Buggys are too strong

[Matt__AsA__Hatter]

The buggies don't have any real downsides.  If they die, they respawn in a few minutes.  If they jump from space they get stunned not even knocked out.  They move so fast that even without sprinting you can evade most creatures in the yard.  If you are full sprinting and run into a wall it just stops without dismounting you.  Grass stops existing and you can just run in straight lines.  They don't need food or bandages to heal.  

Will adding some of these things make the buggies feel 'worse', possibly.  But they are basically horses, if you examine a staple of a horse riding game (RDR2) it has tons of downsides for using a horse that balance the use of one within the game and make it feel fun to use.

Balance is important.  If my buggy is on the verge of death, I should actually care if they die.  Not just go, "oh well I've got another 7 ready to go while we wait on your timer to reset".  If they do actually die, I should have to go and hatch another egg.  The eggs are accessible enough to where it's a minor inconvience due to the players inability to do something.  Risk and reward, to only have reward without the risk doesn't feel balanced properly. 

Instead of grass not existing, we should have to create paths we want to run through by removing it ourselves.  Maybe remove grass in some locations as if a path was created by other bugs.  It should feel like tunnels we have to navigate through and avoid objects.  Motivate us to build bridges and such to make the yard easier to navigate.  The player should be more responsible for allowing the buggy to be able to cross the yard quickly.  This would also make it so a player cannot simply hop onto a mount and evade anything anywhere.  (Grass will need to be fixed to not always respawn for this to function)

I doubt this will be a popular idea though as people tend to like overpowered and broken things.  Personally I'd rather the game feel balanced, than me feel like a superhero tho.  There's enough superhero games out there.

[Alynxkia]

I’m not against the buggies needing additional care, but I’m not a fan of the grass idea as a default. The medium to large insects wandering around in game have the grass move around them due to their movements. It would honestly be a bit weird that our buggy didn’t have the grass move.

If the developers wanna add in an option where grass doesn’t bend for buggies, I have no issues. I do like being able to choose additional challenges, especially when replaying and what you are proposing would definitely change the way the game feels which could make things interesting.

Perhaps our mounts should need food and water. I feel like they should be able to slurp regular nasty water without ill effects though not the stuff in the toxic ant hill. And there are food sources as you’re wandering whether it be the human food that spawns, mushrooms or them being able to eat bugs we kill. For bases we should be able to have feed/water troughs. There are ways to add an additional needs without it being a major disruption to gameplay. I suspect this might be a feature that players will want the ability to shut off. It’s definitely gonna feel too “micromanagement” to some.

On a different thread it was proposed that there be some consequences to constantly keeping our characters up for days on end. I certainly don’t wanna have to make my character sleep every night, but I’m not against having a debuff if I make them pull a three day bender. Continuing on that thought path, maybe our Buggies should need rest once in a while and that would give us a reason to swap them out.