player burnout

[Davis]

To comment on a few things; 

I think this game does lose it's spark after some hours of playing. With that being said, we have a very small team of indie developers trying to give monsters like Minecraft and Hytale a run for their money. I also don't think this game is directly comparable to anything else, it's obviously survival and realism focused and I think that's a huge draw for players like ourselves, that's probably why we're all here. I think it's a bit unfair at this point to say the developers are falling short or not doing a good job (not saying anyone said that). I think it's still early days and until all or most of their planned features are included it is hard for me personally to sit here and say that the game is lacking. 

With that being said, I've mentioned once already that combat needs to change. It's a Minecraft clone and Minecraft has some of the worst combat mechanics of any computer game in the history of computer games. However, they were first to blow up this genre and they got away with it because of that. 

On a further note, the game having more linear story telling mechanics and events does not throw away its sandbox element. The definition of a sandbox game is doing what you the player wants to, and the fact it's a building focused (volvox) genre I feel no matter what they do it's impossible to remove that element from the game. 

All in all, I'm hopeful for the future, it's early days. I think in two years this game will be unrecognizable from today and I hope the indie developers see the value in taking on a few more staff to speed things a long. Not to mention they've made this game modder friendly, and that will in time generate some great additional content (it already has imo). 

[Thorfinn]

On 12/7/2021 at 8:29 AM, Maelstrom said:

I think there should be a tutorial world that teaches the basic survival skills - gather essential materials, clay crafting, cooking, quarrying, etc. and ends at smelting copper.  Make a small world (maybe a couple thousand block radius) that has everything needed to get to copper.  Make the game a bit easier, buff player a bit (higher HP, lower hunger) lower wolf aggression some.  Provide pop up bubbles that give direction about what to do, i.e. when player comes near clay bubble informs player that they will need clay to form items, like storage vessels.  Overall it would be the exact same world to help people conquer the huge learning curve.  

More I think on it, I don't think it needs to be that ambitious. Just pick some arbitrary number like 100 and make that distance around the spawn point a wolf-free zone. No hostiles spawn there. Well, apart from drifters in caves and at night, but obviously one can avoid them by holing up at night and staying out of the caves. No, it would not guarantee copper, but that should be enough to learn the basics anyway, and n00bs don't think of it as wasting time on a tutorial world.

[Sikandar]

There is a grace period for drifter spawn setting already available, would be nice if wolves and other hostile creatures were passive during that period too.

[Hal13]

On 12/14/2021 at 4:55 PM, Sikandar said:

would be nice if wolves and other hostile creatures were passive during that period

they don't spawn in that period. But the grace timer does start when the first seraph enters the world not each time a new player joins the server.

[Yondu]

Hello. I think it's too early to raise the topic of player burnout, since the game is being developed slowly by a home game studio and it is still only at the beginning of its roadmap. You should not be nervous and just as long as there are no special additions to the content, then play something else.

[Thorfinn]

Fair enough, @Yondu, burnout is not the right word in my case. And I'm not at all nervous about it. Just sharing what I think are the elements that make a game interesting to me. The kind of thing I would like to see more of.

For example, the challenge of food can burn bright for a day or two, depending on the gods of RNG, but regardless of the RNG, within a week, that concern has been largely or completely solved, and you are to the point of beginning your winter grain storage. When it takes that long, I often find myself more or less skipping copper age and going straight into bronze, because while wandering about in my quest for seeds, I've found enough tin, too.

[Tehgarin]

On 8/29/2021 at 3:43 AM, shockingboring said:

Seeing as I've also encountered this issue almost right after I discovered the game I just want to leave my 2 cents as well. By now I've been just playing alone for weeks... after burning through all my friends and it's really sad to be the only one in my circle that is interested in the game with what it currently provides.

Many players leaving is a huge problem as the game, with its unique classes, is clearly built for multiplayer and requires multiplayer to allow each class to shine.

I don't think it is a lack of crafting or building content that drives the majority of players away after a short while, I don't think it is the complexity of the crafting and refinement processes either.

All of my friends found the crafting and refinement, the generated worlds, the game itself great and really cool but quit because of the same thing: 

Some scattered lore you can find is not interesting enough for many players to warrant spending hundreds of hours preparing for it.

Simply surviving for survivals sake is just boring. I disagree with the opinion:

Minecraft profited hugely of being the first wiedely known voxelbased sandbox game when it came out. Vintage Story is not in that position and needs to provide more to survive as a game. The game needs an end goal, or several. Some ideas that come to mind would be:

• Bossfights
• Finding something special (that has some sort of use other than lore)
• Building some kind of final machine
• Some special degree of character progression
• Surviving a predefined timespan (which would kind of require permadeath)

There are several aspects of the game that can appeal to different kinds of players:

• Building
• Exploration
• Survival
• Combat
• Technology
• Mining
• Hunting
• Farming
• Foraging

Ideally there would be endgame-goals which speak to each of those different kinds of people. The goals should also be challenging, rewarding and repeatable.

Aside from having a goal the gameplay itself also needs to be rewarding in each of those areas. The game does a relatively good job at that but some areas are really lacking (combat in general mostly...).

A big part of the game is acquiring knowledge, materials and building structures that allow for progression. From my experience only very few players in a group take the lead on those aspects and feel a sense of accomplishment after reaching a new milestone. for all others, reaching some milestone is only mildly rewarding as they didn't actually take much part in it other than run errands.

To provide those players with a sense of accomplishment I would like to suggest a character based progression system. the simplest way would be exp, levels and stat points or skills with a slight bonus to existing activities or even new actions in addition to what the classes provide. It would be very important that higher levels are desirable and players have to make decisions and cannot have all skills at some point as that would reduce the value of having a team.

With a system like that, or anything comparable, players that can't feel a sense of accomplishment for a milestone they didn't actively take part in would have something of their own to come back to.

I know that having exp, levels and skills/stats is very cliché and might not be what the developers envisioned for the game. however the value it would have for rewarding players should not be underestimated.

The problem with having no character progression is that playing feels useless as you could just simply come back when someone else has built what you need to advance.

Likewise having procedurally generated worlds makes exploration feel useless as there is no real soul in the places you find.

Those problems can be overcome and I would love to see Vintage Story accomplish just that.

 

So yea. it's not that there isn't enough to do, it's not that it is too complex or too difficult. The game just needs to provide incentive to play and advance as just an extremely small amount of people can deal with a pure sandbox experience.

I need something my friends and I actually want to build that Steelarmor for.

I don't think so at all. The game has plenty of challenge. And why does every game have to have levels? All then that will happen is you shoot for that hit the top then complain about that there's no more content again. Don't get me wrong I get what your saying however it may be that this game isn't for you then. Lore is coming. Patience is a virtue little to this day have learned to wait for. (get what I did there)  

I dont think you need multiple classes to play together to enjoy or even play this game. And I don't want boss fights. Harder animals maybe but not a Boss creature with tags over his head saying IM THE MAN TO BEAT.  Makes the game feel like ever other game. Not down for that. Vintage Story has a feeling to it which is unique and I applaud Tyron for sticking to his guns and not breaking to peer pressure. he will turn out a game that he wants and a better game in the future for those who are looking for this type of thing.

When major changes like these start happening it means they are looking for money only and they stop worrying about the game and how it works and the people that play it. It then only becomes a commodity of income to them. Instead of what they dreamed of creating.

Hope that helps. No flaming at all just putting my 2 cents out there on topic. Everyone gets burned out on games if they play to often I even move from this game back to a couple of others for action Like sea of thieves or Conan exiles. But ALWAYS come back in a week or two to this one for the quite game play and serenity of the world is delivers.

Hope that helps.

 

 

 

[ArrayPointer]

Vintage Story's ability to supply or not supply the player with enough impetus to continue playing past a certain point should not be a concern for Vintage Story's developers. What I mean by that is they've already created a high-quality, feature-rich sandbox survival game with features absent from other similar games, and they have obviously committed themselves to addressing bugs and creating new and interesting content on a consistent timeline.

Many (not all) of the concerns expressed in this thread are the same complaints leveled against Mosoft's voxel-based wokefest, such as eventual boredom or disfavor generated by lack of A, B or C and too much X, Y and Z. As VS and MC are two different games, the specific particulars are not the same, but the negative views of their effects on gameplay are very similar. Speaking of any particular game that is of exceptional quality, whether any individual player sees it as half empty or half full, it's the same glass of water.

Others in this thread have pointed out that Vintage Story has sufficiently been advertised for what it truly is, and in that regard the developers have more than delivered. If players can't find enough things to do or goals to work toward in a sandbox game with this much content, then perhaps they are consigning themselves to eventual boredom no matter what game they choose to play. Is that the nature of the beast for sandbox games? Others in this thread have pointed out that the game is best enjoyed by an urge to build and create, not simply survival for its own sake.

All that being said, after having played quite a bit at this point, the initial thrills associated with temporal storms have given way to annoyance for me and my fellow players, as has been already expressed elsewhere in this thread. I don't have a solution other than to eventually turn the storms off, but ironically I'm concerned I will miss an important aspect of the game by doing so. It's not that I don't enjoy combative adversity, but I would rather seek it out when I'm ready for it, as opposed to having it thrust upon me regardless of what I'm currently trying to accomplish in the game.

Admittedly I haven't found all the journals in the game to fully understand the lore of the world's past, so perhaps I will gain more appreciation for the intrusion of the Rust World when I learn what actually happened to create the temporal instabilities. I am excited to uncover a well-written story underneath it all, so I remain hopeful that more journal entries will enrich my natural inclination to suspend disbelief (while playing immersive First Person video games).

Regards,

ArrayPointer

 

[Maelstrom]

On 12/10/2022 at 2:19 PM, ArrayPointer said:

I am excited to uncover a well-written story underneath it all, so I remain hopeful that more journal entries will enrich my natural inclination to suspend disbelief (while playing immersive First Person video games).

Lore can also be learned from tapestries and scrolls which can be obtained from ruins in caves and purchased from traders.

[Anthony frailey]

if you pan boney soils too ( boring but highly recommended to do) , you'll get a lot of the journal books.  if you use the better ruins mod , you'll find lot of papers and scrolls too in chest that have info on them. ( I did not know tapestries had lore, I just been sticking them on my wall, lol ) 
to toss in my two cents ... 
the elements are there for the lovecraft style, and has things going on in game on it, however, these features can be turned off mostly in settings, that is in my opinion, absolute genius on the part of the devs. 
And to answer... the ONLY part you will lack is finding temporal gears from spawned drifters , which we all know, is low chance of attaining one that way anyways, if these features are turned off. 
I like the option, to  play with these elements, or without ... 

Thats the key point, options. I get to set the level of enjoyment , for what I am feeling and wanting at the time I decide to play.  That in itself, is what players should be looking at in regards to this game. 
 

Vintage story, is a sandbox , and like all sandboxes ... you have to rely on yourself , to make your own fun inside what's available. 
thats sorta with any game really, even linear, lead you by the nose games.  ( I read the earliest post on this topic, noted a few tried claiming, such open world sandbox, isn't fun for Most players.  This is unfounded, and highly untrue statement.   Where are the statistics, where's the research proof of this concept?  Even then, it'd be a question, of what audience was targeted, five year olds that squeak into the mics , or seasoned survival game experts?  Point of fact, it was opinion of the persons stating, not fact.  If one sees trends, players over-all prefer games Without restrictive pay walls, linear must do this, or that, or even more absurd... survive the "end boss" , or locked content that hinders the -casual- progression, advancement, and widely more important.. over-all enjoyment of playing.) 

its not entirely a "survival" game, not entirely a building game, but some of a cross-breed inbetween the two, with out being a "simulation" game at the same time.  
It's at the stage it is in now, less an issue of not enough content, but MORE of an issue of how much players can think for themselves, with what content is there.  
THATS the issue here truly. 
 

and when the vanilla content, seems to run dry... pop over to mods, and add in extra content.  It should refresh the the experience.  Can always start new game, on new seed ... tweak the environment or world settings, want more of a frustrating challenge? Play in a hot arid desert world, and try to find clay, lol. ( it can be had... but panning hundreds of sand block for enough to make few essentials, is bit time consuming and on the boring side. ) 

But mods extend the playability, offering new things to do , new tools, items, some quality of life improvements... the slightest thing can and will make a difference there in. 

is VS a perfect game? ... No.  No game is, even huge budget AAA titles.   
Is VS a "Good' game? Yes for what it is, its a very good game.  

Edited December 14, 2022 by Anthony frailey

[ArrayPointer]

17 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Lore can also be learned from tapestries and scrolls which can be obtained from ruins in caves and purchased from traders.

Didn't know that, thanks!!