Roland

The bright spot of all TFP A21 communication is how I would put it.

You've still got your shirt on. We're nowhere close to the climax of the scene. My God, Jim! I'm a moderator, not a miracle worker!!

If your intent was to exact revenge upon me by making me spray orange juice out my nose then well played!

Noted for whenever we decide to branch out into Banking.

There has been no A21 video footage yet for anything. You haven't missed anything yet.

Someone has to say it: Welcome to the forums! There have been a lot of changes to loot for A21. Should be interesting to discuss whether TFP went too far, didn't go far enough, ignored the actual problem, made the game great again, etc. Hope you will stick around until then!

If I wanted to play as Chuck Norris, the skill trees would invest in me, not the other way around... The answer has always been "Its done when it's done. That is the catch phrase that has always been the answer. It is what we mean and it is what we say. It's not a difficult phrase to understand. We will work on a build until we are happy about releasing it, end of story. There is no ulterior motive to be aggressive or snarky. You can take it that way but that is not the meaning. You keep trying to read additional meanings into the phrase but your efforts don't change the actual meaning. Go preach it on a YouTube channel because here it's simply the phrase that defines our release schedule philosophy.

I wonder if they could do it simply by having a percent chance that ingredients combined will result in a regular bowl of meat stew and a percent chance that ingredients combined would result in Special Meat Stew. So no new recipes but some new versions of the dishes. You could even have Awful [Dish], Regular [Dish], and Special [Dish] for all the current dishes that can be cooked and the Master Chef perk could change the percent chance for each. Unperked maybe 45% 50% 5% and then with each rank shrink the the Awful dish chance and increase the regular and special dish chance. Just spitballing... not sure if a crafting recipe can even be made to lead to three different possible outcomes.

I imagine we will get lots of feedback and ideas for perks once people play with it. Your ideas sound good to me.

lol...this punctuates exactly how hard it is to wrap your head around these changes. Miner 69er no longer governs the quality of tools you make-- none of the perks do. The magazine for tool crafting does that. Even after playing, I also would often forget that this perk or that perk no longer had anything to do with crafting. This change will very much affect how you spend points and what you spend them on. It will be interesting to see what everyone gravitates to and the relative importance of certain perks has changed a lot.

That is fixed for spears in A21...

Dear Yukkie, Master Chef no longer opens up recipes. Now there is a recipe and cooking magazine that as you find issues of it out in the world you learn more and more dishes that you can prepare. Master Chef still exists but it mainly makes cooking faster and use less ingredients (You don't burn your food so much). So the good news is that anyone can learn to cook dishes now without having to perk up in the Strength tree or spending any points at all. The could-be-good-could-be-bad news is that you're going to have to loot and quest to find better and better recipes so hopefully you actually enjoy playing the full game and not just one aspect of it that requires you to stay in and around your base wishing that everything would just get delivered to you....er....like Christmas. Happy Holidays to you too!

Of course there is a recipe magazine to help us cook better. In the game too. clean water is now required. No more easy yucca juice.

I wasn't intending to be unfair. It really did seem like you thought dysentery was part of the new water changes. If you say you know it already exists then I believe you. That is a problem in my opinion. It represents a very mild and basic post-apocalyptic setting if you are able to NEVER eat or drink anything questionable at the start of the game when you are weak and vulnerable and supposedly scraping by to survive. I don't think bad events should be completely avoidable. There should be random setbacks that you come back from and overcome and react to. Where is there any kind of adaptive gameplay and hard choices and risk if every single possible negative outcome is completely deterministic and not only deterministic but by your standard measured and marked out on a bar so that you can know exactly how far to push it and then stop so that you never experience any setback or weakness other than when you make an overt mistake. Random chance of good or bad events makes a world feel more alive and independently living outside of the player's control. Eliminating random events and making everything something that can be gamed and controlled makes the world feel fake and contrived. I agree and give you the point on this. There is a degree of feeling that something is going to make you sick if you eat or drink it. That being said, I think that being able to track such things with another bar on the HUD is bad gameplay and goes too far beyond having a sense that something might make you sick and more into the realm of having nanites in your blood stream communicating with a chip implanted in your brain giving you biometric feedback that someone without such tech wouldn't really know. What choice? You stop after 4 drinks. Period. There is no choice there. With a random chance the chance that you will get sick builds with every drink. You might get sick with the first one but maybe not until you drink five but maybe that sixth will still be okay so now its time to choose whether to risk it or not. In addition, if you know to stop at 4 and thus always avoid ever getting sick, you never have the follow-up choices that are involved with getting the cure and dealing with the hindrance the sickness imposes. You block out a swath of choices by knowing exactly to stop at 4 drinks. Luck can be the catalyst for a lot of interesting choices and victories that never emerge if there is no luck involved. The fun factor is going to vary from person to person so I can't address that. You know what is fun for you. Its interesting that you don't like the gameplay but you are for goldenrod tea only curing another meter by 10%. The current gameplay is that goldenrod tea completely cures you of the ailment and vitamins can make you immune so that if you eat a vitamin before drinking you have 0% chance of getting sick in the first place. But that is where the progression comes in. At first you have no vitamins or tea so you have to be lucky in order to avoid dysentery. But then your supply of vitamins starts to grow, you have a bunch of tea, and then you have dew collectors and soon the struggle for clean water is a memory. But if we remove the elements of luck and make it completely 100% avoidable then there will never be a memory of having had that struggle the progression is non-existent. But I know it is a gaming preference. Nobody is right or wrong it is just how each person has fun. I wish the chance to vomit was back. Some of my most memorable games were when I vomited out all my food on Day 1 and had to spend the first couple of days trying to get my hunger under control. It was tough but felt good when I overcame it. Anyway....you'll get a chance to see whether or not the chance for dysentery is too upsetting for your gameplay style or not. Maybe it will still be largely negligible being that you are an experienced player and can get food and water pretty easily over new players. It may not even be an issue for you.

The answer is "Its done when its done" If it misses or makes the Steam Sale then so be it. This very issue is exactly why independent studios exist. They don't want their release schedules to be dictated by marketing concerns. They want to release or hold until they are ready. If they can get a release out in time for a big sale event then that's great but there are no marketing execs forcing the programmers to release whatever they have ready or not to meet a marketing deadline. And they certainly don't care to have you and others from the community slipping into that role either.

I don't know what 1 divided by 0 is and I don't know when the dev stream is. Truth. If anything they are racing to try and get done before the Steam Winter Sale season rather than sitting around on their butts twiddling their thumbs until that time.

What is this witchcraft you speak of?!?!

No and it is not planned as far as I know. The kickstarter goal was to allow players to play as a zombie in a PvP mode. That is still planned, I believe. That isn't to say that they might not still do something like that but just that it isn't currently on the list.

Want to learn something new about A21? Get off your ass and figure it out!

Sufficiently verbose is not something I often achieve—usually overshooting the mark by…a lot. You were probably being sarcastic about the “sufficiently”…haha

I didn't mean that a player can't focus their gear, abilities, and playstyle on stealth. Obviously you can do that so in that sense there is a stealth build. What I meant to convey is that this is not a stealth game nor a game that is designed to be conquered by stealth alone. Spending points and dukes in order to acquire the maximum advantages for stealth is never going to guarantee 100% success in stealth in this game because the developers are not designing the game to be a stealth game. There will always be times when a shotgun is going to be handy to have at hand (not that you must pull it out, mind you). Someone who plays this game with a traditional "stealth build" in their mind is going to suffer disappointment as they play and may even think the points and money they spent on stealth was wasted because they wanted to be able to approach every situation from stealth and they don't care that they can re-stealth and then continue. A "stealth build" carries with it an expectation that stealth is going to work every time because that's what I paid for. I know this attitude to be real because we've seen it come up time after time after time. Someone who plays this game with the understanding that stealth is one part of the agility build (or one part of a hybrid build between 2 or more attributes) is going to avoid disappointment because they aren't trying to play the whole game as a stealth character. They use the appropriate tool for the appropriate situation. They are willing to use stealth when it works (and it often works even without a single point spent on perks or a single duke spent on gear) and to either re-stealth or switch to a different tactic when it doesn't. They'll spend points on stealth related perks because it enhances the stealth abilities they already possess from Day 1 and make their character more effective during those times that stealth works. I know this attitude to be real because...its me. I agree with you that many are coming here with preconceived notions about how a game should work with a stealth component to it and there is nothing to be done about preconceived notions. That all happened before they ever showed up. Obviously there has been some friction at the point where the development team's vision for stealth has intersected the expectations of many people for how they think stealth should work from all the threads on this subject. They are aware of the friction and will either adjust or remain firm in their own vision. I just want to make it clear that this is not a stealth game with a traditional "stealth build" that will allow a fully kitted out player to approach every situation with stealth and be 100% successful. Maybe that is a bad choice by the designers. Regardless, as players we can adopt an understanding of how stealth works in this game and adjust our expectations to find relief from disappointment until/if the devs adjust their vision to match what we want. I do think there are some improvements that can be made still and I wanted to make it clear to the OP that our AI programmer and our level designers are not above going through and making adjustments-- especially since the code as of A20 is less about flagging attack volumes that have to be changed per POI and are more about AI and pathing that can be changed for all zombies globally. If there are sleeper placement issues or volume spawning activation issues, those do need to be tackled on a per POI basis but the level design team has yet to tell anyone that they are unwilling to look at a POI and make necessary adjustments.

I think these are some false assumptions: 1) The POIs haven’t been reworked for stealth 2) People don’t play stealth very much 3) The game has a “stealth build” 4) You have to go for your shotgun if zombies wake up in a room. I would add “trigger rooms” to this list but I’m not exactly sure what you are defining as a trigger room. All of the POIs were reworked for A20 so that the rules for how and why sleepers in volumes wake up and detect the player were changed. People tend to call any room a “trigger room” in which zombies woke up and detected them because they assume they didn’t make any mistakes so the room MUST have been coded with an automatic wake-up and ambush trigger. As to your request, there is a change to perks for A21 that will reduce costs for one or two aspects of weapon and tool use— so maybe these changes will free up points to use for stealth that you may not have had in the past— but there are no plans to reduce the exact costs you mentioned or make specific gear like night vision goggles or armor attachments cheaper or easier to find. If it is determined that some balance changes to POIs needs to be done for stealth gameplay, I know the level design team will do it. If faatal isn’t happy with the sleeper code of waking up, detecting players, pathing to them, etc. he will absolutely look over it again before final release.

Im not sure what you mean. Are you talking about walking under a tree or going inside a POI where the windows are all barricaded and there are not any light sources? If the former. I haven’t seen that, myself, and if the latter, it’s intended for you to either use a head lamp, a flashlight, or break open the windows to let light in, or stumble around in the dark. Perhaps your brightness setting is too low for your preferences? I usually turn mine down to 15% so that dark areas and nighttime are actually dark. You say that shade is like nighttime but there have been a lot of posts that nighttime, itself, is too bright at default brightness levels for a lot of people and that we can see too far and too well in the dark. What’s your brightness level set at and what exactly are you meaning by walking into shaded areas? What shadow setting are you using?

We sure couldn’t the last time this topic came up nor the time before that nor the time before that…