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- Joined
- May 14, 2019
The Reign of Giants expansion for Don't Stave about ruins itself with one thing, which is how punishing and stupid it's overheating system is.
The game exists in a Tim Burton cartoony toon world, so it's a setting where things bursting into flame just because it's hot out is possible and funny, and having to build an ice flinging catapult to put out the fires could be funny. Mechanically, you might also argue that the entire point of Summer, in an expansion, is to add way more challenge for people who had already been playing regualr Don't Starve (which had a binary Summer-Winter instead of four seasons, old Summer becoming new Fall).
The biggest problem with it is that as a concept having Summer be the most challenging season is totally wrong tonally, and noting that, the overheating and fires are way too much, too few ways to deal with them and happen too often. Now, why wrong tonally? Winter looms large in culture for a reason. It is the dying time for people. The food dies, the night overtakes the day, the cold creeps in and forces us indoors, everything in the world gets a million times worse. People's whole pre-industrial lives revolved around working their asses off all year to survive Winter. Those dumbass Redditors who talk about people having lots of time off? Those idiots don't realize that preindustrial people worked on a feast-and-famine cycle where you would work literally all day long and then some in harvest season, and then be trapped indoors by snowfall through Winter.
Don't Starve fucking nails this. You won't be able to harvest easy crops so your food supply tanks so you have to be a busy bee saving up massive amounts of supplies. If you wander out you are on a strict time table, worse if no special clothing, before you had better start a fire (burning precious resources) or get home. You spend a huge chunk of time just harvesting wood to keep the fire going. Because night means shadow monsters killing you, the long night not only contributes to video game-induced SAD, it also wastes your time. Everything about Don't Starve Winter is bleak, awful, miserable, and it is so in the RIGHT WAYS.
Summer tries to just invert Winter. "Oh, lol, you burn these rocks instead of wood to make you cold." Fucking great. Those rocks are a nonrenewable resource, so it's extremely punishing. The clothes require weird awkward gimmicky things to make. Your pussy character wants to faint after a few seconds away from the cold-fire and the branches are constantly catching aflame.
The idea of Summer's problem being heat could have been sound with some tweaks. The game has these frog pounds, used for fishing and in Spring lot of frogs near them. They could have been used to fill buckets that could have been dumped on burning objects to put out the fire. Trees could have become shade spots where you could drink from the bucket to reduce heat a little. Basically, it could have revolved around killing time in shade and water, instead of burning fucking magic rocks. And instead of making random ass things catch on fire, ti could have been just the grass and twigs (like a forest fire), so that you could preemptively prevent fire by sweeping the ground.
As is I really like Spring (it's gimmick is that you have to deal with constant rain fucking with things, but you get an opportunity to grow huge crops), so it's like the DLC stapled one competent season together with one piece of shit, and I have to agonize over whether to even boot up Reign of Giants or just stay with vanilla. Don't like it, Shipwrecked is better.
The game exists in a Tim Burton cartoony toon world, so it's a setting where things bursting into flame just because it's hot out is possible and funny, and having to build an ice flinging catapult to put out the fires could be funny. Mechanically, you might also argue that the entire point of Summer, in an expansion, is to add way more challenge for people who had already been playing regualr Don't Starve (which had a binary Summer-Winter instead of four seasons, old Summer becoming new Fall).
The biggest problem with it is that as a concept having Summer be the most challenging season is totally wrong tonally, and noting that, the overheating and fires are way too much, too few ways to deal with them and happen too often. Now, why wrong tonally? Winter looms large in culture for a reason. It is the dying time for people. The food dies, the night overtakes the day, the cold creeps in and forces us indoors, everything in the world gets a million times worse. People's whole pre-industrial lives revolved around working their asses off all year to survive Winter. Those dumbass Redditors who talk about people having lots of time off? Those idiots don't realize that preindustrial people worked on a feast-and-famine cycle where you would work literally all day long and then some in harvest season, and then be trapped indoors by snowfall through Winter.
Don't Starve fucking nails this. You won't be able to harvest easy crops so your food supply tanks so you have to be a busy bee saving up massive amounts of supplies. If you wander out you are on a strict time table, worse if no special clothing, before you had better start a fire (burning precious resources) or get home. You spend a huge chunk of time just harvesting wood to keep the fire going. Because night means shadow monsters killing you, the long night not only contributes to video game-induced SAD, it also wastes your time. Everything about Don't Starve Winter is bleak, awful, miserable, and it is so in the RIGHT WAYS.
Summer tries to just invert Winter. "Oh, lol, you burn these rocks instead of wood to make you cold." Fucking great. Those rocks are a nonrenewable resource, so it's extremely punishing. The clothes require weird awkward gimmicky things to make. Your pussy character wants to faint after a few seconds away from the cold-fire and the branches are constantly catching aflame.
The idea of Summer's problem being heat could have been sound with some tweaks. The game has these frog pounds, used for fishing and in Spring lot of frogs near them. They could have been used to fill buckets that could have been dumped on burning objects to put out the fire. Trees could have become shade spots where you could drink from the bucket to reduce heat a little. Basically, it could have revolved around killing time in shade and water, instead of burning fucking magic rocks. And instead of making random ass things catch on fire, ti could have been just the grass and twigs (like a forest fire), so that you could preemptively prevent fire by sweeping the ground.
As is I really like Spring (it's gimmick is that you have to deal with constant rain fucking with things, but you get an opportunity to grow huge crops), so it's like the DLC stapled one competent season together with one piece of shit, and I have to agonize over whether to even boot up Reign of Giants or just stay with vanilla. Don't like it, Shipwrecked is better.
