A few thoughts on how to both prevent Zirax from playing keep-away with your everything, and eliminate not surviving as a solution to survival challenges. Dropping everything on death makes it undesirable, but it also leaves you helpless. The result is people leveraging their functional immortality to grind away opposition through attrition rather than outfighting it. They do some damage, die, respawn, exploit their way into retrieving their gear, do some damage, and so repeat until they've clear the POI. For this, I propose letting you retain the contents of your toolbar. This would provide ten slots you can depend on. It's not a lot, but it's enough for some weapons, ammo, and healing items. You'd still drop your loot and have to retrieve it before it despawns, but you'd have the tools to do so with normal combat gameplay instead of exploiting collision and AI deficiencies. Conversely, death outside of combat means almost nothing. A player who chooses to ignore food and oxygen will hardly be inconvenienced by starvation or suffocation. Even health conditions are easily remedied by seeking out the nearest source of health depletion. The player will always respawn with their health, conditions, hunger, oxygen, temperature, and radiation exposure reset to healthy levels. I believe this perverse incentive should be eliminated. Post-respawn health, hunger, and oxygen levels should be severely reduced. Your body temperature and radiation would reset to just outside safe range. Conditions would reset to their previous stage rather than disappearing entirely. Respawning at a proper cloning chamber would improve your starting condition somewhat, but still underlying problems would still need to be addressed. You'd still need to bandage that broken leg, or take meds to remove the endo parasite. 12/7/2020 UPDATE The suggestion on the table now looks like this; First, remove any positive effects that might perversely incentivize death. This means conditions carry through respawns, though some may be reverted from stage three to previous stages if they are too debilitating. Oxygen and food levels start much lower. Radiation- and temperature- related conditions would revert to their first stage, and the player's body temperature and radiation levels would only revert to just outside the safe zone. Death also causes 20% damage to the condition of the player's armor and all equipment in their toolbar. Second, the Respawn Nearby option goes away. Tents and their respawn point function is already covered in the tutorial. It might be necessary to also add cloning chambers to SV for respawning in space playfields, especially as space content develops, be we can worry about crossing that bridge after we've reached it. Third, have the contents of players' toolbars travel with them through the respawn process. Any backpack items are still dropped as usual. Players should be notified on respawn that their equipment was damaged in the retrieval process, and of its current condition. Fourth, all these changes would be selectable as world difficulty options.
You are never helpless. Respawn at base, re-equip yourself, and go back out there. If you fail to plan ahead and have a valid respawn option then there is always the "fresh start" option which lets you keep all your levels and structures/unlocks/etc and drops you in a drop pod again. In all honesty the "respawn nearby" option is most likely strictly for testing purposes and because of the fact that the game is still in development and has lots of bugs. I fully expect that this respawn option won't be available forever. I'm prepared for the game to have harsher death penalties later on in development, not easier. It's a survival game after all and you failed to survive. It's just my opinion though.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. I have never seen it done. I have only ever seen people bash their heads against the wall, respawning nearby over an over, dodging rockets and lasers until they break the loop either with or without their gear, becoming very stressed and angry in the process. If respawning nearby went away, they would use their survival tents instead. And then they complain that the tier 4 SV they left unattended outside the POI was destroyed by rocket drones because SVs don't have turrets. It's not a bad thing for people to want to stay and fight. Combat is a pillar of the game. Forcing them to go through this unintended hazing ritual, however, IS bad. Dying should be the negative result you get from experimenting with a method that didn't work. It shouldn't be a punishment for trying in the first place. By letting people keep the contents of their toolbar, you can encourage clever planning and still have death carry a sting. Likewise, having conditions persist somewhat through death will make them more meaningful survival challenges. A broken leg or poison bite should be a problem the player gets to plan a solution for, not an ignored triviality. It's a survival game after all, and keeping yourself healthy is part of the gameplay.
Main issue as i see it is that most POIs are designed with the idea of making it harder for the player, instead of making it fair, i just went trough 2 Alien POIs, Abandoned drone base and Abandoned factory, in both cases, at the lowest level the game dumps you down the shaft and then throws something like 15 alien scorpions and nightmares at you from all sides. There is no way to avoid this scenario, enemies spawn only when you are already down the shaft, it's incredibly hard to jetpack oit of there, in fact i am pretty sure the hole is outside of the normal jetpack range, and i run out of ammo on my pistol, my assault rifle and my shotgun before i was able to kil even 1/3rd of the enemies inside. There is no place in the entire room where the enemy can't reach you for you to retreat and reload you weapons, and backing off is not an option because enemies are coming at you from all sides. In this scenario the onlt real choice you have is to kill as many enemies as you can before your guns run dry and you inevitably die. This is really just bad game design, dumping overwhelming force at the player is the easiest thing in the world, but hardly engaging or fun, it just leads to frustration as player realizes death was the only option, and not even for the purpose of the plot, but seemingly just arbitrarily.
Even with the T1 shotgun (shotgun is best for bitey critters) it is possible to do both these POIs. You'll need to get a head-shot where possible to maximise damage, use health packs or juice to heal, and bring meds if you have it for any bites. I still die in these POIs sometimes and I've been playing a while, but as soon as you've upgraded equipment is also gets much easier. I do agree the FPS gameplay isn't exactly the best out there, but I wouldn't personally say its the difficulty. For me its more that its a bit janky. On the main topic, I think most of the death loop problem could be solved with the following: Drones lose interest and leave the area when they make a kill Base turrets don't shoot infantry/players unless they are within 50m, get shot themselves, or a special infantry or drone "paints the target" Mostly if you die to things other than drones or turrets, your personal drone can recover the backpack. This does make sense. If we're going to reduce the cost by removing the hotbar annoyance (yay), then keeping a lot of the cost you incurred by taking damage makes sense to me. I'd love to see some experimentation around this - perhaps in some custom configs if the devs could add options there?
That is categorically untrue, t1 shothun only holds 5 rounds, even if each one is a headshot, which is extremely hard to do when you are being rushed by a fast moving target, you can only take down about 1/3rd of the enemies before you run dry. There is simply not enough time to reload before you get ganked to death. Maybe you are the top twitch shooter player annd can somehow land every single round perfectly, and avoid enemies rushing you from behind at the same time but most people are not.
I'm not an especially good shot, but I usually find there is either enough room to kite them around (using jetpack a lot), or there's a ledge you can run and jump on to, giving you time to reload. With an epic shotgun it gets a lot easier, and like I said I die often enough when I've only got T1 stuff, but this is usually how I level up early game, raiding abandoned POIs and dying only a couple of times if I'm lucky. edit> oh the other thing I usually do is have multiple guns in the hotbar, and rather than trying to reload, I just switch guns. Even if the gun switching animation isnt finished, you can start firing almost straight away.
There's this thing called a "Drone". You'd be surprised at what you can with a little scouting ahead with it. Oh, and if you didn't know, you can use it to pick up your previous clone's backpack.
I would appreciate you dropping the patronizing tone, in many areas ceiling is too low to spawn a drone(probably by design), and either way it does not help you avoid being ganged up on by 15 melee creatures which only spawn once you phisically enter the space, so scouting ahead is kinda pointless. It only helps mitigate the consequences. My point being that, if you took time to reasonably prepare you should not be put in position where the only possible outcome is death, not even once.
I would appreciate you not assuming my tone. You would be surprised by the number of players, even long-term players that either are unaware or simply forget about using their drones. In the years I've been playing I cannot recall even once where there have been more than 5 or 6 creatures that spawned in any given area, and they're usually pretty simple creatures, like scorpions or those weird dog-things, both of which are easily dispatched with a single T1 shotgun blast. There is one particular area in the Abandoned Bunker POI )I think it's the Bunker, might be the Reactor), where Nightmares collect on the lower level, but they are also rather simple to dispatch, even in groups and give themselves away with the screeching noise they make, long before you would walk in to where they congregate. It use to be a lot easier to spot spawn points, as the majority of creature spanwers were visible items, though that was changed a couple versions ago, though the spawn locations remain largely the same.
No i am absolutely certain there were at least 15 scorpions and nightmares in this case, did i mention that as a rule the only way to get on this lower level is to step on the invisible trapped block, which then dissapears and drops you from height high enough that, if you did not anticipate it and slow your fall with a jetpack, is enough to break your leg. In this case i was lucky, because i used explosives to destroy a big gun nearby, and that triggered the trapped block, i still died several times, but had i triggered it properly i would be in even greater trouble.
I might need to formulate an idea about random elements in creature spawners later. The main thrust in this idea here is that even if you fail in a combat and die, you still get to continue playing. It's the interruption to normal play resulting from stripping the player of all their power progresion that's really infuriating. Clearing a POI is stressful even though it also fun. You prepare yourself in both mind and loadout before heading in, and maintain a "fight or flight" mindset through out. You peek around corners, scout with your drone, scan surfaces with you multitool, strain to hear and identify every sound, and shoot anything that moves. Epic loot is almost a side bonus to the satisfying catharsis of finally blowing up the core. One death, though, and that experience is basically over. You have to stop playing the normal game and consult your inner library of quirks and exploits to get your lost equipment back. If you're lucky, you can get your drone in and snatch your stuff back. If you're unlucky, you have to dash into the hot zone and weather the gunfire to fast-loot your corpse box and oh god I can't fit everything I need to drag some stuff back to the toolbar why is this UI being such a jerk right now and a zap you're dead again. Now you have two corpse boxes to retrieve. Worst of all, the mindset is gone. You're no long a hunter, adventurer, or explorer. Now you're genuinely angry, to at least some degree, at everything and everyone that contributed to this experience. The immersion has failed. The puzzle has failed. The challenge has failed. You don't care about winning anymore. You just want the experience to be over. The effect this has had on me personally is that I hardly bother with POIs anymore. They're something I do later on if at all. When I do need to knock over a POI for some reason, such as to disable base attacks, I bring in a CV with 30mm cannons and blast it into submission before entering. I stay there outside and let my ship shoot a hole into the base and knock out any generators, disabling the base almost entirely. From there, it's a simple stroll passed silent spawners and dead turrets popping from walls on my way to the core. I'm not even going to bother going out of my way to loot when I already have a CV the smashes POIs with impunity. Whatever grand spectacle Jeff Randall or whoever had planned as they spend weeks lovingly crafting their encounters, I'll only ever see its shatter wreck. I'm not a hunter on the prowl. I'm not a warrior thrilling in the fight. I'm an exterminator doing a job. I'm not at this POI for fun. I'm here for work. The sooner I finish, the soon I can go back to the fun. It's exactly the most satisfying experience. I really do like those battles apart from the death loops. This is what got me thinking; what do I need to get back into the fight? Not much, really. A weapon. Some ammunition. Some meds. Maybe some survival supplies. I need these things to be ready right away as soon as I respawn. A spare second out of enemy line of sight to pop a stimpack or energy bar would be nice, but I can get by. If my toolbar went with me through respawns instead of dropping with the rest of my loot, the fight wouldn't stop. I'd instead get to battle my way back to my loot, armed this time with knowledge. It wouldn't take luck to proceed, only skill and aggression. The attacker mindset would carry through to the end. The fun would continue despite setbacks. The game can go on.
I think Samoja's point is valid, and I acknowledge there is rooms like that where its very difficult to survive, and it often feels like you're able to beat them not through skill but by having done that POI before and knowing what to expect and how to handle it. I do really like the difficult bits though, and it's very satisfying when you get them right. But the solutions aren't obvious and the FPS part of the game can indeed be janky and frustrating in the way you describe. Yes I do this sometimes for efficiency once I'm at 25 and don't care about levelling up. It's a major problem to immersion as you say. I think the solution we need is to make it so generators and turrets on the inside of the base are ignored by turret targeting, either automatically or by the POI maker being able to configure them as an "invisible" one for targeting purposes. This is a good point and I agree partly, with some caevats. Consulting an immersion-breaking bags of tricks is indeed a bad thing. But I think there should be a big risk and punishment for dying and temporarily losing some stuff, as well as starting back away from the action, seems reasonable to me. Perhaps we could do the following: If you die, you drop everything, including armour. Some items might degrade or be destroyed. You appear back at your nearest clone or med bay, with no spawn nearby option Clone chambers/med bays now manufacture infantry equipment and automatically equip it to you on respawn, including dropping items into your hot bar in the way you've set up. You configure what the starting equipment is. The med bay will manufacture it automatically as constructor would, for a normal resource cost, in preparation for your next respawn. This removes the annoyance of the UI/hotbar and having to pick up backpack using drone or with a running grab, and you're able to fight back to your backpack immediately. It also creates an actual resource cost to dying that scales with the level of equipment you're printing each death. You don't spawn "nearby" so there's no death loop, but you're responsible for setting up a safe spawning environment with an equipment/resource supply that limits you from doing infinite consequence free death runs. Additionally, it removes the magic teleportation of your equipment back to where you respawn, which doesn't make sense from an immersion POV. Best of all it keeps the pain of death in a survival game where it should hurt, but with much less UI annoyance and cheese.
Well we don't have to worry about magic teleportation. We have perfectly good technological teleportation. That's how logistics works. Even assuming you also remove the tent respawn, people are still going to want to try again after dying. Dropping them kilometers away, possibly on the other side of the planet or even another playfield, is exactly the wrong thing to do for them. Instead of being helped back on that horse, they now have to figure out where they are and how to get back. There's probably no way they're getting their gear back. Their vessel is also in jeopardy, especially if it's in hostile territory. This assumes you can even get back to it at all. Respawning without your armor could easily softlock your save by trapping you in an NPC station you lack any means of leaving. You don't want to punish failure; you want to encourage it. Every attempt is an exploration, and failure just means you've discovered another dead end. You want people to pick themselves up and try again with the new knowledge they've gained. If they die in combat, you want them to try a different tactic. If their base is damaged in a raid, you want them to readjust their defenses. If they succumb to hunger or conditions, you want them to prepare more. Monetary fees for respawns are traditional, though. Twenty percent seems a reasonable fee from your bank account to pay the local sovereignty for use of their emergency services. Players could get around this by storing their funds physically in a container, with all the associated risk and hassle. There would be no fee on uninhabited or hostile planets.
Taking the idea that we are clones, then the cost of death should be as it is - drop backpack along with everything in it. It should however persist on the ground for a decent amount of time to allow for recovery (despawn times for pretty much everything are far too quick). To me the real discussion is around the progressive respawn choices. It is and should be upto the player to make adequate preparation for dying by having a clone chamber (or equiv) appropriately located along with backup equipment in a convenient store. If the player has no respawn locations down at all, then the new clone should be dumped into an escape pod and launched at the starting planet of their choice as well as being charged for the repeat insertion by some means (financial or whatever). I would actually suggest that a new resource of some kind be added in the form of bio material for the clone chamber, so they players need to keep that at an adequate level to respawn. It should not be overly onerous. Taking a lead from a post above, it is a short step to also top it up with the materials required to spawn the player in light armor too. As a quality of life thing however, your toolbar should be remembered. If you have a backup equipment closet (maybe this needs to be a specific purpose new type of T2 clone chamber + locker), you should be spawned fully equipped and armed assuming you made the adequate preparations. If you have made adequate preparations, I see no reason why additional costs should be levied on the player (credits, xp or whatever). It is when they havnt that costs should be levied. Having a means to store loadouts for cloning would also potentially leads to a means of quick swapping loadouts and ammo, supplies etc according to need. How many of us have different armor setup for different needs?
I think this would make a good amount of sense for that period before a player has his own clone/medical chambers, or in systems where they might not have them. If I'm three systems away from my base, exploring in an SV, I'd rather pay to spawn from a polaris base or even a pod to get to my stuff faster if I die. It would also give us something else to use our money on besides CPU parts and resources of convenience. This right here I would really like, especially in endgame. We already "Save Template"s for our vessels, why not ourselves? These seem like they would be longer term changes though, so in the short term, if the game would just remember what stuff is in our toolbar when we die, and put it back there automatically when we grab our backpack, that would help a lot. I had a recent death loop defending my base from drones in PE Ultra Hard Rogue. My backpack kept getting further and further from my base, so I would run out, grab it, duck behind a rock to put a gun in my toolbar... and die again. The drones just kept floating to the other side of my cover. Good on the drones, they seem to be a little smarter now, but if my guns went back into my toolbar I could have at least done some damage before being re-cloned.
I don't think that needs to happen. It would be reasonable to add cheap clone chambers to SVs if this change were to happen. It then could simply become the player's responsibility to ensure a clone chamber is nearby (SV/HV/CV). If it really bothered people prior to getting a starter HV, the personal constructor or tent could be replaced with a deployable clone chamber + constructor device. The 3d model could just be the tent with a constructor sticking out the side. While I don't think the punishment should be over-the-top, I disagree with this statement. I think having serious consequences for failure adds more meaning and excitement to your actions, adds immersion and decreases the arcade-like feeling of current deaths. The consequences need to be either manageable, avoidable or both, but they need to be significant in a survival game. I really like the way you say the aim should be to make people feel like hunter or adventurer. In that sense I think allowing them to die potentially tens or even hundreds of times with little consequence really detracts from that, especially when there isn't a clear explanation why you randomly appear again 300m away from where you died. This is why I really like your original proposal. I think encouraging failure goes against your original proposal, which hits on exactly the right issues. As immersion is a big part of what is aimed for in choosing the respawn system, I think this could clash a little when you're on a hostile planet or light years away from nearest system. Asking you to construct some equipment for your clones fills a similar role, but it's a little less dependent on context to feel right from an immersion point of view. While I think the demand for convenience that brought us wifi-logistics and teleporters means they're probably here to say, my opinion is that such "technologies" are really immersion breaking and I would prefer more weren't added. For example, if you could be teleported back to your ship just before death, why not just teleport a Zirax trooper into space or a vat of acid? Why not just teleport a big bomb into the POI and set it off? Why not just use wifi to grab all the loot out of boxes? And why don't the NPCs use any of these technologies? I don't think sci-fi needs to be realistic per se, but I think it needs be at least reasonably consistent in abiding by the rules it sets for itself. So basically I'm saying I think we DO need to worry about magic teleportation, and we should probably avoid going further in this direction. I think this is a good idea.
Of course it would, it would make sense to add a lot of things to SVs, but the devs want to keep them nerfed into singke-seat fighter types only...
Yes, I know... I'm subscribed to both- and the efforts are appreciated, since I don't have time to do it myself. I just wish they didn't have to fill the gap because it was already that way in vanilla
