Game feels practically unplayable

[Electro Spaghetti]

EDIT: fount out what I was doing wrong: playing on pc. I imagine that almost every single issue I have could be fixed by playing in vr but honestly pc so bad I wonder why they even made it in the first place, and then also tosses in extra mechanics that only effect pc players. (Stamina on swing, making combat arbitarily harder and tree chopping even slower and more awkward, weapon upgrades for things like improving swing speed, the weapon stats other than damage, the whole blocking mechanic in the first place, along with many other things. Guess I just won't play the game then cuz I'm not set up for pc vr.

Before I leave a negative review I want to see if maybe I'm doing something wrong, because right now I am ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ done.
Every time a chop down a tree or try to build a wall, another wave of cannibals spawns. The wiki suggests that they get agressive if you chop down tress or build walls in front of them, but doesn't say anything about spawning behaviours. We've now hit day 7 with no item progress and mutants are spawning and we haven't even finished our wall yet because of the sheer quantity of attacks keeps stalling us and the game is ramping too much too quickly. 200 logs in peaceful? With a vr player to chop down trees, no sweat, done in a day. On normal? 20 in a day is an arduous task.
I know, "just don't build a wall lol", but then how do I defend myself when all the traps are ♥♥♥♥? And if I've built in the wrong place then there is literally no way to know, especially given that the community made map reccomended our building spot and there is no villages or anything in sight, just 3+ patrols per night, agrroing and noticing us from the moment they become rendered in.
And then the combat itself is hot garbage, especially considering they made the ai too clever, it's like trying to fight a pack of hpyeragressive headless chickens. And I'm not talking about any of that "fuzzyness" ♥♥♥♥ either: if you block, they sometimes just try to wait until you drop your guard before immediately slapping you in the face. Or, they might just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ backflip over you and you have to try and figure out where the ♥♥♥♥ they've gone. Or, they may just run to the side of you and invalidate your block anyways. Even the wiki suggests using campfires over traps btw, and other than cheesing with campfires the only strategey it suggests it hitstun, which means tanking hits as getting withing melee range will almost certainly involve them getting the first hit, or continuing to not stay still so you even if you have someone else draw agrro all you'll end up doing is miss.

Then there's stealth and how you swing your weapon on pc: you cannot go fully invisible when stealthing, and 90% of it comes from not moving anyways so your targets have to come to you. And even at maximum possible stealth, entities have a very generous radius around them where they just automatically detect you, so it's not even useful for hunting as if they wander too close they immediately yeet themselves across the map, meaning the best way to hunt is to either abuse buggy terrain/pathfinding (shoutout the edge of the crater for so many free deers that just literally dive in and out of solid rock until they get stuck), or for vr players, chase after them and eventually catch up and smack em one. The second option doesn't work on pc, especially on small targets, due to the janky slow and awkward swings and you have to look above/below a certain angle to hit certain heights, which probably don't help melee combat either. I honestly can't tell if this was designed as a vr game or a pc game: the "what you see is exactly and only what you get, there's no melee range, only exactly where your weapon is", which is usually the case for vr games as I find a similar issue when playing rec room on pc, but at the same time, extra things like how the menus work and the stamina system (quick shoutout to the hotkeys btw, commonly using e, r, g and c, but never f, and I only found the lighter by being told it existed by a vr player and had to guess what button it was on becuase "l" only makes sense in the "L for lighter" way, which is a method of keymapping only used for rarely used items or by 10 year olds) suggest the game was designed for pc.

Other than the rampant very odd bugs (shoutout to the ghost pot I once had and the gun pieces not respawning for me, only my friend so they had to pick up and give to me the extra piece that the game forgot to add to my inventory when I picked it up), I'm still probably forgetting something but I'll make one last point: settings and graphics. First off, the menu is janky as all hell where pausing more than once in a session will bury you in the settings for some reason, but my biggest problem is setting limitations and ineffectiveness. (Also, which is better "fastest" or "minimal"? the ordering of the list suggests minimal may be the least resource intensive, but wouldn't that be fastest? or does lowering the graphics past a certain point actually slow the game down?) I'm playing with max brightness across the board, becuase I physically can't see anything at night whatsoever on anything else. And hell, I can't see anything anyway cuz the gamma is wrong and I can't change it other than raising my physical position compared to my screen (current position is totally fine for every other game that iv'e played btw, even in dark areas). And I'd like to turn off the grass: it doesn't do anything other than be a pain trying to see animals (99% of the time they see me well before I ever see them) and look ♥♥♥♥. But you can't turn it off all the way. Great. What about shadows? Usually they can be pretty resource intensive and maybe if I just turned them off altogether I could see a little better and also turn the graphics of everything else up. No, you can only make them look eye bleedingly awful. And it's just the same across the board: you can't turn anything off, only make it look worse. Even pvp can't be disabled, only minimised, meaning that the only reason why fighting as a team isn't much of a risk is because I can't hit anything anyways.

Overall I think I can trace all the problems back to one root: "muh realism". They have actively detracted from the gaming experience in the name of immersion and realism, not realising that it ends up killing both anyways as you have to deal with all this ♥♥♥♥ that feels like it was all designed irrespective of everything else around it. Lighter going out? Aka go blind in the middle of cave combat for the sake of "muh realism" . """""""""fuzzy"""""""""" ai that's closer to pvp combat with an unfair advantage? "muh realistic enemies". Weapon only hitboxes with no reach? "muh realistic weapon". Stamina system that serves no purpose and has odd niche rules when it comes to restoring? "muh realism"

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, especially given that the game doesn't have THAT bad reviews, but all I see is poor design with the best fixes being to cheese combat, google the bugs to watch out for, and enable cheats that prevent enemy spawning in the day, giving you a chance to do things other than fight them off.

TL;DR: game feels so poorly designed it's unplayable, what am I doing wrong?

[eclipse]

use in-gamecode for cannibals only at night

dont build on patrol routes - pretty sure the maps online show them - they used to

stealth works pretty good i think last i checked, hide in bushes not in the open

you can stealth kill animals from a closer distance then standing

they killed the graphics in this game to cater to ps4 i think

hell if i remember correctly the very first early versions looked better

[Electro Spaghetti]

Originally posted by eclipse:

use in-gamecode for cannibals only at night

dont build on patrol routes - pretty sure the maps online show them - they used to

stealth works pretty good i think last i checked, hide in bushes not in the open

you can stealth kill animals from a closer distance then standing

they killed the graphics in this game to cater to ps4 i think

hell if i remember correctly the very first early versions looked better

like I said, don't feel like I should be using cheats just to make a game playable.

hard to find a place with anything near that isn't on a patrol route. bit late now unless I want to reset and start over again

I am crouching. I am in a bush. I am wearing as much stealth armour as possible. You can't move without losing 90% of your stealth and my experience has been all entities having pretty much a 1m radar that they instantly detect you in so it doesn't matter anyways.

the graphics are set to a minimum cuz I have a potato pc. What I'm saying is that the game would actually look better and be less resource intensive if I could just remove certain things altogether

[Megamix]

Have to say i`ve completed this game too many times now (VR) never had any problems as I just get on with the game, kill them when they show up and build when they don`t, my new play map i`ve built a good wall around it, got all my defences up in front of my camp, with other players you really should be knocking them all over the place, I just play for fun now go cannibal hunting once i`ve got my base up and running, or build another base, and once you clear a cave you can use them to travel from one place to another, I still enjoy playing the forest with over 500+hours in to it i think.
I will admit it is a harder game combat wise in pancake mode, hope you don`t give up as its a great game to play and have fun on with friends.

[Electro Spaghetti]

combat in vr is fine becuase hitstun id the most effective start anyways, but you can't try to play intelligently or block becuase it's physically not a mechanic. As a pc player I can't even fight a single cannibal and I have to leave it all up to my vr friend becuase the swing animation is too slow so I have to tank before I can hit them, then I have to worry about the fact I lose stamina every swing, and playing defensively and blocking just doesn't work with the ai. Also, if you don't use the cannibal's club, blocking isn't even worth as damage goes through anyways
"build when they dont" the issue is that this is causing more to spawn almost instantly. like I said, can't put 20 logs into a building in a day because yet another cannibal wave spawns the moment we cut down trees or place logs in the wall. And now we have mutants knocking on our unfinished front door and we haven't had a chance to do anything other than build and fend off cannibals
I have had fun in peacful, spent a good solid 25 hours base building and exploring. but the cannibals are just to frequent, even on normal and now I'm even too demotivated to even touch the peaceful world

[2High2tell]

Okay.. what is more realistic? That you and a minor few people can not play the game because it is sooo bad, Or 2, (99% of people who play do not complain about such things because they are not effected by it?

When you look at it this way, then maybe it is not the game. but the player (for whatever reason) Reading your rant tells me there is NOTHING that can be said here to help you. I am sorry you can not handle this game, but that is on you.

This is not a hard game, never was. No need for cheats, that is a preference on playstyle. and just like here, people will read your review, and hopefully understand that it is a run-off and not really about the game.

[Electro Spaghetti]

Originally posted by 2High2tell:

Okay.. what is more realistic? That you and a minor few people can not play the game because it is sooo bad, Or 2, (99% of people who play do not complain about such things because they are not effected by it?

When you look at it this way, then maybe it is not the game. but the player (for whatever reason) Reading your rant tells me there is NOTHING that can be said here to help you. I am sorry you can not handle this game, but that is on you.

This is not a hard game, never was. No need for cheats, that is a preference on playstyle. and just like here, people will read your review, and hopefully understand that it is a run-off and not really about the game.

Bruh. What part of "BEFORE I leave a negative review I want to see if MAYBE I'M DOING SOMETHING WRONG" Makes you think I don't already see it that way. I haven't even begun making the review yet. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong that makes me struggle where others are fine and so far the answers I've got just say "that's not my experience" which does indeed suggest to me that there is nothing I can do, in a "each copy of the game is personalised" sort of way.
But honestly it feels so unpolished that I've seen early access games that have more polish and any issues aren't as severe or glaring.

After looking over maps it appears that we did pick a bad spot, but there was genuinely no way of knowing until it was too late and we would have never found a better spot without a guide as well.

And I never thought it was hard either, just completely dysfunctional. Hard implies challenge, and medium to high level of skill or effort required. And tbh I wouldn't have as much of an issue if it didn't feel like this game was made for pc and then ported over to vr, due to blocking and stamina being present on pc but not in vr. If it was made for vr, then it would make a lot more sense: despite no blocking combat would be miles easier and a lot of the dysfunctionality essentially holding me back from properly playing and enjoying the game would be gone.

[Nitro]

The game is super hard when you first start out. Your experience was exactly like mine. Here's a list of tips, tricks and hints:

-Move to the fertile lands. Can google location. Eastern side of map. Much lower incidence of attacks.
-Use armor. Lizard skins and bone.
-Armor stacks. Use as much as you can get.
-Toss whole corpses on the fires.
-The best way to fight them is to strafe while sprinting. I'm on PS4 use back buttons to make this work. When rushed, strafe/sprint to the side then swing, faster weapon works best.
-The cannibals can't swim.
-Traps are super effective.
-Bow is your friend.
-PS4 I adjust the settings brightess at night. "Night Vision"

I don't understand if you are on VR or not but hopefully this all helps.

Those should be enough tips to get you going. If you need more help ask away.

[Nitro]

Stealth works better with full lizard/leaf stealth armor. 10 stacks. They still will find you but you can hide much better.

[Nitro]

Apply cloth to your weapon and light it on fire. Helps a lot with damage.

[Nitro]

No fires at night unless you want the cannibals visiting.

[Kaldrak]

Build your compound walls out of rocks, not wood. Rocks respawn and you don't piss off the cannibals with clearcutting the trees. Also I think the rock walls are tougher than the log ones, not sure about that though, since I haven't tested. Make sure the rock wall is two stacks high and make a custom wooden wall where you want to enter/leave and hit r till you make a door with a lock.

Oh, and then if you're still having trouble, turn off building damage and ignore literally everything on the other side of your walls.

[Dutchcrazygamer]

Did you try to take a look at this video (and part 2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSL8tcXHe-0 ?. It explains some of the patrol routes of the canniballs. I am doing a playthrough myself and when i was on day 8 i still had no canniballs that spotted my base. When i started to explore the yacht i found my first group of canniballs (they were those club ones because the longer you wait the stronger they get). The location i build was in the vertile lands because there are no patrol routes there. There is however a village but there are mostly no canniballs there. And you were correct about chopping down trees, it pisses them off. If you remove the stumps they won't know you were there. (if there comes a patrol somehow when you are out in the caves or something) . The game is designed to be a wave game (after your base location has been spotted by scouts or any remaining canniballs that escape your axe) so it pushes the player to explore and (maybe) move to a different place and finish the game.

[Electro Spaghetti]

-Move to the fertile lands. Really shouldn't have to use google just to get a decent start in the game.
-Use armour. I am. Not really helping much as I can't keep more than 2 peices before I get hit in yet another raid.
-Toss whole corpses on the fires. I know. My friend thought you had to use bonfires but we learnt otherwise fairly quickly.
-PS4 (VR) No, I'm not in vr. that's why the combat is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad because you're heavily restricted in how and how often you can swing. But like I said, the blocking and stamina systems not being present in vr suggests that the game was designed for pc first, while how you swing on pc suggests it was designed for vr first. Either way trying to play outside of vr appears to be what kills it.
-The cannibals can't swim. Shouldn't need to cheese just to fight.
-Traps are super effective. My own experience and other people told me otherwise.
-Bow is your friend. Haha pc awkardness go brrrr
-PS4 I adjust the settings brightess at night. "Night Vision" I have all the brightness settings on max 24/7. not helping. It's the gamma setting which I can't change that's the issue. You can technically change gamma by looking at your screen form higher or lower but that's bordering excessive actions.

Maybe I didn't say it specifically but I thought it was damn obvious I was on pc.

I literally said I had full stealth armour on peaceful and was still getting contsantly detected by every animal within a meter of me.

No fires AT ALL? Guess that makes a little sense.

I thought about rock walls, but custom building is another broken thing on pc and like you said, they need to be double height to work. I have building damage disabled. The issue was the frequency of the attacks preventing me from doing literally anything else other than fighting them off.

No, I didn't look a a YT guide. Like I said, you shouldn't have to in order to be able to play the game.
"If you remove the stumps they won't know you were there" The issue is every time I chop down a tree a new wave SPAWNS IN RESPONSE. It's not about them knowing I was there or anything because I don't even get a chance to clear the stump before I get attacked for thinking about touching the trees.

I respect the concept of waves, but there's a difference between a ramping challenge and total suppression until the big guns arrive.

I'm going to edit the main post with a couple extra thoughts.

[Abs]

Like almost every survival game there's a sharp learning curve. And like the others once you learn how to survive it's pretty easy.
We all have been there and realized don't build there or don't do this. As for the forest I find it to be one of the easier survival games to learn but these are the types I play and I understand failure is the game. As soon as your successful the game is pretty much over. And it turns into a building simulator that happens to have cannibals. Just like DayZ turns into pvp that happens to have zombies and Green Hell turns into a building simulator that happens to have natives ect ect ect .
Players here gave tips to help, most politely some not. I am not going to give any. I don't think this is the type of game for you and you should leave your review and move on to a different game type.

[Electro Spaghetti]

I'm fine with everything about the game apart from how it connects the user to the game when playing on pc, I've had np trouble with the "surviving" side of it whatsoever. I want to like it and I'm trying my best to. But it's just not working out.