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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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exp world, have a constant screamer horde, 3-4 times a day, only 2 torch and a forge running.

 

start a new world, 2nd day~evening trying to clear a POI, 3 screamer came knocking. Either the heatmap is bug or the screamer threshold is.

 

and melee feel kinda off, there a lot more miss/glancing. Had a spear went through a zed shoulder/torso, miss a spear point blank torso stab. I didn't miss like this in the earlier experimental (didn't get to play b155 for long).

 

edit: omg I can hear another screamer and it not even 3rd day morning yet.

 

I'm starting to think that areas can become "Heat Contaminated". :)

 

For 4 days in a row I found a screamer at an area were I took a lot of candles and torches. I killed her three times and the fourth I just drove by.

 

Get rid of your torches for now and move your forge about 100 meters away. It should work.

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Just a request if possible.

 

Can we have an option for random animations for zombies. ?

 

Also be grand to have say a new zombie which is a clown. Could have been a street performer or be located at the poopy pants kids nursery haha.

 

Thanks.

 

that would be nice

 

but i think when zombies walk the walk differently (not like spider zombies im talking about just walking) but some zombies like fat/heavy zombie's stay the same like the demolisher and cop!

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bunkersmall: do not break open to the step, but go in the backyard, and wrench the AC unit on the ground.

add ladders, then break open the small wood panel to drop inside.

 

That leaves the 1k hp block and the door intact on the other entrance. (beef up the hatch on your entrance. not fun wen zeds break the fence and a cheap hatch)

 

The large bunker it a loot fest yes. but you have 2 vault doors to bash through (nope, cannot pick them).

 

There's a spot in pregen01 where there are 2 of each fairly close to each other.

 

They are intact bunkers. There shouldn't be any sleepers in them.

 

Nice starting places, and before diggers, great to build on. Right now though, their large area makes it kinda tough long term.

 

Now, if one was at bedrock, and did have sleepers, then yeah, that would be nice.

 

Zeds DO climb ladders. Up and down. They also go up trellises. Particularly on the one trailer.

Had my platform on a big rock behind one, for day 7 BM. After the first wave, they all came up the trellis on the other side

of the trailer (which had a walkway and was supposed to be my escape route).

 

They'd hop up onto the roof of the trailer (thus a few getting shot there), then run across towards the walkway.

One block was below the roof, then up one block to the walk. (due to how the trailer lip is)

 

Walkway 1 block wide. They'd drop to the first block, jump up, then run in a nice single file.

Me and the M60 took care of them. (got pretty good at using it single shot)

 

Didn't plan for it, had no clue how they ALL got up to the roof. After the horde was done, checked and "Oh, that's how".

 

Gonna beef that place up just to see how day 14 goes.

 

(dogs still ran into the spikes and I'd pot shot them as I could)

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Just died on day 25 permadeath insane/always nightmare, got caught out on a random blood moon couldn't get into battle area quick enough. What a ride. A18 has come a long way:

 

* Early game survival feels so good, no stack of food and medical supplies, no huge farm.

 

* Whoever thought of random blood moon is a genius. 7 days bit too long for me, I find Frequency every day but range of 4 is a nice sweet spot, blood moon is always a constant threat now, can easily get caught out during quests/mining.

 

* Loot and general balance feels good now. Character didn't feel strong till day20. Transition into mid game questing hard earning money and upgrading my base feels good, I'm not constantly wanting to kill for xp.

 

* I got a random screamer on day 1 and 3, I hope this isn't a bug. Totally unexpected when I was looting poi, I totally stopped and gtfo. Please don't remove random screamer spawns!

 

* Never gotten dysentery since a18exp and food poisoning is easy to deal with, no idea what ppl are complaining about.

 

* Slowly coming round to the attribute trees, not 100% on board I prefer the old open skills, we were able to mix and match freely, but I'm having fun.

 

* Real glad trader sells vehicles now.

 

* Stun baton is awesome.

 

* Outer Worlds is walking by and I don't even care. Bring on A19.

 

 

Minor points:

 

- The red dots on compass during quests kinda give the game away, hope we can have option to disable somehow.

 

- Iron hatch is really hard to tell which way it opens.

 

** (puts on mining helmet and heavy armor, runs behind row of blade traps)

 

So when's lbd making a come back?

 

:D

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I really wish rank 5 of the penetrator perk unlocked crafting of 7.62 AP ammo. The whole perception build centers around using the sniper rifle in conjunction with the penetrator perk to pierce multiple zombies. But, that is all dependent on RNG and finding the book to unlock AP ammo crafting. And who the hell knows when I'll find that. I'm on day 20 with 5/5 lucky looter and loot bonus goggles and no luck so far.

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Its on the list to be improved.

 

Regarding this POI - it has the heavy duty vault doors. These cannot be unlocked with a lock pick. Will max skill in lock picking allow these to be picked (descriptions suggest not) or is it the intention they be breached with timed charges?

 

(Yes you can bang on them with a pick ax for an hour, but meh.)

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Regarding this POI - it has the heavy duty vault doors. These cannot be unlocked with a lock pick. Will max skill in lock picking allow these to be picked (descriptions suggest not) or is it the intention they be breached with timed charges?

 

(Yes you can bang on them with a pick ax for an hour, but meh.)

 

If there's a locked vault door within a POI, then TFP's have got my upvote. Timed charges seem to be more of a PVP thing or if you're always out of lock picks (for safes), since all the doors I've come across have either been unlocked, or locked, but with the intended path going around them.

 

Edit: Minus the old-style missile silo base, or the bunker POI (ie the oldest design; the one with the shed on top with the iron fence).

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Yes you can only get a tier 6 by looting, so why would you bother trying to spec into a perk to build better stuff?

 

In all games people fall over each others feet to get damage or special effect boni on their weapon (not only shooter but also RPGs, strategy games...). But here you look at weapons you normally shouldn't even see before end game and ask "why bother?". Play the game with your main weapons at perk level 1 and tell me if you still have ammo left in the middle of the fourth horde night and you didn't die twice as often.

 

The problem is I could go 50hrs into a game before I see one, and it might not even be something I use. It's ultimately down to rng and time, which is why I feel its mostly fine as is. However i'm not against giving an ever so slight buff to crafted items, or just further improving the loot drops like Madmole has suggested I believe.

 

Another mod slot isn't an ever so slight buff. At the moment quality6 is labeled temporarily "legendary" because of this one additional mod slot. All the other attributes of a q6 weapon will often be equal or worse than the q5 you have by then because you might find and build a lot more q5.

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I think the design is fine, balance could be off yet on some drops. Having steel by day 21? What will you do from day 21 to day 100? IMO you shouldn't even sniff t3 until level 40+ and around level 60 start getting a decent amount of it but it should be a mix of brown to green mostly, once level 80 maybe have a few purples and blues and one straggler green. I'm level 35 with no steel armor and one brown steel shovel. Feels fine to me.

 

Balance is definitely feeling a lot better. Again we play on a MP server, not SP and play on VERY long days. So I was able to buy a blue AK off the trader as well as a green baseball bat on day 6. Took every penny I had and running non stop trader missions.

 

I can make green tools myself, but have no other points in combat as I focused on tools and resource gathering with a little health regen. Don't have the supplies to make the tools yet as we are constantly struggling to keep up with the basics.

 

One thing that I thought might be a nice future option for balance is a trader price multiplier setting. So that if you want to keep the trader but make the prices more extreme to make it harder to use it to gear up have a setting that can apply up to a 10x multiplier to trader and vending machine prices.

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I like the balance just fine. I see zero fun in crafting everything, we had it for 17 alphas. Crafting lets you build a nice weapon early game, but shouldn't replace looting. Finding gun parts is immersion breaking, finding a rusted out brown shotgun isn't.

 

Agree. I did very little looting in A17...90% crafting & resource gathering. In A18 I loot 80% of the time and craft/gather 20% of the time. Having a reason to hit POIs is a game changer in A18

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hi. In the notes for latest exp it says "added settings for AI Block Damage and Loot Abundance of 33 and 67 percent". Can somebody confirm does this mean the only setting we can use without affecting balance are 33, 67, and 100?.

 

I always lower my loot abundance to 60 - 80 but now im being told this breaks the loot table. Is this true?

 

These are just the values you can select in the GUI. I assume you play with dedicated server and set your own values, you can still do that.

 

By the way, those settings always affect balance, automatically and unavoidable.

 

 

(BTW, I've get to see any minibike parts in loot. I have seen parts from all the other vehicles.)

 

Just found minibike handle bars yesterday (on day ~32) and could build the minibike because I bought the other part long ago from the trader. Had been using the bicycle up till now. For vehicles my playthrough seemed like the drop rate was handcrafted to be optimal :cocksure:

 

Shows how difficult it is to judge a game with lots of RNG on one or two playthroughs.

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I'm glad to see people coming around to a lot of the designs we did.

 

Yeah, example: I wasn't very convinced about zombies not dropping loot every single time.

 

Now I love it, it's pretty cool being able to snipe zombies from 150m and knowing that if there is no yellow bag there is no loot. Before, it was really hard to NOT loot every zombie, it always felt like you had a chance to find some great loot on one of the 10 zeds you just killed.

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Yeah, example: I wasn't very convinced about zombies not dropping loot every single time.

 

Now I love it, it's pretty cool being able to snipe zombies from 150m and knowing that if there is no yellow bag there is no loot. Before, it was really hard to NOT loot every zombie, it always felt like you had a chance to find some great loot on one of the 10 zeds you just killed.

 

yeah it was strange when i played console and i come on here and they dont drop loot until i saw what the yellow bags dropped witch made me go "im fine with this!"

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yeah it was strange when i played console and i come on here and they dont drop loot until i saw what the yellow bags dropped witch made me go "im fine with this!"

 

It's just funny on low loot settins to get those yellow bags and have them contain no loot. Almost seems like they should be coded to always have at minimum 1 piece of loot

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