Role Player

I wholeheartedly approve of this.

First off, thank you for interacting with my post. I do not believe a consensus is possible in gaming communities. As such I believe the base vanilla settings of a game should be made to the preferences of the devs. With, the devs, also including comprehensive configuration settings that allow the community to alter the gameplay as they see fit. Personally I enjoy extreme, but fair, difficulty where sometimes bad things happen such as crop blight, or an injury, or a flood. External stimuli are, in my opinion, the best way to keep an experience fresh. Life is a narrative written by the world you live in and the decisions you make. An example: Say, you are playing this game, and you have are about to begin harvesting your crops and culling your animals for winter. Everything is going well, but a fire starts due to one reason or another. Or a flood comes rushing down the mountain from a storm last night. Or a locust swarm tears through the landscape. And you are left with no food for yourself, nor your animals. How do you survive the winter? Do you cull your entire herd to fill your cellar? Do you barter with a greedy neighbor that didn't lose their crops, giving them almost all of your stored metals? This, my friend, is how you make a story. I don't want to play this game and have every year play out the same way. I don't want to know exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. That is stale and lifeless, to me. Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game inspired by lovecraftian horror themes. Find yourself in a ruined world reclaimed by nature and permeated by unnerving temporal disturbances. Relive the advent of human civilization, or take your own path.---This is a direct quote from the developers. I agree that the mob AI could do with some work, but there needs to be some degree of sanctuary, some place the player can call safe, especially during the first few nights. I believe that the enemy monsters should not spawn your first year except underground or in ruins. You simply have too much to do and too many other worries to attend to. I also believe that sanctuary is something earned, not something given. You should have to fight for what you have, from nature, from monsters, from other people. You should *need* to have good relations with your neighbors, you should *need* to form a militia, to build palisades, to have patrols that check the fields every so often. This ties back into my argument that you don't play D&D without the majority of your group. A lone man is unlikely to survive alone in nature unless he has trained for decades in order to do so. This is something I disagree with, currently, the progression can feel like a chore more than something to enjoy, especially with how far you need to travel for certain resources already (like borax, halite, resin, lime) Progression should be something you develop through skills. I believe a good benchmark for a player to max out a single profession would be 10 in game years. Player interdependence is extremely important to me. No single man should be a master of every trade, it's unrealistic and allows players to spread out when they really should be interacting and trading far, far more often. Half of a multiplayer game is player interaction. Travel should be handled differently than it is now. Maybe utilizing some kind of overlaid fatigue system that causes you to travel slower the farther you travel a day, tying into player attribute skill/equipment/transportation/trail quality(if there even is a trail)/time of year and more. The destination is not where you make your memories, it's the journey. The days of running 50 miles and back just for a backpack full of x material should, in my opinion, be cut. It's not fun to simply run to x location to get x item. You should really, and I mean really, prepare for a journey. I don't hate this, but I don't really see what it adds either. Just take a look at Valheim to understand what I mean with trees. It's an integral part of the game. You don't have Valheim without tree physics. To elucidate, however, I will simply list a few possible cases where this could be useful. A tree falling and killing you/a friend/a pet. A tree falling and destroying a house or industry building. There are many more ways that this could affect gameplay but many of them are stringent on making trees behave like they do in Valheim. This is too punishing, players would likely just stop playing a save after an event like this, rather than see the results of it. It's not fun having everything you've been working on removed in an instant unless that's what you wanted. See my first response, the world does not obey you and you do not obey it. Nature and man will always clash and the stories that spin from these clashes are worth telling. This could certainly be interesting, but I get the feeling that foreign plant species moving around would just lead to a homogeneous world It would be difficult to implement and would rely heavily and a change in how world generation works. Continents would need to be added, each with their own list of biomes with their own list of plants and animals. Think about the wild hogs that are in the US, or the Emus in Australia. There are countless examples of invasive species wiping out whole ecosystems leading to economic collapse and famine. Hence, harking back to my story argument. This is often requested, but I don't think that overhauling the combat system in this way is something that the majority of the player base actually wants. There are other games you can play for this style of combat. Currently the lore, and the extensive armor selection lead me to believe that this game is indeed intended to have a heavy emphasis on combat. The current system is not acceptable and we need some level of skill expression. It does not have to be as comprehensive as I've stated but it needs to be better. This is one topic I'm not okay with acquiescing on. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Look up the game Exanima, it has a breathtaking system for layered armors and clothing. I simply can't do the topic justice like that game can. There already is a system in place to benefit the player for having a balanced diet, I don't see the need for a mechanic that punishes them for having a poor diet Another way to force trade, travel, and conflict between player factions. If I'm getting scurvy but citrus doesn't grow in my biome/on my continent I'll either need to colonize, trade, or pillage for it. It also helps to force players to have more diverse farms and meals giving cooks something to do. This topic can be expounded upon greatly if you'd like to speak about it further with me. To end my response, again, thank you for your interaction. Discussions are important for communities to remain healthy.

I would like to preface this with an assertion that this is a list of suggestions. This is not a list of demands. Please do not mischaracterize my phrasing as an attempt to force my opinions on my peers or the developers. Discussion is an all too often ignored tool. Please use it if you have an agreement or disagreement with anything I suggest. The argument that 'no what you like is bad and what I like is good' is simply not conducive to proper discourse or progression of ideology. Give me a reason my idea sucks, and a reason your idea is better and I just might agree with you and change my own opinions. Logistics are important. This benign statement is the summation of everything I believe in when it comes to video games. All of my suggestions will, in some way, tie back into this single phrase I personally believe that this game is meant to be played with other people, not as a solo. So do not argue with me about my suggestions being too difficult, or simply impossible to perform in solo play. my suggestions are simply not given with any thought in regards to solo players (I am currently a solo player, the current multiplayer aspect of this game trivializes what miniscule difficulty there is to enjoy). Do you play dungeons and dragons without at least having the majority of your group present? My guess is no, you don't. I do not believe you should play Vintage Story without the majority of your group either. We as players, in Vintage Story, already do handle a small amount of logistical concerns. Do I have enough metal to forge x item I need to perform x utility? Do I have enough food to last over the winter? This is a good start but I believe we can do better. Without logistics there is no difficulty. Without difficulty there is no immersion. Without immersion there is no fun. This game is not difficult. It is not immersive. It is not fun. However what we have so far is beautiful, and could potentially be a strong foundation for a fun game. I will attempt to more thoroughly explain my reasoning for why my suggestions are, in my opinion, worth adding into the game. Here is my take on what needs to be changed, and added, in order to reach that point. Quick Bullet points for those of you that don't want to read my entire post. *Better Mob ai with the ability to threaten players hiding in their homes, in water, or on hills. *More difficult progression with more crafting/building/labor minigames. *Skill locks on crafting recipes. *Heavily region locked goods, Forcing trade between player factions. *Realistic tree felling, watch out for where that tree falls. *Harsher natural storms with tornadoes, flooding, wind damage. *Fire. Is. Scary. Make wild fires a genuine concern. *Character Progression through earnable, and lose-able attributes and skills. (Skill/attribute rusting) *Realistic ecology, overhunting could cause a collapse of the food chain. *Dynamic ecology, plants grow and die on their own, are eaten or trampled by animals/players. introduction of foreign and aggressive species of plants/animals causing changes in the balance of the local ecosystem. *More animal variety. *More Drifter variety. *Extremely rare plants/materials for late game players to contest over, perhaps a good way to induce civil wars/wars between player factions. *A better combat system with directional attacks/blocking, feints, shield/hilt/head bashing, kicks, quick sidesteps/back-steps, lunges, and rolling. *A detailed injury/ailment system with in depth healing system. Bleeding, poisoning, venom, disease, fungal/bacterial/viral infections, fractures, broken bones, lacerations, burns. No instant treatments, injuries must be tended then must heal. *Water physics. *Thirst. *Layered clothing/armor. *Mounts, Wheelbarrows, Carts, Wagons, Boats, Ships, Hot air Balloons. *Steam power. More mechanical tools, printing presses, auto-looms. *Animal assisted tools/machines, Ploughs. *More diverse nutritional needs, Scurvy. Progression and Threat. How long would it take you to get the best armors and weapons possible? A couple seasons maybe? How long would it take you to build a mansion, or a castle? Maybe 3 or 4 seasons right? This is terrible. Progression is too easy in this game. and with a group? Well, it is nigh instantaneous. I believe that the current way ore is handled could be improved, instead of simply smashing a block apart you could use a chisel on a block of ore, and perform a minigame to acquire the most ore from the stone as possible. Mistakes in the minigame could cause the grade of ore you can acquire to drop until you possibly acquire nothing for your efforts. I believe tree felling could be implemented into the game with cut trees falling in the direction of a combination of side chopped and wind. Are you afraid of combat in this game? You shouldn't be. It's trivial. So trivial in fact that if you swim in water you, in all practicality, become a god. There is 0 threat posed by any enemies in this game if you kite them in a pond/lake/stream. Zero. It's the same way if you hide in your house. It's the same way if you climb a tree. The ai 'threats' need an extensive rework in order to, actually, be threatening. *Flag water as dangerous for mobs. Drifters could avoid it entirely if they have a clean line of sight to the player and opt to throw rocks, crossing water only once the player is no longer visible. As well as having animals avoid chasing players into water entirely, or at least make them faster in it, pond kiting trivializes every threat in the game. *Give Drifters and animals the ability to break world objects, perhaps with higher tier Drifters and animals being capable of breaking higher tier materials. I had a dog once that literally ate through a wood door. A wooden door is NOT going to stop a determined pack of wolves, it just won't. If they want in, they WILL get in. *Give Drifters the ability to climb walls. give wolves the ability to lunge, vertically up to say 2-3 blocks, no more camping a small hill and cheesing the ai. *Flag crops, beehives, and stored food as targets for drifters and animals. *Make wolves faster. *Give a rare variance/rare monster the ability to start fires, tying into the idea of increasing the danger of wild fires. These are wild animals with brains and nightmare monsters from a doomed dimension. You should not be safe simply because either you decided to take a dip or hang out inside your home. Direct threats such as an angry/hungry wild animals or lovecraftian horrors from doomed dimensions are indeed good ways to raise the stress levels of your players. However, they are by no means the only way to add threats to game. *More dangerous wild fires, my recommendations are giving fires the chance to spread embers that can flow in the direction of the wind and start new fires. (There could also be a concern with temperatures/smoke spread from large fires that could cause players to go into hyperthermia or smoke asphyxia. *Natural disasters such as floods (combined with water physics), tornadoes, wind damage during harsh storms, soil erosion from excessive rain fall. The list goes on for ways to die simply due to weather alone. *Make traveling in winter more dangerous, ice accumulation on the body, freezing of layers of clothing. I am going to pause my thread here, I will update it later.