How do you like A17 experimental?

[Ghostlight]

This literally always happened. In every alpha. There came a point where there was no point doing anything. Your base was up and running. You don't care about screamers. You don't need loot. Without any end-game goals or a "win" state, eventually the game grinds to a halt because you've got all the things.

 

This is not new.

 

It happening by day 30 is new. Every single run as well, since every run will now be the exact same in as far as what you have at a specific level.

[gwensparkle]

I voted "In general I love it" about a week ago. If anything my impression of the game features has gone up. For reference, I've played single player on default settings (except video quality greatly reduced) and the multiplayer server with friends is on easy setting to accommodate the range of players' experience with the game. I liked the sandbox approach, but I also do like the new leveling system from a game standpoint. Just different and I like both types of games so I'm cool with it. It reminds me of my early MMO days starting with Everquest. I take the attitude I'm in the Fun Pimps world now and it's up to me to figure out how to survive in the new system. I never was one to rush, even in a level-based game, so I'm finding my approach to the game doesn't need to change all that much. I'm enjoying the new dungeonlike POIs. I can see so many possibilities for expanding the quest system as well. Performance is an issue for me, but I'm trusting that will come in time. Good work Fun Pimps!

[Corbit]

Why is everyone afraid of zombies? Very primitive AI. I've been waiting a year and a half for 17 to come up with a new AI.

 

Impregnable base can be built very quickly if you understand how to work AI zombies. They're stupid and direct. They're also very slow. Even from running zombies you can easily strafe and make them get stuck in objects and other zombies.

 

You can make ladders and laugh by shooting stupid zombies. You can dig a cave at the bottom, and put on top of the cage and barbed wire that would shoot at the stuck zombies. You can put spinning traps on top of each other to the top hit on the head, and the bottom on the legs. You can make the base triangular and one wall next to the seller. It is possible to dig out a hole and from above a lattice through which to shoot. You can dig a mine in which zombies will fall and just forget about them. And you can just climb on the roof of a stone building and jump on the stairs sideways (zombies do not know how), they will destroy a few blocks in the walls and all you can live there forever.

 

Personally, I want the game to focus on AI zombies, from which it is impossible to hide and impossible to build an indestructible base. I don't understand "survival" for a spoon in vanilla yogurt. "Oh, please make it scary, but behind the fence".

 

The player must always build and rebuild the base. Each time the Horde must become stronger and sweep away any obstacles on its way. This is what makes sense: 7 days to prepare. And then to the last bullet, the last trap, the last block of the wall and eventually fight with a chainsaw.

 

I want like in the movies. To adrenaline boiled.

 

Totally agree with you on this. A couple of friends and I used a small POI with the trailer and destroyed corner building for first bloodmoon. We prepared best we could (spikes here and there and destroying anything they could use to reach us on the trailer and broken building) but still had no idea if it would be good enough. I was quite excited leading up 10pm and the initial horde but soon realised that they just couldn't touch us.

 

They didn't do much damage to the place, it was perfectly viable to use it again for 2nd bloodmoon, if only we had realised cops were no on the menu :/. Even on the 2nd night, there wasn't all that much damage to the POI. Its only a small one, it should have been wrecked!

 

After that we used a tall destroyed building in town for bloodmoons, added some concrete in a few places to increase the floor height. Most of the work was destroying stairs and making openings to shoot through. They just ran about like idiots below us and we murdered them using the gaps we left. That was the 3rd bloodmoon, game beat with a pick and a small amount of concrete. Pretty sure we didn't even need to kill them, they weren't getting up to us. Gamestage was quite high at that point, we were getting loads of irradiated wights, cops and spiders. Did a few more bloodmoons there before starting a new world.

 

I used to feel excited and scared for the next bloodmoon, not knowing what was gonna happen and everything I did was to prepare for that night to come. Not sure when I lost this feeling, probably before a16. Now i'm looking at perks and thinking about what i'm getting next to make the game easier, a day before bloodmoon I prepare but already know the outcome.

 

Our current base had a huge ramp up to a platform with a door into a tight corridor leading off to 2 more doors and some slits covering the door. Put a ceiling on it with some bars so someone could shoot down. Stuck a load of barb wire at the bottom of the ramp. All the walls were cobblestone. We all sat at the top of the ramp shooting as they got stuck on the wire, then they got past the wire and we ran screaming like little girls through the door. they starting smacking walls and the door randomly and we had it under control until we didn't . They got in so we retreated out through the last 2 doors and started firing in but they didn't take long to get through. Luckily that was mostly the end of the horde, one of us died but we managed to mop up the rest. I think they destroyed like 8-10 blocks, that number would have been 0 if I had used reinforced concrete.

 

It was the most fun I had in long time playing, lots of shouting and laughing on discord. We had to purposely make the defences flawed for this.

[SgtThompson]

Mixed.

 

I like the graphical improvements, but those are countered by extremely bad frame rates.

I like the new attribute system, but I think it's a little too limiting.

I like the weapon modding capabilities, but I don't think I like the way schematics are consumables instead of acquired knowledge.

I like the changes to hot and cold on clothing, but its improvements are countered by extremely limiting stamina.

Stamina changes are probably my least favorite.

 

I think it has a lot of potential, but it also needs a lot of work.

[MasterP]

Sadly i cant play it anymore due to worst performance ever, not even on lowest graphics settings.

[SgtThompson]

Sadly i cant play it anymore due to worst performance ever, not even on lowest graphics settings.

 

Yeah, it's pretty bad right now. My frames dropped by half, and my wife pretty much lives in a 25fps finger painting.

[Zorngodofall]

So i've played since alpha 4, way way way back in the day and played this game on all sorts of different pc hardware setups. Alpha 17 seems about as hard to run as alpha 16 was, maybe a little less. With the FOV being what it is probably makes it looks like it runs better but overall I don't have issues. I actually turned the game up to 2560 x 1440 because it kept hitting about 100 fps. Primary base is or was near a lot of trees and it seemed fine. the transition to DX 11 seems to have done good things for the game.

 

Even during horde nights or in a city with a lot of zombies I'm not seeing the same kind of frame drops I saw in a16. No idea what's causing people to have such bad frame rates. It could just be old hardware in some peoples cases not running dx 11 properly but I know some peoples setups who play this game and they still have issues, so it's hard to pinpoint.

 

What probably happened was a17 now uses dx11 so it can utilize hardware a lot better, but the requirements to run the game have probably gone up significantly as well. That's the most likely case I can think of. Because I'm running the game on a ryzen 1600x and a 1080ti and it runs better than it did in a16. One thing to keep in note is that DX11 uses the CPU more efficiently so it's not as tied to single core performance as it once was; it still heavily is, but not by as much.

 

On a different note. The game is infuriating to play. I think i ended up with just about the best setup I could hope for. Multiple biomes in close proximity, a close trader, water source is really close, found mining spots early and got a decent amount of progression done in 21 in game days. Overall the gamestage is broken and the amount of loot we get, is also broken.

 

Day 21 with 96 gamestage or something stupid. I'm modding my xml file just because it's gotten so out of hand. I shouldn't spend more ammo than I get when i go looting a building, looking for ammo. Had to kill 3 irradiated wights and a cop just to get to the second floor of a book store. promptly ran out of ammo said "wtf?", alt f4'd and am promptly editing the game stage file to something not as insane. Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to. Loot isn't anywhere near as abundant as it needs to be. Various kinds of gun spam aren't good because of the trader limitation on buying things. Also the amount of zombies in POI's is insane. Not gonna spend 15 minutes clearing 50 zombies to get 2 schematics.

 

Basically, the balance between difficulty and having enough things to progress through the game hits a hard wall past level 50. That needs to not be a thing. Endgame zombies need to come into the game once you've actually reached endgame, not midgame, hell day 21 can be considered early game still. Honestly I can play it as it is as i've done all kinds of different worlds it just requires a different way of doing things.

 

Basically, after you tech up to electricity and have sufficient guns. Just stop looting and spend days inbetween horde nights farming bullets. I generally quit worlds when i get to that point because the games pretty over at that point, but I think the point being made here is obvious. We shouldn't have to spend a week grinding for a day 21 horde, not getting to explore, loot, scavenge and etc. The overall difficulty and progression wall is out of

hand and is in need of fixing.

 

EDIT: I'm not actually at day 21. I'm at 14 and running into irradiated wights in book stores. Progression is indeed broken.

 

 

I have a LOT of positive things to say about this game that i haven't been able to say in many alpha versions now, but it's so overshadowed by these things that just ruin the game that I feel like it's not even warranted to mention them until these issues are resolved.

[Jugginator]

Day 21 with 96 gamestage or something stupid. I'm modding my xml file just because it's gotten so out of hand. I shouldn't spend more ammo than I get when i go looting a building, looking for ammo. Had to kill 3 irradiated wights and a cop just to get to the second floor of a book store. promptly ran out of ammo said "wtf?", alt f4'd and am promptly editing the game stage file to something not as insane. Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to. Loot isn't anywhere near as abundant as it needs to be. Various kinds of gun spam aren't good because of the trader limitation on buying things. Also the amount of zombies in POI's is insane. Not gonna spend 15 minutes clearing 50 zombies to get 2 schematics.

 

.

 

I'll be honest there, I do think there's little difference from earlier gamestages and later ones. I prefer a challenge and am a tactician (been playing games like such for 20 years now lol), but not everyone enjoys it. My last dead is dead run I noticed the same difficulty spawn wise in POIs from gamestages 50-100 and the max I was at when I made a dumb move and died on day 58 with gamestage 230 or something. It definitely should be tuned a little, maybe less tuning the higher difficulty you go. I adopt a hit and run guerilla-warfare style approach to sudden feral/rad sleeper spawns, and it works, but I can see how not everyone wants to spend 3/4ths of an in-game day clearing one POI when they wanted a little easier difficulty. So, maybe tune it based on selected game difficulty?

[rubenjonathan]

I have to say I love the challenge. Got destroyed on day 7 by 6 or 7 cops I didn't expect so early on, but I liked it. Only thing I hope will be fixed is RWG. No towers makes it super boring for me. Also a bit too much burned forest for my taste. Hope that will be fixed asap. Overall I like alpha 17 and I think balancing has been done well. Love it so far.

[Zorngodofall]

I'll be honest there, I do think there's little difference from earlier gamestages and later ones. I prefer a challenge and am a tactician (been playing games like such for 20 years now lol), but not everyone enjoys it. My last dead is dead run I noticed the same difficulty spawn wise in POIs from gamestages 50-100 and the max I was at when I made a dumb move and died on day 58 with gamestage 230 or something. It definitely should be tuned a little, maybe less tuning the higher difficulty you go. I adopt a hit and run guerilla-warfare style approach to sudden feral/rad sleeper spawns, and it works, but I can see how not everyone wants to spend 3/4ths of an in-game day clearing one POI when they wanted a little easier difficulty. So, maybe tune it based on selected game difficulty?

 

Difficulty is fine. Absurd difficulty isn't if I wanted to play on insane I'd do that. But day 14 rad zombies doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the game. The idea is that you progress, build a bigger base, loot progress and etc. my suggestion is to tune the deaths more properly, they should have a significant impact on your current gamestage, because the game is designed to get more difficult the higher and faster you climb through the game. I shouldn't be at ammo farming vs rad hordes on day 14. that's more day 50ish from my experience if you're just playing the game.

 

I did a playthrough of an a16 world where I had 1k gamestage at day 7. Basically streamlined loot progression to get as far as possible in the shortest amount of time. That would've been a fun world to play on if i didn't mind dying a dozen more times that horde night.

 

the a17 world i'm working on is on warrior difficulty.

[warmer]

The pacing has changed significantly. Leveling seems like an actual achievement and your characters power increases substantially now as compared to in previous builds. There are also so many new POI that I often don't see any that I recognize from the previous build when entering a small town.

 

Overall I greatly enjoy the difficulty in combat coupled with the option for power strikes. It makes choosing how to approach situations a lot more meaningful. The way you engage a POI has significant consequences and I truly like that. There is no running in like a mad man anymore. Doing so nearly ensures you are going to die. You need to be careful about what you are doing. Much more true to the scenario if applied in real world terms.

 

However, like many people have already complained about, the death penalty is VERY heavy handed. Either tone down the severity, or lessen the time line you are affected by it. Once you die during horde night you are effectively done for the rest of the night and you are going to get ground to dust by morning. In solo play the penalty is way over powered because of this.

[OnionRings]

I would love to put my opinion in, but I cant play because of the bad frame rate. I wait patiently for you guys to get it running good, then ill happily play the ♥♥♥♥ out of it and give my honest opinion.

[gozer]

so, A17 ... game performance certainly went down the drain, the insane fps drops when indoors that is some serious nonsense

[Ghostlight]

Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to.

 

Gamestage = (player level + days alive) x difficulty multiplier

 

So deaths affect GS much more than they ever have.

 

Or maybe a better way to put it is that not dying increases GS faster than it used it.

 

As it is, once you are level 100, if you feel GS is too high, you can drastically lower it by performing a controlled suicide. GS drops considerably and the death penalty is irrelevant at that player level. Being able to eat glass is now very useful.

[ricp]

The more I play the more I enjoy that cupboards and searchable items show as open if empty. I remember having to go through each and every f*cking cupboard just to find one tin can and a bit of nitrate, and that has been pretty much the same since God knows when (I started playing 7DtD seriously about Alpha 8 and I think cupboards were the same mechanic then!).

 

Not needing to search each and every corpse (especially after horde night) then having to wait for them to break down to gore so you can remove them is also a really helpful thing.

[Ghostlight]

However, like many people have already complained about, the death penalty is VERY heavy handed. Either tone down the severity, or lessen the time line you are affected by it. Once you die during horde night you are effectively done for the rest of the night

 

While I agree this is bad design, it gets worse later on because you hit a point where the death penalty doesn't matter one bit. Bad design either way.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

The more I play the more I enjoy that cupboards and searchable items show as open if empty. I remember having to go through each and every f*cking cupboard.

 

Nitpick: You improved your character (through Scavenging skill) when searching empty cupboards.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Not needing to search each and every corpse (especially after horde night) then having to wait for them to break down to gore so you can remove them is also a really helpful thing.

 

Nitpick 2: You got Bones worst case scenario. Bones are good.

[ricp]

Nitpick 2: You got Bones worst case scenario. Bones are good.

 

Two things to that.

 

Yes, currently bones are a bit scarce - purely for the glue, which in itself is a little scarce - but in my later stage A17 playthroughs it's not been a big problem. There are gore block littered about the place for bones, you still get bones from the animals and in turn I find the garbage loots and other "low level" loot spawns to yield a lot more duct tape and glue than before.

 

So while I've not had any struggles to find bones/glue/duct tape, I accept maybe others play the game differently and all it takes for those to get a little help is to tweak the loot. Something that will probably happen all through the A17 builds.

 

Secondly, I'd take that trade off. Not having to axe through 40 bodies - which in turn have two issues; the delay of a dead zombie to go to a gore block, and the level of slowdown they were providing (and 7DtD has never been the fastest/smoothest of games) - only to find very little of value and a ton of bones. In fact so many bones they became an annoyance.

 

A bit of a long reply to very short comment, so apologies for that, but for me you are just nerfing an OP resource. Now granted there is a subtle shift of the gameplay - zombies have become more a menace than a (harvesting) benefit.

[ricp]

Nitpick: You improved your character (through Scavenging skill) when searching empty cupboards.

 

Now, you see, I have to agree a little here. If, like me, you've seen the evolution of 7DtD over the alphas you'd see a fairly decent set of incremental improvements. It all followed a certain predictability, and it was no worse off for that. Things that you expected to get better, did so. From weapons, AI, crafting, etc.

 

Character progression, through repetition, certainly seemed to be the way it was going to go. It's intuitive and I think it builds a good development curve for playthroughs. We did see some nerfing of that with the move from A15 > A16 which stops people from 'spam crafting'. For what it's worth I thought A16 got it pretty spot on in terms of it's mix between character progression, perks and schematics. It could have been tweaked, and to be fair a lot of mods did exactly that, but overall I didn't feel like it really needed much change going into A17.

 

A17 is a left turn, there's no arguing that. I have issues about the level gates, and would love to see at least a little movement back to the character progression model. I also have issues regarding weapons and their levels, I get the logic but a level 1 should be a weaker gun in everything not just durability than a level 6. I quite like the mods, could be tweaked but overall I think it offers up a lot of expansion there.

 

That said, the world itself (even with the caveat that it's still experimental), is pretty bloody nice. It's a laggy b*stard, but a lot prettier than A16. Both in visuals and in design, and especially the new PoIs. The world is probably the reason I play the game (and I play it in SP), if you go back to A16 it feels lacking, almost empty with little subtlety. It's just less of an enjoyable environment to play in. It's not bad - in relation - but in the A16 playthroughs I've started since A17's exp release I've just been left with the feeling "I'd rather be doing this in A17".

[Jan2607]

I chose "In General I love it". Before B208 I would've choosen "In General I Like it", but this build made some important improvements and I'm sure that the devs will work on the other issues as well.

Sure, I had to getting used of a lot of the changes first and in the first days I died a lot, but A17E changed a lot of things I didn't like in previous versions. It is a good framework for future updates I think.

[Z-Pooh-Bear]

I love almost everything. Skills, new textures, zombie combat, MODS for equipment especially.

 

 

 

What exactly is good about the zombie combat? The invincibility frames the zombies get? The always getting up twice? The many head-shots per zed until the skill tree magically makes them count? Maybe it's the horrible default melee animation?

[hristian991]

i do not find joy playing this game anymore

[OzHawkeye]

i do not find joy playing this game anymore

 

If you have any hope of having your feedback informing the Developers for future directions, you need to be specific about what you're not enjoying.

[ZehMatt]

I have very mixed feeling about this game for various reasons. Primarily the game runs pretty bad when it comes to multiplayer and I can't put my self out there playing this game more than once in SP, you get thru the Horde Night, you have a base, you have decent weapons and now what, game pretty much over unless you are actually going to loot every single box every game week.

 

I fell in love with the game concept the moment I heard about it but the game can't quite deliver it. It has the potential to become a truly stable game and perhaps in a much better quality but until then, here is my list of annoying issues:

1. Network replication is terrible.

2. Chunk loading is terrible.

3. Player animations are terrible.

4. Limited map size in a voxel world, ya I know memory size and all but thats not really an issue if you have level streaming and a better topology to determine what needs to exist and what not.

5. AI planning is terrible.

6. AI path finding is terrible.

7. Limited amount of enemies, yes they can be slightly stronger but they still look all the same.

8. No lag compensation, makes a huge difference if you can actually hit moving objects regardless of ping.

9. The update cycle is too slow, we only ever get new features and more features and barely any fixes, most fixes only make up for the new features but rarely pre-existing issues.

10. Performance issues. I have a powerful rig and I can't reach a constant 144hz at 1080p, even the latest Battlefield V gets more ;(

 

I could probably go on and on but I think the points are pretty obvious.

[Bacchae]

Horrible "update".

 

You've removed: flexibility and variety for ... grinding.

 

You kill zombies and improve your mining skill. Why doesn't my mining skill improve by ... mining ... the way it used to? Oh right .. grinding.

Why is the map so small? Oh right ... people travelling aren't grinding.

But textures are better right? Have you ever seen a deer look like that? I play Diablo 2 is it gorgeous? No, but it has awesome gameplay. Take the hint.

I honestly don't know what you did for the past year. The water where it meets land looks worse than Minecraft.

The solo gameplay is gone; you need a team to handle the grind.

Anyone who doesn't want to get whamped isn't going to have a good time. Wasn't that why difficulty sliders exist? So people can play according to their skill? Not any more. Stick it on the lowest level and you'll stick get vultures every few mins and cops on day 7.

 

You could have improved electricity and lighting. You could have added weapon/tool modifiers. Instead you turn this into some Rust-like grindfest.

 

 

>Snip By OzHawkeye - Keep it civil please< Your poll says 30% love it. Well those who dislike something generally aren't going to bother posting here, they'll be playing something else (Two Point Hospital in my case).

>Snip By OzHawkeye - Keep it civil please< Thanks for A16.4 I guess.

[stupid]

One thing I noticed about A17, I don't know if anyone else is the same, but I can't play for more than an hour at a time. It's a tedious game. You don't get much time to relax.