron
Germany Join Date: 2014-11-14 Member: 199655Members
Germany Join Date: 2014-11-14 Member: 199655Members
I have some questions/suggestions with the new mode.
First, the time constraints seem a little steep, which partially goes to the extreme fast day/night cycle. But to me it seems that you only have about 1,5 ingame days (estimated only) until you run empty with hunger and thirst implemented (although you only see red health effect without dying). Measuring real time it takes about 15 minutes until you experience damage from exhaustion (about 12 minutes for thirst). Do you really want to keep it this way? My suggestion is an option for the speed of time setting or maybe better, a clock ingame button to switch time speed (which some games have to avoid boring processes).
Second, hunger should take far more time to proceed to starvation as thirst. Correct me if I'm wrong, but dehydration usually is told to come after 3-4 days, while for hunger it takes weeks to starve (difficult for an average, but hunger strikes are matter of many weeks). So do you plan to make hunger last 2-4 times longer than thirst or keep them almost the same? Do you plan to adjust starvation to ingame time matching real world survival?
Third, will it stay resource intensive to manage survival? Like salt getting a new survival currency with not much salt to find around? Is it all or nothing - meaning that in survival mode I can't enjoy exploring because of extreme time constraints forcing me to harvest in a race against time? (right now there seems to be a eating/drinking bug preventing me from long time testing)
Fourth, what will be part of a normal mode and what of a survival mode? Oxygen seems to be everyone, pressure isn't in yet and I don't know if it will come. Same with thermal effects. I assume the surface classics of most survival games (eat, sleep, drink) will be pure survival only. I don't favor them as important as oxygen, pressure, temperature or currents though, as I consider these factors the most appropriate for underwater difficulties. I would assume that currents are hard to implement dynamically in a game and temperature may too. But what about pressure?
Fifth, pure optically, is about visual percentage bars like oxygen vs. percentage in numbers. Do you plan more than the oxygen bar? And what kind of feedback do you plan on health, if no percentage at all? Will you replace any status on health info by optical effects? But how will you do so with infection, radition, bleeding and other effects?
Sixth, what about long term stamina and vision effects through starvation from food and drink. Like blur vision and speed reduction? Do you plan to have stamina at all?
EDIT:
Oh, I forgot to mention the sun rising/moving. Sun looks good, inlcuding effects at water level. But measuring time gave me about 10 minutes for a day cycle and I think less than 2 minutes for a night cycle when I was on top of my lifepod. There also was no moon. Do you plan a moonlight scenario? And do you plan a longer night cycle?
First, the time constraints seem a little steep, which partially goes to the extreme fast day/night cycle. But to me it seems that you only have about 1,5 ingame days (estimated only) until you run empty with hunger and thirst implemented (although you only see red health effect without dying). Measuring real time it takes about 15 minutes until you experience damage from exhaustion (about 12 minutes for thirst). Do you really want to keep it this way? My suggestion is an option for the speed of time setting or maybe better, a clock ingame button to switch time speed (which some games have to avoid boring processes).
Second, hunger should take far more time to proceed to starvation as thirst. Correct me if I'm wrong, but dehydration usually is told to come after 3-4 days, while for hunger it takes weeks to starve (difficult for an average, but hunger strikes are matter of many weeks). So do you plan to make hunger last 2-4 times longer than thirst or keep them almost the same? Do you plan to adjust starvation to ingame time matching real world survival?
Third, will it stay resource intensive to manage survival? Like salt getting a new survival currency with not much salt to find around? Is it all or nothing - meaning that in survival mode I can't enjoy exploring because of extreme time constraints forcing me to harvest in a race against time? (right now there seems to be a eating/drinking bug preventing me from long time testing)
Fourth, what will be part of a normal mode and what of a survival mode? Oxygen seems to be everyone, pressure isn't in yet and I don't know if it will come. Same with thermal effects. I assume the surface classics of most survival games (eat, sleep, drink) will be pure survival only. I don't favor them as important as oxygen, pressure, temperature or currents though, as I consider these factors the most appropriate for underwater difficulties. I would assume that currents are hard to implement dynamically in a game and temperature may too. But what about pressure?
Fifth, pure optically, is about visual percentage bars like oxygen vs. percentage in numbers. Do you plan more than the oxygen bar? And what kind of feedback do you plan on health, if no percentage at all? Will you replace any status on health info by optical effects? But how will you do so with infection, radition, bleeding and other effects?
Sixth, what about long term stamina and vision effects through starvation from food and drink. Like blur vision and speed reduction? Do you plan to have stamina at all?
EDIT:
Oh, I forgot to mention the sun rising/moving. Sun looks good, inlcuding effects at water level. But measuring time gave me about 10 minutes for a day cycle and I think less than 2 minutes for a night cycle when I was on top of my lifepod. There also was no moon. Do you plan a moonlight scenario? And do you plan a longer night cycle?
Comments
Right now the starting stats are probably much too harsh on a fresh player in normal mode. Its not so much the rate for starvation but rather how much you start out with at the beginning of the game. I envision you having about 20 minutes to get a grasp on things which may still be a bit fast. However, my thought on this is to have supply boxes or debris from the ship that are randomly sprinkled around that provide bottles of fresh water as well as pre-packaged food to sustain new players. Right now none of those mechanics are in place so I apologize for it feeling pretty harsh right now.
I very much agree with this and feel that hunger should take longer than thirst. I'll bring this up with charlie, as the current system thirst actually increases much slower than hunger. The current system is very much in a state of adjustment. As far as it matching real life I would say that in its current path it is more about the pacing for game play that will drive the design than realism.
The current stats are
30 minutes from full to starving
45 minutes from hydrated to dehydrated
Each day lasts about 20 minutes
These numbers may have already changed by now though.
The goal is for the constraints to feel much worse at the very start then to become almost too easy once you get the hang of it. However, with that said, its almost impossible to balance a system like this until all of its aspects are in place. What you are playing right now is the first iteration of this system so it has a lot of work left to be done. But with that said, it should feel roughly equal to what you experience in other survival exploration games when everything is hooked up.
Pressure is planned but thermal and currents are not being worked on at the moment. These systems exist but for the moment are not part of our primary objectives. At least not on the level design side.
Not ignoring this question. I do not know what is currently planned on the UI side of things.
Right now the plan is not to include stamina or a need to sleep. The idea is that there will be a lot more to micromanage at a later point in the game so it may be a bad idea to stack sleeping on top of that. We can provide a way to speed up time as I personally feel that is very important in a game where day and night cycles are important aspects of the game play.
With that said, its possible that carrying a lot of weight may effect how quickly you use up your resources. So there will likely be a lot of angles that we can hit this.
I'm not sure on this one either.
I hope this is helpful!
Looking at other survival games, I realize two critical aspects of survival that always cause difficulties and critisism.
For one, some like to explore more (the explorer) and see survival as a secondary aspect that should not prohibit exploring, but still be inside the game. While for others survival are the primary aspect as part of a hard challenge they want to have in the game (the survivalist). There is probably no way to serve both needs with one set of rules and customization or two different survival rulesets will probably be best for that, I think.
A second problem is that survival starts harsh and later gets easy. The player first has to learn the howtos, map the resources and built tools for survival. Once done, the balance of challenge is gone. As mentioned, a solution would be to throw in a limited amount of old world resources to use up until the player has adapted and aquired survival knowledge and resources. Lets say there are resources for 7 ingame days available, then the player has that time to use this stack as an emergency backup for survival - or stupidly live 7 days from these resources and then try to find food and water - it's up to the player. The only danger I see, is that if the backup resources are too hidden, the player will rather hunt for these resources using them up until he realizes (stupidely too late) that he can't continue that way. If the resources are immediately at hand, the player will quickly realize the limitation and sooner start searching natural resources.
EDIT:
Forgot about stamina and weight: I think the food level (calories?) is already a good stamina bar replacement. Just define how much swimming will use up food (other than time), and no need for extra stamina. Weight also can increase calories burning away faster. So a weight bar and food bar is probably enough. If you loose 10% food doing nothing in a certain timeframe, then swimming empty could double the burn and therefore you loose 20% food in the same time swimming. Swimming with a certain weight would add multiplication factor, so maybe you loose 30% food now if carrying much with you. Simple formula, probably easy to implement.
I don't think it is very enjoying, having to track 2 bars that are the basically the same mechanic.
You can still have water as an ingredient for some/most prepared foods.
Bonus: there is already salt in the water(i assume its salt water), so we don't need to pick up giant salt cubes :P
edit: I'm maybe judging this too early, i guess a lot of the enjoyment problems also come from the work in progress, not optimal working gui and its controls.
I would suggest not doing it, mainly for immersion. You'd have to prohibit drinking (like in those games where you drink to refill health). Some people might start to ask why they can eat but not drink. It doesn't let you feel right. Mainly because in real life it's the same. You're used to eat and drink seperately, unlike astronauts or athletes who eat or drink special nutrient energy mixes.
Certainly a nutrition multibar system like carbohydrates, proteins, fat, water and essentials like minerals would be more exact. Each food would replenish a set of nutrients and each activity would cost a set of nutrients. Giving the programmers a pain and making it more strategic/hardcore for the player to watch a set of bars. The survival pace would have to be reduced to make place for a search for diversity (like finding some plants with rare minerals, fat fish or protein rich species), thus strengthening and forcing exploration right down to the deep depths of the ocean. It also mirrors real life eating different meals (unless you live from burgers all day). Unfortunately, the more interesting the system is, the more pain it will be to program.
The simple food and water system feels immersive enough for most and isn't much more complex than a single food system.
About salt in water: Unfortunately it takes tech and energy to get salt out of water, to allow it to drink. I'm no saltwater techie, but if you would need salt to get salt out of water, than the salt you gained could be reused, couldn't it? I don't think salt in masses is needed for survival. Only for food preservation against spoilage.
Just a thought on combining hunger and thirst. Which I think is a totally valid point to make. I have thought about this very thing many times. So here is my take on it.
In terms of pure game play mechanics eating and drinking are not technically redundant systems and they do serve a greater purpose other than extra management. The main difference is that they both have unique rates. This causes you to have to treat them differently. On top of that, it gives reason to have a separate tree for valuable items to collect rather than just having one that covers all. One of the main concerns when it comes to having a system like this is to avoid having it become something that "just gets in the way" of the game. If the system lacks depth then this problem can occur much more easily. I feel this is why hunger systems have always been criticized in the past as being annoying and pointless.
When looked at in simple terms hunger and thirst are a distraction, but if you over simplify this distraction it then becomes an un-fun or uninteresting distraction. It defeats the point of having the system in place at all.
Ultimately the core point for these systems are to introduce cool stories or interesting situations. A more complex system has a higher chance of causing you to experience more interesting situations. It has a higher probability to force you to make important choices and experience consequences and rewards which in turn becomes your story. So IMHO, its a major concern if this system is not accomplishing this goal.
Sorry, ranted a bit. (I just really love this topic)
Ok - This reply got longer than I expected, but it is my thoughts on the hunger/water situation.
I would like to say from my point of view, I don't agree entirely with what you said. It may just be a wording issue, forums are notorious for mis-understandings, but you seem to imply that a simple distractions becomes unfun or un-interesting, and imply that a more complex system has a higher probability of fun.
Although you don't specificly mention fun, you state that a more complex system has a higher chance of creating more interesting situations.
While that can be true, I would counter that by saying a poorly implemented mechanic can be un-fun, no matter how simple or complex, and a well implemented mechanic can be immensely fun, no matter how simple or complex. As an example, placing clogs in NS2 is a very simple mechanic that could be made infinitely more complex, but wouldn't make it anymore fun, in fact, it would probably make it more unfun (I will make this a word!!) The enjoyment comes from what you can do by placing the clogs, rather than the mechanic itself.
The fun derives from what that simple mechanic allows you to do. That is the key, it is the abilities and drawbacks that the mechanic provides that define whether it is fun, not it's complexity.
I often have to stop myself from making things overly complex. Sure overly complex may make something more 'hardcore', but sometimes you can create the same level of fun, for more people, by easing up on the complexity of individual systems, but providing complexity by the way they integrate into the game flow.
My personal opinion would be a combined water/hunger meter, purely for simplicity sake. You can still have the two separate values hunger and thirst, draining the same meter at their unique values, so the complexity is there under the hood, but in game, it is not so pronounced. Personally though, I would go for a single meter/intake
Thinking about it holistically for a moment, the intake aspect of a survival game takes up a portion of the game. As does shelter, transport, tools. As subnautica is a water based single player game, there will be other mechanics to deal with, specific to the game and environment, like oxygen, pressure, temperature, currents.
This is already a lot of complexity managing all the different survival aspects, and subnautica isn't even a survival game, it's an adventure/exploration game with survival elements, at least, that is how I have interpreted the promotion of the game.
With this in mind, if you make the intake requirement complex, you create a lot of grind for the basic survival tasks, and the bigger tasks never get done.
Maybe it could work in the hardcore mode, but I would certainly suggest for the normal mode a single resource.
And actually survival isn't an enjoyable thing to do usually. On the contrary, it's really stressful. Hence the name: survival.
Whatever mechanics you end up with, I really hope the spirit and the beauty of the artwork will be kept, hours of exploration and interaction with the ocean. If it ends up being yet another food gathering simulator then I hope there will be cheats for those of us who've already gathered enough stacks of meat and have cooked them in pots, pans, over open fire and now... in a constructor. ^^
Oh this is true, I did not intend to say that complexity == fun. Complexity has no direct correlation with fun on any basic level.
What I am saying is that I view survival as a design commitment. While it is perfectly ok to include separate modes of play I feel that one does not merely add a simple survival element to a game. Taking that first step toward survival is a full on commitment and if you are going to do it right you have to take the plunge.
A half designed survival system is like a half designed RTS with no strategic elements. A single hunger system that can mostly be ignored brings nothing to the table while only becoming an annoying need to click an icon once every 10 minutes. In other words the game would be better off without it. If the system doesn't force you to make important choices then it is failing as a survival mechanic. This is one of the reasons that we see the DayZ devs constantly adding systems to the game. At its core its forcing you to make choices and take risks, which at its heart, is what makes this particular genre tick.
Now I dont want to argue that it might be a good idea to go with one meter or two just yet. Its very possible that due to the fact that we have oxygen and various other things like item durability and power usage that it will eventually be a bit overwhelming on the player. I want to see how things pan out a bit before making such a choice due to the nature of a system like this. My main concern is that survival systems survive on the details and it can be hard to properly tune such a system until every element is in place roughly functioning as it should.
My current feeling is that, for normal mode, the system should feel demanding at first but eventually reach a point where its almost too easy once the player gets the hang of it. This will take some time to get right but I want to hear play testers saying stuff like "At first I spent all of my time getting food but after a couple hours it stopped being a big deal and now I feel like they need to make it harder."
If we do a hardcore mode then I want it to be agonizing but that's another topic. I love hardcore modes in games like this and would die to see an absolutely brutal hardcore mode.
Creative mode I would suggest not including any survival mechanics at all or making them almost completely ignorable.
I am not saying that we do not need or profit from a 2nd unique system to manage, with a whole different tree of cool stuff to collect create and discover.
What I want to say is, food and drinking are so close to each other that i worry next to hunger thirst may not have the potential to become something amazingly interesting and unique. So maybe merge it, and if needed, implement something more exciting...
Or, just make it amazing and blow my mind.
A short version:
We have primary needs fitting the scenario. Like food and heat in winter, but not water. Thirst and radition in a wasteland, but not food. Underwater it's not food or water, but oxygen, pressure and currents. Rest is secondary needs.
Secondary needs like food and water should be tied to level of activity like swimming and digging. Sleep tied to visual and research concentration. Radiation tied to diseases and dna mutations.
Harvesting food, water or batteries for survival consumption needs is the worst for the explorer type of player, as it draws a lot of time away from exploration. Most other needs add value to exploration. In the end all that counts for fun is avoiding dull harvesting. Even a long hunt is better than just sampling food.
Some arguments for a separate food and water system:
+ you're used to eat and drink separately (immersion)
+ they have separate rates (you starve in weeks and dehydrate in days)
? they are secondary needs underwater (you might as well forget about both)
- it's interesting to search, hunt, research and aggriculture species for different food, but water is boring
But if the game already plans dna for the living species a more complex biosystem could be included:
A species could have dna, proteins, minerals as well as calories, fat and water. Which means that you're forced to explore and research for eating. Some species might be poisonous, carry fungi spores or absorped radition from the ship. Some species offer valuable minerals or biomolecules for research. Some species might produce sweetwater as some species already produce oxygen bubbles. And some species hold ingredients for medical use.
Dynamic feedback levels:
Maybe some factors like starvation, dehydration, radiation, poisoning, bleeding or any kind of deficiency only gets displayed when it reaches a certain threshold. Otherwise it stays in the engine background. A human for example might feel his stomach growl only when he starts getting hungry and far bevor he starves from hunger.