Nekkowe

Apology accepted, thank you!

Yeah, that's fair! Ultimately, decisions about where to have what kind of friction is what a game is made of, and I think Vintage Story really excels at leveraging that into confronting players with interesting situations and choices and experiences in a lot of its systems. The long term planning for crops, bushes and trees, making ore deposits rare but large and possible to slowly pin down through prospecting, bears and wolves, managing metal, there's a lot of really cool and well-thought-out stuff there. My favourite is the food system, managing hunger and food expiration while thinking about the different satieties, how certain kinds of food spoil much faster or slower than others and make for better candidates to leave a stack of at some home-away-from-home side base, tying that into animal husbandry, and then the way agriculture and gathering are affected by the seasons and regional temperature ranges and weather... hunger and food are incredibly well networked into all that surrounds them. Great stuff from start to finish. That's an example of good friction to me. I just wished for - and now I'm looking forward to - combat receiving the same treatment, since the game hinges a lot of itself on combat, it's maybe the only system besides hunger that a player has to engage with on some level no matter what.

Tons of survival games respawn you at the last place you slept when you die, I don't know where all these insecure Minecraft comparisons come from. I also never said that it's The Perfect Solution and that Vintage Story should adopt it, just that making world spawn some kind of special return spot - regardless of how badly suited world generation may or may not leave it - is not very well thought out and provides uninteresting incentives. That said, I find some of the concerns brought up with it pretty silly. Preventing people from "just placing a bed when they're about to die" is completely trivial; just don't let players sleep too close to enemies, or only allow them to sleep on beds inside a room, something the game already has a concept of and detection for. Death also does already have another penalty attached to it; it shaves off a chunk of your max HP every time, something you can only recover slowly and with preparation. Getting in fights you shouldn't will also wear down your armor quicker, so it's more resource intensive. Systems like this ensure death is never fully thoughtless without implicitly making an inflexible and possibly completely unsuitable part of the world much more important than it should be. So far, I have not heard a single good argument for my actual original stated concern with the system: "Why world spawn, exactly?" These two both just saw a mention of beds, reflexively jumped on it as Too Much Like That Other Game™, and completely ignored the broader point. I'm starting to feel like that happens a lot around here. I absolutely agree. I think this kind of thing is unavoidable. It's silly to treat every aspect of it as sacrosanct; every placeholder feature with unintentional consequences can be excused if you throw a big enough word wall at it. But there's developer intent, and then there's stuff just left by the wayside. I think there are plenty of things in this game that deserve a second look, but even stating that much is treated as an invintation to get shouted down politely and civilly "Firmly Rebutted" for "opinionated whinging". If the game were already perfectly aligned with the vision of the developers, they wouldn't be working on a combat overhaul in the first place.

Pot, meet kettle.

What's your problem with me? I can't possibly be having the experience I'm having? It's that alien to you that people outside of yourself might have different experiences? "I don't want to offend", my foot. I'm a stranger to you. I'm sharing my perspective. Why are you giving me the third degree and treating me like some kind of disingenuous liar? What kind of tone is that to take with someone? Is netiquette completely dead around here? Yes, most of the way through the Commons. I have more engaging things to do with my time, including inside of Vintage Story. I didn't know that there even was a boss somewhere in there until after leaving the Archives, and so far, not a single thing I've heard about it has convinced me it'd be cool or fun or even interesting to push that far. I've been told that the next major update is meant to be taking a longer look at how the combat works, so I'm putting the Resonant Archives out of my mind until then. Is that "believable" enough for you? Do you find it in you to treat me like a sentient human being worth having a genuine conversation with now?

Then please read my post more carefully. I was saying that if I leave these particular mechanics on, the game gets less interesting. Temporal Storms don't incentivize planning ahead or preparing your base, or even staying in your base finding something constructive to do with your time while your hunger ticks down; because enemies can spawn directly next to you inside your home, they incentivize burying yourself in a 2x1 hole or running in circles in an open area outside. The spawn point getting reset to world spawn doesn't incentivize careful management of a rare RNG drop you might never actually end up seeing any more of, it incentivizes building your base at world spawn. Who pissed in your coffee? Is that a normal tone to take with strangers around here?

Alright, mindreader, I guess you know better than I do why I bounced off the Resonance Archives, let's hear what my "primary decision factor" was

Ah, that's good to hear! Thank you for your response! I don't agree with most of it, but that's all largely down to differences in personal preference. I had no idea the archives light up on their own later down the line, though - I placed torches in every torch holder I found, which was just the very top and then the looong ladder shaft before the actual no-build area, and from that point on forward I never saw one again... at some point after exploring the first and half of the second level, making a bunch of trips back and forth to dump out all the tattered clothing and butterfly badges and other junk I found in there, I got so tired of dealing with the endless enemy spawns in the commons that I just bounced off it entirely for the time being. Sounds like 1.23 might be a good time to give it another try. Effectively, I think it just pushes the player to build their base at the world spawn, a place that may or may not be even remotely suitable for it. I don't think it's good or interesting for it to arbitrarily be treated as some kind of super special place. Like temporal storms, it's another case where the most straightforward way to deal with the system is way more boring than just disabling the mechanic entirely. Would you say that none of the things I pointed out in my earlier post need an overhaul?

I came to Vintage Story to explore and build, but as interested as I am in the story content, the reason I'll probably never get to the final boss fight is that the combat (and everything tying into it, from the temporal storms to the respawn system) is in a bafflingly awful state at the moment. It's not because I'm not interested in seeing more of the story, or because of some general aversion to combat as a concept. I'd love for it to be as interesting as the rest of the game is, but right now, it's not.

Yeah, I feel like pretty much everything touching combat is in some way underbaked at best and frustrating in a boring way at worst... Temporal storms are unbearable; the spawn system makes even your home unsafe, incentivizing you to just dig a 2x1 hole to AFK in for several minutes (until you turn them off) Temporal rifts and regional stability broadly don't really add anything (until you turn them off) Death returns you to world spawn, for some ungodly reason (until you install a bed spawn mod) Items despawn in minutes (until you install a corpse mod, or get uncomfortably comfortable with /tpwp You Died Here) Not a single animal or hostile construct enemy so much as makes footstep sounds Hunting is barely worth the time, for how impossible it is to actually track a hurt animal (until you install a blood trail and/or footprint mod). They can continue to outrun you forever, with no limits to their stamina and no way to really track them if you lose sight of them for even a moment Attacking things in melee feels both clunky and impactless at the same time Places like the Archive require light but don't let you build or place torches, negating any use for shields, so the odd sawblade locust just kinda kills you in two hits regardless of armor I have not yet made it all the way through the Archives, but I've heard of the boss fight down there, and not a single thing I've heard about it has been positive Non-animal enemies are straight up almost never worth fighting, not least since they almost never so much as drop anything I was really surprised how much emphasis the game places on combat, considering how terrible of a state it's currently in. And I was surprised about how terrible of a state it's in, considering how well everything else works... except gears and stuff, I guess. Even if you turn off temporal rifts and storms and the like, if you want to engage with the story content, you have to engage with the combat. And the combat is not in a good state at all. Are there any announced plans of changing any of that anytime soon...?