Has Horde night lost its magic?

[Slingblade2040]

Been playing with more mods since Vanilla has gotten stale. The bigger roaming horde mod has easily become my fave along with turning off horde night. I've also tried the random horde night which actually makes it fun but it still feels like something is missing. I have also in a previous alpha tried with a lower horde night count like at 4 with the random horde night and while it was fun it just felt like what the larger roaming horde mod is now.

 

So has the horde night lost its touch? What can be done to improve it and make it special again? Should the pimps replace horde night with just massive roaming hordes we randomly get that vary in what type of zombies appear? Maybe they can just make what appears on horde nights random and just ditch the whole gamestage thing? Yes I am talking about possibly getting radiated zombies or a demo on day 7 horde night.

[Rotor]

No.

 

Edit:. Sorry as a new guy is just fine.  Plus I am one of those that will be removing those special "zombies" was soon as I get more familiar with game :).

Edited February 21, 2022 by Rotor (see edit history)

[ElDudorino]

I think the hordes should get harder, quicker. You can just make a box out of cobblestone and fight through the doorway with occasional repairs to the walls and have no trouble through the first few horde nights even if you crank up the horde size. Every game I start, I stress out trying to find a weapon before the first blood moon and make sure I have plenty of medicine, materials, buffs, an escape plan, and then the zombies come and they aren't that big a deal.

 

Even if zombies had much higher block damage on horde night (I think that's even a setting) that would have no effect on a lot of players since there are so many options to passively keep zombies from your walls anyway.

 

Should there be demo zombies on day 7? Maybe not. But feral cops and irradiated Arlene? ... I don't know, maybe it's not crazy.

 

I don't know if there's a way to make the blood moon still scary for a prepared player, honestly, but I agree that they could do more.

[RipClaw]

It depends on what you mean by "magic". There are a bunch of zombies trying to kill you, you have to fight them off and try not to die. End of story.

 

This has not changed. New zombies have been added to the game, some zombies have been changed and some zombies have been removed. Also the pathing has been changed a lot. But that is all.

 

If I think back to my first horde then this was of course much more difficult than today because I knew nothing at that time. For a new player the horde is always much more difficult than for an experienced player.

 

If someone wants to have stronger hordes then he can play mods. There are more than enough of them and in most mods the first horde is already harder than the horde in Vanilla could be.

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[ElCabong]

I got tired of hord night and turned it off. Been playing since A7.

Edited February 21, 2022 by ElCabong (see edit history)

[Ornias]

22 minutes ago, ElCabong said:

I got tired of hord night and turned it off. Been playing since A7.

 

2300 hours and I finally turned it off as well. It was more interesting when they attacked random spots on the wall. It got to the point of figuring out the easiest cheese method. Now I just play with max zombies and some mods. 

[Ramethzer0]

9 hours ago, Slingblade2040 said:

Been playing with more mods since Vanilla has gotten stale. The bigger roaming horde mod has easily become my fave along with turning off horde night. I've also tried the random horde night which actually makes it fun but it still feels like something is missing. I have also in a previous alpha tried with a lower horde night count like at 4 with the random horde night and while it was fun it just felt like what the larger roaming horde mod is now.

 

So has the horde night lost its touch? What can be done to improve it and make it special again? Should the pimps replace horde night with just massive roaming hordes we randomly get that vary in what type of zombies appear? Maybe they can just make what appears on horde nights random and just ditch the whole gamestage thing? Yes I am talking about possibly getting radiated zombies or a demo on day 7 horde night.

Don't touch it.  As a standing vanilla game its just fine.  You want more excitement, there are mods and other base designs to explore.

If you enjoy lower count hordes and complain of boredom, that's on you.   And sending demos on day 7 after new players as part of the regular game?

If you do that, then you're gunna ruin the experience of brand new players who have not played as long as you have.

[Darklegend222]

Horde night magic has been lost since A17. It feels a lot less tower defense, and more tower pathing issues. You either get a design that kills for you, or a design where you do the killing.

 

Either way, it's only worthwhile to have for the exp. In A16.4 or A15, the crafting was so versatile for horde night. Now? You just have to build the exact same designs that are proven to work or risk the AI not doing what you need. I feel no threat if I don't prepare in time as there's so much easy ways to dispatch of the hordes.

 

Sure back in A15 or 16 you could easily dispatch of hordes with spikes, but it made sense since it didn't have a basic crafting system and things were ACTUALLY difficult to come across. Now it's just a trader grind and letting the trader give you the ammo you need, or going mining for pipe bombs. Other than that, it's easier than ever and it's no longer a threat.

 

What you don't want is hordes that ALWAYS step on you, but you also don't want hordes that take forever to finish (looking at you A17.4). So this is the best we can get from a simple comparison scale. I'm gonna be looking into mods such as yourself for larger wandering hordes and the disabling of horde nights.

 

I want there to be threats in the wild, not just during sky scrapers or blood moons.

[hazymkii]

7 hours ago, Ramethzer0 said:

...sending demos on day 7 after new players as part of the regular game?

If you do that, then you're gunna ruin the experience of brand new players who have not played as long as you have.

Absolutely couldn't agree more. Learning this game from the ground up as a new player only to have my base destroyed would only serve to punish new players.

 

For a challange I suggest wandering hordes and dangerous cities with feral sense turned on.

[ElDudorino]

I've been thinking about it and here's what I think would be more interesting: When the blood moon rises, you get swarmed by zombies. But not 8 sprinting zombies who charge straight towards the same point; I'm talking about getting surrounded by 32 shamblers slowly closing in to seal your doom, attacking you and more importantly your base from all directions. You'd need to patrol every part of your base keeping the slow but massive horde held back. This is the more traditional zombie experience but it works for a reason.

 

The blood moon can also for inexplicable reasons cause your vehicles not to start, so although fleeing is an option you'll have to do it on foot or bicycle and weave through the constantly encroaching horde.

 

But also, have harder zombies after the first week. It takes WAY too long for blood moons to become dangerous in the current system.

[RipClaw]

59 minutes ago, ElDudorino said:

The blood moon can also for inexplicable reasons cause your vehicles not to start, so although fleeing is an option you'll have to do it on foot or bicycle and weave through the constantly encroaching horde.

 

Since A19 we have supersonic giant vultures that spawn when sitting on or in a vehicle.

 

 

By the way, fighting the horde on foot is not even difficult. All you need is coffee, a point in Cardio and preferably another point in Run and Gun. It's also not a bad idea to have Megacrush on your belt in case you're in a pinch.

 

1 hour ago, ElDudorino said:

 

But also, have harder zombies after the first week. It takes WAY too long for blood moons to become dangerous in the current system.

 

Set the XP multiplier to 300%. The gamestage will then increase about twice as fast and a higher gamestage means more dangerous hordes. You can also shorten the length of the day from 60 minutes to 50 minutes. That's a whole hour less per week to prepare.

 

You can also modify the gamestages.xml and the entitygroups.xml files. Then you have demolisher in the first horde if you want or radioactive cops or whatever.

There are so many ways you can make the game harder for yourself.

 

 

[knektoid]

20 hours ago, ElCabong said:

I got tired of hord night and turned it off. Been playing since A7.

Pretty much the same for me. I play on a wasteland biome only map with horde night turned off, warrior difficulty and enforcing permadeath. Right now, this is much more fun than being forced into getting ready for horde night every 7 days.  But I have been playing for a long time. I used to love the horde night challenge. Now it is just tedious. I am sure I will turn it back on in another play through later but not now. 

[Slingblade2040]

On 2/21/2022 at 3:04 PM, RipClaw said:

It depends on what you mean by "magic". There are a bunch of zombies trying to kill you, you have to fight them off and try not to die. End of story.

 

This has not changed. New zombies have been added to the game, some zombies have been changed and some zombies have been removed. Also the pathing has been changed a lot. But that is all.

 

If I think back to my first horde then this was of course much more difficult than today because I knew nothing at that time. For a new player the horde is always much more difficult than for an experienced player.

 

If someone wants to have stronger hordes then he can play mods. There are more than enough of them and in most mods the first horde is already harder than the horde in Vanilla could be.

 

Except some players don't want to add mods or know how to go into files and change them.  Even the difficulty settings are ridiculously basic and barely allow for any real customization.  Insane difficulty turns zombies into bullets sponges while nerfing player damage. 

 

This whole new player excuse is beyond ridiculous. Most new players don't bother reading the journal, changing the settings past what's default or even playing past a certain amount of hours because they get bored. This game is not so difficult or has such a high learning curve that things need to be dumbed down to a 5th grade level. It's almost the same excuse given as to why we don't have more advanced options because they don't want to overwhelm these new players when they can simply not screw around with those settings.

 

Hard to believe but some new players might want a challenge from horde night or atleast for it to be something better than what it currently is.

[Jason Tamosiunis]

i think random types of hordes would keep it semi interesting for awhile never know what your gonna get

[Musicianized]

Go into wasteland city at dark, crawl up a water tower  and start shooting zombies and by 00:00 you'll have a harder horde than a blood moon. Every night. 

 

 

Edited February 23, 2022 by Musicianized (see edit history)

[ElDudorino]

13 minutes ago, Musicianized said:

Go into wasteland city at dark, crawl up a water tower  and start shooting zombies and by 00:00 you'll have a harder horde than a blood moon. Every night. 

 

 

Yeah, very true. There are 'normal' situations that are way crazier than the blood moon. I learned the hard (fun) way about this while overnighting in a Wasteland T5 and from dusk til dawn I was fighting a nonstop horde of intense zombies including feral wights. Then the actual blood moon hit a few days later and the worst zombie was a standard cop, not feral or anything. I could be wrong but I think the blood moon happening in the wasteland actually makes the wasteland *easier* than if it were a normal night where you made too much noise.

[Viktoriusiii]

Ever since zombies became predictable to satisfy the "tower defense" aspect, it became stale.

It was fun the first few hordes just shooting like a madman.
But if I dont intentionally @%$# up a design or neglect building my hordebase, it is just a chore. A chore that gives great XP... but a chore nonetheless.

You can not have predictable behaviour in a horrorgame. Maybe a hand full of games have pulled it off... but as soon as you realize that their movement is predictable and you can work around it... it loses the fearfactor.


Yes A16 A.I wasn't great. No complex tunnels and running on the spot.
But at least you never knew what they would do.
You didnt build a hordebase (well you could but it wasnt necessary) because they would attack from all sides anyways.
So every night was exciting. And no that is not just me "knowing the game now" I have played more alphas before the change than after (8 before, 3 since)


But I think it fills the thrill for newer players, which is after all the only demographic that matters. ;)

[ElDudorino]

5 minutes ago, Viktoriusiii said:

But I think it fills the thrill for newer players, which is after all the only demographic that matters.

Might need a poll to confirm that. I am a new player (I was aware of the game but never played before a20) and honestly the blood moon was a big disappointment for me.

 

My first blood moon I jumped up on top of the main building at the drive-in, lined the top with spikes, built a little tower in the middle, and clutched my pistol terrified while waiting. The thunder and everything freaked me out, and then the tense music kicked in. And then 3 in-game hours later I wondered why there were no zombies. Turns out they were just beating on the walls at the bottom and achieving nothing. So that was anti-climactic.

 

My second blood moon was in a cobblestone box with spikes all around it. I put a cobblestone block in front of the door and stood there blasting anybody who got close. Then I 'beat' the horde and it got quiet, so I logged out for the night. Logged back in and it turns out that restarts the horde so I fought them all again. In the morning, the only damage of note was to my spikes.

 

I still get tense every 7th day and worry about my fortifications because I'm a natural worrier and I take the zombie apocalypse too seriously but realistically what happens is I get exponentially stronger each week and the enemies barely get any upgrades. So blood moons go from too easy to trivial after the first week.

 

Zombies following a predictable path just means they're a super easy threat to neutralize, even as you crank them up. I play on Survivalist with 20-count blood moons, all other settings default, which is a pretty big settings bump over Adventurer/8-count but it doesn't make blood moons any more threatening. Maybe on day 210 they will be but I'll have started a new game by then because there's not much to do in-game by that point.

[Sjustus548]

I think it's one of those gaming aspects that is really cool and exciting when you first experience it but starts to become pretty tedious and annoying the longer you play.  I'm up to well over 1000 hours now and have been playing since one of the early alpha builds so they have lost all the appeal.  I still have them on but mostly because I hope to have that enjoyment of them again.  I've changed them to every 10 days now instead though so it's probably not long til I just turn them off. 

I still remember my first horde night.  My wife and I were in a wooden shack and were frantically repairing the walls so the zombies wouldn't get in and kill us.  We were just praying that our wood wouldn't run out before the horde night ended.  Now we are running around outside on the ground with the zombies fighting them.  We've stopped building horde bases because they feel pointless now.  All the traps break so fast now that they barely make it thru the first hour so we don't see a point in using them.  Plus with the zombies high IQ these days as soon as they make a path thru all the zombies just pour thru that one stop, rendering the rest of the traps obsolete.  The turrets can be nice but they specifically target the Demolishers No-No Button so it just causes them to explode very quickly.  I would rather just take my Auto Shotty or my M60 and fight the zombies on foot.  But all horde nights really do it distract me from things I would rather be doing, like looting or crafting.  

[RipClaw]

3 hours ago, ElDudorino said:

My second blood moon was in a cobblestone box with spikes all around it. I put a cobblestone block in front of the door and stood there blasting anybody who got close.

So you had a firearm.

 

That's one of the differences from my first horde back in Alpha 15. I only had a bow with stone arrows. Normally, you didn't have any firearms in the first horde until Alpha 17. If you were lucky, you found a toilet pistol, but without the schematics, you couldn't even repair it. So you didn't use it unless you had to.

 

By the way, the zombies were not harder back then. On the contrary. There was only one feral, which is now called Wight, and otherwise there were only the basic zombies. The most dangerous zombie was the cop.

 

[Roland]

Horde night does not need to be removed or changed into something else. If you don't enjoy it any longer or just want to take a break for awhile, simply disable it in your options or change it so it only happens once every 20 days. There are many new players who are not burnt out on it and even some veterans who still enjoy it. 

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

Ever since zombies became predictable to satisfy the "tower defense" aspect, it became stale.

It was fun the first few hordes just shooting like a madman.
But if I dont intentionally @%$# up a design or neglect building my hordebase, it is just a chore. A chore that gives great XP... but a chore nonetheless.

You can not have predictable behaviour in a horrorgame. Maybe a hand full of games have pulled it off... but as soon as you realize that their movement is predictable and you can work around it... it loses the fearfactor.


Yes A16 A.I wasn't great. No complex tunnels and running on the spot.
But at least you never knew what they would do.
You didnt build a hordebase (well you could but it wasnt necessary) because they would attack from all sides anyways.
So every night was exciting. And no that is not just me "knowing the game now" I have played more alphas before the change than after (8 before, 3 since)

 

It didn't feel that way for us. We built a block to stand in and the zombies came from all sides that looked all alike. "Oh look, they come from the north, shoot northwards. Oh look, now they come from the east, shoot eastwards" 😉. We never knew where they were coming from and it didn't matter.

 

 

4 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

 

 

But I think it fills the thrill for newer players, which is after all the only demographic that matters.

 

2 hours ago, Sjustus548 said:

I think it's one of those gaming aspects that is really cool and exciting when you first experience it but starts to become pretty tedious and annoying the longer you play.  I'm up to well over 1000 hours now and have been playing since one of the early alpha builds so they have lost all the appeal.  I still have them on but mostly because I hope to have that enjoyment of them again.  I've changed them to every 10 days now instead though so it's probably not long til I just turn them off. 

I still remember my first horde night.  My wife and I were in a wooden shack and were frantically repairing the walls so the zombies wouldn't get in and kill us.  We were just praying that our wood wouldn't run out before the horde night ended.  Now we are running around outside on the ground with the zombies fighting them.  We've stopped building horde bases because they feel pointless now.  All the traps break so fast now that they barely make it thru the first hour so we don't see a point in using them.  Plus with the zombies high IQ these days as soon as they make a path thru all the zombies just pour thru that one stop, rendering the rest of the traps obsolete.  The turrets can be nice but they specifically target the Demolishers No-No Button so it just causes them to explode very quickly.  I would rather just take my Auto Shotty or my M60 and fight the zombies on foot.  But all horde nights really do it distract me from things I would rather be doing, like looting or crafting.  

 

Ah, you also missed the information that traps have to be set up so their tops are level to the ground. Then zombies do not pour through that single path but step on new traps, because they think a level ground is faster to traverse than the step down/step up of the hole of a destroyed trap.

 

Edited February 23, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[PoloPoPo]

As an experienced player, horde night certainly has lost its magic. So did the whole game. So does every game after hundreds of hours into it. No blame to 7D2D. Either accept it or try to get a bit of magic back with mods you don't know yet or move on to another game. As for your suggestions to change horde night, I don't think that is necessary as horde nights are perfectly fine for newer and more unexperienced players.

 

I remember my first savegame with my brother-in-law via LAN. He had like three hours under his belt and therefore was the "experienced" one between the two of us. He always warned me about horde night (standard settings) being absolutely crazy. So we reinforced a house, layed down a few spike traps, loaded our guns and.... still both died multiple times to the first horde.

 

TL;DR: New players don't just "simply put a box of cobblestone and easily survive horde nights". They don't know about that. They don't know about hatches and other sneaky stuff. They barricade themselves in their room, barricade windows and doors and wait until the horde breaks in. Then most likely they die.

[Ramethzer0]

On 2/22/2022 at 2:52 PM, Slingblade2040 said:

 

 

This whole new player excuse is beyond ridiculous. Most new players don't bother reading the journal, changing the settings past what's default or even playing past a certain amount of hours because they get bored. This game is not so difficult or has such a high learning curve that things need to be dumbed down to a 5th grade level. It's almost the same excuse given as to why we don't have more advanced options because they don't want to overwhelm these new players when they can simply not screw around with those settings.

 

Hard to believe but some new players might want a challenge from horde night or atleast for it to be something better than what it currently is.

You don't get to speak on behalf of new players like that.  Your cynicism about the vanilla settings is absolutely NOT shared by all.  And as Roland has already pointed out, these settings have multiple nuances.   I would rather focus on a discussion talking about those nuances and how they may affect a game, rather than shoving them into the death simulator while you wax poetic about how you turned horde nights off for yourself.

Edited February 24, 2022 by Ramethzer0 (see edit history)

[Laz Man]

23 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

Ever since zombies became predictable to satisfy the "tower defense" aspect, it became stale.

It was fun the first few hordes just shooting like a madman.
But if I dont intentionally @%$# up a design or neglect building my hordebase, it is just a chore. A chore that gives great XP... but a chore nonetheless.

You can not have predictable behaviour in a horrorgame. Maybe a hand full of games have pulled it off... but as soon as you realize that their movement is predictable and you can work around it... it loses the fearfactor.


Yes A16 A.I wasn't great. No complex tunnels and running on the spot.
But at least you never knew what they would do.
You didnt build a hordebase (well you could but it wasnt necessary) because they would attack from all sides anyways.
So every night was exciting. And no that is not just me "knowing the game now" I have played more alphas before the change than after (8 before, 3 since)


But I think it fills the thrill for newer players, which is after all the only demographic that matters.

 

Are you sure its just not nostalgia?  Back then you could just build 3 high solid square base and call it a day.  I don't see how that is more thrilling then what we have today.

 

Edit:

 

A15 day 21 horde night example:

 

 

Jump to around 15 min mark.  

Edited February 24, 2022 by Laz Man (see edit history)