I appreciate the detailed non trolling responses by the way.
No worries, you too. I'm not trying to prove games are shit or anything. We're here because we all love games, and maybe my expectation is that I should be able to love all games because I think of them primarily as entertainment and fun first and foremost.
I'm able to even see the game objectively. I actually go orienteering, hill walking and mountaineering etc. so I can see how a game can be built out of this. And I'll use Gran Turismo as an example. So in Gran Turismo you run the same circuits, trying to carve off a second each time, then a millisecond as you hone in on getting the optimal run. That's a fun game loop. Someone mentioned QWOP earlier and although very different, the core game loop is quite short in both examples. 3 laps or 5 laps or ten minute burst for fun. There's a reason why circuits are not 40 miles per lap.
So, there is (or appears to be) a rudimentary sort of orienteering in DS. I appreciate we haven't seen everything yet and I'll happily eat crow if it turns out to be different, but the thing that puts me off DS is:
- the micromanagement tasks
- the lack of data such as topographical (contoured) and bathymetric at the offset
- Balance mechanics are never fun
- the length of some of these runs
- the punishing nature of random encounters hindering you
It's a lot placed on gamble and betting. The fun for me in this would be short run routes and treating them like a circuit hot lap. Posted against other players. Who can get from A->B the fastest with this loadout. But I don't feel equipped enough with information to make this leap, so you have the position where a simple L2/R2 tap can literally cost you minutes.
Then you have the random encounters like in FFXV and enemies in the wildlands which are just tedious. Maybe they only spawn with specific value cargo I'm not sure but it's a hindrance to the core game loop to me (something in the way of the objective arbritarily). Again, a bad spawn and you're fucked. Maybe the very easy mode will mitigate some of this, but do you see where I'm coming from - when i want to hand in a side quest in an RPG the last thing I want is to run into 4/5 random encounters that prevent me from actually delivering the treasure. It's going to be tedious and annoying as fuck to plot a route then because you're not wearing super grip shoes you fall over making the last half hour of excellent planning moot.
For me the challenge in this game has to be environment and traversal balanced against speed and efficiency
OR objective and obstacles. It's trying to do too many things and not looking very appetising as a result. There's a fine line between enjoyable adaptation as a player and something which is just designed to fuck you over and present an obstacle that you might not be equipped for and have to retrace steps.
For example, you have a decent cargo, you've plotted out and due to lack of contour data you routed over a mesa to cut a few miles off. You get to the mesa and need your ladder, you prop it out, the cargo weight breaks it and then your option is to walk round then repair your ladder at the next base. Optionally you didn't take the ladder because it looked low enough to just clamber over. Traversal is one of the biggest pain points in massive games, so we see things like cars, horses and grappling hooks (in Syndicate) to make those distances more enjoyable to traverse than pressing up. Cars have almost immediate agency as you have to be switched on at all times, horses have that annoying 'press X to follow road' now but they at least make the distance smaller than foot, grappling hooks enable you to shorten distances vertically and horiontally. But all these things have one core aim - to eradicate the tedium of walking.
I can see an interesting idea and a core mechanic - if focused - that could engage me, but it looks as though the enjoyment of 'hot lapping' deliveries or optimal logistical planning is over ridden by barriers and tedious mechanics that don't heighten the fun factor albeit they do enhance the realism. I'm not just raggng on it for the sake, I just genuinely feel the hype is down to people imagining best case scenario, whereas I'm thinking more worst case I guess? The balance will be in the middle but I'm not even close enough to the middle to consider a purchase etc