Degrees of wildlife.

[bentalbot]

I've simply come to the conclusion that the leveled system of wildlife encounters that increase as you move further out from civilization isn't entirely logical. For as tied to real processes and logic as this game tries to be, I don't think there's any situation in which a fox would actually attack a person. Perhaps a child, but they would know they don't stand a chance against a full sized human and wouldn't even try.

What I think would make more sense, is if the further out you moved, common wildlife would begin to be replaced by similar but more dangerous wildlife. Foxes would be replaced by wolves, for instance. It's much more believable to have a wolf attack a person, especially if a mechanic was added to have them spawn and move in packs. Bears are pretty much the de facto predator so I don't think there need be any scaling there, unless it were on the inner side where they would change to mountain lions or some such.

I'd also like to see some variation of the regular creatures. Boars should probably spawn in closer to civilization as simple pigs, and only the boars further out will actually attack you. Deer should actually be deer, with the larger stags or even moose appearing further out. There should even probably be bulls that graze around more distant herds of cow, and that become aggressive to the player if they approach.

I believe it would give more depth to exploring out in the wilderness since you're not always being attacked by the same things all the time. Also if sounds were included for my wolf idea and played before the wolves were actually on screen, that would give the player pause for thought as to whether they want to continue or double back and try to avoid the pack.

[theTrav]

This has been discussed before and the dev's agree with you. The primary limiting factor is the speed at which Jorb can crank out new art resources for these critters. He wasn't doing any of them while path-finding was being fixed, so maybe now we'll see foxes replaces with wolves and deer replaced with mooses