Goodbye Immersion, Hello Anti-Stealth

[Mantel]

Harsh title, but this is how it feels.

 

Disclaimer:
I play 7dtd since it had minecraft graphics and was a bugfest. remember the wall of chests you had in your first horde night where the zeds run against, but never atacked it? the bulwark of stupidity? funny times. since then, 7dtd improved by A LOT! Imo, there is no other survival game out there (except maybe Ark) that can show this much of positive improvement! Fun Pinps, you have my respect!

 

Now the unhappy part:

Iam really enjoying the stealth mechanic. Its amazing, that you have to watch out for trash, unstable floor, zombies around corners or behind doors, you are constantly on guard cause in open combat, stealth players are weaker then their loud counter part. Still, there are more and more anti-stealth POI´s coming out, so that stealth is NOT POSSIBLE in those POI´s.

Here an excample:

No trash on the floor, No Armor, Everything is as stealthy as it can be. The Zeds not even had line of sight on me, so it has to be magic what gave them my position. Thinking about that their brains, ears and eyes are rotting this is simply not possible, and yet i have to face them in loud combad, even if im silent. This is NOT immersive.

Another thing: I totally love the idea of jumpscares. Unstable floors, zombies falling from ceilings (they might have come up there when alive, but died there due to infection of whatever),

but then there is this joke:

As you can see clearly, there is a zombie. Ok joke aside: the wall im facing right now is one of those hidden walls where a zombie is sleeping behind. I have a few questions: 1.: how did he get INSIDE the wall? 2.: how did he craft this fake wall? 3.: How is the player supposed to know those walls are fake, if he is not hitting EVERY SINGLE WALL in the whole POI, what would feel more like a chore then a game?

I hope the Fun Pimps read this, so stealth wont lose its value. Most people play loud anyway because its faster, dont give stealth yet another downside.

thes excamples were made in the rural_church_01 POI, for those who want to test it themselfes.

One short idea of a system you could use to make this immersive:

You once had a smell function. If the player was carrying meat, zeds around you got attracted towards the player because of the smell. Im carrying cooked meat in my hotbar on those screenshots, but the smell function got removed. Another smell factor could be that if the player is hurt , zombies can smell my blood and wake up because of this. So if stealth players make a mistake, i.e wake up a zombie / walk into traps / are too hungry / loot smelly items, they get punished by waking up zombies.
We would leave our meat in our vehicles and prepare properly for quests this way, because every mistake can make it harder, and its immersive.

[RipClaw]

Stealth is possible in this POI but not during the day and not without points in "From The Shadows". The game does a stealth check when you enter the room and if you are not crouched or there is too much light in the environment then the zombies will wake up. With maximum "From the Shadows" you can also break a fake wall without the zombie waking up.

 

[Roland]

I think it wouldn't be very immersive if you always had a guaranteed chance to 100% stealth every room in every POI no matter what the conditions just because you maxxed out your perks. Take that room in your example. You are walking out in the open and everything is well lit and even your stealth meter says that you are perceptible to zombies out to 13 blocks away. If that zombie woke up suddenly-- even if it wasn't because of you but just woke up on its own you would be plainly visible and in it's line of sight with the amount of light and obvious lack of cover or shadows in the room. To stay invisible under those conditions seems un-immersive to me.

 

Most POIs and rooms can be stealthed and if you go at night that number rises even more. I know from past postings that some people feel that stealth perks are not worth taking unless you can stealth 100% of the time without fail. I don't agree with that sentiment, myself. I think that as long as I can stealth the majority of the time it is still worth it and the times I can't break up the gameplay. 

 

Finally, in both of those situations you can retreat and hide until the zombies forget and then go back and stealth kill them. So even in those cases you can keep playing the game stealthy.

[BFT2020]

Yeah the last time I stepped into that room, I quickly backtracked out through the hallway and waited for about 30 seconds.  When I made my way back, I was able to silently drop the zombies in there that were just milling around.

 

Most people seem to just use the less noise from actions from the perk, keep forgetting the part about zombies giving up searching for you faster at the higher levels.  Also not seeing any rocks in the hotbar to use a distraction....

[Mantel]

i will check the "it has to be night" part, the fake wall part however was me saying the its simply not immersive that zombies live in walls and that there are walls that players cant differ from fake walls unless they are hitting them.

25 minutes ago, Roland said:

even if it wasn't because of you but just woke up on its own you would be plainly visible and in it's line of sight with the amount of light and obvious lack of cover or shadows in the room.

They were behind a curtain, so no like of sight there. they all broke the curtains they were standing behind at the same time what really doesnt feel immersive.
i have no problems with the "difficulty" part and i understand that it feels "too easy" if you can stealth 100% of the game, but you can make it harder even when stealth works. the smell system was just one excample, you could also add barely visible (i hate the completely invisible part, you should get rewarded for being cautios) tripwires or things you stumble on if you step on them, you could even add a "seeker" zombie that senses you at an increased rate and alerts nearby zombies with your position (like in horde night)

 

as i said: i dont want it easyer: i want it immersive, i want to dive into the game and forget that its a game (dont worry, i have a real life :3 )

[theFlu]

2 hours ago, Mantel said:

but then there is this joke

Yeh, that's one of the places that are just stupid. Not even hard, just strange for the sake of strange. I'm hoping it's a homage to some weird movie, somewhere..

 

I too strongly dislike some of the stealth features, but as others have said, the trigger rooms such as that are "sneakable" with enough stealth points. It's a check that ignores LoS, but takes into account distance. It grants triggered zeds auto-GPS-agro until the zed actually sees you, after which it starts behaving normally.

 

1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:

Also not seeing any rocks in the hotbar to use a distraction....

The game seems modded to high heavens, are you sure you're seeing a hotbar? But mainly, rocks don't do much for sleepers until you know how to to leg it, so it's not exactly a great sin in the OPs case.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Mantel said:

i will check the "it has to be night" part, the fake wall part however was me saying the its simply not immersive that zombies live in walls and that there are walls that players cant differ from fake walls unless they are hitting them.

 

I get what you mean. I agree that it is blatantly just the level designers setting up a trap for no story-based reason at all. This sort of thing seems to bother some people more than others. I just accept it as part of the POI exploration experience. I really doubt they will stop hiding zombies in surprising areas.

1 hour ago, Mantel said:

They were behind a curtain, so no like of sight there. they all broke the curtains they were standing behind at the same time what really doesnt feel immersive.

 

Gotcha. Yep, I agree it is not immersive if you are looking for an inworld reason for why zombies are where they are rather than simply a game design reason. It's like D&D. Why are all these orks standing around in rooms in caves and how do they exist if the player isn't there?

[hiemfire]

31 minutes ago, Roland said:

It's like D&D. Why are all these orks standing around in rooms in caves and how do they exist if the player isn't there?

Someone had a GM that needed a bit more practice with worldbuilding...

Edited February 23, 2023 by hiemfire (see edit history)

[Roland]

True, but the problem isn't limited to unpracticed DM's. It exists in movies, books, video games-- everywhere and not just from poor authors/directors etc. 

 

I think that most would agree that JRR Tolkien was a pretty accomplished world builder and yet.... its a stretch to understand how all those orcs and the Balrog could scrape out an existence in the mines of Moria or how armies subsisted in Mordor without farming or game to hunt or water to drink, etc. 

 

My point is that it is a common hole in quite a bit of examples of story telling and world building that audiences are expected to just gloss over. I agree that it is blatant in this game.

[Mantel]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

I really doubt they will stop hiding zombies in surprising areas.

And why should they? Jumpscares are great. Just... dont make it too weird. At least let there be some logic behind it. For excample: there are tons of buildings with clutter and rocks on the floor. maybe some zombies got buried under it and grab your feet if you step on it (maybe with a quicktime event, where when you pass it you successfully pull out your knife and kill the zombie and if you fail you get a broken leg and the zombie comes out and attacks you)? Or zombies coming out of car wracks? Maybe even a zombie falling down of a tree and if you look up you see the remains of a rope where a ex-survivor hung himselfe. There can be tons of creative ways to make surprising zombie events. But zombies being master carpenters so they can hide themselfe inside a wall lets me think back on the southpark episode with the hippie infestation xD

[Riamus]

I doubt they are going to create special mechanics to handle scaring you.  Zombies can't occupy the same space as a car, so will not jump out at you.  They can't occupy the same space as rubble (there would have to be an empty area under it and then they'd have to break the rock to get out), so no coming out of that.  Zombies in trees would look odd because they don't have any animations that make being in a tree look real if you see them.

 

I'm not against more realistic scares, but I honestly don't care about what they have now.  This is a zombie game.  It is already not realistic.  I have no problem with their choice to put zombies in places that don't make much sense.  At the same time, you only get surprised once and then you know the zombie is there every other time, so it really isn't necessary to put much effort into trying to scare people.

[Roland]

Honestly what scared me the most was in A17 when zombies could path straight to you even if you were on the third floor in the hospital and they were outside walking in your direction. Thinking that you had cleared everything behind you only to have a random wandering horde that had spawned outside nearby now coming up unexpectedly behind you in the middle of huge POI was terrifying. 

 

Those A17 zombies were no good for horde night but they were awesome for when you were doing quests and exploring POIs.

[Riamus]

13 minutes ago, Roland said:

Honestly what scared me the most was in A17 when zombies could path straight to you even if you were on the third floor in the hospital and they were outside walking in your direction. Thinking that you had cleared everything behind you only to have a random wandering horde that had spawned outside nearby now coming up unexpectedly behind you in the middle of huge POI was terrifying. 

 

Those A17 zombies were no good for horde night but they were awesome for when you were doing quests and exploring POIs.

Only in A17?  I've had this happen a number of times in A20.  Going downstairs from Dishong or the Apartment building to find 30 zombies waiting for you is fun.  Heh.  And I've had a bear find is way up to me on the third floor of one of the POI once.  It growled before I saw it, or it would probably have killed me.

 

They can't always path up to you because of how the stairs and such are, but in some of the buildings, they do so and you have a stream of zombies coming up for you.  And if they can't, they'll just hang out downstairs for you.  And all it takes is one screamer outside while you're doing a POI to make things interesting when you finish the POI.  By the time you finish, there are 8-10 screamers, all with their zombie packs. 😀

[Laz Man]

Prepare your bodies for A21.  I expect at least some poopy pants...lol

Edited February 26, 2023 by Laz Man (see edit history)

[Telric]

They probably sensed your massively unimmersive UI, so they joined in. "We zombies cant let a UI have all the fun, can we?"

[Roland]

21 hours ago, Riamus said:

Only in A17?  I've had this happen a number of times in A20.  Going downstairs from Dishong or the Apartment building to find 30 zombies waiting for you is fun.  Heh.  And I've had a bear find is way up to me on the third floor of one of the POI once.  It growled before I saw it, or it would probably have killed me.

 

They can't always path up to you because of how the stairs and such are, but in some of the buildings, they do so and you have a stream of zombies coming up for you.  And if they can't, they'll just hang out downstairs for you.  And all it takes is one screamer outside while you're doing a POI to make things interesting when you finish the POI.  By the time you finish, there are 8-10 screamers, all with their zombie packs. 😀

 

I guess not only in A17 but just not to the degree of A17. The past three alphas have seen quite a bit of dumbification of zombies which is important but unfortunately results in a less scary hunted feeling. In A17, if I hunkered down on one end of an attic which had a large gap to where the zombies couldn't reach me, they would create a hole to the roof outside and run around and then break through behind me to get me. In A20 (and A21) if I'm standing on the other side of an open door four blocks away from a zombie with no obstructions it will sometimes (too often for my taste) go into destruction mode as though it thinks it can't get to me. In A17 since all zombies knew long pathways to your position they would pile up on top of each other and crest over spots where maybe the stairs were broken out. In A20 only some zombies know the long path and most can't see long paths to the player and of those that can some will forget mid journey. So it just doesn't happen as much. Feral mode helps but it still doesn't bring it to the degree of A17.  In A17 I could get up on a roof and zombies would find a way to break through from the inside to get out on the roof with me. If I used godmode to fly over to a neighboring roof, they would run back down through the first house and into the second house and up and break through to get out with me on that roof. It was insane and very unzombie-like (hence all the complaints) but also terrifying and fun in its own way. Of course, this same behavior made them extremely exploitable on horde night where you could step from one position to another and see the entire horde alter their path and you could keep seesawing them all night long just by stepping back and forth between two positions.

 

That first iteration of the new AI had perfect information and that kind of gave them an advantage that made them scary for POI exploration but didn't work well for horde nights.

Edited February 24, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[Ramethzer0]

Again, I repeat:

 

I have no more spoons for "But my immersion!" threads and how they intersect with Stealth builds.

Seriously.  Only knives.

 

[zztong]

On 2/23/2023 at 11:36 AM, Mantel said:

Ok joke aside: the wall im facing right now is one of those hidden walls where a zombie is sleeping behind. I have a few questions: 1.: how did he get INSIDE the wall? 2.: how did he craft this fake wall? 3.: How is the player supposed to know those walls are fake, if he is not hitting EVERY SINGLE WALL in the whole POI, what would feel more like a chore then a game?

 

I'm not too troubled by #1 and #2. I could see people crafting a fake wall at the beginning of the apocalypse on the assumption the people turning into weird creatures might not be able to find them. I would think this would be rare. I could see somebody making a closet-like hiding spot. I'd like to think it would be pretty rare, but since stealth works on zombies, maybe hiding in a secret room became some kind of common wisdom amongst survivors? If so, then as you mentioned, they hid and became a zombie.

 

#3 is a POI design puzzler. I've got one POI where I have a hidden basement. I think the game is lacking secret doors. Thus, I used the same wooden easily-breakable block, then painted the lower portion of the wall a little differently. It was the only clue I could think of. If you're on a mission to clear a POI you can eventually get down to where only one zombie volume needs cleared and get a hint. That would save you banging on most of the walls. Other than that, what would be a good indicator of a false wall?

 

On a related note, I used to laugh at zombies standing on ceiling tiles. Okay, I still laugh at it, but I've accepted it as 7D2D trope and started to put them there too. It's ludicrous, but I guess I'm okay with it.

Edited February 25, 2023 by zztong (see edit history)

[Roland]

3 hours ago, zztong said:

started to put them there too.

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[warmer]

I am still hoping they bring the "smell" mechanic back, which if I understand correctly, is similar to how feral instinct currently works.

The game gets really boring and predictable if you can't get ambushed sometimes. I definitely understand what you mean about it being unrealistic, but without these moments, I'd never be afraid as a stealth build except for on horde night, and this game without fear is kind of silly.

[Mantel]

10 hours ago, zztong said:

 

Other than that, what would be a good indicator of a false wall?

 

The usage of fake walls would for excample leave marks on the corners. Maybe the paint is a bit off or you see very small gaps on the edges. I mean, if you would use a fake wall in real life (a movable that is, if we accept the thinking that they were alive while crafting them, they need to think about food and water, thus cant stay there forever), if people look close enough, they would see it because there are gaps.

[Viktoriusiii]

On 2/23/2023 at 6:25 PM, Roland said:

I think it wouldn't be very immersive if you always had a guaranteed chance to 100% stealth every room in every POI no matter what the conditions just because you maxxed out your perks. Take that room in your example. You are walking out in the open and everything is well lit and even your stealth meter says that you are perceptible to zombies out to 13 blocks away. If that zombie woke up suddenly-- even if it wasn't because of you but just woke up on its own you would be plainly visible and in it's line of sight with the amount of light and obvious lack of cover or shadows in the room. To stay invisible under those conditions seems un-immersive to me.

Immersion should never impact gameplay negatively. And building your character to do one thing and that thing failing 50% of the time... feels really REALLY BAD.
But we had this discussion before... so let me just
@Mantel sorry bro... they won't fix this. They think it is totally fine for one of the 6 fightingstyles to not work 50% of the time.
You are pretty new on this forum, so let me tell you:

TFPs will do ANYTHING to force confrontation. Some of the changes have been reasonable (like fixing exploit bases).
But most of them take away from how ppl want to play (you can still play without bloon moon, just disable it.) in favor of fake action.
 

Spoiler

A few examples over the years:
fake walls. As you correctly described, there is no reason for 50% of the current fake walls and roofs to exist. Cupboards are fine. Secret rooms are fine. Hell even upstairs falling down are fine (since they might have hidden there) EVEN WALLS UNDER GROUND are fine, since oyu can argue they buried their way there (a big stretch but whatever)... BUT: streamers can scream... and pewdiepie did it, so everyone does it... and that gives numbers.
Everything being lootbased. This might actually change next alpha, so take with a grain of salt, but the past 4 alphas have all piece by piece taken away the ability to just play in the wilderness by yourself.
All possibility for efficient* bases are pretty much removed. There is no unbreakable trap besides dartshooter, so you better use that one...
And demolishers just blow up everything anyways (that guy is probably the most unbalanced enemy in gaming history xD)

*efficient =/= exploit
Every base has a cost/effectiveness gradient. Less work => less result more work => better result
And spikepits were A LOT of work and after some fixes didnt instakill, but because of spikes they died... you still had to repair the structure... but it worked great.
Nowadays spikepits are a lot of work with barely any result...

 

So... don't hold your breath on stealth getting fixed. They are determined to keep this 'wake up based on chance' system. They might tweak it a bit so its not AS bad anymore... but it will always be flawed, because in these rooms, zombieawareness acts differently to any other zombie (which breaks continuity... and is a big no-no in gamedesign).

If they at least explained in detail how this system works... how to avoid it... that would mean we could counteract it... (remember how trash was introduced? THAT was a great anti-stealth mechanic. It was just intuitive enough that you understood what you did wrong and just hard enough that you could still avoid it if you were careful but now it is just rolling dice and you have to deal with the consequences...)

 

[zztong]

28 minutes ago, Mantel said:

The usage of fake walls would for excample leave marks on the corners. Maybe the paint is a bit off or you see very small gaps on the edges. I mean, if you would use a fake wall in real life (a movable that is, if we accept the thinking that they were alive while crafting them, they need to think about food and water, thus cant stay there forever), if people look close enough, they would see it because there are gaps.

 

Hmm, we don't have a way with textures to put such marks in place. We would need a custom block.

[Mantel]

33 minutes ago, zztong said:

 

Hmm, we don't have a way with textures to put such marks in place. We would need a custom block.

There are custom Blocks where you hide loot behind like the quest crate. It wouldnt even be much work, just decrease the block size by 0,5% of the fake wall and thats it. But making it completely invisible feels a bit off. 

[BFT2020]

Here we go again  🙄

 

TFP is taking away people's ability to play the game they want to

 

Stealth is broken

 

Nobody is explaining how the system works

 

Except it has been discussed many many times and a simple search pop up these three fairly easy

 

 

Also this one was a very good discussion on stealth

 

 

 

If you pay attention and take note of how the system works, you can find stealth builds very powerful and fun to play, and a lot less Skyrim type where stealth was just way overpowered and ridiculous