Jump to content

Replace Reading


Krumple

Recommended Posts

Okay I am not new. Just need to state that because I am sure I will get a bunch of comments about it.

 

Reading is boring and takes too much time. Yes I am aware you can speed up time in solo mode. I am also aware that there are several mods that address reading but I think most of those are silly. Like being able to hold a book in a primary or secondary slot while doing other things. 

 

I propose to get rid of reading but you can either make more magazines with unlockable recipes.

 

One thing that the game lacks is positive moodles except for the well fed but it only lasts like 20 minutes. Why is the game so negative on what you "don't" do like if you put off sleep or are hungry, ect?

 

So how about give us some positive perk moodles, like if you oversleep you get a "well rested" perk that lasts hours and in this time your skill experience gains receive a bonus depending on how well rested you are.

 

Also cooking, it really doesn't have all that great of perks. I don't know anyone that tries to focus cooking. Sure there are abilities to use rotted food without getting sick and the ability to make food that prevents or reverses unhappiness. I get all that. But how about introduce a positive moodle where if you eat "tasty" food you get a moodle that lasts hours depending on how great it was. During this time your skill experience gains are given a bonus depending on how tasty the food was.

 

Another idea is based on killing zombies. Let's say you kill x amount of zombies within a short period of time you receive a "psyched" positive moodle. During this time your combat experience gains are increased. But to prevent grinding out zombie deaths during the time the perk is active you don't gain additional positive moodle effects and you can even place in a cool down before you can receive the "psyched" moodle again. 

 

To continue this concept, when you fail on certain tasks (or introduce more failure) you gain a negative moodle. For example mechanic work has a lot of failure with it. This can be the "frustrated" moodle which impacts skill gains by reducing mechanics. However on the other side if you succeed then you gain a positive moodle which increases mechanic skill gains if you continue to work on vehicles while its in effect for a few hours. During this time if you fail you don't get the annoyed negative moodle. Then once again you get a cool down before you can receive the positive moodle again.

 

I would rather have more failure and more positive impacts than to sit and watch my character read a book for 30 minutes in real time. I know, I know, you can speed up time, blah blah blah. The fact is, reading books are not fun and a huge majority of players try to find ways around it using mods. The point is, remove it, replace it with a system where by you gain skill experience bonus through other ways. 

 

Thanks for reading.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reading isn't supposed to be fun. It's simply there to give you XP boosts. I've seen a lot of people complain about how slow leveling skills are and if you use the books as intended it seriously helps in that department. So I disagree. Reading shouldn't go anywhere. In my opinion of course.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reading is fine, and when it comes to learning the drudging inner mechanics of how to learn some type of craft, I wouldn't exactly call that fun. 

Would be nice if we could "read" while going to sleep (like in real life), that way we don't have to spend in game time sitting around doing nothing. Some portion of the book is read, player gets rest but doesn't spend time just doing nothing as it's abstracted that while the player was falling asleep they read a little bit of the selected book.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, TheLostBigBoss said:

Reading is fine, and when it comes to learning the drudging inner mechanics of how to learn some type of craft, I wouldn't exactly call that fun. 

Would be nice if we could "read" while going to sleep (like in real life), that way we don't have to spend in game time sitting around doing nothing. Some portion of the book is read, player gets rest but doesn't spend time just doing nothing as it's abstracted that while the player was falling asleep they read a little bit of the selected book.

This isn't a half bad idea. Not sure how possible it would be to add though. Maybe someone from TIS could give us some info on why it is or isn't possible to do this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Krumple said:

One thing that the game lacks is positive moodles except for the well fed but it only lasts like 20 minutes. Why is the game so negative on what you "don't" do like if you put off sleep or are hungry, ect?

 

So how about give us some positive perk moodles, like if you oversleep you get a "well rested" perk that lasts hours and in this time your skill experience gains receive a bonus depending on how well rested you are.

 

Also cooking, it really doesn't have all that great of perks. I don't know anyone that tries to focus cooking. Sure there are abilities to use rotted food without getting sick and the ability to make food that prevents or reverses unhappiness. I get all that. But how about introduce a positive moodle where if you eat "tasty" food you get a moodle that lasts hours depending on how great it was. During this time your skill experience gains are given a bonus depending on how tasty the food was.

 

 

I like this, especially the cooking part. Cooking well really needs to be more rewarding than it currently is. Maybe make the positive moodles into a separate suggestion?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, TheLostBigBoss said:

Reading is fine, and when it comes to learning the drudging inner mechanics of how to learn some type of craft, I wouldn't exactly call that fun. 

Would be nice if we could "read" while going to sleep (like in real life), that way we don't have to spend in game time sitting around doing nothing. Some portion of the book is read, player gets rest but doesn't spend time just doing nothing as it's abstracted that while the player was falling asleep they read a little bit of the selected book.

Come on, thats the worst reasoning ever. MANY things in real life are not fun, but that doesnt mean you add that same tedium in your games lol.  Working is not fun. Having to treat your injuries  is not fun. Hell I would wager, that  if we had zombies in real life, having to kill and/or avoid zombies, would not be fun. Using that same reasoning, if implemented to its fullest, we would start up a game and have exactly no fun, because realistically most of the actions in the game, are not fun in real life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

43 minutes ago, Morrn40 said:

Come on, thats the worst reasoning ever. MANY things in real life are not fun, but that doesnt mean you add that same tedium in your games lol.  Working is not fun. Having to treat your injuries  is not fun. Hell I would wager, that  if we had zombies in real life, having to kill and/or avoid zombies, would not be fun. Using that same reasoning, if implemented to its fullest, we would start up a game and have exactly no fun, because realistically most of the actions in the game, are not fun in real life.

 

Which is why I gave a clear example to reduce the tedious nature of reading as of current with a way to abstract the act of reading while resting in game, which doesn't involve any player interaction and has the passage of time. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reading should definitely not be removed, and I have no problem with how long it takes to read a book, but I think reading should give you both an instant skill point and an XP boost. Your skill in any task is a combination of your theoretical knowledge and your experiential knowledge. The skill system should reflect this. We already split each tier (ie beginner, intermediate, advanced) into two skill points. It doesn't make sense that reading an entire 220 page book does not immediately reduce your chance to fail at a specific skill. If you had two people who had never touched a car before, and asked them to change the battery, and gave one of them a book about changing car batteries, the person who read the book will be far more likely to change the battery successfully than the one who hadn't read the book. I can't imagine any skill for which this is not true.

 

Reading a book should give you one skill point automatically, representing your theoretical knowledge from having read 220 pages about the specific skill. Then you also get an XP boost for level 2 because your theoretical knowledge allows you to do things more efficiently. This system would make books a lot more rewarding, and also more realistic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, this is one of the weirder requests I've seen . . .  If you really don't like it, it's easy to change how fast a timed action occurs through a mod.

 

Unlockable recipes? Sure, I'd love to have more options than just reading a book, but we don't need to remove reading to do that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I feel like reading is a necessary evil to add to immersion, but I also feel the way reading happens in single player should change.

 

I feel reading is important to the game but I do feel the mechanics of it can be changed.

A good example might be Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain's Cigar.

 

When you "read" a book you choose how many "hours" to read then time skips ahead - similar to how "sleeping" works. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, I had an idea a while ago about expanding the existing CD/players to provide an alternative to reading. Your post inspired me to actually put it in the suggestion forum :) 

 

I like a lot of what you're saying about longer-lasting buffs/debuffs. I think Rimworld does a great job wit mood effects in terms of power and short vs long length. They also overlap. so a bunch of minor negative things can be overpowered by a few nice buffs (meals, skill up etc as it might pertain to PZ)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/22/2019 at 11:08 PM, EnigmaGrey said:

Yes, this is one of the weirder requests I've seen . . . 

 

Yup - if anything, reading is actually too easy.

 

It's still possible to read books at maximum efficiency while being severly depressed & inhumanly tired - in pitch black darkness. No big deal.

It's one of those cases where moodles are way too easy to ignore & exploit, because their effects are often too specific.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/22/2019 at 12:28 AM, TheLostBigBoss said:

Reading is fine, and when it comes to learning the drudging inner mechanics of how to learn some type of craft, I wouldn't exactly call that fun. 

I would have to say that this sentence highlights an excelent reason for why the reading mechanic in the "game" is handled poorly.

 

While the current mechanic of reading in the Single Player (SP) scenario may actually work well, 

ie increasing a specified XP for loss of game time. because it doesn't punish the player for making the specialisation choice, as it is easily offset by the Fast Forward (FF) function.

 

The current reading mechanic just doesn't translate very well to a populated Multi-Player (MP) Scenario.

Ie a coop MP game could possibly offset the reading with FF as all players can agree that this time is set for reading and this other time slot is agreed upon to be for sleeping.

but in competetaive MP this type of discussions are just not really possible.

 

I bring up the sleeping mechanic, because IMO the sleeping mechanic and the reading mechanic are nearly identical in the SP experiance of the game.
ie FF is the cure.

 

Fact:  By default Sleeping is disabled in the default MP settings.

 

And by all counts of playing MP I am grateful that the above fact is true!

 

I even go as far as attempting to disable the reading mechanic in every MP game that I serve

by either increasing the normal XP gain or drastically increasing the Pages Read Per Minute option.

 

Both options IMO negate the need for the Book/Reading mechanic to even be included in the game and that the reading mechanic should be treated the same way as the Sleeping Mechanic when it comes to MP.

 

As it stands the current Reading Mechanic in MP is only good as a visualisation to other players that I am AFK. 

Because seriously are you watching the little green bar fill?

 

I definitely hope that the current reading mechanic is only a temporary one.

UNLESS!

They plan to fix the problem when they introduce NPC's and allow us to swap control between our starting character and the NPC's.

ie allow the player to start to read a book then take control of a different character.

 


 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...