PC Now that You have played Alpha 19, What do you like or dislike?

[dowz0r]

I honestly think the new loot system is terrible. I'm trying to think from the perspective of a realistic and fun approach to how looting would look like in this post-apocalyptic world. It's pretty lame finding a military style ammunition crate that only gives you some @%$*#!ty spears or low level trash because you're only on game stage 5. This is immersion breaking in my opinion. I've noticed looting is almost linear and not random at all, you know what to expect, and it almost makes looting pointless because I'd rather save important crates or chests for looting in a different game stage because I'll just get another 5 spears. Of course you can still get useful materials such as duct tape, oil, etc. But in terms of getting weapons, tools, and items with levels, it's poorly thought out and doesn't have that randomness and excitement to it anymore. 

I know this would be complicated, but I think there needs to be a more realistic approach, for example looting regular homes should give you loot that you would realistically find in a home, so basic stuff with a small chance for weapons. The challenge to make it through a home POI should be easy since it's a place that maybe doesn't have a high yield. But if you decide to go to a military base, then you should expect a challenge and be rewarded no matter what stage. I know this sort of system would also have its issues due to players cheesing zombies or whatever at low levels and then getting epic gear, but I still think some sort of realistic and intuition based approach should be used, and not this game stage based looting. I do not like this new loot system, and prefer the previous style despite its flaws as well, but at least it still felt random and there was that feeling of excitement and not knowing what you were going to get. There is no excitement or mystery in this new system.

Sorry, not a very well thought through explanation, but I genuinely do not think this game stage looting is the proper approach. I feel like there should be that tiny chance of finding maybe a higher quality weapon during the early stages, but it should be impractical to use it in the early stages of the game. 

 

[Gazz]

At this moment we can't have it both ways.

We would like to have certain POI "work" at a higher gamestage so that a shotgun messiah factory would maybe have +100GS and you could find the cool loot in it.

But then you'd have to survive getting there.

At this time it would just be a freebie where the awesome loot is defended by GS 1 enemies. So nope.

 

[Matt 1977]

Love the stone age loot now. No complaints about anything so far. Thanks TFPs for another fantastic update.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

It´s a nice update. Slower progression was much needed and is appreciated. Tough i am going to stop playing once i saw all the new stuff. I feel like i am on console. Those on screen markers totally ruin the game.

And no modding is not the answer to everything. We don´t have a lot of time to do our MP and we don´t wanna spend it trying to get mods running on a dedi. We rather play something else.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

I somehow love the slowed down progress with weapons. I just wonder, from when on better weapons can be found? Is it after a specific day? Once you took some special skill? Reached a specific level?

I found blunderbuss and double barrel shotgun on day 2 and what i heard and have seen from others, it's the same there. But nobody found a simple 9mm pistol or a hunting rifle that early. Is this supposed to be like this?

I just wonder because obviously you can find the T2 shotgun early, but not any pistol or rifle, even not their T1 variant?

BTW: The skilltree is still broken. Each tree still ties one specific ranged weapon type to exactly one specific melee weapon type...

 

[dowz0r]

At this moment we can't have it both ways.

We would like to have certain POI "work" at a higher gamestage so that a shotgun messiah factory would maybe have +100GS and you could find the cool loot in it.

But then you'd have to survive getting there.

At this time it would just be a freebie where the awesome loot is defended by GS 1 enemies. So nope.

Fair enough. I still think there is a better way to approach the loot, but hopefully it'll be refined with time, I understand this is still alpha and this game is already super fun and addicting. Cheers

 

[Lemmers]

At this moment we can't have it both ways.

We would like to have certain POI "work" at a higher gamestage so that a shotgun messiah factory would maybe have +100GS and you could find the cool loot in it.

But then you'd have to survive getting there.

At this time it would just be a freebie where the awesome loot is defended by GS 1 enemies. So nope.

Yeah that sounds like a great idea. I think Madmole said on stream he wanted gamestage to change based on biome too. So the Tundra/Desert would have slightly better loot and tougher enemies, but it would give players a reason to go there and freeze/burn their butts off. The random gen "Safe Zone" forest in the middle of the map makes me think this idea is coming down the line.

 

[Skuriles]

I somehow love the slowed down progress with weapons. I just wonder, from when on better weapons can be found? Is it after a specific day? Once you took some special skill? Reached a specific level?

I found blunderbuss and double barrel shotgun on day 2 and what i heard and have seen from others, it's the same there. But nobody found a simple 9mm pistol or a hunting rifle that early. Is this supposed to be like this?

I just wonder because obviously you can find the T2 shotgun early, but not any pistol or rifle, even not their T1 variant?

BTW: The skilltree is still broken. Each tree still ties one specific ranged weapon type to exactly one specific melee weapon type...

The loot is based on your gamestage. It is a combination from skills, your level, time (but I think other can explain it more detailed) etc. You can see it in character menu if I'm not wrong.

You will still have little chance to get some better weapons but most of it will be basic grey/orange stuff like spears, clubs etc.

For me it is a great update so far. The most annoying thing was the really bad performance when resolution was higher than Full HD. Now I can play with my GTX1080 in UHD and it is very smooth so far.

I like the slower progression and the reduced loot. As long as you have a small chance to get good/epic weapons/armor in lower gamestages as well. Don't want to play a Zombie FPS, but a bad @%$*#!, burning club swinging, in full metal clothed former IT student how has been infected by a boar 5 minutes after starting a new game...(without the club and iron armor)

BTW: is it wanted that boars can infect you? Normally I would say they are not infected at all. 

But the little I have seen so far was great. Feels a little bit easier to play with melee weapons in early game stage on "adventurer". The Zs take fewer hits and they don't start getting furious by nearly 100%, but with lower chance now.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

The loot is based on your gamestage. It is a combination from skills, your level, time (but I think other can explain it more detailed) etc. You can see it in character menu if I'm not wrong.

You will still have little chance to get some better weapons but most of it will be basic grey/orange stuff like spears, clubs etc.

Ah, ok gamestage sounds reasonable. I assume there is some xml where i can look up what gamestages are needed for what "age"?

But the backdraw is, so i can now basically stop looting and just fight zombies to level up until my gamestage reaches the next level. As somebody wrote already here, i would waste time will not find anything better anyway, instead it's better to safe up the loot crates (especially the special ones) to open later when they can have spawned better things...

 

[RolandDT]

Really the only complaint I have is that on occasion my FPS will drop from a consistent 55-60 to around 20-25 for no reason. I totally get we're playing experimental but it is a little odd. I mean I have a GTX 1060 6gb, 16 gigs of RAM and an 8th gen i7 8750h processor so its not my setup. I'm sure it'll get optimized come the stable version, but that's about my only issue with 19 so far.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one experiencing this! My FPS will start out fine (locked at 60 FPS), but the longer I play sooner or later I will just hit a spike that dumps my FPS into the 20s or less, without warning, and will not go away without a restart (not really possible when hosting a MP game). I have an i7-9700k (OCed, but OC vs non-OC makes on difference), RTX 2070 (OC model, but not OCed currently - again, no difference in the FPS issue whether it's OC or not), 32 GB 3200MHz CL14 RAM, and running both an NVME SSD for the system and a standard SATA6 SSD for the game. This issue has persisted since at least 18.4, and possibly earlier. The only "fix" I've found is with the new dynamic resolution system. Enabling that allowed me to regain my full 60 FPS without having to restart. Being a MP game, I did not experiment further at the time.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

Ah, ok gamestage sounds reasonable. I assume there is some xml where i can look up what gamestages are needed for what "age"?

But the backdraw is, so i can now basically stop looting and just fight zombies to level up until my gamestage reaches the next level. As somebody wrote already here, i would waste time will not find anything better anyway, instead it's better to safe up the loot crates (especially the special ones) to open later when they can have spawned better things...

The stages for loot tiers are in the patch notes:

• Tech 0 (GS 1-11) – Primitive tools, weapons and armor including a bow and the blunderbuss.
  
• Tech 1 (GS 12) – Iron or similar melee items and armor and and the first proper firearms like a pistol or double barrel shotgun.
  
• Tech 2 (GS 50) – The best melee items, bows and armor and mid range firearms like a pump-action shotgun.
  
• Tech 3 (GS 91) – The most advanced firearms like an M60 or the Sniper Rifle.
  

I think one of the advantages of the new system is that it disincentivizes cheesing the loot rooms of the larger POIs in the first week since there's no point. You are better off just going through the quest progression and the smaller POIs.  If you want to min/max by not opening crates you can but that doesn't sound fun to me. I'd rather open the loot chests and start accumulating ammo, armor, and mods.  

 

[Liesel Weppen]

The stages for loot tiers are in the patch notes:

• Tech 0 (GS 1-11) – Primitive tools, weapons and armor including a bow and the blunderbuss.
  
• Tech 1 (GS 12) – Iron or similar melee items and armor and and the first proper firearms like a pistol or double barrel shotgun.
  
• Tech 2 (GS 50) – The best melee items, bows and armor and mid range firearms like a pump-action shotgun.
  
• Tech 3 (GS 91) – The most advanced firearms like an M60 or the Sniper Rifle.
  

Ok, obviously i've overseen it in the patchnotes then.

I'm still wondering why DBS seems to be far more common than a pistol, if both are available from GS12.

I think one of the advantages of the new system is that it disincentivizes cheesing the loot rooms of the larger POIs in the first week since there's no point. You are better off just going through the quest progression and the smaller POIs.  If you want to min/max by not opening crates you can but that doesn't sound fun to me. I'd rather open the loot chests and start accumulating ammo, armor, and mods.  

Imho the game shouldn't force a playstyle. And it's not the games task to protect idiots from their own stupidity. If they WANT to cheese into loot rooms, let them do so.

I do not want to min/max by stopping looting, i would stop looting because it becomes boring if i knew from the start there is not even a chance to find better equipment. Instead just fight some Zs until you reach the next "level" and then loot again. Maybe the meantime can be used to farm wood, stone, etc and build/advance your base.

I dunno what gamesstage i have in my current playthrough. From the list it should be something in between 12 and 50 because i already found a DBS (but iirc i found it day 2 (maybe day 3).... where i was for sure not at GS12 or higher...? Or did the gamestage calculation change with A19?).  But i guess its more near to 12, especially since i died 2 times lately (that may even have me dropped below 12 again?). So a lot to level before i'm even allowed to find better stuff....

So just being above 12, it would still be worth trying for finding a pistol... but as seen above, they seem not to be very findable with just GS12.

Further question: In multiplayer each players gamestage is applied if he loots a box, or is for all players the combined gamestage of the party applied? Either in multiplayer better items become findable much sooner or players may have very different loot drops... Both not very good.

 

[Merandor]

Loving A19. Congratulations to the FP team.

Graphics are great and the music has put the scare back into the game.

I play singleplayer, random world perma death. If I die I delete, generate a new world and start again. The maps so far have been pretty good. I would prefer bigger cities with more of the top tier POI's. I still havent seen most of them.

Traders on the edge of towns is also a good thing.

Unsure

The gated loot system I hated at first but it is quickly growing on me. You have to change your game style a little. The blunderbus is fun once you learn when to use it. I quested like a maniac to earn enough to buy a pistol so now feel pretty good. No AK47 or rifle for Fright Night is going to be a challenge though!

The Negatives

The damage buffs, deep cut and broken leg for 1.5 hours sucks badly. Early game there are no splints or medical kits and so wasting 1.5 real time hours is really bad. The traders should all stock those items so you can atleast keep playing.

I am finding food is a problem as the vending machines at the traders often have none and just the new buff items. (new buffs are good but we need food) It must just be luck but I have a LOT of beer (useful in real life, not so useful in the game) as every food pile just seems to give beer, not food.

Anyway, thats all so far. Well done on the update

 

[leaderdog]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one experiencing this! My FPS will start out fine (locked at 60 FPS), but the longer I play sooner or later I will just hit a spike that dumps my FPS into the 20s or less, without warning, and will not go away without a restart (not really possible when hosting a MP game). I have an i7-9700k (OCed, but OC vs non-OC makes on difference), RTX 2070 (OC model, but not OCed currently - again, no difference in the FPS issue whether it's OC or not), 32 GB 3200MHz CL14 RAM, and running both an NVME SSD for the system and a standard SATA6 SSD for the game. This issue has persisted since at least 18.4, and possibly earlier. The only "fix" I've found is with the new dynamic resolution system. Enabling that allowed me to regain my full 60 FPS without having to restart. Being a MP game, I did not experiment further at the time.

I experienced this yesterday when in the snow biome, it started to snow and my frames when looking outside went down to 13fps but when I spun around and looked inside they're were a solid 60fps.  I watched as the snow started to fall then a fog rolled over and then it got really stormy, at that point looking outside was fine again, back up to 60fps.   thankfully I wasn't in combat when something like that happened, it was unplayable.

ryzen 3700x

32gb Ram

gtx 1070

1080

playing ultra with bloom, occlusion, and motion blur off.

As for the stone age tools being found in locked tool stiffy boxes... this is possibly one of the worst ideas I've ever heard of.  I opened a box and saw 3 level 2 stone axes.  oh boi!  If you want to level/gamestage gate something like metal tools and weapons, make it so thoey don't drop but don't give me garbage I can make.  Give me metal frames, repair kits, lumber even is fine.  Something usable.  Right now it's just scrap stone no one wants.

And the constant stam drain I hated in alpha 18 is worse in 19.  I was stuck in the snow biome and did a bunch of looting and then when the environmental protection wore off it was way to cold to stay in.  Surprisingly no one in the snow areas had puffer coats or reasonable clothes... anyways, so I loaded up what I wanted to bring with me and headed into the forest following the road.  It was sooooooooo slow because of stam drain and encumbrance. I don't have any interest in making multiple slow trips so I made one really slow trip.  It's boring. this isn't what I want to do when I play a zombie game. 

I'll likely be making some modifications to the gamestage loot and stam or just wait for a mod.  I find this terrible as far as game play.

Having a "stone age" loot is just dumb for this game.  The reason you're looting containers is for something useful.  There is no way a store is selling stone axes, stone spears, or stone shovels.  Primitive bows, you could make an argument some stores sell them.

As for graphics and the changes.  Not excited about how the zombies look, the bright colors on their clothes make it look like they just turned, (which makes the stone age loot even less reasonable, but aside from that and the above there is many good changes in the game.

And THANK YOU!!! for fixing the melee combat!  It is sooo much better now than it was.  Much praise for that!

Oh, aslo, I did use khaine's 60 backpack to increase carry space.  There is so much loot and different foods and drinks.  To keep them in the tiny backpack we're given even with the 60 slot bag it fills up so fast.  This isn't enjoyable. I'm all for bag management.  I do enjoy that.  but the current system is terrible.  Subquake's weight based system is so much better.   that way a 10 stack and 6 stack of pills doesn't put you over the encumbrance mark.  But of course you can't carry a stack of 500 flagstone blocks either.  So there is give and take in that but it does make way more sense.

 

[Viktoriusiii]

Imho the game shouldn't force a playstyle. And it's not the games task to protect idiots from their own stupidity. If they WANT to cheese into loot rooms, let them do so.

I do not want to min/max by stopping looting, i would stop looting because it becomes boring if i knew from the start there is not even a chance to find better equipment. Instead just fight some Zs until you reach the next "level" and then loot again. Maybe the meantime can be used to farm wood, stone, etc and build/advance your base.

You got it the wrong way around.
A challenge is only a challenge, if there is no easy way out.
If there is, it makes the whole challenge meaningless.
This is the same discussion as safe bunkers, hordenight-exploits and all the other exploits people used to do that got fixed.
Sure you can get joy out of a challengless game.

But I have a pro tip: activate cheat-mode and press 'U' and you can have all the easy loot you desire.


As long as this game is a survival game, I expect survival beeing a challenge.
And beeing rewarded with weapons for doing the "frame up"->"frame down" move is not something anyone can call a challenge.

 

 

[leaderdog]

You got it the wrong way around.
A challenge is only a challenge, if there is no easy way out.
If there is, it makes the whole challenge meaningless.
This is the same discussion as safe bunkers, hordenight-exploits and all the other exploits people used to do that got fixed.
Sure you can get joy out of a challengless game.

But I have a pro tip: activate cheat-mode and press 'U' and you can have all the easy loot you desire.


As long as this game is a survival game, I expect survival beeing a challenge.
And beeing rewarded with weapons for doing the "frame up"->"frame down" move is not something anyone can call a challenge.

 

I agree with Liesel Weppen,

when you say got challenge, does that include turning off horde night in a zombie game where they advertised horde night as one of the important challenges. 

Build a good game, let people play it the way they like. 

Changing it so zombies could walk up the steep slope tiles was bad.  They should have just made it so the zombies attacked them like a regular block.  Watching them jump up the steep slopes just looks wrong (saw it on some of the streams when they tested it).

Making zombies walk fast in water and then able to swim... no

Digging zombies so underground bases aren't safe... terrible.

Zombies on the north side of a structure with no line of side to the back of the building shouldn't traverse around to the back to find the easiest way in.  (Hopefully they fixed that from the previous alphas).

A challenge in a zombie game would to have a world populated with zombies... or at least cities crawling with them.  But as it is, you see one lone zombie in the wild.... but with the terrible stamina drain I guess having a city of zombies to navigate would be literally impossible, at least from a melee/stealth point of view.

Modding in zombies in the wild doesn't work well apparently it's too much drain on the cpu.  The good old days the cities were crawling with zombies and respawning them fairly quickly to make it look like the city is infested.   I like to "claim" the town/city so the spawn locations should have 3-5 instant spawns and then have a week or so respawn to make it look like you're taking back a city.  Now there's a challenge I'd enjoy.  But walking slowly everywhere because of encumbrance or fast stamina drain isn't what I find challenging... at least not in an enjoyable way.

Those people can turn off horde night. Which is their choice to do so, so let the rest of the people play how they like.

 

[Jeraal]

-Not a fan of the stone age loot. What hardware store orders boxes of stone axes? I guess the military bases will have boxes of stone arrows? This means entire POIs will just get skipped.

-Don't care for the candies either. 

-The onscreen way point indicators just seem wrong.

-While the previous version may have seemed too washed out color wise, A19 seems to be too much in the other direction. I use ultra settings, would lower settings (which ones) make it look better?

-The new injury system can just f@%$ right off! Also, did infection percentage rate get increased? I got hit just after midnight day1/day2, and the percentage seemed to climb really fast. No stumps, no antibiotics at trader.

 

[Viktoriusiii]

[...]

Well... how would YOU have solved those issues?
Sure there might have been better ways, and I am surely nobody to be a TFPs lackey, but these issues had to be adressed someway or another.
The most important thing is for the challenge to stay viable. And as I said you can't have a viable challenge if there are exploits.
AFTER that you should be allowed to play however you like. But that doesn't mean every way should be just as valid. There is just no way to have everything be exactly the same. Things have benefits and weaknesses. Sneakbuild is awesome at clearing pois but bad at hordenight. Melee is ammo conserving but dangerous, M16 is a hordenight-zombie-shredder but uses more bullets than you could count.

But if the options are:
give up 10 seconds of your time to get the most awesome loot and be able to do that like 10 times per city
or
take 20 minutes clearing the poi to get the same

there is just no comparison. And with the stone age these exploity behaviours are reduced, ESPECIALLY in the earlygame where you can cheese this the most, having Q5 shotty and ak in Week 1.

 

[Laz Man]

...Changing it so zombies could walk up the steep slope tiles was bad.  They should have just made it so the zombies attacked them like a regular block.  Watching them jump up the steep slopes just looks wrong (saw it on some of the streams when they tested it)....

I disagree, if the player can do it relatively easy I think its a fair change.  You forgot to mention how the player was 100% safe on top of a platform surrounded by steep wedge blocks which is game breaking...

I guess they could have gone the other way instead, make both the player and zombies be unable to go up a steep slope... but at the end of the day its basically the same thing.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

I'm still wondering why DBS seems to be far more common than a pistol, if both are available from GS12.

...

Imho the game shouldn't force a playstyle.

Variance. I found two pistols (Q1) in toilets the first two days. I also recently just received a DB shotgun around Day 5-6. I don't know if finding the pistol in toilets is intentional. The game isn't forcing a playstyle it simply reduced the availability of better gear early game. You can play however you want. If you want to nerdpole to the top of the roof on Day 1 you can. It just won't be super rewarding. 

In terms of A19E, why not just play the game and see how it feels. Once it goes stable, you can always mod it to your heart's content. It seems pretty inevitable that someone will create a modlet to alter the loot balance.