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Thoughts on the balancing and changes in b221


InSanity

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Just got a hold of the new build and have already put almost 3 hours into, so haven't got too far but I just wanted to give some initial feedback on the build as a whole.

 

XP rebalancing-I enjoy killing Zs as much as the next guy but I also don't mind farming and love building cool bases and so far it definitely seems a bit more balanced but I'll find out just how much once I really get into farming and building a little later on.

 

Melee retuning/Ranged retuning-I've been a big proponent of making firearms actually useful as in the last build I could easily get away with using 90% melee and then a little bow/panic shotgun or something but so far I am absolutely loving using the bow as you can definitely tell the difference when killing Zs(especially sleepers with the stealth attack perk) and animals(which seem to spawn far more frequently i've noticed?). I also agree with the changes to the power attack and primary attack as I've had no problem killing Zs without the power attack since it's been buffed as it allows for much longer fights if necessary I've yet to do too much mining/farming but it doesn't seem as if it's changed too much either way so far.

 

Trader/Economy Rebalancing-The fact that firearms are now not so useless and now do not sell for very much is something I'm okay with and I really enjoy that now both the trader and vending machines sell all the different foods and drinks and I love that the trader sells mods and general building materials and such. The rework to the economy seems to take care of exploiting the trader for large amount of dukes while also adding new dynamics to him with the mods and materials so I enjoy that for sure.

 

New Quests/Buildings-Already had a fetch quest in one of the new cabins and even though it's just for the sake of variety I really did like it and it's a simple change but overall I think it adds a little something extra which is nice.

 

Leveling/Gamestage-As I've mostly been looting and killing Zs and the xp for that has been reduced I have been leveling a little slower but overall feels pretty similar to before and I can definitely say the game (so far) seems better as far as special Zs, ferals, and gamestage as before I could get ferals in a quest/normal poi on day 2 and it just went up from there but I'm already a few days in and I've seen far less of things of that nature so I'm enjoying that much more than previous builds.

 

Performace?-Didn't see too much in the patch notes in way of performance updates but at least to me it seems a decent bit better as I"m running on 1600x900 res on all high settings with everything turned on getting 90-100+ fps outside and 70-80 fps inside.

 

Just wanted to give my 2 cents and would like to hear from the rest of you once you play a little and get a feel for the new changes but overall seems great to me so good job and thanks for the hard work TFP.

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My Steam is updating the game as we speak so haven't had a chance to look yet, but have they added the FOV slider back and fixed that horrible stutter when you strafe around objects?

 

I do not see the fov slider and I have not really encountered that so I could not tell you.

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I'm excited to try out the new run settings - making a new map now. I've got it set to:

 

Game Difficulty: 4 (Survivalist)

ZombieMove: 1 (Jog)

ZombieMoveNight : 2 (Run)

ZombieFeralMove: 3 (Sprint)

ZombieBMMove: 4 (Nightmare)

 

I'm also happy with this relatively minor change I noticed:

 

Bicycles and wheels no longer need a workbench to craft

 

Previously there was no point in getting a Bicycle because by the time I could actually craft it - I was already ready to make a Mini-Bike. This will make them useful for a while and you'll be able to get them earlier.

 

 

 

I'll be interested in checking out the new trader economy as well. It definitely needed some tweaks. I would love a more unique economy system in the future though. One that fluctuates and possibly even uses the seed to give unique value to some items and not others. I'd love to see a demand system where demand of certain items might go up as you near blood moon for example.

 

Performance:

 

Before doing the wipe and Just to test performance - I just loaded up an existing world where I'd have the same conditions as i've observed many times. I didn't notice any difference in performance whatsoever - not a single percentage change. The new reflection settings don't cause any increase in GPU usage no matter which ones I use. There's no real way to disable reflections anymore. Though using "Low" is probably better than "Off" visually due to the way the lighting works. But even with the setting set to the new "Ultra+" it made zero difference in performance.

 

The biggest culprit i've seen to performance since A17 has began is some of the textures. Cobblestone and Flagstone for example - whatever shaders is being used on them or whatever - is more GPU stressful than concrete. So upgrading a base to concrete from cobblestone gives you a performance boost. :p - But yeah anything with a lot of reflections or PBR or whatever they are using now on them as well will cause a pretty good hit too. Inside of POIs with a lot of the PBR textures and you can see a huge bump in GPU usage.

 

Anyway, I couldn't tell any difference. I just put reflections on "Middle" just for the sake of it.

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Im at work and cant play, is a new game recommended, or nothing was changed that would need a reset?

 

Probably. When I had just tried out my existing world - I had hundreds of trees that I couldn't chop down. A couple of them were in my base. I also noticed quite a few errors in the output log about some of the blocks. It was playable but who knows what else would go wrong.

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Im at work and cant play, is a new game recommended, or nothing was changed that would need a reset?

 

They added several new POIs and reworked some existing ones to be able to support trader quests and the like, so as usual a restart is highly recommended to get the full experience.

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120 minute days, Nomad:

 

Day 1

I found a bear, two wolves and a doe on four separate occasions. I avoided all but doe.

 

The trader was 1.6 km and that's where most of the fighting took place, on my journey.

 

Combat: Sometimes slower. I start out with one power attack to the head, then normal attacks if only one normal, else all normal attacks.

 

Its night and I'm at level 4, only went in to this POI.

 

 

So far, so good!

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120 minute days, Nomad:

 

Day 1

I found a bear, two wolves and a doe on four separate occasions. I avoided all but doe.

 

The trader was 1.6 km and that's where most of the fighting took place, on my journey.

 

Combat: Sometimes slower. I start out with one power attack to the head, then normal attacks if only one normal, else all normal attacks.

 

Its night and I'm at level 4, only went in to this POI.

 

 

So far, so good!

 

As I said originally, I've been loving using the bow and I was lucky enough to find an orange compound bow on day 1 so I usually do an arrow to the head and then either another arrow or finish with melee depending on the situation. Current game is at day 3 on nomad with 90 minute days and I think I've found around 4 or 5 boars, 2 doe, and a stag, along with a pack of 4 or 5 wolves on day 2. I've gone into a few POIs but mostly been wandering around and at the end of day 2 I was level 8 which seemed somewhat slower than b208 but should balance out once I start farming and base building for the first horde with the new changes to passive xp.

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As I said originally, I've been loving using the bow and I was lucky enough to find an orange compound bow on day 1 so I usually do an arrow to the head and then either another arrow or finish with melee depending on the situation. Current game is at day 3 on nomad with 90 minute days and I think I've found around 4 or 5 boars, 2 doe, and a stag, along with a pack of 4 or 5 wolves on day 2. I've gone into a few POIs but mostly been wandering around and at the end of day 2 I was level 8 which seemed somewhat slower than b208 but should balance out once I start farming and base building for the first horde with the new changes to passive xp.

 

I'll have to try the bow again. Does it feel like there are fewer bird nests to you?

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I'll have to try the bow again. Does it feel like there are fewer bird nests to you?

 

Possibly but that could just be my luck. I'm very happy with the ranged rebalancing because I used to always run with a crossy as my main weapon and that didn't seem as viable recently but now it feels good to use and will only get better with more perks/mods. In addition to that I think guns are finally getting more towards where I believe they should be, as a (typically) rare mid/endgame item that is not used everyday but saved for special occasions like looting dangerous POIs and horde nights. It still has some tuning and has changes to be made but I think it's already an improvement on b208 where you could amass a small armory of weapons and ammo by day 2 and then just sell them to the trader for thousands of dukes because they were pretty worthless to use in the first place

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"Reduced wandering horde counts"?

 

Seriously? I was hoping they'd massively increase the size and frequency of wandering hordes. Especially after early game when you can go an entire day mining and nothing happens. This change is terrible. Game needs a TON more zombies (outside POIs ofc).

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I saw nothing about increase in bones or glue loot or change in recipies :distrust:

 

also those crappy cabins have replaced a lots of trader in random gen boohhh

 

There seems to be a lot more animals wandering around the world so by day 3 I already have 50+ bones, a couple, glue, and like 10+ duct tape.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

"Reduced wandering horde counts"?

 

Seriously? I was hoping they'd massively increase the size and frequency of wandering hordes. Especially after early game when you can go an entire day mining and nothing happens. This change is terrible. Game needs a TON more zombies (outside POIs ofc).

 

You can up the difficulty/run settings/mod the xmls for more zombies.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

They reduced zombie kill XP but didn't increase any other XP gains as far as I can see.

 

Gets popcorn....

 

They increased the "passive" xp and reduced the zombie kill xp by 27% to encourage a broader range of playstyles versus just kill zombies and level up.

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"Reduced wandering horde counts"?

 

Seriously? I was hoping they'd massively increase the size and frequency of wandering hordes. Especially after early game when you can go an entire day mining and nothing happens. This change is terrible. Game needs a TON more zombies (outside POIs ofc).

 

Meh...roaming hordes don't work properly anymore anyway. They just conjugate about 80 meters away from you and just stand there. I have always just increased the zombie counts in the spawning.xml as well as greatly reduce their respawn delay and that gives plenty of zeds. You could go overboard if you wanted and have as many as your CPU can handle. We've had them set to 255 alive on our screen at once before and they were everywhere.

 

I've been playing Navezgane and we have the wasteland set to where zombies never clear and all the boss zombies are there like they used to be in A9\A10 - if you go there it's just infinite wave after wave of hundreds of them on the screen.

 

It's not a big deal because it's just so easy to fix.

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Meh...roaming hordes don't work properly anymore anyway.

 

yesterday (b208), a very big roaming horde came in my direction. I tried to attack them from behind, so I went around a nearby building, to appear at their backs. When I appeared from behind the building, the horde wasnt there anymore...

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Day four and I think 24? duct tape just from containers, lots of bones from Dog pack on day 3 (6 of em), Dire Wolf on day 2, and Dire Wolf on day 4 lol, Every wolf I have seen has been a Dire Wolf starting out. Its been good, zombie kill xp is better now, it was just stupid high before. I think they said they are still going to increase passive gains more if they havent done it already, idk, havent noticed. Melee and Ranged combat both seem better, Kinda cool giving the Z's the ole 1,2 combo with normal attack then power attack when they stagger.

 

Overall seems good, its an improvement so far.

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After playing for a bit -- The speeds aren't as fast as I thought they were going to be. I assumed Jog would be somewhere in the middle between their normal walk and their normal run. But that's not the case. They are just ever-so-slightly faster than the normal walk. It seems to apply some sort of multiplier to it because the faster ones like the stripper are much more noticeably quicker than before but the slower ones like the hawaiin guy don't move all that much different. I still think the Jog setting is good enough for a compromise between walk and run. Just wish they were a tiny bit faster.

 

I bumped all the other ones up to Nightmare though.

 

Survivalist

Day: Jog

Night: Nightmare

Ferals: Nightmare

BloodMoon: Nightmare

 

I'll try it like that for awhile and see how it goes.

 

 

Also bumped into a zombie bear on my first few hours of life in the burnt biome. Popped over a hill and there he was. Luckily he didn't aggro me.

 

I'm finding lots of glue and tape. So it looks like we will have less of a bone grind.

 

The tier 5 perks are still just as ridiculously OP as before. So there's that to look forward to. :(

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