5 things in Alpha 17 that give me some concern (based on Madmole's day 1 vid)

[Scyris]

1) I know you based this only on the one video but if you based it on that video plus the follow up statements by developers you would know that there will be zombie loot and they are currently working on the balance. What there won’t be is zombies morphing into corpse block loot containers.

 

2) This seems to be a preference thing and unfortunately for me but lucky for you Madmole shares your preference of being able to tell the difference between stunned and dead. From the video it does seem hard to tell but the truth is after playing for a bit the sound cues are different enough that you quickly learn. I suggested mixing up the sound cues so it wouldn’t be possible to tell and Madmole said that he preferred having clues that zombies were dead vs knocked out.

 

TLDR: You will quickly learn to notice the difference. No twitch animation required.

 

3) The solution to this will be revealed in Madmole’s next video after he’s practiced up a bit...

 

4) Could have been bad luck. My experience is that there are more wanderers in the world than in A16.

 

5) Graphics are important to a lot of people and they are Joel’s realm of expertise on the team. Your percentages are skewed by Joel’s emphasis on sharing what he does. But even if you were right about the ratio of graphics work to other work it would please many people who are concerned about how the game looks.

 

I myself favor gameplay over graphics, I believe that no matter how pretty a game looks, if it plays like crap its still crap, final fantasy 15 comes to mind here, game looks amazing, but in terms of a jrpg? it was effing bad. Easly one of the worst jrpg's i've played and I been playing them since the NES era. Sadly gamers today are mostly brain dead cattle that will play a game if it looks pretty.

 

I agree with Madmole on #2, there needs to be some better indication if something is dead or not. There are audio cues yes, but those will be useless if your dealing with a pack of zombies. With how they make all this noise. I really hate sleepers personally, because they wake up in A16 and make a bunch of screeching noises for no reason. IMO the zombies shouldn't use any voice effects unless they actually see you and hunt you. Its annoying when your walking thru a poi and stuff 2 floors above wakes up and starts making a bunch of racket.

 

Has anything been done to fix that btw? Stuff on the floor above or 2 above shouldn't hear me walking around and opening stuff. in A16 if your not sneaking you'll wake the whole poi up just walking around.

[Scyris]

Actually, I have what I think is a valid concern / question. If I kill a zombie using X many arrows, will whatever percentage of arrows that might have been able to be salvaged from the corpse still be there when the Z despawns?

 

Or will they fade away with the corpse?

 

My apologies if this has been answered, and thanks in advance.

 

I'd honestly prefer the arrows be in a loot bag left behind, it seems too time consuming to take the arrows out of each body. Especally with how pixel pefectly it seems from the video you need to get the crosshair to loot them, it'd be find if you could just point it in the generally direction of the body and hit E to look them, but having to highlight each one is probally going to make me just not bother collecting them back. The system also seems semi pointless too, the whole point of the loot system in A17 is to spend less time looting, yet then you put in arrow recovery that from the looks of it, will take longer than looting the bodies would in A16.

 

Then again this is fromt he view of someone who virtually never uses guns, due to them waking up entire poi's, I find the zombie screeching super aggravating and I wish I could mute them. wonder if its like the auger where I can just remove the sound entries from the xml.

[Ripflex]

Responding to OP list:

 

1) No Corpse Loot

I actually killed zombies for the XP and visceral enjoyment. When an update came along giving high level zombies great loot, the group gaming experience became more of a Zombie farming each bloodmoon and if you are low level and crappy scavenging skill/quality joe - you were excluded or even ask to leave bloodmoon since you nerf the zombie loot drops --- no serious that was a thing for awhile.

I'm happy they are re-tweaking it...

 

2) Stunned vs Dead

Zombieland rules of surviving a zombie apocalypse... rule 2. The double Tap. I like the uncertainty personally.

 

3) Clumsy Melee

Developers can't play their own games - this has always been a fact... don't judge the combat by Joe's pro skill level in that video

And about kiting backwards - this has annoyed me in most games on how they just allowed that to save time than add immersion, you should scale up slopes slowly, you shouldn't sprint 100 meters backwards and sideways in 10 seconds like an Olympic sprinter. That type of move more for arcade mode gameplay like Quake and Unreal Tournament or COD. I want my Immersion - I didn't say realism because people counter that as "it's a video game" excuse. Adapt people.

 

4) Too Few zombies.

I agree here 100%. If The fun pimps simplify with models with a single but detailed skins and model (dumping that UMA model stuff) and utilize the multi-core CPU in Unity 2018.2 engine, they should be able to increase the zombie count again and add them lovely wandering zombie herds we knew and loved.

 

5) Overfocus on Graphics.

wtf ... graphics kinda dated now, I don't understand this reasoning... the more they improve this the better IMO, I mean most my friends don't even play this game mainly because the meh graphics.

 

These are my responses only just opinions. No malice to OP.

[Darthjake]

I'd honestly prefer the arrows be in a loot bag left behind, it seems too time consuming to take the arrows out of each body. Especally with how pixel pefectly it seems from the video you need to get the crosshair to loot them, it'd be find if you could just point it in the generally direction of the body and hit E to look them, but having to highlight each one is probally going to make me just not bother collecting them back. The system also seems semi pointless too, the whole point of the loot system in A17 is to spend less time looting, yet then you put in arrow recovery that from the looks of it, will take longer than looting the bodies would in A16.

 

Then again this is fromt he view of someone who virtually never uses guns, due to them waking up entire poi's, I find the zombie screeching super aggravating and I wish I could mute them. wonder if its like the auger where I can just remove the sound entries from the xml.

 

 

I'd like loot bags too, but tbh, hunting for arrows is a pain the ass in real life, but once you get to steel arrows, this will help with resource management imo, until you get to the omg, I've got so much stuff stage of the game.

[JCrook1028]

I can't see myself bothering with collecting arrows from z's unless maybe the first day or 2. After that I've never been short enough to bother. Frankly very early on the feathers just start stacking up in boxes.

[Vedui]

I can't see myself bothering with collecting arrows from z's unless maybe the first day or 2. After that I've never been short enough to bother. Frankly very early on the feathers just start stacking up in boxes.

 

Yeah it seemed a bit tedious! Unless you can just "f" and suck them up by being in the general area

 

Or maybe any arrows stuck end up in the loot bag, so that we at least can just grab them all without having to individually retrieving from the corpse.

[Exxodous]

Yeah it seemed a bit tedious! Unless you can just "f" and suck them up by being in the general area

 

Or maybe any arrows stuck end up in the loot bag, so that we at least can just grab them all without having to individually retrieving from the corpse.

 

Of course there is nothing "requiring" us to retrieve the arrows. By not retrieving them we have lost nothing compared to A16.

 

My take on the sticky/retrievable arrows is this: It's really nice aesthetically and from an immersion standpoint but the retrievable part is more geared towards new players or the beginning of the game where arrows may be hard to come by. Once established arrows are a dime a dozen and most of the time I've got 1000's lying around. Of course this is subject to balancing that may occur in A17.

[aloys]

I haven't gone through this whole thread so sorry if this is repetitive.

 

One point brought up was the lack of zombies and especially in towns. A15 was awesome with how everytime you went into a town you were gonna find a bunch of zombies to deal with. A16 just didn't feel right. I would rather have towns and the whole world full of zombies instead of sleepers!

[SylenThunder]

I haven't gone through this whole thread so sorry if this is repetitive.

 

One point brought up was the lack of zombies and especially in towns. A15 was awesome with how everytime you went into a town you were gonna find a bunch of zombies to deal with. A16 just didn't feel right. I would rather have towns and the whole world full of zombies instead of sleepers!

Roland covered this. Biome spawns are increased again.