Alpha 8: New Status Effects / Diseases

Look i like care systems in Games but.....

Sorry but this is one of the things that really turns me off on games is a Extremely Extreme Health Care system. you will spend more time trying to take care of your self then playing the game. Reason i have quit some of the new indie type of games is this very fact. It is hard to balance. so kudo's there. just i don't want to learn to be a doctor. I'm already seeing enough of them now. And now you have and Encyclopedia on Medical you want me to learn. sorry not happening.

I wanted to play a Space flick go to other planets ( due to updates haven't warped even once yet ) though have wondered why the warp engine is so darn big for the SV's. would have like to have seen it a bit more compact so you don't have to build a almost CV to use it. I got this game right after it hit steam a few years ago. waited till some of the assets were added before playing it as back then i found it almost unplayable. now it is.

You also need about 55 more points in the game for the lvl system it falls short just 55 points. then you could learn everything in the tree.

Now don't get me wrong but some i can see, but this is so extensive am i playing Doctor here do i need to take a hospital with me everywhere i go. You have a health system in the game and several med packs ,pills, shots,medical beds and several medical machines why so much ? Even in GM mode it all effects you which by the way sort of defeats GM mode. and the med system really takes up a lot of room for the HV's but there isn't one for the SV's ?

I've been beta testing games since around the year 2001, and have seen this trend coming in several games. What you don't seem to get is that people want to play a game not spend all your time sick taking pills, shots and 3 different med kits to try not to be sick and die from a cut finger. which is by the way through the heaviest armour in the game that hasn't even got a scratch on it. One of my streaming friends suggest i turn certain things off ...tried it made no difference.

I love the story even though it just leaves you hanging in the Breeze after Radar......It tells you to ck in space but what there's some UHC ships wrecks and not one log or nothing. Just leaves more questions and no answers.

I love the build system and love making and building bases though think the drones right after you set the foundation for a base should give you a few days before being discovered, not just suddenly you going to be attacked.

Yes a bit more polish here and there. But the game itself is looking so much better though after the last update my FPS dropped from the 50 and 60's to about 20. yes optimization would really be a thing now i'm sure.

(This is at the Radar)( outside by the way. the inside is a good challenge loved it)
I'm loving the game just not all the medical and getting one shotted by Botted Zirax hope you have looked at that aspect of the game to. my homing missiles just don't seem to home in but about every 4th or 5th shot. yet theirs never miss. And i'm shooting 4 at a time by the way. I getting now where i won't even do the radar. And leaving Radar don't get me started. That's just suicide.

As for my ship yes it has blocks knocked off all the time as in one shotted also. and this is with the best armour for ship building in the game. seems the guns the enemy has just shoots the cockpit right out of my ship with one shot and thats with me dodging and staffing all over the sky. And isn't there any type of anti air for their missiles, you know like chaff you can drop or a laser that can at least knock down some of the missiles. Oh by the way i was sneaking in to the com tower. Tell Spanj he doesn't have to worry his ships ARE NOT OP, neither are mine.

Make the Motor cycle persistent in the game and were you can pick it up if you want. so many times i just wanted to leave it outside. get up and go for a ride. then park it. i go to collect stuff but wait i need to collect my bike as it might not be there when i get back to it. darn wished that bike was right where i got off of it so i could have just hopped on it and made a getaway from those pesky spiders which you all have done very well i might add. they remind me of the fiddle backs and recluses we have here in Oklahoma. yes make a recluse mad and it will chase you.

Ok i have critic the game a bit this isn't a rant just some things maybe you could look at. And maybe consider looking into. Though the medical is really a bit over the top like in orbit. you could just make a space medical game with all the medical you have in the game for your next Game. all the assets are already there.

And i'm playing survival SP though me and some of my Streaming friends have been trying to set up a server all we get are errors, but we will continue to try. I'm sure it's just something simple thats being overlooked. Didn't mean to get off topic butwell here we are. I love the game, just needs a bit of tweaking here and there. darn did i just write a book.... i think i did well i don't post things very often and for those that will want to pick this apart this is my experience and i won't answer. I've got a little over 400 hr's in the game so not as much as some of my other games yet. I'm still just a noob at the game

 

This is completely a game breaker for me. I spent so much frustrating time dealing with all the medical "stuff" yesterday! It's not that I like the game, which I've currently logged 648 hours in...

I don't so much hate the plethora of new effects, what I hate is the fact that I'm supposed to carry half a dozen cures now? Are we not advanced and in space?? How does that make sense then? I read your comment above about being near an CV or HV. So are you saying now that foot or motorcycle exploration is now frowned upon because I cannot be near a med station?

Yesterday I was in space. I was fighting some aliens. I was modifying a CV (which I had to scrap due to constant radiation/heat exposure from my thrusters I later found out) I was trying to have a good time. After struggling with the new system for a while I decided to just let myself keep dying over and over. Yea, that was my solution. Play, get sick, die, get my bag, play, get sick, die, etc., this med stuff has squashed a major amount of my enjoyment.

At least add a server config option to disable it. If someone wants to play doctor-ville and spend their time discovering new diseases and how to cure them then by all means let the good times roll! But some of us want to keep playing for the hunt, the conquest, the actual AI challenges not the chain of ailments/treatments being thrust at us.

 

While I understand the desire to keep people from just rushing in to enemies, the amount of micro-management for the ailments is kind out of control. To a point where I am tempted to just skip this update all together which is a shame because everything else is freaking awesome. It is just so frustrating. Prime example, I went to start trying to raid the Abandoned Mine on the starter planet now that I have decent weapons. Immediately down the ramp the scorpion from hell jumps out and attacks me. Now this time I have the Dermal Parasite since I learned the last time I attempted to head down the ramp. Whew... Cleared... wait... now I have an infections open wound from the same attack? WTF. Mind you at this point I have not even made it into the first part.

My other problem with all of these additional items is we now have to keep in them in our inventory. Now we have 10 slots taken up because of the 10 different medicines/bandages/med packs so that you don't die when you first enter a POI.

As to the suggestion of building CV or BA med stations, that doesn't much help when you are neck deep in the middle of a POI. I definitely miss the old system of medical. I don't know of any other game that has this much management of medical effect. Definitely not a fan.

 

I was laughing with a friend yesterday because I had looted 7 different 'status' items (pills, ointments, etc.,) plus I had bandages so a total of eight items and.... I could not heal myself. Bandages do not heal.

I'm not arguing Against you! I'm having a lot of fun with this game. I understand a lot of effort was put into this new disease/cure system. It's just too much and not what I want to be spending my time on. I DO want to rush into some bases. Sometimes I die and my shi* gets wrecked, but oh well it was fun! I don't want to go slow letting spawners overflow my POI. Especially now that they give so many effects and the answer is keep running back to my CV or SV or whatever.

Anyway I'm not even trying to complain. I'm trying to give feedback and just let you know it is a lot to manage. Space was murder with all the radiation stages. Omg what a pain figuring out my thrusters were killing me lol (I like that one). Planet side has become rough as well. Ugh and the food nerf.... why!!!!!! I loved my gardens.

I think a seriously deep medical system would have you carrying at minimum two items and max 5 and would go something like this.
Stage 1 - 30mins. It was topical, throw so ontment on that!
Stage 2 - 20mins. Ugh it's in me I can feel it! Time for some pills.
Stage 3 - 10mins. My blood! It SCREAMS! Grab that needle bro!

At this point you've given me a good hour to continue playing even if I'm ignoring what's happening. Maybe I have to keep eating, healing, oxyginating, whatever but I can keep going.

Stage 4 - 2mins. I'm going to die. Only way out of this one is a Med Station!
Stage 5 - 999. I am undead. I no longer feel the cravings of a normal explorer. I hunger but do not quite know for what. All I know, is you are out there.. and I'm coming.

Ok to wrap up, thank you guys for listening and making the proposed 8.1 changes. I personally would still like to see it tweaked further but already I can appreciate that you listen to feedback and our looking to make this an incredible game for us to enjoy!

Cheers

 

I have played my share of hardcore survival games (old ones and new ones) and a medical system is something that... can either make or break a game.

Indeed, I do love Empyrion and the idea of it having a complex medical system but you have to keep in mind that this will turn balance and maybe not work with the systems you have created before that. And this is the issue here.
You have a LOT of new items that basically do the same and are tiered for injuries that one may never have because of either long timers or simply because they've run out of health points before a "real emergency" arises.

Now: I have played for like 5h now and I've indeed died because of tier 1 status effects that drained my health and the constant need to replenish HP with food items (especially early on) is a nuisance.
An even greater nuisance are status effects that kick in and make it unable to fight or run (Bad trip and Indigestion) so you have to cure them before you are even capable of resuming work.

As I've said I've played a couple of really hardcore survival games (Robinson's Requiem and it's better successor for example) and all of them were made visually and gameplay-wise simple when it came to medical, even if they looked "complicated".


To come to the point: Either you keep the status-bars like HP, stamina, food as it was and reimplement simple debuffs or you merge everything.
As someone that likes a good challenge, I'd go for the latter and hence I want to give a couple of "ideas" for one that makes more sense and might improve gameplay.


Some may be shocked but this could be a blessing for a proper survival game: Scrapping the status-bars
I've never liked "You've got that many health points left" and stamina made very little sense in its current implementation anyway. (Just referring to a lot of steam reviews that are being rather negative because of the large planets and long distances.)

Instead of status-bars a heart-rate monitor, oxygen meter and health warning symbol should be shown and I shall explain to you how it works:

A medical panel which can be accessed via the menu shows a health doll and status indicators like heart-rate, blood levels, stamina and nourishment.

Injuries are shown on the health doll and can range from scratches to deep cuts, from bullet wounds to damaged organs, from an infection to sepsis. Fact is: Your basic idea doesn't change but is more visualized and will have long-term effects and won't cause imminent death. (Unless it's something really bad)

For example, a scratch will cause blood loss but if you hover over the injury, it might show as "minor" and heal off on its own.
Having several minor to moderate bullet injuries (due to wearing armour) it might take 3-5 minutes before the blood loss is critical and the player incapacitated.

The interesting part should be: Treating injuries won't "remove" them but make them get weaker and suppress some of their adverse effects (like bleeding). There's still a chance that for example, a cut is getting infected and the infection has to be treated as well.

Now to the other indicators: Injuries that cause blood loss will not only reduce blood levels but also cause pain which will be indicated by a higher heart rate. This means oxygen is consumed way faster and stamina and nourishment may drop faster as well. Very low nourishment means, wounds will heal slower while high nourishment will make recovery (especially blood) faster, especially when it comes to minor wounds.
Stamina reflects the exertion and comfort of a character and will drop slowly over time and faster if doing exhausting work (Like with the survival tool) but unlike old stamina, it has a way higher threshold. Being in a base CV or shelter will recover it to a certain point and sleeping will boost its recovery to the max.

This system isn't too far from the old but still allows for a lot of leeway when it comes to status-effects but your questions might be: How does death occur and how to heal injuries then?

There are two kinds of "deaths". Incapacitated and dead.
Death occurs if a player has been incapacitated for 1-2 minutes or succumbed to a critical condition (organ failure, radiation sickness, etc).
So basically, dead means dead.

On the other hand, a player is incapacitated when their vitals reach critical levels. Receiving several major injuries, losing too much blood, having no oxygen to breathe for a longer period of time, etc.
While in this condition, it's possible to get revived with the right items.

About healing: One of the major flaws in the new system is the amount number of items that can be used. This may confuse players and hinder gameplay, especially if one has to decide on the meds they have to take with them.

Instead of having a bulk of different items, medkits shall be used to incorporate necessary equipment.
This means you have to use a medkit which will open the health screen with additional options for treatments.
Those can include bandages, ointments, pills, sutures, injections, etc.

Of course, there are a limited number of items inside a medkit and once they are used you have to recharge it. This can be done at any medical terminal. Medical terminals are used to recharge any medical kit and help to stabilize vitals like blood levels.
Medical beds, on the other hand, will speed up the recovery from any injury and slow down untreated ones while surgery stations will mend all injuries.

One thing that's also important are death penalties but that's something to discuss anyway.

Obviously, this whole system could have been explained way better with pictures but due to me having limited time and writing this down from scratch, quality had to suffer.
If there are any questions about it I'm happy to answer them!

 

I have found it interesting finding the various afflictions from fighting and hearing people try to deal with them in my voice chat, but often times the solution is just die that way we don't need to waste supplies. Being able to spawn right back there with no penalty that is the solution more often then not. I would also like to need to carry less around. I usually carry the 3 ointments and the bandages, but the other day fighting scorpions I ended up with their 2 infected wound right off the bat and i had no way to fix that had to find the tier 2 pills or injection, and had to do it quickly because health was draining fast.

My main problem with most of the status effects is they are not debuffs they are fatal, pretty much all of them so its not something you can run back to base for if you are not relatively close. I have even died before making it back out of the alien base to my sv to even try to fly back because you are deep inside a poi. Please make these more status effects and less, drain health, right now it doesnt matter what you get, you either have the cure on hand or wait to die and get your bag.

Also I really dont like not being able to heal at all with an SV. I am not sure what the seperation of sv and hv is suposed to be but right now hv has the best weapons, best sensors and best med care

 

Like other post, I think medic is too deep/complicated. I really love hardcore/realistic survival but at this stage, injury is too harsh.
My feelings after several A8 single player game:

-Most of the time, I died before I can cure any effect (injury + health drain are fatal).
-Died is not punishable. So why should I bother to find a cure? If I died effects are vanished.
-There's really too many items, I think they must be combined. 1 treatment for 2 or more effects, 2 kit for each effects, 1 "MEGA" kit cure all effects.
-Maybe too many elements for crafting kits. At this time, I prefer find them in POI.
-Armor not really protect injury. Medium and heavy armor should protect from several effects.

 

I honestly like this system but I do have an issue with it. I got punched in the side of the head by an elemental and went straight to Mutilation.. Im fine with that, I got punched in the head by an elemental! However mutilation is one of the hardest things to cure without a med-bay and by my bad luck I was 4 jumps away from the one I was sure of, ran across admin trading centers and settlements etc all with out medical facilities that could cure me and finally had to make it back home to use my own med table to be rid of it.

My issue was the heartbeat noise for mutilation constantly draining my stamina.. For some reason I would get into very high regen some times (could cause this by going to a stamina regen deco item but it happened on its own).. When this happened for about 30s I would hve the heartbeat noise playing some 20-30 times at the same time... If the SFX is playing already or played within the last X seconds (length of the sound clip?) please stop playing it again.. Its like opening 30 shutters at the same time they are not offset or checking for max of a single sound effect to be played so it is ungodly loud.

Again, I like this system.. Most of the time I kill things from very far away, time my jumps to not take damage, etc.. This system does not really come into play for me but it is a concern and I am actively trying to avoid it.. When it does engage... by getting punched in the side of the head by an elemental!!! it certainly changes your immediate priorities...

And ultimatley at the end of the day you can Life Scum and just die and Poof, instantly 70m from where you were in ailment and forlorn.. you are now fine and just have to equip your gear again.... (I have life scumming though so that is why I flew 4 sectors checking health stops with stupid heart beats in my ears )

 

Just wanted to give some feedback on this, I like the complexity of effects, but I find even at level 15 hanging out mostly on the starter planet, I'm not really able to craft sufficient medicines to ensure I can deal with whatever the environment throws at me. Am I missing some obvious ingredients, or is it supposed to be this hard to be able to craft all the various types of medicines? Also, the requirement to carry to many things is kind of annoying, I use 6-8 inventory just on meds. A level ~10-12 craftable item that can cover a few categories that can be found somewhat easily (the ingredients to make it) would be nice and save having to deal so much with having pills etc for effects, which mostly have to be looted as far as I can tell.

 

OH, since which patch? Thanks, this sounds like a good balance. I'll try it. Will it require starting a new game if I have a save game from 8.0?

 

IMHO The Radiation Burn is unbalanced in when I get a Radiation Burn when I cure it I immediately get an Open Wound. Thus one illness requires TWO different medkits or medical devices to cure.

 

Actually I don't mind that. Being treated for one condition can devolve into a less serious one, then can be cured. I accepted that as a form of 'healing progression'.