Urmanin

You just indirectly confirmed that the journey is that long just to justify the elk. And the point of my statement isn't that I have to hold W - it's that it's mind-numbingly long, absolutely pointless and completely boring. Everyone knows about the elk, and everyone outside your little precious echochamber abhors chapter 2. So far out of every entirely separate group I have played with 100% of the reactions to chapter 2 were "I am never playing with lore content again". You can defend it all you want, but there are always people like you who defend objectively bad decisions and practices in gaming. This leads to the game's "official" communities becoming a smaller and smaller chamber of nothing but positivity as the project slowly shrivels up and dies. In the end all arguments defending bad changes to the game boil down to "but I liked it" (you are in the absolute minority), more tedium = more hard and good, and mods will fix it. It's a death knell for the long term prospects of the game. It has happened before dozens if not hundreds of times, and this time will be no different. The devs very badly need to take a step back and ask the important question of "what does this change accomplish? what does it mean for actual gameplay and fun?" and to put the second game on the backburner until VS is done. I will for the last time reiterate - tedium and realism for their own sake is just the game insisting upon itself. The game flow gets bogged down with pointless chores and tasks become longer and more complicated with zero payoff. If you like games like the germans' favorite farming simulators, this is for you. If you're a normal human being, more tedium with zero payoff is extremely off-putting. Believe me, outside of here the absolute majority of people hate pointless tedium and the lore content as it is in the game right now. The point of games is to be fun, and if it's not fun, why bother.

It's not just the parkour, it's also the boss. They just looked at the ender dragon, who NOBODY likes actually fighting, and thought "how can we make this 5 times more annoying". And your payoff is literally nothing. Not to mention hours of holding W in empty terrain to get there. All of chapter 2 needs to be scrapped again and redone. It is straight up awful.

Their development time is a finite resource which is why they're spending it making a second game instead of having all hands on deck for actually finishing vs first. It's a very poor excuse, and Tyron and co are not the first by far to use it. It ends the same way every time too, and I am not willing to bet VS will be an exception in the long run. The magic "creator vision" just looks extremely unfocused with no clear priorities. I'll trust someone like the devs of valheim or starsector to deliver on a straight vision, bit from the looks of things Tyron and co have no clear vision anymore, they just add whatever is cool to them in the moment regardless of prior commitments or promises anymore. The biggest case of that recently was warframe and guess what, the game only started getting better when the "people with the vision" completely left warframe development for the second game (which tyron and co are also doing) and were replaced. VS is not some magic unique case in game development. Videogames have been actively made since the 80s and in that time I have seen plenty of examples of "creators with vision" who made a good foundation but then lost track and ended up just making a mess.

We get it, Tyron wants everyone to use his ugly oc donut steel sword named after his precious self insert oc. He was just mad people threw spears at his precious eidolon to turn it into an eidogon, because as a boss it's boring and quite frankly nobody cared for it of the about 3 times i'ver seen it done with different people. It's also why the second boss is as it is - it exists just to waste your ammo, and makes it so you can't throw spears at it. As a weapon the falx makes no sense. At no point should it magically be more effective at fighting anything than a spear, the weapon of choice of every footman in history. Looking at it realistically it offers absolutely zero benefit over just using any old normal sword. Sure, it SAYS it's somehow, magically better at fighting drifters, when looking at it it would be worse than any straight-edged blade at cutting something in an actual fight. It'll just get caught on your enemy, or the metal jutting out of them when slashing. Or do you think there exist enemies which let you stand still and use the falx on them like a hand saw? That's what the design seems to imply. It's like he looked at a khopesh and thought to himself "how can I make it lamer". I refuse to use falxes on principle just to spite Tyron at this point. Thankfully there's no shortage of alternatives even in the base game (spears, bows and the shortsword). Again, the excuse of "oh but you have better spears now" holds no water because the new "better" spears are now the same as old "worse" spears, meaning you have to put in more resources and effort to get the same, or worse, results. All because the devs are mad at people doing what every caveman learned to do.

Quite frankly the game isn't as solid as you claim because the whole chapter 2 of the story is some of the absolute worst I have seen videogames have to offer. Not to mention many other gripes, no matter how minor, people had over previous updates some of which still haven't been addressed even though it would really not take long. Such as the stone paths being misalingned with their version of stairs. This has been a complaint for coming up to 2 years at the very least. Do not tell me this takes years of dev time to fix. It doesn't. And looking back at updates and excuses, some design decisions in regards to it read as stubborn and entirely tone-deaf. Why are the chapter 2 locations so far? To justify the elk. Their words not mine. People defend it as an "adventure" but holding W for hours on empty plains with nothing in them but an odd wolf or bear (or the notorious pit traps that are everywhere) isn't very fun. Why did the spears get nerfed? Because carrying 10 and throwing them is "too powerful". We'd certainly want to address all the npcs complaining about that one. In a pve game. Why is the mechanical update now the fishing update? Because it's easier to put into the second game (which TOTALLY isn't affecting vs development trust me bro). God reading that whole post about it, it's so pathetic. It's just Tyron crying about it because he knows it's true.

Nerfing ranged options in a stone age to late medieval survival game is an insult to every hunter or soldier that ever lived until firearms became widespread.

That's what I said. You can require metal tongs for iron, meteoric iron and steel metalwork, but there is no reason I should retire perfectly workable tongs for when I need to work with copper, gold or lead.

I don't trust Tyron to roll back bad changes since he's the one who made the devastation tower (and the journey to it), the literal worst, anti-fun part of any game I have seen in over 25 years. I'd rather go back to getting PKd in ultima online than do that one again, ever. My point of most "realism" changes this update just being tedium for tedium's sake stands. Sure, make me grow EVEN MORE flax, as if you didn't already need multiple crates' worth of flax to do things in this game, like being able to make a sailboat and a windmill.

There should be no durability loss on tongs. It's just tedium. You want metal tongs, possibly with leather wrapped around the handle part to work with iron+? That's cool, that's fine, I don't want to constantly have to re-craft tongs. And I certainly don't want to need to have tongs everywhere to work with anything hotter than a mild midsummer day in a fantasy game where i am a blue-skinned better-than-human immortal.

See, the changes would be fine if you needed one pair of tongs (infinite, wooden) to work with crucibles and another tier of tongs (infinite, metal) to work with higher temperatures, and not just "let's make players forge tongs forever now". Hell, realistically you now shouldn't be able to work with metal ever with wooden tongs now since the smelting temperature of copper is over 1000c and tongs are routinely used, right now, for lower temperature work with ingots. And needing them for food cooking is just completely unneeded and unnecessary.

Here's another question on forging realism since tongs need to be more realistic all of a sudden: where do all the metal voxels I hammer off go? Metal doesn't just magically disappear. Does it teleport straight to the rust dimension?

Calling a tiny echochmber "literally everybody" is really funny because outside of a small curated club nobody likes, or wanted, these changes. Nobody ever, EVER, complained about not having to change tongs constantly like every other tool or being able to pick up food. Again, a lot of these changes are just more tedium for the sake of tedium. People who defend things with "but it's realistic" are the epitome of midwit, as realism is not and never will be inherently fun. The first thing a videogame has to do is be fun. People like Gabe Newell already explained why realism is often the opposite of fun. You have to balance realism with how fun or tedious something is, adn you have to walk a pretty fine line to do it and 1.22 fails miserably by jumping straight into the "I have to go grocery shopping" chore pit. But as I already pointed out all these tedium changes and other problems are unlikely to be fixed because as far as I can tell the dev team only listen to positive feedback and nothing else. I am constantly amazed by the ability of modders, who do it for free, to make the game more complex and less tedious while fixing core issues for free while a team we all pay money to in order to develop the game can't do some basic features and fixes after years of them existing.

To add, saying "you can just mod it out if you don't like it" is just the "mods will fix it" excuse. That's the skyrim defense. I shouldn't ever need mods to fix core issues.

A lot of the 1.22 added realism falls off the line of balancing fun and tedium straight into the tedium category. Hunting in VS is something nobody enjoys because quite frankly trying to chase animals that never tire and are also faster than you gets old extremely fast to put it mildly. There is nothing interesting or engaging about it. Hell, endurance hunting is an unproven and recent theory in real life with no real proof behind it. Hence why people preferred throwing spears, because it's the only semi-reliable hunting method outside of cheese in the game. But as people have known for a while Tyron hates ranged so spears got nerfed. Sure, they claim it'll be adjusted, but the truth is that they shouldn't have been nerfed at all in the first place. It absolutely feels like Tyron wants everyone to use falxes instead of literally anything else despite the weapon being unpopular to say the least. There is no reason a regular sharp sword would somehow be worse at cutting than this falx thing, named after tyron's dear oc donut steel. You want combat to be realistic? Add more medieval weapon variety, unnerf spears, and buff slings to be much slower but just as powerful as throwing spears, if not more. I've seen someone punch through a metal helmet with a sling, you can't tell me it does little to no damage, that's extremely unrealistic. The reason bows superseded slings was because they were much easier than slings to use, not because they were more powerful or anything, same deal with crossbows and then firearms. Another thing is quenching and tempering. It sounds fun until you realize you have a chance to break the tool which is enough for me to never engage with those systems. Grind wheels add critical chance? Who thought that was a good idea? You could have had grinding wheels either restore durability at the cost of maximum total durability or to just increase damage/damage tier at the cost of durability for weapons, but instead you went with the absolute most nonsensical option. Tongs having durability is something literally 0 people wanted, and if the game insists on being realistic you wouldn't ever need a second pair of tongs as that's not a tool that you would realistically wear out and break over an entire human lifetime. I've also seen that hot food might require tongs to hold now. If that's an actual change, again, you'd have to be demented to add that to the game. Who wanted that? Nobody asked for this. Farming now requires far larger fields. Sure, if you're playing multiplayer that change may look okay to you since you're not the one doing farming, but if you were in charge of feeding everyone already your workload just doubled for zero benefit, and in singleplayer the amount of tedium just increased, and you now have even less time for other things in the game. The biggest point against this update was that it was promised to be the mechanical update and instead you get the fishing update + maybe some mechanical stuff on the side if we're lucky. Changing how mechanical power works before adding reinforced axles is straight up putting the cart before the horse. What this does in essence is force people to rebuild mechanical setups to be weaker/slower with 0 alternatives to make up for it currently. But you can le epic wholesome reddit chungus fish now (which nobody asked for in the promised mechanical update), so that makes it alright or something. Meanwhile other things remain unfixed or unadded that would be a cinch to add. Paths and path stairs are still misaligned. You can't mix flour with water in a barrel to reduce tedium. Hell ,the omok pieces that were being sold were straight up wrong for several patches. I've only played the game since 1.21, and I truly do like the game as it is in 1.21 (with the exception of the entire tower quest which is straight up abysmal to put it very mildly, and 0 people who did it want to ever do it again, to the point that they'd rather disable lore content altogether, and temporal storms which are cool the first time you see it and and then just turn into waste of time afk simulator after) but already I am seeing massive issues with the development process and certain development philosophies of vs, namely the lack of someone who tells the dev team that some changes are straight up bad or unnecessary and a lack of direction/vision for the update pipeline. All of this has happened before and vs seems to, unfortunately, be heading down that road too. Sure, some changes are good or fun, but the bad so far massively outweighs the good. Just like Kojima and George Lucas, Tyron is in a desperate need of someone who stands behind him as he works and periodically hits him with a rolled up newspaper and tells him no. Sure, he made a massive cope post about the second game totally not affecting the development of VS but most changes feel like they did them because they could just copy them to the second game. Thank god hytale is a thing now at least maybe someone will just mod it to be vs+ eventually, because quite frankly I am finding it really hard to trust that 1.22 onward will be net positive updates to the game and not just more tedium = more hard and tedium = good. Some competition would do the dev team a lot of good.

Also another feature not seen in 1.22 is that the tower still exists. It is the most anti-fun part of almost any game I have seen in my life since the times of ultima and wizardry and my greatest wish is that it is deleted from the game completely because if it isn't I'm never finishing the story no matter how much more gets added to it in the future. In real life you can stockpile ice to slow down how fast it melts, and even cool basements with it. People centuries ago did it. We can't though it'll just melt. Not like it was useful for anything that isn't an elvator or building material in the base game anyway, and it still isn't. It just melts now, making it a borderline useless block. Also, unlike bows you will usually only have 1-2 spears to throw and not a stack of arrows, and falxes just never made sense as a weapon to begin with. Of course a spear would do more damage than a falx. Not to mention most people don't use spears for throwing once they get access to bows. Hell, if you want to keep things realistic, the sling would do as much if not more damage than a longbow, a properly used sling can punch straight through a metal helmet. It's one of the deadliest (but hardest to use) weapons in human history. As for mechanical upgrades, you're bricking people's builds first but adding no beneficial changes to compensate as far as I can tell. People wanted high power setups and now they're just gone with no benefit. People were waiting for elevators but you just shelved that too until 2028 or whenever.

1) Why would you add iron spears but nerf other spears to compensate? In which universe does this make sense? It just reads as "you make bronze spears out of iron now". 2) Glacier ice changes: I suspect this is done entirely to combat ice elevators. In an update where elevators are now no longer in. That's great, man. 3) Mechanical power changes: this is done just to spite the playerbase. Yeah, just ruin everyone's builds with no way to compensate, that's a great idea man. So far 1.22 is looking like a straight downgrade to 1.21 due to these alone. Everything else added can already be done with mods. Clearly this is an update aimed at adding mechanics that can be reused in the other game (which TOTALLY doesn't affect vs development, trust me guys), and not the promised mechanical power updates (outside of blowing up people's setups for no reason).