A17 Thoughts and Suggestions

[DamienDarkside]

So yeah, thread number 104839 about Alpha 17. This however isn't a purely negative one. I actually love most of A17 and I hope that some of these suggestions can make the game better, and with reasons WHY they would make it better. I am not saying I am better than TFP but they want feedback (oh and boy are they getting it eh?)

 

Max Stamina - So I don't mind the food system being tied into the max stamina system. I would run down to low levels of food then use various cheap items to boost my wellness back in A16 which was kind of broken. However I now have to constantly eat stuff just to keep myself near 100%. I am raising my max stamina over 100 through perks... but I'll get to that later.

 

I compare this to weapon damage in Fallout 3, and how it was fixed in Fallout: New Vegas. In Fallout 3, weapon damage was directly related to the remaining durability of your weapon. So what would happen is that upon finding an assault rifle I would repair it immediately so I wouldn't have less damage. Fallout New Vegas did something which made it work even better. When a weapon was at 75% durability or above, it wouldn't change the weapon's damage. Only when the weapon dropped below 75% durability would it start affecting the stats of the gun. This was fantastic imho, and to properly reinforce the difference between the two they changed how it was labelled. If your gun was below 75% it would be labelled as "repair" and if it was above 75% it was labelled "Maintain".

 

So my suggestion is obviously adding the max stamina penalty to when player hunger is 75% or below. If you keep yourself properly fed ("maintained") and above 75%, you are rewarded by not having a debuff. If you linger below 75% you start being penalized. Right now I am currently being punished for not being filled to bursting constantly.

 

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION: "Satisfied" buff upon hitting 100% hunger that is longer in duration when fed with higher-quality foods. The effect is that as long as it is enabled, hunger doesn't go down below 100%. Maybe "Duration = Amount of Hunger Points left / 2" so that when you eat something that has 20 Points at 100% hunger, you get 10 minutes of not having your hunger plummet. If you eat that 20 points at 90%, it raises to 100%, takes the difference (10) and gives you 5 minutes of not worrying about needing to eat right away again.

 

2) Player Death - Okay, this is simple. The concept is fantastic and encourages me not to die. The duration is absolutely terrible and makes me not want to play the game. So I died, and I figured "okay, I'll just wait out the hour" so I did and played for another hour before a random vulture came out of nowhere, wombocombo'd me and I died in three seconds. I was ten minutes away from finally having my perks back. This isn't a "git gud" situation, I was instakilled without being able to counter in any way.

 

I don't have several hours a day to play this game. I have a full time job. I have relationships. I have other games to play. I choose to sit down and play for an hour or two and honestly I think I have spent more time in this build being penalized for learning the game again than not having the Near Death debuff.

 

Lower the penalty to half an hour please. Long enough for me to want to avoid death, but short enough for me to not look at the clock and say "Do I really want to spend another full hour at level 1?". Which you are basically at level 1, lets be fully honest here. It snowballs into "I've got lower stats, I can't get into a building because of the zombies, but I also don't want to be smacking a tree for an hour and not exploring", and then being so bored I want to fight zombies, and my lowered stats kill me (or a dog/vulture/feral taking 100 arrows), causing it to restart.

 

3)Zombie Knockdown - Is great, just make them stay down for like, 1.5 seconds more. I should have enough time with a zombie to knock it down then smash it's skull in. This will give enough space for a player to either kill a downed zed, try to manage a small horde, but short enough that we aren't left wondering "is it dead?" (apart from the +700xp ding). Placing actual headshots with clubs is super satisfying. I heavy attacked a vulture and yeeted him off a building, then cracked a zombie on the head hard enough that he flew off the roof and that felt amazing. It makes me want to fight zombies! Great job Pimps, I just love ragdolls in games so this was an easy <3 for me. (If you wanna increase knockback to launch them more, BY ALL MEANS DO SO)

 

4) Zombie Loot - Don't worry, I like the new loot. A bit more common with drops with a bit less of a reward is my suggestion. I do like how they aren't "loot pinatas" but I like the short burst of "ooh loot!" when one drops a bag. I feel rewarded for doing well. In the bag I get loads of loot. I just feel like a slight increase (2-3%) with either less rewards or more varied rewards would do the trick. More varied rewards would counter the gun delivery of a dropped loot bag that is currently here.

 

5) The Forge - Take the level gating off this or reduce to level 10 (which is acceptable imho). "OH BUT NOW WE HAVE AN EARLY GAME". Yeah, the early game is getting the basic resources to make this thing when you can barely get resources off the ground. You crack a rock and barely get iron out of it compared to you when you are level 50 and raking in the iron.

 

With crap tools I need to:

 

- Get leather. By exploring buildings to find leather and possibly dying to zombies. Hunting animal that randomly spawn that requires me to have a firearm or be really good at archery, while also possibly being attacked by zombies. Attacking a dog that is very much able to murder your soul at low levels. All of these are risky.

 

- Get a bunch of clay dirt, get a bunch of rocks. This takes time, you barely have good enough materials in order to harvest things. Also you will be attacked by zombies during this.

 

- Make the bellows and have materials to smelt. This requires exploration to find the iron pipes required to make this work, which means zombies.

 

This requires me to dig, chop wood for fuel, crack open rocks or explore to get iron, explore buildings with zombies or find garbage to get iron pipes. That is the early game and for new players it's a LOT to take in.

 

Yes, you're all experienced survivors that can look at 50 zombies and they fall apart. Good, then your reward for playing so much 7d2d during it's development is to be able to make this stuff faster than a new player because you're skilled at the game and you know what you're doing. You get to partially skip the early game, and padding it out is terrible game design.

 

6) Quest Rewards - Increase the XP rewards. If I gotta get my gear, risk my life, use my resources, travel to the place and travel back to the trader, I want 3-5k experience. I should be very much rewarded for the immense risk of clearing out a POI (which are so good btw, props to the team).

 

7) Variance in mods - I don't need a workbench IRL to make a spiked bat. I just need a rock and some nails. I can easily attach a pocket to my pants. I can wrap barbed wire on my stick. I'm getting all these schematics for mods but I have to wait for a super high level to use them! Schematics should be how we LEARN them, especially the high level ones. Some should already by learned. If I have enough nails for a club, I should be able to make my club a spiked club without the need of a workbench. Especially since I have to be in combat a lot and the death is super punishing.

 

8) Guns - Apart from the hilarious bug of a bullet flying inside my rifle using the force, I do feel like guns are NOT in a good spot right now. I have a shotgun, and I am DUMPING well-placed shots into a skull. It should pop. It doesn't. I shouldn't have to play on Scavenger in order to fire a 7.62 bullet through a zombie's skull to kill it (and I am sure it takes more than one bullet on Scav anyways with the new system).

 

Gun damage should be influenced by rarity, yes. However the major benefits to finding a purple shotgun should be the durability, fire rate or increased debuffs left to zombies. Higher level shotguns should knock down more. High power rifles should be able to dismember when you're using such high power rounds. Pistols should get a critical bonus or something to keep them relevant. MP5 should have hipfire reduction. I think this would be a better system than seeing if 20 7.62 rounds can defeat a feral boi. It doesn't by the way. I tried in the barn on Nav in normal difficulty. Went through maybe 80 rounds. Then I died, then I alt-f4 and decided on a new world instead of waiting an hour to play normally again.

 

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That's all I got for now. Thanks for reading all of this and hopefully I'll post more in here because i got over 400 hours in this game over the past few years and I want to play more and more of it.

[AshaMarie]

I like your feedback though nothing bothers me much in this game except for the damage zombies do to blocks and the melee weapons lag or whatever it is. I am just sad to watch zombies tear through walls like they were glass.