Game Development: Ancestral Ropewalk

[loftar]

Spring is by far the worst season. Rather than seeds regenerating day 1-3 of spring, they dont even start until summer hits and even then it takes like a week or two before theyre all back (even in caves??). Terrible mechanic and I hate it. Trees are a massive part of development and to turn them off for 2 and a quarter of the seasons is just dumb. Seeds should start respawning day 1 of spring and they should all be back on all trees within a few irl days. Otherwise, spring should basically be summer with more bees and pretty flowers so you can still tell the difference.

My biggest issue with seasons is that you guys haven't fixed seasonal questing. You still get shit quests that ask for morels during the first summer of the world. You also should not be getting quests that are technically possible if you were to dig out the snow and then relog in that spot every 20 minutes hoping for an ant hill or tangled bramble to spawn. Just dont allow these quests to be assigned already!

Not saying you're wrong, but I think these grievances are more for the autistas among you. For noobs coming to the game, starting in winter sure is hard mode, and I also find personally that it detracts quite a bit from the walking-simulator aspect of the game by basically making the whole world look the same. For questing, too, I think the complaint is more true the more actively you're questing, whereas if you just happen to get a quest in winter (which is now guaranteed to be winter-specialized) and then don't do that quest for a week or two, you'd still be as out of luck.

Kinda salty that a lot of qol and seemingly obvious fixes havent been added to improve seasons since seasons were added, which is the other main issue with them imo. Seasons were added and very little has been done to flesh each one of them out to make them unique and decent in their own ways. And now preferring to pull the plug rather than adding those things is also frustrating.

Without going into details (though what I said about questing above probably counts as an example), I think that many of the "obvious" fixes that you speak of are more complex than you probably give them credit for. Likewise for content, it's not like we haven't thought of that a fair deal, but in the balance of things, it hasn't felt like enough LIT material that we've thought that it would make enough of a dent. I mean, we'll certainly keep considering it, and if we can think of enough content for winter and spring that they could be playable indefinitely as a game in itself (like summer and fall are), we'll certainly consider making seasons time-based again.

However, one of the main aspects of geographical seasons would be that you can choose your own season. If you don't like winter, you can simply not play winter. If you don't like spring, you can simply not play spring. It would have those kinds of advantages.

[rye130]

We are considering disabling seasons. Winter (and spring) remove a fair bit of content -- whole core game loops -- we have no easy fix for that, and it seems to hurt a fair bit more than intended. We're considering reworking seasonality to be a map local thing, rather than a server wide event, but that is a bigger project. Eternal summer? Let us know what you think.

The first winter of a world was always a little fun, and the shorter winter's we have now feel like a good length. A lot of people seem to take a short break through winter/spring and then never come back. Removing seasons probably stops that from happening quite as fast, but I don't think it'll help player numbers this far into the world.

Here's a few of my issues with seasons that could help, if you don't plan to remove them:

• Spring not getting tree seeds back right away is really stupid
• Credo quests asking for things you can't go out and get still sucks
• The cave layers probably shouldn't be affected by seasons, or need some unique seasonal content added to them. Being able to do some kind of farming underground regardless of season could be pretty cool.
• Being able to map new tiles and get the actual tile information instead of just snow would be really nice (instead of all tiles becoming snow and having the same tile id, make snow covered variants for each tile type and display them on the map as the non-snow-covered version) Add a button to toggle winter view on the map (showing what areas are covered in snow/ice)

[dafels]

[*] We are considering disabling seasons. Winter (and spring) remove a fair bit of content -- whole core game loops -- we have no easy fix for that, and it seems to hurt a fair bit more than intended. We're considering reworking seasonality to be a map local thing, rather than a server wide event, but that is a bigger project. Eternal summer? Let us know what you think.
Enjoy!

great stuff, nice patch

[KotMroku1]

Without going into details, I think that many of the "obvious" fixes that you speak of are more complex than you probably give them credit for. Likewise for content, it's not like we haven't thought of a fair deal, but in the balance of things, it hasn't felt like enough LIT material that we've thought that it would make enough of a dent. I mean, we'll certainly keep considering it, and if we can think of enough content for winter and spring that they could be playable indefinitely as a game in itself (like summer and fall are), we'll certainly consider making seasons time-based again.

However, one of the main aspects of geographical seasons would be that you can choose your own season. If you don't like winter, you can simply not play winter. If you don't like spring, you can simply not play spring. It would have those kinds of advantages.

I'm not sure how valid that would be with the world size and all, not to mention how possible it would be to code, but there could be a middle ground. Instead of same seasons over the whole map, or cold north and warm south (or regionalized patches of seasons which would be just... bad) you could have it so that there's a gradient of how long seasons last. You could have long winters up north (possibly even permafrost on the edge), and long summers down south. This way you wouldn't only pick what season you want to play in, but also pick if, and how long, you'd want other seasons to happen around you. Obviously care should be taken with proportions since most players would presumably want to stick to summer.
This could be also tweaked with autumn and spring in mind, so that every season is always present in the game world at any given time, even if not at the same place, though the main way I see that happening is having an equator of perpetual summer, and winters happening alternately in north and south, which might make the summer regions quite claustrophobic to play in.
The north/south thing is also just an example, but one that most people will be familiar with.
As a side note - having permafrost regions could also have some late-game PVE content tied to it, with frost trolls, polar bears or something, and it would be a long stretch since I don't think the time system can be easily tuned to do that, but polar nights would be cool as well.

[Akiracee]

FWIW, I like seasons, and I'd be sad to see them go.

[loftar]

FWIW, I like seasons, and I'd be sad to see them go.

FWIW, that's true for me and Jorb too. The idea would not be to just remove them forever with no looking back. If/when we can think of good and proper ways to make them viable, be that geographical seasons or other changes to bring back time-based seasons, we certainly will.

[jordancoles]

Without going into details (though what I said about questing above probably counts as an example), I think that many of the "obvious" fixes that you speak of are more complex than you probably give them credit for.

I'm sure that some of the 'no-brainer' changes are actually fairly difficult to implement, but it's not like you guys are above long-haul projects that are spread out over long periods of time (rendering rewrite, OCO, seasons to begin with).

When seasons were added we were excited to see what would be added on a weekly basis to improve on them. It seemed like seasons would be the development direction for the coming years. They were instead added and dropped for the most part. Some improvements were made in terms of snow fall map gen and the length of winter but overall they haven't been tinkered with enough to justify their full removal imo.

Seasons can be a nice thing, but they need to be fleshed out and QoL'd

Also lol at all of the random forum accounts coming out of the woodworks to stroke the seasonal cock as if they didn't quit after the first seasonal rotation 2 worlds ago

[Asgaroth22]

FWIW, I like seasons, and I'd be sad to see them go.

FWIW, that's true for me and Jorb too. The idea would not be to just remove them forever with no looking back. If/when we can think of good and proper ways to make them viable, be that geographical seasons or other changes to bring back time-based seasons, we certainly will.

I could get behind that - but what would you do with season-exclusive content in the interim? Would it just be temporarily removed from the game? I'd assume trying to stich it together into one season would take about as much time as reworking seasons in their entiriety.

[Ardennesss]

Oh hey it only took you guys a few years to repeat back to us what we've been saying since seasons were added, nifty.

[SnuggleSnail]

Good patch!

+1 with Shubla about prayer for discovery

If you guys are suddenly willing to remove objectively bad content that nobody likes consider having a look at realms/oceans. Funny coincidence that Community Fair was a defining feature of what made this game good at some point, and was universally loved - but there has never been a similar community hub since oceans were added. Even world 11 where Tuz actively tried to make a CFv2 and metal spiraling was still in the game to encourage cast sales.