Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[akram22]

But this isn't the walking dead. Zombies run.

 

they still zombies . lol

[Anabella]

I think loot corpses will be the 2nd thing modded in, after ui, and will likely be in every major mod except ravenherst. Because Jax is mean. =)

 

Yea mean ol' Jax. But he likes being popular more so I don't think that will last too long. LOL

[corvette81]

Dunno if this has been asked but with making the sprint/run limited to forwards(personally don't agree with the change should be a movement speed % decrease like irl you can run backwards just not as fast) is there gonna be a key we can press/hold to turn our heads to look around like 270 degrees? (question in italics for easier viewing )

[eidobunny]

Exactly. Ever since A1 the only smart choice-- the only good choice has been to kill zombies. It overpowers all other gameplay choices. Now for the first time you could:

 

Kill the zombie in your way

Lead it away and return

Throw a rock to distract it and move past unseen

Stealth around quietly looting without waking any zombies

 

All of these options are now more equal because the incentive to kill for loot is now missing. Those who like to power level will still want to kill every zombie they come across so they can post that they easily made level 20 by Day 4 but for the rest who just play without worrying about how fast we level there are now a lot of fun optional ways to survive vs zombies than simply kill them and we won't be as penalized for it as we once were.

 

Just knowing I would most likely get no loot from a single zombie made me try looting an entire poi by sneaking and leaving all the sleepers where they lay. I never would have done it before when I could get xp AND loot from killing them.

 

It is a very similar dynamic to the spam crafting. Once that overpowering pathway to gaining experience was removed it made lots of other xp gaining activities more viable and improved overall gameplay.

 

Yeah I get you, there are some pros to this system, both on a macro level and on a micro level. But I'll say it again; where is the incentive for participating legitimately in a horde night? I'm hoping there are multiple bosses that drop loot roughly equivalent to what we are receiving now on horde nights. Otherwise there's no point to really building an advanced defensible base, which is one of the most important endgame activities (for a good amount of people)

[toores]

I thought about it last night and real zombies would not be carrying a bunch of junk. If we all turned to zombies right now, what would we find in our pockets? Not much. Some people may have a backpack on with supplies they were carrying to bug out and then died and became a zombie, but not many.

 

The POIs contain the loot. Zombies block access. Kill/evade zombies to get at the loot. Yes, on your 100 dude server you would need to increase loot respawn or a bigger map, so you can drive farther to find stuff.

 

Bones from zombie corpses? Maybe corpses could stay around longer, it would look better, but on bloodmoons we remove oldest ones, so FPS does not tank? Would I really want to hack up zombies ever? Good way to get infected. I think more animals would be nice, to get bones and fat, with zombies killing them, so you need to thin out the zombie population to encourage more animals to survive, but if a zombie kills a boar, could you not just kill the zombie to loot the boar corpse? Lots of ways you can go with this.

 

Much testing and tweaking to go.

 

I agree about the junk, it never made too much sense to begin with. So i'm ok with less loot, but it would be really cool if the remaining and more rare zombie loot would really be zombie speciffic now. It is good gameplay to go after nurses when you really need some medical supplies.

[akram22]

Yeah I get you, there are some pros to this system, both on a macro level and on a micro level. But I'll say it again; where is the incentive for participating legitimately in a horde night? I'm hoping there are multiple bosses that drop loot roughly equivalent to what we are receiving now on horde nights. Otherwise there's no point to really building an advanced defensible base, which is one of the most important endgame activities (for a good amount of people)

 

the reward is your life , successfully defeat a horde = you have survived another day , I think

[Prisma501]

the reward is your life , successfully defeat a horde = you have survived another day , I think

 

And dont forget: a base that still is mostly intact!

 

Cheers

[eidobunny]

the reward is your life , successfully defeat a horde = you have survived another day , I think

 

But you can just drive a minibike around and keep your life. You can stand on a skyscraper and keep your life. You can stand on the roof of some random house in the boonies and keep your life. That's not a reward. With zombies not dropping loot, all a horde night is against your home base is punishment. Why even bother building a base at all?

[SnowDog1942]

But you can just drive a minibike around and keep your life. You can stand on a skyscraper and keep your life. You can stand on the roof of some random house in the boonies and keep your life. That's not a reward. With zombies not dropping loot, all a horde night is against your home base is punishment. Why even bother building a base at all?

 

If u can do all those things to stay safe you dont need the loot anyway

[Gamida]

Keeping a stack of small rocks on your tool belt is actually a good idea now as the distraction feature is quite good and a lot of fun.

 

heheh...Stupid zeds.....I'm smarter than you....

 

So if a zombie is rambling towards me as I am crouched and I throw a stone to his/her/its side then he/she/it will turn and walk in the stones direction? Doe that mean just to the point the stone hit or he/she/it will keep walking in that direction until something else catches his/her/its attention.

Also if it is a wandering horde, do they all hear the stone and move towards it or will just one.

[eidobunny]

Right now you build a base to keep your goods, and sustain a horde attack. Eventually you can increase your efficiency by making better walls, better traps, using better weapons to kill the zombies more effectively. Every horde night, you get rewarded with about the same amount of loot you lost through base damage, consumables like arrows and bullets, etc. Now you are rewarded with... nothing? Or next to nothing? But you still take the base damage. So why wouldn't you just... leave your base every horde night? It seems counter-intuitive to me. The most obvious and most efficient solution to survival would be to abandon your base every horde night. To me that's completely the opposite of how the game should play. You should be investing more and more into your base to make it more and more defensible against progressively stronger hordes. This update completely eliminates that mechanic. I'm just going to ride around on a minibike every horde night instead.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

If u can do all those things to stay safe you dont need the loot anyway

 

??????????????????????????????

 

And you can just dig a hole and sit in it on day 1 in a16 and never die, so I guess you don't need to even play the game at that point, you've survived, game over.

 

I want to fight a big horde and not have the sinking feeling in the back of my head that I just threw away several days worth of loot and got nothing in return. At least now the zombie loot recoups my losses, and looting zombies feels, as another user put it, like Christmas. That's just... gone now? Like everyone else I'm gonna withhold judgment until I play it but I have a bad feeling about this and I'm voicing my concern.

[Prisma501]

Right now you build a base to keep your goods, and sustain a horde attack. Eventually you can increase your efficiency by making better walls, better traps, using better weapons to kill the zombies more effectively. Every horde night, you get rewarded with about the same amount of loot you lost through base damage, consumables like arrows and bullets, etc. Now you are rewarded with... nothing? Or next to nothing? But you still take the base damage. So why wouldn't you just... leave your base every horde night? It seems counter-intuitive to me. The most obvious and most efficient solution to survival would be to abandon your base every horde night. To me that's completely the opposite of how the game should play. You should be investing more and more into your base to make it more and more defensible against progressively stronger hordes. This update completely eliminates that mechanic. I'm just going to ride around on a minibike every horde night instead.

 

Play the game VS game the game. I like the first better. But thats a personal opinion.

 

Cheers

 

-edit- and you must be playing a whole other game than me. Nothing and really nothing in a bloodmoon horde zombie loot is compensating sh*t for base destruction. No concrete/steel, no 100dreds of ammo of any type. What do you loot after a bloodmoon that can even remotely compensate for repairing your base??

[Erik Louden]

Q: How good are the digging zombies at digging? Can they dig through concrete?

[Ouch Quit It]

Just finished watching the video going back and forth over things....

 

Obviously it isn't just texture shading holding up the release from the Unity upgrade...Seems ALOT more than that.

 

I will like to play it for a bit before giving an opinion on a lot of the "upgrades, zombie loot, melee, stamina, etc... Many of the updates look cool and interesting...I like the laundry baskets and microwaves as lootable containers.

 

1- So what determines whether a zombie wakes up...used to be a perimeter thing..some of the zombies were heavy sleepers, "almost like they were dead". ..now it is whether you have your light turned on or not?? Seems very random.

 

2- The game seems to have lost a lot of its crispness...in the landscape graphics...maybe its the video ….maybe its me

 

3- Don't like the constant respawn of Zs everytime you back off to regroup...I guess that's why it takes 2 hours to go through a POI

 

4- Why cant we make scrap iron arrows......before iron arrow heads....its scrap iron..pointy pieces should be in scrap iron....GAZZ??

 

5- arrow retrieval seems quite difficult....will it be worth the time it takes??? How long are they around for...especially if the Zs disappear right away if they don't have loot?

 

6- Who is the in the picture on the wall??

 

 

Ouch

[Windsailor]

I get your point. The big picture should be though what are the majority of your players going to want to have? I have played with a lot of people. I have watched a lot of people play on both youtube and twitch. I have admin'd and really watched players and how they behave. One thing almost ALL of them have in common is they LOVE their loot.

 

I second that. I like looting stuff. That's very "rewarding" - although sometimes you get drowned in junk. Which then means one has to focus on the important stuff.

 

Now with the zeds having no more loot, this part of the game will disappear.

 

I saw MMs rant tweet this afternoon. I agree that zeds shouldn't bring you "the meal". But is this a binary decision between black and white? Real lifes also has gray...

[SnowDog1942]

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

??????????????????????????????

 

And you can just dig a hole and sit in it on day 1 in a16 and never die, so I guess you don't need to even play the game at that point, you've survived, game over.

 

I have a suspicion. Maybe someone can confirm or deny. You MIGHT starve to death, or die of thirst.

[Blake_]

I thought about it last night and real zombies would not be carrying a bunch of junk. If we all turned to zombies right now, what would we find in our pockets? Not much. Some people may have a backpack on with supplies they were carrying to bug out and then died and became a zombie, but not many.

 

The POIs contain the loot. Zombies block access. Kill/evade zombies to get at the loot. Yes, on your 100 dude server you would need to increase loot respawn or a bigger map, so you can drive farther to find stuff.

 

Bones from zombie corpses? Maybe corpses could stay around longer, it would look better, but on bloodmoons we remove oldest ones, so FPS does not tank? Would I really want to hack up zombies ever? Good way to get infected. I think more animals would be nice, to get bones and fat, with zombies killing them, so you need to thin out the zombie population to encourage more animals to survive, but if a zombie kills a boar, could you not just kill the zombie to loot the boar corpse? Lots of ways you can go with this.

 

Much testing and tweaking to go.

 

Well.... now that I think of it, you are right about the zombies, the bones and the fat.And yet... "upping" the amount of animals isn't the answer for sure, because your fellow workers have been there, done that several times in previous alphas and they settled for a low amount( in madmole's video he encounters like 2 boars and 1 vulture just a few minutes in, they tweak it up and we will literally swim in does! ). Where do we get then enough bones to make paper?

 

I suggest: maybe a 100 plant fiber + 50 wood recipe workbench-gated to do 10 paper? mmm could do.... and yet....more simple: (GAZZ, I beg thy) increasing the amount of animal gutting from 50 to 80 bones per animal ? nice glue amount, not too much, not too greedy, smooth. 20-40 fat from big animals and a little less for lesser animals.... plus traders (which as of 16 aren't the holy grail of fat and bones). Meat of course would remain unchanged because for some reason gazz is a tweaking god and each animal gives a good enough amount (7-14 meat for deers/boars/wolves barring the knife damage bug)

 

Anyway, I am confident you guys will come up with something cool and simple.

 

I literally can't wait for that masterpiece. The speed of development is one of the fastest and more solid ones I've ever seen and I'm not joking around. Retweaking that amount of shaders and redoing /making from scratch more than 5 different systems would take any other devs 2 more years at the very least. 30 guys at EA would make 3 pots and two coloured chickens in 9 months.

[eidobunny]

Play the game VS game the game. I like the first better. But thats a personal opinion.

 

Cheers

 

Yeah you can create arbitrary rules in your head and hopefully trick yourself that way, but many players will see through the mechanics and use them to their advantage. Many players experience a phenomenon where they automatically take the action they perceive to be the most efficient, even if that makes the game less fun for the player. So the onus is on the developer to make sure the player has the fun.

 

I had a discussion about this in a game development thread once, hopefully this conversation makes sense out of context:

 

A thought that jumps to mind with screen transitions in games like this:

 

Let's say you walk to the civic district, and as the screen transitions you think, "oh I forgot something, I need to head back," so you immediately turn around and enter another screen transition. At the same time, you see a rare critter spawn or something else desirable just as the screen darkens.

 

Are your spawns set up that if you return immediately, that critter will still be there? Or will it be gone?

 

Edit: On second thought, if it would be gone, I guess that'd mean you could just farm spawns by walking back and forth between screen transitions. No worries either way.

 

though keep in mind on this topic, jumping back and forth between screen transitions to farm enemies is a boring mechanic in basically any game it shows up in

 

there's a nice little phrase I read in some talk at one point that essentially said "if you give them the chance, a gamer will optimize the fun out of a game" and so you have to save players from themselves to keep a game fun, which I think fits there. Just because there's a workaround for that case where you go away too quickly and miss a guy doesn't mean that that workaround being in there's actually a good thing, because then when someone decides they have to farm something, they'll gravitate towards going with the less fun (but faster) screen transition method (or whatever method) since they think the farming's going to be boring either way

 

then in the end they end up liking the game less, even though ultimately it was their own decision to go with the boring cheap farm method instead of trying to get the item more naturally

[MidnightRook]

I second that. I like looting stuff. That's very "rewarding" - although sometimes you get drowned in junk. Which then means one has to focus on the important stuff.

 

Now with the zeds having no more loot, this part of the game will disappear.

 

I saw MMs rant tweet this afternoon. I agree that zeds shouldn't bring you "the meal". But is this a binary decision between black and white? Real lifes also has gray...

 

Zombies DO drop loot, on occasion. So that is the gray you are asking for. It may not be the exact shade some want, but its NOT all or nothing. Take that thought out of the reasoning right now.

[akram22]

But you can just drive a minibike around and keep your life. You can stand on a skyscraper and keep your life. You can stand on the roof of some random house in the boonies and keep your life. That's not a reward. With zombies not dropping loot, all a horde night is against your home base is punishment. Why even bother building a base at all?

 

will do you play to hide, if its the reality i would hide really ,in one of those spots ,so ?

[Deceiver101]

Not removed. Lol. In other news Vehicles have also not been removed even though Joel traveled everywhere on foot... I know it seemed that Joel’s video was comprehensive but it was not. There is still a secret or two you guys don’t know and not seeing something is not evidence of it’s removal.

 

Heads to pink mist are still a thing.

 

"I always say the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. "

[eidobunny]

will do you play to hide, if its the reality i would hide really ,in one of those spots ,so ?

 

I want to build a base and fight the hordes

 

I think that's one of the most fun parts about the entire game

 

Eliminating loot from the hordes will cause me to not build a base and avoid fighting the hordes

 

Do you see what I'm getting at?

[Prisma501]

Yeah you can create arbitrary rules in your head and hopefully trick yourself that way, but many players will see through the mechanics and use them to their advantage. Many players experience a phenomenon where they automatically take the action they perceive to be the most efficient, even if that makes the game less fun for the player. So the onus is on the developer to make sure the player has the fun.

 

I had a discussion about this in a game development thread once, hopefully this conversation makes sense out of context:

 

You just missed my edit. Which is what really makes me curious. What on earth do you loot that even remotely compensates for base destruction? If i used your arguments myself i would be driviing around in my minibike all night for the same reasons despite of the every zed having loot.

 

Cheers

[Soup]

I want to build a base and fight the hordes

 

I think that's one of the most fun parts about the entire game

 

Eliminating loot from the hordes will cause me to not build a base and avoid fighting the hordes

 

Do you see what I'm getting at?

 

Almost positive the madmoleman said there will be a boss that drops worthwhile loot on horde night in the recent video.

[Gamida]

3- Don't like the constant respawn of Zs everytime you back off to regroup...I guess that's why it takes 2 hours to go through a POI

 

I am a little concerned about that one too. I think MM did mention though that they would have to look into it I think.

 

One way it could be is that the new zombies you see are ones that were in other parts of the building that were alerted to you and moved to the noise. So if a poi would have had 15 zombies in it then if you cleared out 10 at entry point then rest of building would only have 5.

If though there are 5 on each floor (say 3 floors) and you are after killing 12 trying to get in basement and then there are still 5 on each floor above so you have to go through more than 5 from advancing/retreating because they all respawn on that floor well it could take a while. Especially if you die on last part and have to start over again from scratch.

That is my take on it.