How worth it is pushing on with story stuff/is it just me or are the default distances kind of silly?

[Jubal]

So, I finally reached the second story location, about 8000 blocks or two full days of journey by elk from home, and now apparently I need to go the same distance again in the same direction for the next location? And for all I know there'll be further ones still? For a game that uses a single rare item for limited spawn resets (I have one left with me, plus one back at home) and which makes replacing your main transport mode very costly, that feels incredibly excessive in terms of distances and especially in terms of supply lines and loot: I am now already 8000 blocks from home, with two trunks full of stuff from this location which would take an age to get back: it's a long round trip to go home and get more trunks, and getting enough facilities together here to make more trunks to hold future loot is also a huge investment of time because it requires an anvil, and I'm... not really sure why I'm doing any of this? Either from an out of world or in-world perspective?

The next location sounds interesting, but it's also SO far away from home that it's not going to be somewhere I can move near or visit at all regularly. It's wildly too far for me to be able to do anything useful as regards preparing better routes there, and I don't have that much physical IRL gaming time to take an entire ingame month per round trip even assuming I do every round trip perfectly and never mess up (which also means every round trip has to be done in the most boring way and I'm very disincentivised to explore). So getting to the new locations doesn't really add to my gameplay because they're too far from home to be especially useful, and I'm not totally sure what else I'm getting out of any of this.

Before anyone says it, yes I'm vaguely aware that you can probably adjust these distances at world gen. But I didn't know that when I started my main world and I don't have time to make a new one: I think the default story location distances are about double what's reasonable for a "standard" player. I don't feel like I get anything extra out of the distances being further: the challenge isn't different, because it's all the same biome I'm not really seeing anything new about the world, and I'm minimising non-vital exploration because on the x-deaths-to-go-before-reset system I need to minimise danger much more than maximise interest in exploring. In general it feels like the game's pressure at this stage becomes to just do lots and lots of these pretty slow trips, because it combines very static home facilities with very long journey times and large quantities of moderately valuable but also awkward to transport loot.

But yeah, interested to hear other thoughts or whether I'm really missing something here.

[Rainbow Fresh]

30 minutes ago, Jubal said:

I'm... not really sure why I'm doing any of this? Either from an out of world or in-world perspective?

Well, the simplest answer would probably be "They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this. Or maybe you are just interested in seeing some actual content in the world, that isn't just the same trees in the same plains, the same rocks filling the ground and the same couple cobblestones littering the world in the same "ruins". But instead actually big, cool, fleshed out locations with lots of detail in love put into it. Or you just want the shitton of loot you'd otherwise have to work long and hard for.

Mind you, I'm not saying any of these reasons are rock-solid, kill-all-doubt reasons for why you must, absolutely, under any circumstances go there and do that. Far from it. If you don't feel like its worth it, maybe it's not. Nothing and noone in this game's story content is keeping you from anything; Homo Sapiens mode exists, after all.

Edited Friday at 10:35 PM by Rainbow Fresh

[Edwin_Blacktallow]

I would agree, the default distance is far. And when you only have so much time to play just walking for an hour, not really feeling like you are getting closer to your goal and then having to stop does suck.

I try to peek into surface caves and find broken translocators, they can get you a fair distance but which direction that is is pretty random. Also as far as I'm aware you always end up deep underground, so pack a lantern, a pickaxe and some ladders to get back to the surface. You might get lucky and end up with a chain of translocators with short walks between them that help you traverse longer distances.

Another option would be mods, now I belive this game should be a challenge. But I also believe it should be fun, I use a few quality of life mods to help balance that out. One is bed spawns, chuck a bed roll down, sleep in it and when you die you end up where you slept. If you still drop loot on death and your saturation is reduced it is still something you want to avoid, so death dosent become meaningless, but it's less of a set back, that way you can get back in the action, and back to the fun.

Over all I would say the story locations are worth the effort. Vintage story does a great job at making the journey difficult, and it should be. You need to plan, you need to think about what you are doing before wandering off into the wilderness, I think that's great.

Don't feel disheartened if you need to head back home before moving onto the next location, think about everything you learned on your journey. Make a plan, take time to prepare and get back out there!

[LadyWYT]

Honestly I feel the distances are shorter than what they should be. I know why the devs decided to adjust the distances from what they originally were, and in the long run that was probably for the best in terms of game design, but the story also lost some of its impact with that change.

42 minutes ago, Jubal said:

The next location sounds interesting, but it's also SO far away from home that it's not going to be somewhere I can move near or visit at all regularly.

It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, however, the distance is what makes the world actually feel impactful--that is, it's going to require some planning and cost you something to see those places. If you plan poorly or run into trouble, then you'll have to improvise a solution, since turning around and going back home isn't necessarily going to be an option. That travel difficulty also means you'll need to be careful about what items you choose to pack, what items you buy from NPCs, and what loot you take from locations, since you won't be able to just go back home and drop off your loot whenever your bags are full.

In contrast, worlds that are very compact are very convenient for travel, but can easily wind up with stories that feel just a little bit silly rather than serious. Take Skyrim, for example--it's supposed to be a vast wilderness inhabited by dangerous creatures, dotted with ancient ruins, and otherwise sparsely sprinkled with something resembling civilized society. And to an extent, that's true. However, it's also difficult to take that setting seriously when there's a village or farmhouse over almost every hill, or you can run from one end of the country to the other, on foot, in a single day and still have daylight to spare. Even moreso when an NPC asks you to make a delivery to the village next door, that they couldn't make themselves because it's "too far to travel". Really? You couldn't just...go for a short walk and do it yourself?

It's also worth noting that from a design perspective, the distance also helps the player uncover the story in the proper order, without skipping steps or otherwise venturing into areas that they maybe aren't yet prepared for. For example, it's possible to skip chapter one entirely, as well as most of chapter two, and still have the story make sense. However, the player would probably be pretty disappointed to do that and learn that they missed half the plot in the process. More "rails" could be added to force players to complete various steps before the story progresses, however, that's not ideal as that kind of design removes even the illusion of choice from the player.

[Jubal]

2 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Well, the simplest answer would probably be "They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this. Or maybe you are just interested in seeing some actual content in the world, that isn't just the same trees in the same plains, the same rocks filling the ground and the same couple cobblestones littering the world in the same "ruins". But instead actually big, cool, fleshed out locations with lots of detail in love put into it. Or you just want the shitton of loot you'd otherwise have to work long and hard for.

I think part of what I'm saying here is that the "seeing some actual content" bit involves such an excessive amount of seeing basically the exact same landscapes that the time ratios are out of whack by a mile. It's so many, many multiples of time travelling very similar or identical landscapes to actually finding and interacting with something interesting, especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later. And it's not interesting or challenging work to reach those things, because the game's mechanics make it a take-no-risks incentive structure not one where you ever push yourself.

9 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

"They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this.

This bit is fair enough. I have partly enjoyed the lore so far, and the locations are cool, but I think part of the game's problem right now is that the world so extremely self-evidently doesn't make any sense that the only motivator is "huh yeah I'm vaguely curious about this I guess". I'm not always sure where the storyline is trying to go: there's bits where it appears to reference our primary world a bunch which feels weird in the obviously fantasy setting, there's bits where the world seems to be trying to feel grounded in how it works with the rifts/rust/Jonas stuff being an active divergence from this very grounded we-care-about-crop-rotation mechanics setting, but then a lot of bits that aren't in the Weird/Magic element also don't feel like they're trying to make sense. I think if it presented its core mysteries in a punchier way that might help, and maybe more early dialogue with traders could help with that. The traders seem... sort of remarkably unbothered by everything, and I think that doesn't really set up much sense of mystery: the writing doesn't always make it clear what you as a character do or do not know about things already, and gives you pretty limited options to ask a bunch of very obvious questions of the only people you meet (and I'm not suggesting the traders should know the answers, but they should help the player frame what the mystery and stakes are here).

4 minutes ago, Edwin_Blacktallow said:

I try to peek into surface caves and find broken translocators, they can get you a fair distance but which direction that is is pretty random. Also as far as I'm aware you always end up deep underground, so pack a lantern, a pickaxe and some ladders to get back to the surface. You might get lucky and end up with a chain of translocators with short walks between them that help you traverse longer distances.

Another option would be mods, now I belive this game should be a challenge. But I also believe it should be fun, I use a few quality of life mods to help balance that out. One is bed spawns, chuck a bed roll down, sleep in it and when you die you end up where you slept. If you still drop loot on death and your saturation is reduced it is still something you want to avoid, so death dosent become meaningless, but it's less of a set back, that way you can get back in the action, and back to the fun.

I'd considered this and started to explore this option, but nothing went in remotely the direction of The Plot. I'd hoped that plot locations were going to keep being scattered around base, rather than just strung out in an endless line. Because I can't very practically translocate with my elk, that also rather reduces this as an option I guess - also fixing translocators takes a lot of temporal gears and I never seem to have many of those. Also my translocator rooms all look horrible since someone on the bugs github told me to do a visual remapping command and now a lot of them have ugly question mark blocks in

8 minutes ago, Edwin_Blacktallow said:

Over all I would say the story locations are worth the effort. Vintage story does a great job at making the journey difficult, and it should be. You need to plan, you need to think about what you are doing before wandering off into the wilderness, I think that's great.

Don't feel disheartened if you need to head back home before moving onto the next location, think about everything you learned on your journey. Make a plan, take time to prepare and get back out there!

I do actually like the planning aspect! Working out what tools and supplies I need for a journey is something I enjoy, and I usually go well prepared. In the current situation, the only and main reason I'm "unprepared" for the next stage is not having hauled even more storage kit with me, something the game gave me absolutely no way of knowing I might need in the first place.

I guess I think the game kind of takes it to a point where your optimum strategy is to not engage with the world, which is a pity for a game that is about building a very engage-with-able world. I love learning things on journeys and reflecting on that, and part of my frustration is that I feel that curiosity is discouraged by the mechanics: the travel is long, the benefit of curiosity during that travel is very low and the penalty gets extreme as it's larger the further from home you get. When travelling, you should ideally not be stopping, because any stop is a point at which an enemy you might not have noticed could attack, and you should not be travelling anywhere with low visibility, so avoiding forests and scrub, and you should not be travelling at night, and so you end up doing very cautious daytime travels and it feels anxiety-inducing because of the large punishment for failure but without it actually providing a challenge because all I'm doing is trying to avoid holes and bears, endlessly, for miles of the same blocky countryside. And the punishment for failure is that the game wastes enormous quantities more time as you walk back to wherever you were somehow. The things I most like doing which feel like good "journey challenges" - reconnaissance, clearing paths, ideally taking time to lay paths, mapping safe routes, etc - are just about viable within 5k-7k blocks, but basically become really time prohibitive for a 15,000 block journey.

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, however, the distance is what makes the world actually feel impactful--that is, it's going to require some planning and cost you something to see those places. If you plan poorly or run into trouble, then you'll have to improvise a solution, since turning around and going back home isn't necessarily going to be an option. That travel difficulty also means you'll need to be careful about what items you choose to pack, what items you buy from NPCs, and what loot you take from locations, since you won't be able to just go back home and drop off your loot whenever your bags are full.

In contrast, worlds that are very compact are very convenient for travel, but can easily wind up with stories that feel just a little bit silly rather than serious. Take Skyrim, for example--it's supposed to be a vast wilderness inhabited by dangerous creatures, dotted with ancient ruins, and otherwise sparsely sprinkled with something resembling civilized society. And to an extent, that's true. However, it's also difficult to take that setting seriously when there's a village or farmhouse over almost every hill, or you can run from one end of the country to the other, on foot, in a single day and still have daylight to spare. Even moreso when an NPC asks you to make a delivery to the village next door, that they couldn't make themselves because it's "too far to travel". Really? You couldn't just...go for a short walk and do it yourself?

Having an extended challenge and planning requirement is impactful, I agree. What I'm arguing isn't that there shouldn't be planning and cost, but that the mix of spawn and distance and the fact that the game doesn't actually give you a lot of improvisation flexibility makes the optimal strategy for meeting the challenge time consuming and dull rather than creating interesting situations where it makes sense for me to improvise and work things out. I can't "improvise" a repair to a suit of armour, for example, that's something I can only do from home with these crafting mechanics, and I certainly can't improvise if I don't have a temporal gear available. I can obviously improvise building camps, and spending a bunch of time making clay jars for storage or whatever, but again, the incentive feels very heavily against doing that and in favour of just making you take days more game time to go home and sort things out, because the punishment of having to do a 12k block corpse run is never going to be worth any risk, so rather than improvising and taking interesting risks the thing the game won't penalise you for is just taking a big extra chunk of time.

I think there's also a balance regarding world sparseness and VS, whilst I see the attraction of its sheer scale, feels silly in the other direction to me: yes, a full day of walking won't get you right across any country larger than Liechtenstein, but even premodern Liechtenstein had several villages in it, and with a long day's walk (14hrs on foot) from my current location I genuinely could be in another country and in a different city, having passed through a minimum of four settlements along the way assuming I took a relatively un-settlement-y walk: the actual road would take me through thirteen. Obviously VS is post-apocalyptic and we can assume a radically sparser population, but it doesn't make internal sense even with that caveat: a landscape (un)settled with villages at the density of VS would have an rapidly collapsing, dying population with each village getting crushed by genetic bottlenecking over the generations and certainly wouldn't be able to support me having a random building trade vendor a few miles over the hill. So I struggle to take VS much more seriously than Skyrim on that front? Skyrim feels artificially cluttered, but VS feels equally very visibly artificially empty (besides that my nearest neighbour in game sells luxury goods out of a cart that never moves and has no means of moving, never leaves his cart, never has any customers, never gathers food, and is apparently invulnerable.)

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Well you ahve to keep in mind that the story locations only exist because of the story and we only have 2 out of 8 planned chapters.

Why is this important?

Because the village didn't even exist until chapter 2 was implemented and it put in 3 story locations by itself. I expect more locations of even grander scale and if that's the case, you won't want to be stumbling across them while trying to eek out a meager survival in this game. I think 8000 blocks of distance to travel isn't far enough, especially since they give you a half-price discount on an elk to get there just for beating the chapter 1 boss.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

I think part of what I'm saying here is that the "seeing some actual content" bit involves such an excessive amount of seeing basically the exact same landscapes that the time ratios are out of whack by a mile. It's so many, many multiples of time travelling very similar or identical landscapes to actually finding and interacting with something interesting, especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later.

I think that's an issue that really only applies right now, simply because the world still hasn't been fleshed out that much yet. Yes, there's a good variety of flora and fauna to see, but it also doesn't take a lot of effort see most of that variety either. It's also a drawback of sticking to a realistic world, since it means that not as many creative liberties can be taken. You're not going to find ice spikes or mushroom forests, to use an example from the other block game.

It's also worth noting that procedural dungeons are only starting to be added to the game. Once more are added, that should provide more interesting landmarks to see along the way--landmarks that will certainly tempt players to get sidetracked from their journey, or at least mark on their map to come back to later.

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

And it's not interesting or challenging work to reach those things, because the game's mechanics make it a take-no-risks incentive structure not one where you ever push yourself.

Honestly I don't think this is quite a fair assessment of Vintage Story's design. The player can certainly approach it as a "take-no-risks" situation, but like you said--that tends not to lead to a very fun experience. I think a more fair assessment is that Vintage Story places a lot more importance on risk management: that is, the player needs to plan more carefully than they might need to in other games, simply because their actions will have consequences, and those consequences might not be easy or pleasant to recover from. 

 

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

Having an extended challenge and planning requirement is impactful, I agree. What I'm arguing isn't that there shouldn't be planning and cost, but that the mix of spawn and distance and the fact that the game doesn't actually give you a lot of improvisation flexibility makes the optimal strategy for meeting the challenge time consuming and dull rather than creating interesting situations where it makes sense for me to improvise and work things out. I can't "improvise" a repair to a suit of armour, for example, that's something I can only do from home with these crafting mechanics, and I certainly can't improvise if I don't have a temporal gear available. I can obviously improvise building camps, and spending a bunch of time making clay jars for storage or whatever, but again, the incentive feels very heavily against doing that and in favour of just making you take days more game time to go home and sort things out, because the punishment of having to do a 12k block corpse run is never going to be worth any risk, so rather than improvising and taking interesting risks the thing the game won't penalise you for is just taking a big extra chunk of time.

This is where I would note that planning is important. No, you can't necessarily improvise armor repairs while on the road. However, if you know you're traveling to a village, you can bring gears to barter for repairs and other goods, in addition to just making sure your equipment is in good shape before you leave base. Likewise, if it might be a while before you can make repairs then you might be picking your fights a little more carefully than you normally would. Corpse runs can be avoided by improving skills and practicing good situational awareness, as well as remembering to pack along a few temporal gears. If the player has crafted a terminus teleporter then it becomes as simple as spending a temporal gear to teleport to the last point of death.

Basically, travel planning is important because there are things the player won't be able to easily do while they're traveling, so they should make sure they've taken care of those things beforehand and otherwise packed supplies as appropriate. Otherwise, planning has no purpose and the player can play rather carelessly since mistakes aren't going to actually cost them anything.

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

When travelling, you should ideally not be stopping, because any stop is a point at which an enemy you might not have noticed could attack, and you should not be travelling anywhere with low visibility, so avoiding forests and scrub, and you should not be travelling at night, and so you end up doing very cautious daytime travels and it feels anxiety-inducing because of the large punishment for failure but without it actually providing a challenge because all I'm doing is trying to avoid holes and bears, endlessly, for miles of the same blocky countryside.

I have to disagree here. Traveling in daylight, avoiding rough terrain, and making camp at night is rather realistic and how travel should be...or at least, it should reflect those qualities. As it stands currently, the most efficient travel method is to move at a constant gallop, day or night, using the minimap to avoid holes and otherwise diving off cliffs and swimming across lakes as needed. As long as you're moving, you'll outrun enemies and they won't really get a chance to attack. There's no penalty for riding your elk at a full gallop with no rest or making it swim across an entire lake either. Likewise, the elk is rather tough and tends to heal fairly fast, so careening over the edge of the hill you just climbed and letting the elk absorb the impact isn't a big deal either. I think it would be a little more interesting if the elk had actually stamina and needed to rest from time to time, or suffered penalty for large drops, so that the player had to actually be mindful of treatment to keep their elk in optimal travel condition. For example, an elk at Good weight might move faster than an elk at Normal or Low weight, and elk could lose weight if they've been ridden hard without rest for a couple of days. In that case, the player could ride hard and cover a lot of ground quickly, at the expense of needing to make camp and rest a day or two to allow their elk to recover, or they could choose to move at a slower overall pace but not need to rest much at all.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later.

Circling back to this point--one thing I forgot to mention earlier, is that while chapter 2 locations are quite far away, the devs built in a "fast travel" option that you unlock after completing the travel. It does have a recharge time attached to it, so you do need to be mindful about when you use that feature, however, it's a great way to travel back and forth between your base and the "main hub" of chapter 2, essentially.

[ifoz]

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

This bit is fair enough. I have partly enjoyed the lore so far, and the locations are cool, but I think part of the game's problem right now is that the world so extremely self-evidently doesn't make any sense that the only motivator is "huh yeah I'm vaguely curious about this I guess". I'm not always sure where the storyline is trying to go: there's bits where it appears to reference our primary world a bunch which feels weird in the obviously fantasy setting, there's bits where the world seems to be trying to feel grounded in how it works with the rifts/rust/Jonas stuff being an active divergence from this very grounded we-care-about-crop-rotation mechanics setting, but then a lot of bits that aren't in the Weird/Magic element also don't feel like they're trying to make sense.

The lore is interconnected once you start figuring stuff out, but it's intentionally very vague on the surface in an attempt to hook the player with that element of mystery.

The references to the real world are actually pretty important, though do be warned this next part has timeline/world spoilers.

Spoiler

Vintage Story is set in an alternate timeline of our real world's 1300's, though significantly more advanced thanks to Jonas. Jonas' technology itself is somewhat based on real medieval alchemy myth, specifically regarding the Prima Materia. This is also why it's more of a grounded fantasy setting - while it is set in the real world, it's a version of the real world where medieval alchemy myth was in fact functional science. The world was also scrambled geographically when the Grand Machine activated, which is why it no longer resembles the real world's geography/layout. Pretty much real world but with alchemy, and then a bunch of stuff was messed up.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

think if it presented its core mysteries in a punchier way that might help, and maybe more early dialogue with traders could help with that. The traders seem... sort of remarkably unbothered by everything, and I think that doesn't really set up much sense of mystery:

This is something I do think could stand to be improved, but that also sort of makes sense. Considering the timespan between when everything went down in the old world and the time we actually play in, humanity has had a long time to get accustomed to rifts/monsters/other temporal weirdness. For the traders, that stuff would just be a part of everyday life.

As said though, I really hope trader dialogue is expanded upon eventually. Being able to ask more direct questions to get the player curious about the world would be nice, and make a lot of sense given the perspective of their Seraph.
Stuff like different traders also giving different answers to questions is something I think would be fun, since it'd both encourage interacting with more traders and establish that they are unreliable storytellers, but that there might be a kernel of truth in their folklore.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

So I struggle to take VS much more seriously than Skyrim on that front? Skyrim feels artificially cluttered, but VS feels equally very visibly artificially empty (besides that my nearest neighbour in game sells luxury goods out of a cart that never moves and has no means of moving, never leaves his cart, never has any customers, never gathers food, and is apparently invulnerable.)

I think this is something the devs are working on - in a recent developer stream, Elvas discussed their future plans for NPCs and traders. He said that eventually, they would like for the game to somehow map paths between trader outposts, and have traders either trek or cart their wares between one another. Given the newer NPC systems added in 1.20, I'd also expect traders will gain things like the ability to sleep at night, dress warmer in the winter and eat at certain times of day in the not too distant future, as those things are already possible.

Edited yesterday at 02:58 AM by ifoz

[DarkGold]

I've completed chapter 1 but not started the chapter 2 journey yet (chapter 2 location is marked on my map, haven't set out, got distracted prospecting for cinnabar and pentlandite). After hauling all the loot from chapter 1 back to my base, I figured doing the same in chapter 2 would be more of a pain, so I initially stopped between chapter 1 and 2 to progress from iron to steel so that I could put sturdy saddlebags on my elk.

I'd already come up with a compact outpost design for chapter 1, that required about 20 slots of inventory to carry the materials for it (cobblestone, bed, door, storage vessel, etc). Refining that design a little further, to reduce inventory needs and add a stable, is something I will do before I leave. The goal being it fits it in my elk's bags.

This is part 1 of my journey plan; construct a couple of outposts along the way. But this alone doesn't seem like it will make hauling several trunks of loot back painless, so that's why I've been distracted searching for pentlandite. I see cupronickel is useful in building some things I think might make life easier (haven't built them yet, not sure, I've just been looking at the Jonas parts I've found so far and seeing what the handbook says about what I can build with them).

I am 1 Jonas part and some cupronickel away from a very interesting item I would like to try building that might trivialise return trips. I think I'll need to power it with temporal gears, but I have been trading with Treasure Hunter traders for a long time now, building up my rusty gears by selling them longbows and buying temporal gears off them when they have them for sale.

I have also had to build up the courage to explore some underground caves and ruins to try and find that final Jonas part I need. I even decided to carefully pick some fights with some really tough monsters who stuck around a short while after temporal storms in the hopes they dropped the part I was looking for. I usually don't fight fair. Fences are useful for fighting Shivers. Bows (which I tried and found underwhelming at the start of the game, so put away in a box for years) turn out to be very useful for fighting Bells.

I have found these intermediate pursuits pretty engaging, so in my experience, I'm excited to eventually see what chapter 2 holds, but didn't feel the need to rush straight there from the end of chapter 1.

Edited yesterday at 03:26 AM by DarkGold
Correcting typo

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, ifoz said:

This is something I do think could stand to be improved, but that also sort of makes sense. Considering the timespan between when everything went down in the old world and the time we actually play in, humanity has had a long time to get accustomed to rifts/monsters/other temporal weirdness. For the traders, that stuff would just be a part of everyday life.

As said though, I really hope trader dialogue is expanded upon eventually. Being able to ask more direct questions to get the player curious about the world would be nice, and make a lot of sense given the perspective of their Seraph.
Stuff like different traders also giving different answers to questions is something I think would be fun, since it'd both encourage interacting with more traders and establish that they are unreliable storytellers, but that there might be a kernel of truth in their folklore.

Flipping the situation around and putting oneself in the trader's shoes for a moment--it's easy enough to say the NPCs should provide an in-depth exposition about the history of the world up to that point of meeting. However, there's a lot that's likely passed into myth and been twisted over the years, if not forgotten entirely. I think it's also worth noting that it's quite difficult to explain things that are taken for granted, especially if you're unfamiliar with the world outside your personal bubble. From the trader perspective, they probably just assume that everyone knows the legends and basic survival tactics(like living behind fortifications), and in the event someone doesn't...assume they're a little addled in the head(if not lying) and set some safe boundaries. 

[Jubal]

Lots to discuss here, but a few points based on the discussion:

• To clarify re traders, I don't want more trader dialogue to find out what the traders know, and I'm happy for them to know very little. What I want dialogue there for is to communicate to me as the player what I know as the character. Is the fact that I revive after death surprising to me, for example? Even if the Trader gives a totally nondescript answer, the fact that I can ask the question tells me what I know in a way that helps frame what I should be curious about in the world and what I should accept as an abstraction of the game rules that is common knowledge for both my character and the NPCs. Like, being able to turn fibres into yarn instantly, or certain tools being condensed or working in a slightly magical way, are all valid and useful rule abstractions, but then in many games so are death mechanics, and I think making it clearer what the player character finds it worth asking about would help. The answers you'd get could be entirely meaningless and vague, I think that bit is fine, but the questions could still give useful pointers.
   
• I know some people differ but I don't think stumbling across plot locations early is or should be a problem: I think I'd be more motivated to keep playing and to introduce other people to the game if it was easier to go "look there's these cool locations you can find" more than "so if you play for six real-world months you might get to go to a small village". I do think that future chapters involving even further travel would either have to involve a lot more fast travel, or a change of the spawn mechanics/penalties, or would just be prohibitive for any normal player (bearing in mind that none of us in this thread, by virtue of being here, are in any sense normal players). Part of the question I try to approach this stuff with is "given how VS works, could I recommend it to friends" and I think this is the sort of thing where the answer becomes "maybe, but" rather than "yes definitely".
   
• I actually agree it'd be nice to have things like elk weight and stamina in there, the sorts of things that encourage me to set up nice little way stations are positives for me. I also don't dislike things like travelling in the day and sleeping at night, that feels nice: what gets to me much more is the very large disincentive to get off and look at anything on the way. Maybe for me the thing I dislike is that the challenge of travel is largely about big gotchas - you got mauled by a bear or most likely had to run from a bear and then fell down a giant hole - and basically everything is fine until suddenly you're dead. There's relatively little challenge that falls between "trivial" and "immediately likely deadly".
   
• I don't know if adding procedural dungeons helps with the travel and emptiness problem enormously, because it's another thing you could interact with but you're incentivised not to interact with? If I come across a dungeon when I'm already many thousands of blocks from my current spawn, I'll happily mark it on my map but there's no way I'm going to stop and investigate it because the corpse run if I die (which I'm very likely to at least once in anything like that) just isn't likely to feel worth it or fun.
   
• Re the historical background stuff, I think that's something I might need to think on and flesh out elsewhere, but I think it might need handling a bit differently, because when you first come across definitive real-world lore elements it comes across very much less as "oh wow, this was the real world?" and more "this is a very clearly fantasy world, why does it have France in it". I probably have some unusual bar-lines for verisimilitude on history stuff given that I am a medieval historian by day job - which isn't to say I'm an "accuracy stickler" in any sense, but I think the real-world tie increases the "wow this landscape is wildly empty" problem because it implicitly sets up reality, and even more explicitly real Europe, as a fair comparison.
   
• I feel like there's some expectations I want to gently nudge a corrective to, since I know some of you guys have been playing for many years. One is about planning, where I think the test of "could a player in their first world who hasn't been looking everything up in advance reasonably plan for this" is actually quite a useful one - otherwise it's not a planning challenge, it's a foreknowledge challenge - and I think there's a few too many cases where the answer is "not really". Especially things like, as mentioned earlier, something like "did you bring enough boxes".
   
• Another thing I'm confused about is that it seems like everyone is playing like temporal gears are multiple times more common than they appear to have been for me. I have averaged finding slightly less than one temporal gear per ten hours of gameplay of Vintage Story, including the haul from the C1 plot location which is where I found about half of my total so far: most of them so far were used on fixing transponders, a couple on moving spawns to do plot locations for C1 and the first one of C2. I have two left, one with me and one at base. So I haven't looked much into things like temporal gear powered devices, because I obviously cannot afford to use them anyway, and even if I did go home I'm then some way off being able to afford spawn resets for more travel? Am I missing some major source of these things?
   
• The final note I want to put here is that mostly I think the question here is defaults. Clearly some people love bits of this game that others don't like and vice versa: I think in a game that prides itself on flexible settings people absolutely should be able to choose to have 10,000 block journeys to the Archives or whatever if they want. But I also think it's reasonable for someone playing the standard mode of a game they've bought to want to actually see the game's content without having to spend many, many more times the time investment doing slow and careful daytime round trips to their base, avoiding any non-necessary interactions with the environment along the way, and I do think that's generally what the game mechanics push play towards as of now.

[CastIronFabric]

I prefer story locations being very far away. I also prefer with being required to do a task with a trader who is very far away in order to get the map location.

As a side note, I am even ok with traveling 3000 blocks to do a trade. I know that might sound like a contradiction to my thread regarding trading but its not. My issue with the trading has less to do with distance and more to do with the store itself now that I have had time to think on it, as an example, passing 3 Clothing Traders that I will never use, to get to a Treasure Trader that I will only ever use for a map  who is near other trader types I will never use, never need and I can not sell anything to. However to be fair that complaint is a different subject I just wanted to clarify my historical position as it might seem contradictory here. 

EDIT: oh and as far as the story goes, speaking personally I have never done it. I usually burn out on a play thru by the time I get all the stuff I really want to get done. The story itself is literally on the bottom of my list so I never get to it. I would rather have more wine than I would ever use than do the story, that said, this time I plan on doing the story but again...last.

 

 

Edited yesterday at 12:08 PM by CastIronFabric

[williams_482]

You're definitely correct about respawn mechanics strongly disincentivizing any risk taking while far from home, unless you have a comfortable surplus of temporal gears and can anticipate in advance that you're making a high risk choice. Setting a respawn point before entering a story location? Easy, obvious. Setting a respawn point before a dungeon? Tough choice if you're low on gears. Setting a respawn point before you stumble blindly into three brown bears who apparently spawned right next to each other in a dense forest your elk can't navigate, and by dint of surprise, sheer number, and unfavorable terrain are able to claw through your steel chain before you can kill all three? Impossible, unless you're clairvoyant, and when this happens ~8,000 blocks from the last place you set your spawn, itself ~8,000 blocks from home... not a super fun time. Ask me how I know. 

There is a Jonas device which solves this problem, the trouble is that it's a pretty expensive one, and specific Jonas parts are a total crapshoot. So that's not really a solution, especially when this story location is supposedly intended to be handled with iron age gear. 

I think if the game wants to make these long journeys fun, it needs to either make that expensive to operate terminus teleporter a little less prohibitive to construct, or give the player some ability to respawn within a manageable distance of their death point if they are wearing a more obtainable object, such a s a temporal gear amulet. That won't affect the amount of planning necessary, or the usefulness of creating way stations. It just opens up more possibilities for whimsical exploration en route without the 10,000 block corpse run of Damocles hanging over your head. 

[CastIronFabric]

26 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

You're definitely correct about respawn mechanics strongly disincentivizing any risk taking while far from home, unless you have a comfortable surplus of temporal gears and can anticipate in advance that you're making a high risk choice. Setting a respawn point before entering a story location? Easy, obvious. Setting a respawn point before a dungeon? Tough choice if you're low on gears. Setting a respawn point before you stumble blindly into three brown bears who apparently spawned right next to each other in a dense forest your elk can't navigate, and by dint of surprise, sheer number, and unfavorable terrain are able to claw through your steel chain before you can kill all three? Impossible, unless you're clairvoyant, and when this happens ~8,000 blocks from the last place you set your spawn, itself ~8,000 blocks from home... not a super fun time. Ask me how I know. 

There is a Jonas device which solves this problem, the trouble is that it's a pretty expensive one, and specific Jonas parts are a total crapshoot. So that's not really a solution, especially when this story location is supposedly intended to be handled with iron age gear. 

I think if the game wants to make these long journeys fun, it needs to either make that expensive to operate terminus teleporter a little less prohibitive to construct, or give the player some ability to respawn within a manageable distance of their death point if they are wearing a more obtainable object, such a s a temporal gear amulet. That won't affect the amount of planning necessary, or the usefulness of creating way stations. It just opens up more possibilities for whimsical exploration en route without the 10,000 block corpse run of Damocles hanging over your head. 

Here is what I think is compelling:

A. having a need to create multiple bases

Here is what I do not think is compelling and makes the above problmatic.

B. not making it easy to set a new spawn point.

In my view, B is making A problematic.

That said what I do like about this game is that its literally the most flexible game I have ever played regarding settings, mods and going into creative to solve a game play experience one does not agree with. As a side note, the irony is that 'playing the game as its intended to be played' is often an argument on these forums despite the fact that the game goes out of its way to make the game the most flexible game ever (I am likely being unknowingly hyperbolic here) so that the player can play as they wish. In fact, I would go as far as to say 'play as the player wishes' might actually be how the game is indented to be played

 

Edited yesterday at 12:16 PM by CastIronFabric

[Jubal]

46 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

That said what I do like about this game is that its literally the most flexible game I have ever played regarding settings, mods and going into creative to solve a game play experience one does not agree with. As a side note, the irony is that 'playing the game as its intended to be played' is often an argument on these forums despite the fact that the game goes out of its way to make the game the most flexible game ever (I am likely being unknowingly hyperbolic here) so that the player can play as they wish. In fact, I would go as far as to say 'play as the player wishes' might actually be how the game is indented to be played

I agree with this: I guess my corollary to this is that the default standard-mode settings should therefore be balanced to "what will give a new player who wants to have the main-line game experience a challenging but not overly grindy first world run with this game" on the grounds that experienced players who like the game can easily raise friction and difficulty with the settings as they please, but inexperienced players who are less used to the game do not have the same capacity to reduce or adjust specific bits of friction because they don't know what all the settings do yet.

[CastIronFabric]

21 minutes ago, Jubal said:

I agree with this: I guess my corollary to this is that the default standard-mode settings should therefore be balanced to "what will give a new player who wants to have the main-line game experience a challenging but not overly grindy first world run with this game" on the grounds that experienced players who like the game can easily raise friction and difficulty with the settings as they please, but inexperienced players who are less used to the game do not have the same capacity to reduce or adjust specific bits of friction because they don't know what all the settings do yet.

I have to mention what I say can cause circular logic for example: 'the way I want to play is how the developer intends the game to be played' which is a perfectly fair position to take however if the game is intended to be played as you wish then...there is a logic circle there. That said, I understand why a person would want to play the game based on how the developer sees the game play. I just think they should not be overly religious about it and understand that is purely a personal decision. 
Anyway, I digress. 

Edited yesterday at 01:42 PM by CastIronFabric

[DarkGold]

5 hours ago, Jubal said:

So I haven't looked much into things like temporal gear powered devices, because I obviously cannot afford to use them anyway, and even if I did go home I'm then some way off being able to afford spawn resets for more travel? Am I missing some major source of these things?

Maybe not a major source, but for me it's been several small sources that add up, dependent on play style.

I've got maybe 6 temporal gears sitting in a box at my base and 3 strapped to my elk. I've spent at least 5 (3 on a translocator, at least 1 in C1, 1 when I returned to base after finishing C1) during play, probably a couple more. I've had lots of opportunities to buy gears from Treasure Hunters, and haven't taken the opportunities because I've already had at least 4 gears sitting at base and no machines to power with them. I haven't tended to die very often after getting leather armor (I travel carefully and typically avoid/run from dangerous creatures), so I don't go through gears respawning quickly.

Because I didn't do any dungeon delving until after C1, but I had stuff I wanted to buy from traders, I did a lot of trading to earn rusty gears. Because I was doing a lot of trading, I was frequently seeing temporal gears for sale from Treasure Hunters, and frequently could afford to buy them. This was source 1 for me.

Source 2 has been fighting drifters and bowtorn as they become a nuisance that I want to remove rather than avoid; if I want to potter around near my base and they are sending projectiles at me. I have a 3 high fence around my base and lanterns to keep them from spawning in my base (my base includes my farming fields), so I normally ignore them. This is only an occasional source; of the maybe 15 temporal gears I've acquired in game, maybe 2 have come from this.

Source 3 has recently been intentionally fighting high tier creatures that remain after temporal storms end (so that I'm not dealing with more spawning/a horde, just 1 tough enemy at a time), with the intention of trying to get a Jonas part to drop. Again, not a big source, but the higher the tier of the creature, the better the drop chance of temporal gears, so it happens more regularly than fighting the normal surface spawn.

Source 4 has recently been intentionally going into underground caves to find and break locust nests and search for treasure in ruins (again, looking for Jonas parts). I recently stumbled across a bell during my search, which was an intimidating problem to solve, but I was incentivized to kill it because it might drop a Jonas part. Because it summoned a bunch of enemies, I ended up killing a bunch of enemies, and at least one of them dropped a temporal gear. So source 4 is rooted in a mix of sources 2 and 3; incidental and intentional combat while seeking Jonas parts.

So in my experience, from doing a lot of trading and from doing careful combat, and not spending them quickly, I've ended up with a surplus of temporal gears.

4 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

Here is what I do not think is compelling and makes the above problmatic.

B. not making it easy to set a new spawn point.

It's true that setting a new spawn point is costly if you have few temporal gears, but if you have an excess of them, it becomes very easy; the challenge is directly proportional to the challenge of acquiring temporal gears at a rate you aren't running through them.

I think acquiring the gears can be more or less easy depending on play style. Trading heavily or fighting tough enemies makes acquiring gears more likely. If you don't want to engage with either of those systems, you are right, it's really hard (or rather tedious) to come by them. You can pan for them (which isn't difficult, very safe), but drop chance is low, so it's not a fun strategy to rely on.

So should it be easier/quicker to get temporal gears? I think it depends on how you like to play the game. Some players won't find it hard to source them. Others will find the available sources not fun for them. This might just have to be something players try and see what works for them? I'd be interested to hear ideas for alternative sources that would make their acquisition easier for more play styles. Would having the option to increase the drop chance of the gears for various existing sources in settings solve the problem?

Edited yesterday at 04:22 PM by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Jubal said:

To clarify re traders, I don't want more trader dialogue to find out what the traders know, and I'm happy for them to know very little. What I want dialogue there for is to communicate to me as the player what I know as the character. Is the fact that I revive after death surprising to me, for example?

I think this is why a lot of the lore is set up to be discovered indirectly, and not directly explained to the player via NPC exposition. Show, don't tell. The player character is a specific individual, however, there's also room for the player to make their own assessment of how said character reacts to things like revival after death. That doesn't mean there aren't hints as to how NPCs or even the player character generally feels about certain things though. The tapestry flavor text, for example, is written from the player character's point of view, and the flavor text for some other items seems to be written from the same angle. For death, or the inability to die specifically, there's a couple lines of dialogue that cover this as well, though it's not something the player will discover until they've played through chapter two.

 

4 hours ago, Jubal said:

I know some people differ but I don't think stumbling across plot locations early is or should be a problem:

Except certain locations contain things that are highly useful for completing locations that come after, or important information is revealed in later chapters that makes the experiences from prior chapters feel even more impactful, because you know what lead up to that point. For example, the first story location, the Resonance Archive, makes the impact that it does, because it's the first real glimpse into what came before, and where the plot is headed now. Completing chapter 2 before completing the Archive, however, is going to lessen that impact, since the reward is no longer that useful and the mechanics introduced in chapter 2 aren't a factor in the Archive, which might be confusing to some players. The Archive is also what provides the clues for the player to even start on chapter 2 to begin with, so while the player could complete chapter 2 without completing the Archive, they're probably going to be a little confused over why they're doing what they're doing or why it's important.

It's also worth noting that the third location from chapter 2 specifically has a lot of narrative buildup before the player actually encounters it, which helps further set the mood when the player arrives there since they have some scraps of information of why that area is the way it is. If the player could easily stumble across it first though, then they're probably going to be disappointed when they can't talk about it with NPCs aside from the preset dialogue for how the story is intended to unfold, and the location just isn't going to have the same impact when the player needs to actually go there later.

4 hours ago, Jubal said:

I don't know if adding procedural dungeons helps with the travel and emptiness problem enormously, because it's another thing you could interact with but you're incentivised not to interact with?

I wouldn't say that the player is prohibited from interacting with those locations when they find them. It's more that the player will be required to choose whether or not they want to explore and loot it right then, just explore it a little and come back later, or simply mark it on their map for a future expedition. Some of the teasers for potential dungeons looked pretty wild, so I have a hard time believing that spotting a few while traveling wouldn't be at least mildly interesting.

 

4 hours ago, Jubal said:

I think it might need handling a bit differently, because when you first come across definitive real-world lore elements it comes across very much less as "oh wow, this was the real world?" and more "this is a very clearly fantasy world, why does it have France in it".

For me, it was the opposite. The fact that it's not immediately clear what the world is, and that it seems to be some sort of fantasy sci-fi realm, is what makes the reveal about the world's history interesting when one starts digging into the lore. If France and the Byzantine Empire and other pieces of the real world are talked about, then it must have been the real world in the past...which begs the question, what happened to twist it into what it is today? How much time has passed since the player's apparent disappearance from and return to the world?

In contrast, stories that start with the premise "This was 100% the real world, but now it's not" or "The main characters are from the real world, just pulled into this fantasy realm for most of the book"--those I don't really find very interesting, partly because the real world is something I see every single day so the parts of the story that involve the real world tend to be pretty boring. It can also feel like a rather cheap way to draw the reader in, simply because there's generally a distinct line of separation between the two worlds, and the "real world" tends not to matter at all save for being a plot device to explain why the main character knows nothing about the fantasy world or doesn't have skills/has overpowered skills.

5 hours ago, Jubal said:

I feel like there's some expectations I want to gently nudge a corrective to, since I know some of you guys have been playing for many years. One is about planning, where I think the test of "could a player in their first world who hasn't been looking everything up in advance reasonably plan for this" is actually quite a useful one - otherwise it's not a planning challenge, it's a foreknowledge challenge - and I think there's a few too many cases where the answer is "not really". Especially things like, as mentioned earlier, something like "did you bring enough boxes".

This one I'm a little on the fence about. Yes, there could probably be a few more direct suggestions of supplies the player should bring, however...supply lists are also somewhat subjective. Part of the fun of Vintage Story is also that the game doesn't hold your hand and instead allows you to think through things yourself and draw your own conclusions. It's a different mindset than what most other games tend to require.

When it comes to planning journeys, NPCs shouldn't have to tell you to bring food, weapons, armor, or medical supplies--that should really be a given. If an NPC is saying an area is dangerous, it's a very good idea, I've found, to take those warnings very seriously, since those warnings aren't just narrative dressing.

5 hours ago, Jubal said:

Another thing I'm confused about is that it seems like everyone is playing like temporal gears are multiple times more common than they appear to have been for me. I have averaged finding slightly less than one temporal gear per ten hours of gameplay of Vintage Story, including the haul from the C1 plot location which is where I found about half of my total so far: most of them so far were used on fixing transponders, a couple on moving spawns to do plot locations for C1 and the first one of C2. I have two left, one with me and one at base. So I haven't looked much into things like temporal gear powered devices, because I obviously cannot afford to use them anyway, and even if I did go home I'm then some way off being able to afford spawn resets for more travel? Am I missing some major source of these things?

Are you playing with temporal storms enabled and do you fight through most of them? Temporal storms are one of the main sources of temporal gears, since they occur semi-regularly and spawn tough monsters that tend to drop those gears. It's not unusual to get a handful of temporal gears from each temporal storm. Story locations do have them as loot, as do ruins to a lesser extent, I think, and treasure hunters will sometimes sell them. However, temporal storms will still be the best source, followed by hunting monsters deep underground.

 

5 hours ago, Jubal said:

The final note I want to put here is that mostly I think the question here is defaults. Clearly some people love bits of this game that others don't like and vice versa: I think in a game that prides itself on flexible settings people absolutely should be able to choose to have 10,000 block journeys to the Archives or whatever if they want. But I also think it's reasonable for someone playing the standard mode of a game they've bought to want to actually see the game's content without having to spend many, many more times the time investment doing slow and careful daytime round trips to their base, avoiding any non-necessary interactions with the environment along the way, and I do think that's generally what the game mechanics push play towards as of now.

Which is why the option to change location distance exists, and I think it's a good thing that option exists. However, personally I draw the line at cutting those distances further in the name of player convenience, because it cheapens the story significantly. The devs should be allowed to tell their story in the way they feel is appropriately challenging, which includes choosing how far the player should have to travel to experience the entire story. And that is what the default should be, otherwise the devs don't really get to tell their story.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

inexperienced players who are less used to the game do not have the same capacity to reduce or adjust specific bits of friction because they don't know what all the settings do yet.

This is why it's generally a good idea to play a game on the defaults first before installing mods or really tearing into the settings. Meet the game on its own terms first, figure out the general expectations, and then adjust what needs to be adjusted. Yes, a game's design should be such that the first experience players have with it will be a good one. However, that doesn't mean that the game itself needs to be made so easy that the player won't have any challenges to overcome, especially if the game's target audience is one that prefers a more challenging environment.

[LadyWYT]

22 minutes ago, DarkGold said:

So should it be easier/quicker to get temporal gears? I think it depends on how you like to play the game. Some players won't find it hard to source them. Others will find the available sources not fun for them. This might just have to be something players try and see what works for them? I'd be interested to hear ideas for alternative sources that would make their acquisition easier for more play styles. Would having the option to increase the drop chance of the gears for various existing sources in settings solve the problem?

Tackling this in a different post because I already wrote one ranting novel.  But in any case, I I'm not sure it should necessarily be easier or quicker to get temporal gears, since that both cheapens their value and it's already relatively easy to acquire a hoard of them. Crafting them would have to be a late game process, and also turn them into a mundane object rather than a valuable esoteric artifact. Purchasing them from a certain old friend is probably an option since there's probably a good supply in that case, and it also requires the player to have completed part of the story before they get access to that kind of convenience, which I think is probably fair. Other NPCs could also sell them, I suppose, though I'd expect the price to be fairly expensive since temporal gears are rare items, even they aren't very useful to NPCs otherwise. What's more needed is more things to spend them on, since rift wards don't require that much power, night vision is very situational, and using the gears for respawns is negligible if one is good at avoiding death.

That being said, I think I'd like to see an option of allowing the player to start with a temporal gear in their inventory; that way players who prefer to roam around a little more can have a chance to set their spawn at their base and then proceed as normal, without worrying as much about losing a lot of progress thanks to an untimely death. That being said, they would still need to be careful, since gear respawns are limited by default.

[CastIronFabric]

1 hour ago, DarkGold said:

I think acquiring the gears can be more or less easy depending on play style. Trading heavily or fighting tough enemies makes acquiring gears more likely. If you don't want to engage with either of those systems, you are right, it's really hard (or rather tedious) to come by them. You can pan for them (which isn't difficult, very safe), but drop chance is low, so it's not a fun strategy to rely on.

So should it be easier/quicker to get temporal gears? I think it depends on how you like to play the game. Some players won't find it hard to source them. Others will find the available sources not fun for them. This might just have to be something players try and see what works for them? I'd be interested to hear ideas for alternative sources that would make their acquisition easier for more play styles. Would having the option to increase the drop chance of the gears for various existing sources in settings solve the problem?

I think its safe to say though by the time you have more temporal gears than you need there is not really a compelling reason to have a second base other than just do it.

I like the idea of having multiple bases useful in or around mid game. At least speaking for myself, having even 3 temporal gears before I have at least Iron is fairly rare.

Edited yesterday at 05:08 PM by CastIronFabric

[Jubal]

33 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

This is why it's generally a good idea to play a game on the defaults first before installing mods or really tearing into the settings. Meet the game on its own terms first, figure out the general expectations, and then adjust what needs to be adjusted. Yes, a game's design should be such that the first experience players have with it will be a good one. However, that doesn't mean that the game itself needs to be made so easy that the player won't have any challenges to overcome

To be clear, this is exactly what I am doing, and I'm writing this precisely to highlight flaws in that first experience. I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but it's coming across as a bit of a strawman to jump from someone saying "this specific element feels slow and frustrating without adding much interest and challenge" and end up at "the game being so easy the player won't have any challenges to overcome". There's a wide gap between those things, no? And I'm not necessarily prescriptive about how this is solved, but I think the current balance is really quite unsatisfying.

On other points:

• I'm absolutely fine with the "this is the real world" reveal not coming immediately, that's perfectly reasonable. However, it's quite a large lore point because it means you as the player can connect the whole real world of pre-VS-fall history into VS' lore, and I think should come in a way that's impactful, grounded, and feels like it makes some sense. I'm not sure any of those are the case now for me. The world up to that point feels so much a classic fantasy-medieval that I think it needs more than just the name-drop to make the connection feel meaningful - why for example is almost none of the pre-fall stuff we find attributable to anything culturally specific? And the addition of "we should be able to imagine our world turning into this one"... it throws issues like the impossibility of the sort of populations and ratios involved here into focus in a way that I'd be more willing to hand-wave in a world that didn't make that connection. I'll reserve further judgement until after I summon up enough energy to go and try and do the rest of the plot so far, but it didn't work as a reveal for me.
• I do have storms on, I find if I try to fight through them I mostly just end up frustrated and dead a lot rather than obtaining anything that could be described as useful loot.
• Thinking about it, I think this may differentiate a few of our perspectives here: I like planning and building and exploring in this game, but I am never going to be good at the slightly janky real-time combat elements, most of which are designed to be very high lethality. If I go into, say, a dungeon, or even just deep into some caves, or if a bear attacks me, the chance I'm going to die is vastly higher than someone who has a thousand hours more ingame experience, better reflexes, and/or less chronic pain than I do. So I think that's partly why the disincentive thing hits in: when something moves from "this might be an interesting risk and I could take a few scrapes" to "I plausibly expect to die an average of two times doing this even with a decent suit of iron armour, well fed, and carrying healing kit" then rather than "that's risky but interesting" many things become "well I don't actually want to do 10,000 blocks of walking to slowly work my way through two minutes of fighting spread over multiple real-time hours, when I don't actually know if there'll be any reward for that". And yes, one conclusion here is that you're clearly better at the game than me and you've played it a lot more, but that's kind of part of my point: what's trivial for an experienced player is not always going to be viable, let alone trivial, for someone on their first run with a mere 100 hours in the game (itself already a pretty big time commitment by most standards).
• The reason I think there needs to be more player perspective stuff is that lots of the game doesn't make sense, inherently, because it's a game. So there is no way to tell right now which of the things that don't make sense are assumed common knowledge about how the world works and which are actually part of the game lore., And again, I'm not asking for exposition, I'm asking for framing. Those are not the same narrative thing. I do also get the idea of doing something with no framing where you let the player tell their own story about who they are much more, but then that clashes with the game having a lot of very laid down lore about what's happened and how this all came to be.

[DarkGold]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

I like the idea of having multiple bases useful in or around mid game.

I feel naturally incentivized to have 1 base (because I want all my collected resources to be on hand). The only way having multiple bases feels incentivized for me is if you either force certain resources to be necessary to farm in multiple locations (so I have to manage more than 1 location, not just collect things and take them back to base) or if you were to reduce the cost of travel to a trivial level (eg, portals in Valheim make moving between locations a breeze, so there is no disincentive to move between multiple locations).

I distinguish bases from outposts in this regard; I define an outpost as somewhere I will spend more than 1 night at, but not permanently accumulate resources at. Outposts store food for the time I am in the area and allow safe/convenient sleeping/heating. Good for mining or exploration in an area far from base, but then I'll take all the resources I gain in this area back to base when I am finished my expedition. I am incentivized to make a bunch of outposts.

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

At least speaking for myself, having even 3 temporal gears before I have at least Iron is fairly rare.

I think this is probably common for anyone not fighting in storms or trading a lot. I certainly tried to get to the iron age as quickly as I could as a new player (it still took me until the end of year 3 though; spawned in the middle of an ocean, there were new player challenges), but I also focused heavily on trade (since I wanted to accumulate rusty gears in a safe way to buy things from traders). So I ended up with maybe 5 gears, probably 4 from trade, before the iron age, then I stopped trying to get more because I had nothing to spend them on (wasn't resetting my spawn or dying much).

If I hadn't focused on trading, because my play style was not to go around hunting things that would drop temporal gears, I would have had very few gears. To me, it seems the game provides 2 main ways to get temporal gears (trade, combat). If players aren't getting them, it's either:

1. An information issue: players don't know how to get them.
2. An enjoyment issue: players don't enjoy doing what they know lets them acquire them.
3. A skill/tuning issue: players know how to get them, try to get them, are chewing through them faster than they can amass them. Given players are able to respawn at world spawn if they run out of temporal gears respawns, and farm gears at world spawn, the game makes it possible to accumulate gears without requiring you to spend them at the same time. This means being unable to meet demand could be an issue where high demand is being driven by strategy (how often a player chooses to use a gear), rather than a fundamental issue caused by lack of supply.

These issues all have different solutions. To find the right solution for any given player, the issue that player is facing needs to be addressed. I presume for many players it's probably mostly an enjoyment issue, since trade doesn't require the same kind of skill as combat, nor does panning. Players aren't forced to engage in skillful play. So how can temporal gear acquisition be made more fun for people who don't like the existing options?

Edited 23 hours ago by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[LadyWYT]

6 hours ago, Jubal said:

I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but it's coming across as a bit of a strawman to jump from someone saying "this specific element feels slow and frustrating without adding much interest and challenge" and end up at "the game being so easy the player won't have any challenges to overcome".

I can where one would get that impression, but I think you summed it up better in that...it kind of boils down to individual player preference. What feels slow and frustrating to one player can feel like a satisfying challenge to another player, and vice versa. When it comes to travel distances specifically, shortening them to 3000-5000 blocks would certainly be more convenient, but I also believe that it would make the world feel rather small and inauthentic. Likewise, I don't really see the purpose in doing much planning for an adventure, if I'm literally just going to be gone for maybe a day or two at most. At that point it doesn't matter if I didn't pack supplies, or played carelessly with the supplies I did bring, or looted a bunch of stuff I didn't need, because I can just zip back home and grab what I need/drop stuff off, or just make whatever I need on the spot. If there's a checklist I'm given of specific stuff to bring, then I no longer need to bother with planning--that's already been done for me. Having a detailed explanation of exactly what to expect in the location is similar, in that now there's not that much excitement to the exploration since I already know what's there.

As a side note on the 3000 block minimum distance--the distance really can't be lower than that due to one location that is easily noticeable from around 2000 blocks away. There's a little more to it, but I'll drop that information behind spoilers. 

Spoiler

The Devastation, as I recall, covers roughly an area with a 1000 block radius, and is visible for another 1000 or so blocks beyond that. The player is supposed to visit Nadiya first before finding it, and while the residents have heard of it, only one actually knows where it is(the hunter, who covers a wide range of territory). However, if location distance is shortened, then the Devastation could easily end up close enough to Nadiya that it would either be visible from the village itself, or easy enough to spot simply with a couple hours' worth of walking. In that case, it doesn't make sense that only the hunter would know where the Devastation is; anyone in the village should be able to point you in its general direction, because they would be able to see it from their general area.

 

6 hours ago, Jubal said:

And yes, one conclusion here is that you're clearly better at the game than me and you've played it a lot more, but that's kind of part of my point: what's trivial for an experienced player is not always going to be viable, let alone trivial, for someone on their first run with a mere 100 hours in the game (itself already a pretty big time commitment by most standards).

Sure, but looking at it from my side of the fence, so to speak...I don't really think it's fair to new or veteran players to lower the bar for the standard experience, just because new players aren't experienced at the game yet, especially for a game that wants to cater to a more hardcore demographic. I think for a game that wants to be taken seriously as a more difficult game, it's better to set the bar higher, and let players improve their skills accordingly or adjust their settings as needed, rather than make the game for a casual audience first and then expect it to attract hardcore players.

Edit: I suppose if the argument is that the location distances are too far, then the question to ask is...what exactly constitutes a reasonable travel distance then? It's easy to argue they should be shorter, but what does shorter actually look like, and how does such a change impact the story and game as a whole?

Edited 17 hours ago by LadyWYT

[DarkGold]

A thought...

So the problem with acquiring temporal gears is that it's really unlikely to find them if you aren't quite invested in trading or fighting things. Trading is something some players might not be drawn to (lack of interest), so is combat (lack of skill means lack of enjoyment and rewards). What things do players that don't like trading or combat do in the game instead of those things?

Surface exploration? Fishing? Would these be good places to introduce temporal gear sources without trivialising the game for other players? I was thinking about the vessels you find in surface ruins that have ore or seeds, etc. Could there be something like a vessel that has temporal gears? Could you have a low chance to fish up a gear (or maybe find one when you cut a fish up)?

Would these methods be viable and fun for players that like to spend their time doing these safer activities without disincentivising the more involved activities the game currently supports? Or does panning gravel/sand/bony soil already sufficiently fill this niche?

Is it reasonable to just have a setting that lets players do less of any of the 3 possible activities (fighting, trading, panning) and get the same result as players that like to do more of those activities in much less time (eg, drop rate is increased, treasure hunters guaranteed to always be selling temporal gears)? This doesn't introduce any new sources, it just limits the amount of the game players don't enjoy that they have to engage with, and they can change that amount according to skill (if players get really good at killing things later in the game, they can change the setting back to normal). I assume this would be a world setting mostly experienced in single player (so has no effect on other players' enjoyment), but I don't see why it couldn't be a player specific setting on servers, like standard/creative game mode is. This approach would not impact the believability of the game world (it is clear the world should be harder, a player chooses to make it easier).

Is it necessary to force players to get better at fighting, since story content is gated behind fighting things?

Edited 7 hours ago by DarkGold
Correcting typos. Added question about fighting being required. Added adjustable settings thoughts.

[CastIronFabric]

17 hours ago, DarkGold said:

 

I think this is probably common for anyone not fighting in storms or trading a lot.

As a side note, I feel rather confident that most people do not fight during storms and most people do not do a ton of trading. 
I feel fairly confident that in a full playthrough the large majority of people do not have a ton of T gears to be throwing around about 10 times while they make a trip to 20,000 blocks and back. I feel fairly confident that most people are base locked near their location and that most people do not have multiple bases.

That all said, my current playthrough I am manufacturing my own RP rules for having multiple bases and I use the bedspawn mod and that is all good (some people just creative mode in a teleporter or use translocator relocator mod). I get why people would not want to do that and build just one large base. However I can see why some people would want to have multiple bases in different biomes, with different styles and build a trading route between them and use carts. Its not for everyone clearly but its what I am doing.

as another side note: BedSpawn mod has 243,148 downloads while Better Ruins mod has almost a million downloads now. The estimated number of copies of Vintage Story sits around a million as well however to be fair one player likely downloads a specific mod several times over the course of their full ownership so its not unusual to see the that number of Better Ruins mod downloads are about the same as the estimated number of game sells. I guess the point of all that intresting data is that mods are used a lot

Edited 6 hours ago by CastIronFabric