I killed a wolf and all I got was this stupid broken claw

I was hunting deer in Palia (they are called something else, but they are deer) and slowly collecting the tufts of fur, occasional antler and stuff from each one I killed, and I was thinking how stupid this was. Clear back to EverQuest, or even back before, to Ultima Online, you would kill a critter, and you’d only get the occasional paw, maybe every third one would have some fur, the really rare one might have a liver you could store in your bank for a few years until you really needed it…

Everyone accepts it now that no matter how carefully you squeeze the life out of a cute woodland creature, you won’t be able to use more than a small fraction of the kill. Why is that?

It all comes down to the need to get experience. In real life, if you killed one deer a year (usually all you can kill, given hunting license restrictions), congratulations, you’re a bona fide hunter. In EverQuest, if you killed one deer a year, you weren’t getting those leather mittens made anytime soon.

So what if… when you killed a deer, you had to figure out how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home? Killing a deer would just be the start. You’d find a way to get it home – maybe with a wagon, maybe you have some help – but once home, you could get a lot of hide from it, all the bones, all the meat. You’d be rewarded for the effort. Of course, maybe wolves and bears would be following your scent. Maybe someone would try to take it from you. But the reward would make the risk worth it.

I was asked what would happen in dungeons, where you could loot maybe one thing and then be forced to leave. Well heck, that’s the opening scene to The Raiders of the Lost Ark. And why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure? A lone adventurer couldn’t even clear out my basement, and there aren’t many monsters there. I think.

Maybe in a game like EverQuest, all anyone really wants to do is kill stuff. That’s the game loop. But Palia? It just doesn’t make sense in a game that tries to deemphasize wholesale slaughter. I’m feeling really bad for all the deer I kill. They panic and flee, but I just walk forward, slowly, like a psycho killer, calmly taking them down with arrow after arrow, looting their scrap of fur, a small piece of meat, or the occasional antler.

Kills should be important. And I’m really surprised that in Palia, they didn’t try to do something more.