Direction of this game is slipping away

[DeadRising]

I started playing this when it was first released on EA, but i do feel the games direction has been lost it seems to me like the dev team has abandoned so so much potential this mission system isn't needed and i can safely say it's stopped me from playing it.

instead of adding missions why didn't you add scuba gear or an xp system where your character learns to hold his breath longer and dive to shipwrecks exploring underwater caves etc instead of making it an survival game and then having to fight giant squid and large sharks.

Don't lose focus on such a great concept go back to it's roots what Stranded deep was all about !

peace! <3

[jokermanalias]

agreed

[:. Clawfighter :.]

Agreed! even though I personally think that the missions are cool though, but it shouldnt be necessary to complete them. I don't like the idea about a "storymode" in SD.. It takes to much time to develop and create which could be used elsewhere.. I also think that the devs should focus on making the game look nice, right now the water looks terrible and the islands doesn't look that interesting, also the playermodel looks clunky and unnatural.. I mean first make SD look proper and then add some new stuff.. This is what I think personally

[:. Clawfighter :.]

I really don't understand the devs to be clearly honest..

[gxfryman]

Totally agree but they won't listen. Might as well move on.

[Caius]

agreed...I mean Gyrochopters...meh. I'm sure they are just testing stuff around but there are some bugs and stuff that are way overdue. like the compass, and chopping down pine trees. The fish cage was a great idea, whales on the orizon were excellent, but gone for now...progress is a total hiccup. ALso, the introduction of venomous snakes...as far as my knowladge goes, you find them in the pacific area, only at sea, not inland...and they are deadly, yes, but "night snakes"?!? absolutly not, the only case I can come up with are brown boas in Guam which are not venomous and also an alien species to that area. Don't get me wrong, I own this game since the very beginning, and own other "Alpha" games, I want this game to succeed and I will wait for that day, but guess what, another studio are doing exactly the same sort of game, you wonder why.

[Panthyr]

I agree with the original poster.. the game has lost direction. I too, gave up on the game for a long while... hoping that the devs would do a course correction... they did not. They seem to be developing game based on recommendations of 10-year-olds. That is definitely the wrong way to go.

Early on, I was confused why the devs would add (or tweak) nonsense things to try to make the game 'harder'... rather than focus on fixing the things that are broken. A current example would be adding 'flu' and 'heatstroke' to an insanely unrealistic level.

When was the last time you were in an isolated area and still got the flu?? Answer: NEVER That is just idiotic. The infuenza virus is contracted from OTHER people who are infected.... and contracting that virus in an isolated, tropical climate is very rare (if not impossible)... certainly not daily or multiple times a day. Was research done on this prior to implementation??
I realize 10-yr-olds aren't big on research.

When was the last time you had heatstroke multiple times in a 24 hr period?? Answer: NEVER Also idiotic. Here's an idea... lose the silly gyro-thingy and add a HAT... silly thought I know. Wanna prevent heatstroke before it begins?... dunk your head in cool water when you begin to feel dizzy... then your body. Head first then the body. Lower brain temp.. then core temp. Heatstoke takes a while to occur and easy to fix if caught quickly.... and will not re-occur as quickly as game suggests. Oops, again, on the research thing.

Early on... and the reason I chose this game.. was the devs delcaration that they wanted to develop a 'REALISTIC' game. I think they have strayed...and not just a little... a lot. I suspect this, as stated earlier, is an attempt to make the game more difficult - when it simply makes it less realistic and stupid.

Examples:

- Correctly removed the lighter and buckets... but still have an abundance of hammers, motor parts, air tanks, etc. Far from realistic. Althiough it is realistic to find random items that could hold rain water.

What happen to the rain? Tropical remember??

- A gyro copter. Cool.. for about a day... then just dumb.

- Cans of beans?... Ok I guess... but no other food items found on shipwrecks?? Interesting.

You should get the idea by now. Think of it this way:

If you were stranded on an island with a inflatable raft and little else, what would you realistically scavange from your surroundings? If you think boat motors, cans of gasoline, and gyro copters... you are to blame for the direction this game is taking. This is a SURVIVAL GAME not a CO-OP, not a First-Person Shooter. Those can be found by the hundreds on Steam.

Ultimately... someone will develop the 'best', most 'realistic' survival game. If not this one... there will be another someday. I really hoped it would be this one. But I've been wrong before.

[Waltzing]

_Panthyr_ The flu and heatstroke effects have been removed.

[frillen]

I'm a little split on this...

I love Stranded Deep for its basic survival aspects, physics and beauty - I really feel like a castaway on a tropical island.
While I did have fun doing the missions and building the Gyrocopter, I somehow also feel that it breaks the immersion, but BeamTeam have promised an end-game scenario and they have made it optional, we can simply ignore the missions and not place them in the map :)

What I am a little worried about is which direction it will take... Survival with elements of exploration or Exploration with elements of survival?

We all have different ideas about what Stranded Deep should be like and BeamTeam listens to us and add ideas to their roadmap if it fits to their idea of the game.

I am a patient guy and hope that it will turn out to be both entertaining while still giving me a feeling of struggling as a castaway on a beautiful tropical island against the environment :)

The problem is that it is almost impossible to make a game where realism is very high while keeping it entertaining and challenging at the same time, so they have to cut some corners...

Stranded Deep has for a long time only been challenging until you got some experience with it, there wasn't really anything slowing you down or suddenly throwing you out in desperate situations once you have built a solar still and a smoker.
Then they added the Flu/Heatstroke which almost set the community on fire, some adapted to them, became more aware and planned their activities so they minimized the risk of getting them, and others felt that they made the game boring and too much micro management, some even said that the game became too hard and impossible to survive!
Flu/Heatstroke wasn't balanced well and Flu may be the wrong word, but both things added something very needed to the game - Difficulty and awareness.

Let's face it, basic survival is very easy and doesn't really take up much of your time, while the opposite would be the reality...

• You can eat anything edible, there's no penalty for not keeping a nutrional balance + smoked meat and unskinned animals never spoils - All food have the same quality and nutrition
  
• Drinking water is being produced in a very generous solar still and never spoils or has lower quality
  
• You can literally deforest an entire island, run around and work hard constantly, there's no stamina bar that limits your activities.
  
• Weather in particularly thunderstorms doesn't affect you or your stuff(yet)
  
• If it wasn't for the aggressive sharks you could swim for as long and at any time you like, even during a storm.
  
• You can run through the vegetation without getting a single cut, bruise or scratch
  
• You don't have to build up skills, you can pretty much build and craft anything from the crafting menu as long you have the required materials.
  
• There is very little variety in items to be found or crafted whether they functional or just decorative - It seems like every time they add something new, something old is removed from the game
  
• All crafting is instant, you can literally craft a bunch of stuff as fast as you can select them and you can also build a house in less than a day.
  
• Tiger Sharks are the only real danger in the water although they a bit unrealistically aggressive and present.
  While you can get poisoning Sea Urchins and Lion fish, it doesn't really affect your health that much and wears off in a day or 2
  
• Snakes and crabs are the only dangers on land if you can call them that, you don't get poisoning from a snake bite and only lose a little less than 1 health bar, crabs can pinch you but it takes roughly 12-15 times before you lose a health bar
  
• You can pretty much hurt yourself in various ways and just use some medicals or bandages then it is as if it never happened and there is no healing time.

These are things I would like to see changed to make it a great and realistic survival castaway game.
There's a lot of talk about it being unrealistic when they increase the difficulty, but no one is talking about how unrealistic the easier(fun) aspects are!

It is a computer game and it is hard to please everyone, realism is a hard to simulate in a game while still keeping it entertaining and not too much of a grind or hard, they have to cut corners.

Stranded Deep has taken some weird turns since the release, but it still has the potential to become a great survival game that can make you feel like a castaway - I still love this game and have faith in it even though it might never reach the level of realistic survival aspects that I would love, but it is a unique castaway game and hopefully there will be more like this in the future :)

[DanteBrane]

Originally posted by frillen:

I'm a little split on this...

I love Stranded Deep for its basic survival aspects, physics and beauty - I really feel like a castaway on a tropical island.
While I did have fun doing the missions and building the Gyrocopter, I somehow also feel that it breaks the immersion, but BeamTeam have promised an end-game scenario and they have made it optional, we can simply ignore the missions and not place them in the map :)

What I am a little worried about is which direction it will take... Survival with elements of exploration or Exploration with elements of survival?

We all have different ideas about what Stranded Deep should be like and BeamTeam listens to us and add ideas to their roadmap if it fits to their idea of the game.

I am a patient guy and hope that it will turn out to be both entertaining while still giving me a feeling of struggling as a castaway on a beautiful tropical island against the environment :)

The problem is that it is almost impossible to make a game where realism is very high while keeping it entertaining and challenging at the same time, so they have to cut some corners...

Stranded Deep has for a long time only been challenging until you got some experience with it, there wasn't really anything slowing you down or suddenly throwing you out in desperate situations once you have built a solar still and a smoker.
Then they added the Flu/Heatstroke which almost set the community on fire, some adapted to them, became more aware and planned their activities so they minimized the risk of getting them, and others felt that they made the game boring and too much micro management, some even said that the game became too hard and impossible to survive!
Flu/Heatstroke wasn't balanced well and Flu may be the wrong word, but both things added something very needed to the game - Difficulty and awareness.

Let's face it, basic survival is very easy and doesn't really take up much of your time, while the opposite would be the reality...

• You can eat anything edible, there's no penalty for not keeping a nutrional balance + smoked meat and unskinned animals never spoils - All food have the same quality and nutrition
  
• Drinking water is being produced in a very generous solar still and never spoils or has lower quality
  
• You can literally deforest an entire island, run around and work hard constantly, there's no stamina bar that limits your activities.
  
• Weather in particularly thunderstorms doesn't affect you or your stuff(yet)
  
• If it wasn't for the aggressive sharks you could swim for as long and at any time you like, even during a storm.
  
• You can run through the vegetation without getting a single cut, bruise or scratch
  
• You don't have to build up skills, you can pretty much build and craft anything from the crafting menu as long you have the required materials.
  
• There is very little variety in items to be found or crafted whether they functional or just decorative - It seems like every time they add something new, something old is removed from the game
  
• All crafting is instant, you can literally craft a bunch of stuff as fast as you can select them and you can also build a house in less than a day.
  
• Tiger Sharks are the only real danger in the water although they a bit unrealistically aggressive and present.
  While you can get poisoning Sea Urchins and Lion fish, it doesn't really affect your health that much and wears off in a day or 2
  
• Snakes and crabs are the only dangers on land if you can call them that, you don't get poisoning from a snake bite and only lose a little less than 1 health bar, crabs can pinch you but it takes roughly 12-15 times before you lose a health bar
  
• You can pretty much hurt yourself in various ways and just use some medicals or bandages then it is as if it never happened and there is no healing time.

These are things I would like to see changed to make it a great and realistic survival castaway game.
There's a lot of talk about it being unrealistic when they increase the difficulty, but no one is talking about how unrealistic the easier(fun) aspects are!

It is a computer game and it is hard to please everyone, realism is a hard to simulate in a game while still keeping it entertaining and not too much of a grind or hard, they have to cut corners.

Stranded Deep has taken some weird turns since the release, but it still has the potential to become a great survival game that can make you feel like a castaway - I still love this game and have faith in it even though it might never reach the level of realistic survival aspects that I would love, but it is a unique castaway game and hopefully there will be more like this in the future :)

I just started playing this game again and I see what you mean. Perhaps they could overhaul the survival mechanics to brutal difficulty for a separate mode and kinda leave it like it is for another mode for more casual players to have a balanced play of explore and survival.

[frillen]

Originally posted by DanteBrane:

Originally posted by frillen:

I'm a little split on this...

I love Stranded Deep for its basic survival aspects, physics and beauty - I really feel like a castaway on a tropical island.
While I did have fun doing the missions and building the Gyrocopter, I somehow also feel that it breaks the immersion, but BeamTeam have promised an end-game scenario and they have made it optional, we can simply ignore the missions and not place them in the map :)

What I am a little worried about is which direction it will take... Survival with elements of exploration or Exploration with elements of survival?

We all have different ideas about what Stranded Deep should be like and BeamTeam listens to us and add ideas to their roadmap if it fits to their idea of the game.

I am a patient guy and hope that it will turn out to be both entertaining while still giving me a feeling of struggling as a castaway on a beautiful tropical island against the environment :)

The problem is that it is almost impossible to make a game where realism is very high while keeping it entertaining and challenging at the same time, so they have to cut some corners...

Stranded Deep has for a long time only been challenging until you got some experience with it, there wasn't really anything slowing you down or suddenly throwing you out in desperate situations once you have built a solar still and a smoker.
Then they added the Flu/Heatstroke which almost set the community on fire, some adapted to them, became more aware and planned their activities so they minimized the risk of getting them, and others felt that they made the game boring and too much micro management, some even said that the game became too hard and impossible to survive!
Flu/Heatstroke wasn't balanced well and Flu may be the wrong word, but both things added something very needed to the game - Difficulty and awareness.

Let's face it, basic survival is very easy and doesn't really take up much of your time, while the opposite would be the reality...

• You can eat anything edible, there's no penalty for not keeping a nutrional balance + smoked meat and unskinned animals never spoils - All food have the same quality and nutrition
  
• Drinking water is being produced in a very generous solar still and never spoils or has lower quality
  
• You can literally deforest an entire island, run around and work hard constantly, there's no stamina bar that limits your activities.
  
• Weather in particularly thunderstorms doesn't affect you or your stuff(yet)
  
• If it wasn't for the aggressive sharks you could swim for as long and at any time you like, even during a storm.
  
• You can run through the vegetation without getting a single cut, bruise or scratch
  
• You don't have to build up skills, you can pretty much build and craft anything from the crafting menu as long you have the required materials.
  
• There is very little variety in items to be found or crafted whether they functional or just decorative - It seems like every time they add something new, something old is removed from the game
  
• All crafting is instant, you can literally craft a bunch of stuff as fast as you can select them and you can also build a house in less than a day.
  
• Tiger Sharks are the only real danger in the water although they a bit unrealistically aggressive and present.
  While you can get poisoning Sea Urchins and Lion fish, it doesn't really affect your health that much and wears off in a day or 2
  
• Snakes and crabs are the only dangers on land if you can call them that, you don't get poisoning from a snake bite and only lose a little less than 1 health bar, crabs can pinch you but it takes roughly 12-15 times before you lose a health bar
  
• You can pretty much hurt yourself in various ways and just use some medicals or bandages then it is as if it never happened and there is no healing time.

These are things I would like to see changed to make it a great and realistic survival castaway game.
There's a lot of talk about it being unrealistic when they increase the difficulty, but no one is talking about how unrealistic the easier(fun) aspects are!

It is a computer game and it is hard to please everyone, realism is a hard to simulate in a game while still keeping it entertaining and not too much of a grind or hard, they have to cut corners.

Stranded Deep has taken some weird turns since the release, but it still has the potential to become a great survival game that can make you feel like a castaway - I still love this game and have faith in it even though it might never reach the level of realistic survival aspects that I would love, but it is a unique castaway game and hopefully there will be more like this in the future :)

I just started playing this game again and I see what you mean. Perhaps they could overhaul the survival mechanics to brutal difficulty for a separate mode and kinda leave it like it is for another mode for more casual players to have a balanced play of explore and survival.

I agree, they should put the game modes in effect, the current level would probably suit fine for casual players to have focus on building, crafting and exploring, normal and survivor modes should have more focus on the survival aspect - It doesn't have to be brutally hard like for example Subsistence and The Long Dark, but I wouldn't mind to be challenged to a point where I rarely feel secure, there is just something about survival games that gives jo this feeling :)

[Dschoean]

The story missions are fully optional, they have been added, cause many people complained about a missing goal in the game.

Everything Beam Team does, is to try to deliver everything which has been asked.

I do agree that the missions seem to be a little bit odd, because they won't tie in the game yet. But this is a full work in progress, it'll change through time..

This game will evolve into something great, I'm totally positive about this.

There'll be more survival aspects in the next updates, Sam already mentioned it.

Cheers

[Charles]

Originally posted by Caius:

agreed...I mean Gyrochopters...meh. I'm sure they are just testing stuff around but there are some bugs and stuff that are way overdue. like the compass, and chopping down pine trees. The fish cage was a great idea, whales on the orizon were excellent, but gone for now...progress is a total hiccup. ALso, the introduction of venomous snakes...as far as my knowladge goes, you find them in the pacific area, only at sea, not inland...and they are deadly, yes, but "night snakes"?!? absolutly not, the only case I can come up with are brown boas in Guam which are not venomous and also an alien species to that area. Don't get me wrong, I own this game since the very beginning, and own other "Alpha" games, I want this game to succeed and I will wait for that day, but guess what, another studio are doing exactly the same sort of game, you wonder why.

Mate, I don't know what rock you live under, but here in Australia ( in the tropical pacific) I can assure you that you have to watch your step at night just as much as in the day when it comes to avoiding venomous snakebite....in the tropics that's most of the time other places in the pacific only during summer at night. There's a lot of food getting about for them at night.
"absolutely not"???!!?.....well if you reckon it's a case of absolutely not I'd like to see you walk around barefoot on a tropical island on a warm tropical night......you'd be braver than me if you did.

[DeadRising]

It's nothing to do with it being an EA game or the fact it's still in devilopment my point that I am trying to put across is this...


The Dev's have lost their way with this game back in 2015 when i purchased access to alpha test and play this EA title the updates were more structured now it seems there's no set plan their trello board has no value as nothing on there has been implemented from way back in 2015 when they first started it instead they've side tracked themselves by adding missions that completely seperate you from the already awesome survival feeling it has..

this is my thoughts

Step 1. take a deep look at shipwrecked style films and castaway stories.

Step 2. develop a solid structure building system that incorporates the ability to use the enviroment for example a Hammock between two trees and many other options.

step 3. create an immersive underwater ambience and aquatic life with sharks that act curiously to your presence not always harming you.

step 4. weather with storms that can flip your raft and wind that interacts with physics

step 5. different ways of purifying water?

step 6. new creatures, animal life etc etc

then over time communicate with your community via events like a videolog? or a devblog? show us how things are shaping up give us willing to want to stay for the long haul.

I've had this game for over 2 years and I've enjoyed all the time I'ved had it but its potential is drifting away with the current and on the edge of being "cast away" to the bottom of my play list.

Dev's come talk to us we can help

[BushiNeko]

I agree that it's been a lot of one forward two back steps.
I have come and gone a few times on this one. Try as I might to WANT to love this game, it suffers the same thing ultimately it has since day one.

There is no reason to do anything.

Build still, build smoker, have a shelter. Done.

You can only talk yourself into trying different things so much. I gave up on even trying to build the gyro after my last attempt to love the game because its a matter of ' say what? '

There is no survival aspect still, after all this time. Sure implementing things and tweaking would be expected IE Flu Heatstroke etc. But after all this time:
We still have zero need to work at living.
We have zero need to worry over weather.
We have zero need to worry over clothing.
These seem like they would be the priority when going for a survival genre game. You know, actually survival issues.

Instead we row here, loot boat, find stuff, row there.
Or what I find myself still doing. Buid smoker. Build Still. Build bed. Realize I am done. With no need to deforest an island and filling a smoker with easy to catch things + only lighting when full your set.

There is literally no reason to do anything, you cant even ' sandbox ' it after a while because there is so little to build, or a why.

So I wander off... yet again.

[MV-Play]

Unfortunately I must agree with you folks.

During the two and a half year that I own this game, I have gone through feelings of admiration, bewildering and frustration. The game started as the promise of a real castaway experience.
Finaly a game without zombies. Just you and nature.

I used to be rather active at the forum the first year. As already mentionned by a lot of posters I also was expecting to see nature growing more beautiful, diverse animals with a more complex a.i. instead of autistic sharks, swimming around starving, feverishly looking for their only source of food: a skinny survivor of a plane crash.

Some good mod makers, such as I-o-IPositive7, are tweaking the game.
Nevertheless, their contribution is restricted by the limitations of the game itself.

It's not up to me to tell developers what to do. Ultimately it's their game, not mine. But, and of course, this is a personal opinion, I think they are too far away from the original concept.

So, little by little, SD has become an unfulfilled dream. That's sad and could have been avoided by keeping the experience more primitive and down-to-earth.

Nevertheless, I would like to thank the developers for the many pleasant hours I could spend on their islands the first few months after SD's launching.

There remains a sparkle of hope Beam Team returns to the basic concept of their game but, and I do not like to say this, I think this might be a goodbye.

Meanwhile, I am playing a similar game that brings back the sense of wonder I had at the beginning of Stranded Deep.

And again, that's sad and regrettable.