1 hour ago, FramFramson said:
I've recently been feeling some dissatisfaction with the current magazine system, but it's hard for me to put my finger on what I don't like exactly.
Yes, part of it is that trader rewards will invariably beat out what you can craft, but that can be dealt with by nerfing trader rewards. But another part of it is that both the old and new systems have this oddly guaranteed slow-but-steady incremental progression. There's never any Eureka! or lucky moments when you jump a couple levels in a crafting skill. It makes it feel like you're going to school rather that scrounging in an apocalypse.
One idea I had was what if we went back to some iteration of learn by doing but that it only worked at an abysmally slow pace. Meanwhile magazines could still exist but would be rarer and offer several point of that skill at once (and thus more exciting). An added wrinkle could be that magazines could have a randomized range, like they give 3-6 skill points as opposed to a fixed 5 points (in a system where they're rarer) or something.
I don't know if that's really the situation I'm looking for, but I do want skill increases to feel more meaningful. Perhaps making do with worse weapons for longer, but also having your upgrades really be upgrades and not just "Oh I can make Q4 now instead of Q3."
Some element of finding "broken" but repairable higher-tier weapons which require a lower to repair than to craft is also an interesting possibility for making loot something more interesting than just dozens of identical books.
I have a moment where I create a world, go all the way to trader. I do a couple of the same quests again.
And I'm like, "hell no i will do the same @%$# over again. Its insane! With a lack of diversity and a single scenario that makes me virtually sick. There's no desire to play, but they've made everything so it's a very strong lever to progression. After all almost 90% of quest rewards give out logs that directly affect your progress.
The funny thing is that even if you loot at home, you probably don't have enough space in your inventory, and even with a truck + drones you can't loot more than 4 POI's if you play in "vacuum cleaner" mode. Because of which there is a banal answer that.
The point of clearing POI's without a quest if the quest will give me more rewards, as I will not be able to pick up more items anyway. And then I have a second question - why can't we take all the quests at once. What the hell is the point of a player doing one quest to go to a merchant to pick up another. You can still take quests from other merchants, and in the same Navezgrad you can have up to 5 active quests from different locations. Seems efficient? But the thing is that you have to literally drive around the map to take a quest from each merchant.
And it's honestly very annoying. When you could pump the merchant relationship up to V. You have to literally drive for 3-5 hours without fail through different POIs back and forth instead of doing everything efficiently. And the slot system limits trivial scavenging, and I'm sure the developers just didn't update the inventory system to save so many items.
There's a lot of junk that has a single use. For example, the aloe cream, you can craft with it.
The moment with the level 6 item made me fall over at all. Now nothing depends on your current level.
You just have to have luck and all the best items will drop at the end of the game. What the hell is the point of progression then?!?
Seriously, you start thinking about the mechanics of the game and you get hysterical at how bad it is. And instead of people talking about possible solutions they just told to stop play the game or to cram everything in with mods. For the sake of not logical to discuss how it can be changed for the better, as I prefer my feedback as a disgruntled player who wants to make the game better.