Weirdly I'm not dying very much in reforged. Not nearly as much as in the vanilla game. I heard about how hard the game was from the maker on a different thread and I think it changed how I play. It's made me play more like I would if this was really happening to me. In the vanilla game I feel invincible. I'm not just a space castaway, I'm a space castaway from an advanced civilization with jetpacks and constructor technologies that the Z empire needs a whole civilization to support. So I'd act the fool which is fun and I wind up dying over something stupid . But this is different. With maybe the exception of the slimes, I'm the weakest thing out here. I don't think, should I built one gun or two, I think, how many can I build. I don't strafe drone bases to test what to set the pitch roll and yaw values. And when I got the ship shot out from under me and had to hoof it home nearly five miles at night on my own with no motorbike, it was a massively entertaining and heart clutching journey. Then there's the time I got close to a dreadnought and its fighters hunted my underpowered level 6ish starship down and gave me the mother of all Empyrion beatdowns. I died there obviously. So now I don't feel invincible in space and when I see red in the radar I stay away instead of heading straight at it. Don't steal promethian ore in orbit anymore either. Now I don't attack the infiltrator species and they stay neutral to me. I've got screenshots of them standing right in front of me. I didn't know they were anything other than monsters. They're not though. They're dudes. I didn't know that. Also, when I (spoiler) find the damaged hovercraft (my new favorite thing in the game) , I still search the whole planet for a base before I settle down. But before I just wanted the prettiest site. Great sunrises. Nice treeline or whatever. Now it has to be pretty and defendable. It's interesting psychologically, I think. It's harder so I try harder and think about survival instead of how much mischief I can get myself out of.
The cool thing about modding/ editing games is that we can control the experience to be what we want. The bad thing is that we know all the inner workings and it kills all surprises. And of course, the "difficulty" perspective can't be the same for a player just being a "victim of the game" and a player that makes the "difficulty". In all games the AI is pretty much predictable and basic. Given enough time we learn the NPC patterns and we can use them to our advantage. That is why "scripted events" are popular in many games : they can't be "cheated" to some extent like the AI. And then there is artificial difficulty, like making a flat plane, putting a loot box at one end and a player at the other, and a huge critter between the two. Or putting the player in a desert with a hunger bar rapidly gowing down, and hide an atom of food somewhere. Both these examples can be experienced very differently by various players, as some find this "challenging" while others will feel ripped off by lazy design. I'm on the fence with Empyrion, because of the way things have been done from the start, even in its "modded" versions. I'm all for open development where players can mod and tweak the game, and for me that's the main dish in this game. Presently it's very fragile and glitchy, and knowing how the game works makes it very easy to break quests or exploit its weaknesses. And knowing that some designers can make this "even more difficult" is pointless in that context.
What Kassonade said is one of the main reasons I have never had much of a desire to mod a game. I dont want to look under the hood. I dont even like having to use the "command" menu in the game as it completely breaks the immersion factor for me. One thing RE does well, especially early on, is make all of your decisions matter more. Resources are more difficult to get in large quantities, so (for me at least) I have to plan and think far more. When I play in vanilla on a non-MP server I feel much more relaxed and dont sweat making rash decisions or throwing my cloned corpse over and over at the same difficult POI just to see how it ends. In the end, I think it is one of the things that has hooked me so much is that each time I start a new playthrough it is a different experience, and while I get to set the initial course on its difficulty, the game always leads me in a different path than the game before.
That's why for some, Santa Claus still rocks, and for some others there was no other job available during the Holidays...
I think, for me, as resources and progress in general require more effort, I'm even more protective of my efforts than I would be in a regular game. Basically, I'm much more invested in everything I own. While I'm risk-averse regardless - I very much play as if death is something to avoided, while it is in fact largely trivial and even preferred in some circumstances (such as when the player is starving / low on O2 / poisoned etc.) which removed the perception of risk. Combining my personal risk-averse play-style with RE results in a pretty good game balance. Add to that smarter and more dangerous enemies that demand additional respect and a greater sense of achievement for overcoming these heightened challenges, and we have a more complete survival experience. The only issue, well, it's not really an issue but more of a result of various factors combining, is that I don't challenge POI's during the early-game much at all. Sure, I could but I'd die A LOT, which is counter to my more cautious play-style where my death offends me lol. Only when I'm sufficiently equipped for the POI in question do I accept the challenge. This, in-turn, slows the early to mid-game even further as I'm not getting regular injections of high-end loot for construction, needing to rely on old-fashioned resource gathering and wreckage loot. This means there's a lot of game before I construct my first CV for system hopping. Scoob.
For me it depends on what else there is to shoot at (to get XP and level up). What I find most annoying is what gives XP and what doesnt - ie explosive kills dont - even if you shoot them in the face with a rocket...
