Is this balance of allowing early game injuries which are unsurvivable (EDIT: on medium difficulty) intentional? e.g. endo parasite and infected wound cannot be treated early game but you can still get them. Since you cannot treat them, the optimal game strategy is not to waste resources trying to survive but to allow the death which is not how this game should play. Should this be the case if the early game is balanced so the dangers like bitey animals are not spawned for a period at the start of the SP survival game? Should that period of grace also extend to the injuries they can inflict being untreatable? I am not sure if this is by design or is by neglect using a default RND process to generate injuries. This is prompted by trying to play the latest release and getting these two injuries from an Otyugh bite which can only be cured via a pill requiring confetti moss scrapings which are simply not available on the starter planet or in early game until you have promethium and a base and mushrooms. This happened day 2 before I even had a chance to start a base and was only just solving the issue of oxygen and trying to get some transport. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2106038421 I also want to remark how badly this played out due to two additional factors. One was the Heidelberg POI mission setting off at the same time since I was trying to survive these injuries while the plot was unfolding making a little bing! every few seconds and I had no time to read any of it and frankly it was a nuisance, the whole thing was just ridiculous like a comedy. No more amusing for the fact that the Otyughs were set around the Heidelberg as a hazard, so this is bound to happen to other players. Second was the motorbike which is really bad and just does not work across tough terrain and means you have to constantly dismount and reposition the bike as it gets jammed by tiny slopes and flips over, also reversing is terrible. This was total frustration when attempting to get to my camp to use the constructors to make enough stuff to survive the 7 mins, which proved impossible due to the rate of food consumption on high setting with two untreatable injuries. Altogether this is not a challenge its a doom and a downer and once you get that kind of injury you may as well revert to a save or allow the death, when what the game should do is drive you to make the effort to survive and reward you with success if you can figure out how. Currently, I would contend that it is not possible.
I would find the wounds acceptable if playing on hard. Not acceptable on easy or medium difficulty settings. I agree with you about UI interruption. Perhaps, a notification message queue or something. Plus, I decline the Heidleberg quest every time it triggers and it continues to be triggerable. The motorbike has always been garbage. Though it has its uses. And since it shouldn't be better than an HV it has little room to improve. Same can be said for the HV. It's annoyingly frustrating to drive, but the devs keep adding carrots.
I agree the UI around mission is just plain horrible (to the extent I just cant be bothered with the missions mostly because of it). I am really hoping this is just some temporary hack until done properly. As for bitey things at the start, I agree - things around the start area for easy/normal start should probably have a cure that can be made in and around that area. OTOH anyone who is used to the game and knows what they are doing probably wont get bitten by anything anyway and quite likely go on a killing spree with the survival tool on landing and most likely good at evading critters that hurt. I have no issue with harder starts being a free for all in terms of incurable bites etc.
I should have said. This was with enemy difficulty set to medium, I will edit that in to the OP. I made a screeny of the SP start conditions. Here it is. Last time I played hard enemy it was not really practical and not even fun, so I got over that. The following settings are what make the game fun for me but certain doom is not fun. When testing any game there is an element of "what happens if" going on in the back of my mind and sometimes getting bit is part of the experiment. In this case I agree with the two of you that this should not be happening on medium difficulty so early in the game.
In a survival game, death should be a possibility at all times. Even cake walk games like No Man's Sky you could possibly die within the first 80 seconds if you happen to start on a world with a hostile atmosphere because you have to find the thing to gather to up either your cold, heat or radiation protections and you just plain dont know what that is or even how to gather yet...and if you find this game to be too hard do yourself a favor and NEVER play Ark Survival or The Forest just off the top of my head where you can die quickly at game start... Its all random with EGS, you can die in your first 5 minutes, your fist day or not die for weeks...its even possible to not die at all if you get lucky enough and build a warp SV without needing to take out any POIs, get everything you need and then do those after you have a tank of an HV you can use to destroy them all safely. That is the part that they need to work on, the game can be way too easy which it should not be.
Well then let's ask this question. What really determines the level of easy med or hard. Enemies? Would those not relate to the factions? So are the critters part of this. Start Equipment? Does that only deal with your equipment or does it also set the level of the game itself? I have yet worked out what really sets the level of the playfields. What really makes the game easy, med or hard?
The enemy difficulty affects the health and damage of NPCs. Start equipment determines the equipment you start with, based on the planet.
So really the enemy difficulty does define easy, med and hard. Maybe it would help if they rename it to Overall Difficulty. No scratch that idea someone down the road would want a control to set the difficulty of the enemies. Thank you Ravien
About the only thing I could see Eleon adding in the future to aid in this is to tie the "chance" of getting a deadly side effect from an attack to the game difficulty. Easy = 0-10% Medium = 10-20% Hard being 30% Or similar...but then again, even with only a 1% chance the people that get that rare chance of it early on will complain the game is still too hard and we are back to square 1
When I first started playing 12.4 it seemed that everything I did resulted in radiation burns If I put ointment on, I then I got broken bones following the treatment I used bandages then the radiation burns would sometimes come back immediately after using the bandages and the whole cycle restart. All this was played on medium difficulty for everything in SP. Even using the cure sitting in my SV without radiation close by had the same effect multiple injuries following on. I usually tried to get back to the home base as a basic suit does not protect you if you die, spawn in space and freeze before you can get back to your craft especially if it is a simple early craft with no clone chamber just the bare essentials for ore collection.
I agree I (and IMHO most people) expect that if you apply a cure it does not cause another injury. This is another problem with the medical gameplay. It looks like the devs are trying to make the gameplay more meaningful so maybe some ideas would help. Extra injuries mechanic. e.g. radioactive contamination. With additional injuries I would suggest that there is a yellow countdown timer (to contrast the red injury timer) to getting the secondary injury, warning you that you are about to get sicker if you do not find a cure. Then the new injury appears of its own agency as a result of the first injury, not as a result of applying a cure, which does not make sense. If you then apply the cure to the original injury it will only cure the yellow countdown timers which have not yet manifested but will not cure the secondary injuries which have manifested and become red, which will need their own cures. Secondary injuries may have their own tertiary injury countdown timers etc. If you apply the cure for a secondary or tertiary injury before curing the primary injury which caused it, then it resets the countdown timer to temporarily alleviate the injury to buy you time but does not cure it and it will return when the timer is up. In response to my own experience, my main suggestion would be that if you can get the injury then you need to be able to make the cure. If you have no confetti moss available on the desert planet then the antiparasite pill you can make in the emergency constructor should use something which is avalable at the start, like alien thorn or tooth, or one of the plasmas you can sometimes find in the lakes.
Its always been possible to have more than 1 injury at a time and some attacks can break your bones, give you an open wound and radiation poisoning or frost bite. But if you cured radiation burn, then a broken bone and got a radiation burn again right away with no large amounts of radiation near you then it was a bug and should have been reported as that is not normal.
Currently the problem has not been as bad as it was. Maybe, I was rushing too fast with inadequate preparation in medics and equipment. Also, I was trying out a lot of different play styles especially in minimalistic craft my first SV was a flying cockpit but using it really speeded up level progression which probably placed me in situations for which I lacked all the required equipment but knowing that I was ill equipped made it great fun.
I agree that questing can get awkward if you get caught in some survival situation. The entire presentation needs to be reworked with more consideration to the player experience as he or she takes in story moments. It's just a first draft of several I'm sure and really just meant to show off potential of the new dialogue tech. I also agree that curing one condition for it to lead to another is annoying. Game should show you all the injuries you have sustained instead of hiding one behind another. I could potentially see medical gameplay being expanded on and more interesting but last thing I want is something like SCUM where you keep track of a bajillion vitals. I will however disagree on the nature of whether or not getting this or that disease is fair in early game. Anything other than the starting biomes on easy temperate and maybe arid should challenge you and be meant for experienced players. As far as I know nothing in starting biomes on easy temperate (no matter what difficulty you choose) will spit at you or inflict a disease that you can't cure by eating some of the local flora. Once you go exploring or decide to stay awake through the night all bets are off and becomes a learning process.
I don't think anything is "unfair" in a survival game it was just annoying that I had to apply 5 jars of radiation burn ointment a bunch of bandages and other meds but nothing seemed to work. I have had several occasions where things just didn't work such as the hover bike was giving overloaded warnings at less than half of the CPU limit. In most cases of weird stuff I have verified the files and it has reported a missing file replaced the file and everything was OK which is the nature of the experimental branch. After thousands of play hours on EGS I tend to forget that as things change so must play styles to suit the changes I know exactly what I want to do but it doesn't always work out due the game updates.
It is not "random", you went into a fight or did not watch your back for attack. It is RND though if a critter attack give additional injuries. Meds are normally pretty easy to get by Trading. Can even have an emergency BA/CV ready to be spawned/built, containing only medical equipment, no power needed. Radiated starts or similar then can have one with shower and WC and airtight room (1 block). On medium difficulty you should have learned to handle situations where you can get injuries until gotten meds. Maybe play on easy starter planet until have learned, if it happens often. Or just die, no penalty to talk about now, except your own pride.
For those who want to learn how to survive cold/Radiation or only to apply their experience for such a Situation... Subscribe to @ravien_ff Project Eden Scenario https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1742662471 and choose the Dead Planet as Start Location. Or even worse
