Animals, Enemies, and Situational Awareness

[Roger Laguna]

Hello,

I only have 20 or so hours on the game, but I've noticed a repeated issue that I wanted to make public to the Developers in hopes of them doing something about it. This is the issue of a lack of situational awareness regarding potential threats in the world. I regularly die to ninja-bears, stealth-pigs, and silent wolves that I never saw or heard coming. While I do agree that a level of stealth should be incorporated into these threats to add an element of realism, the current ability to detect them is almost non-existent and detracts from the experience tremendously. While it may be difficult to further incorporate additional visual elements to improve awareness of these potential threats, it would surely be easy enough to add additional noises to improve auditory detection.

Thank you for hearing my rant and I hope that efforts will be made to improve this deficit. 

[Facethief]

The trick with pigs is to have a panic attack every time you see a piglet. They scare me more than anything else, as pigs have a wider chase range (it seems) than the other aggressive animals. Which makes sense, as herbivores can afford to get injured more than hunters in the real world.

[Monkeylord]

I agree. Animals should have footstep sounds at the very least. It's okay if sometimes a wolf or a bear sneak up to you, they are hunters after all, but you should hear most animals from a distance

[rvenson]

I really like the fact that you need to be extremely cautious when exploring new locations and expect stealth predators on forests and hills. However, sometimes it feels like bears can hide anywhere, and even if you kill all of them in a region, the next day there are more to deal with.

There seem to be some obvious improvements that could make hunting and exploration dangerous but still fun:

• Add droppings and footprints in regions where animals spawn.
• Make predators growl louder, so they can be heard from relatively long distances.
• Give them audible footsteps, allowing players to detect them at short distances.
• Reduce spawn frequency, so if you clear a region, you can expect at least a week of relative peace.

As a fan of hardcore gameplay, I don't want predators to be easy to flee from or easy to kill.

[Roger Laguna]

Great input guys, thanks for the replies.