just.dont
New member
First of all, A20 gives off much better first impressions than A19. RWG is finally back into action (last time it was usable in... what, A12 or something?), the game looks much better than it did before, and everything graphics-related runs extremely smoothly on ultra on my rig (compared to A19, where I *had* to massively reduce graphic settings just to avoid extreme FPS drops).
I also really like the general loot rarity changes (and other ways to get stuff, like farming) in A20 as well, even though there are rough edges - still, it's way better than A19 and a few of A's before that. No sudden "I've got T6 shotty on day 1 by pure luck", food has a possibility of running out now (which could pretty much never happen for quite a few versions before), some items are appropriately rare to provide meaningful blockers on the way to better equipment. The POI update is also pretty great (but again, not without rough edges).
However, there's a lot of changes particular to A20 that do raise an eyebrow.
1) Biome loot modifiers. They are so incredibly gamey that after just one try my immediate knee-jerk reaction was to mod them out to nearly nothing (compared to vanilla values). As it stands, instead of giving the incentive to move to harder biomes, they are way too good - and instead they provide all the incentives to "cheese" yourself into obtaining better loot as soon as it's humanly possible. Plus, binding biome loot modifier to the player (instead of POIs, for example) is especially appalling, as it allows much more abuses - for example, killing the bloodmoon horde at the edge of the wasteland to get much better content in their loot bags.
2) Further reduction in spawns. Come on, guys, this is going long enough to turn the game squarely into a "28 days later" game (even though default settings do not reflect that) - as it stands right now, spawn rate looks like it was tailored specifically to make Insane/Nightmare/Feral Sense starts doable. Well, what the hell everyone else is supposed to do? "Enjoy" whacking one, rarely two zombies at once in a pretty long while when outside of POIs? Trying to play with "always run" (not "sprint") zombies and feral sense reminded me of A12 or A13 at the release - where we had a single zombie constantly spawning somewhat close and homing onto you constantly (so you had to whack exactly one enemy every X seconds, like a clockwork). "Walk" speed zombies might as well not exist with the current spawn rate.
3) It seems that current design ideas for the sleeper zombies is clashing really badly with other systems. I'm basing it on the fact that POIs gravitate heavily towards "trap rooms" and zombie activations that might as well be "let's just spawn zombies out of thin air". It looks like the concept of taking sleepers down one by one with stealth isn't getting any warm feelings from TFP, so sleepers now mainly activate in ways that make stealth pointless. I'm not the one for stealth builds in a zombie game - but I'm the one for keeping suspension of disbelief in check, and currently the amount of zombies coming from places where you generally wouldn't expect a humanoid being to be is getting ridiculous. Can we keep the amount of zombies in vents / suspended ceiling panes / closets / etc at least proportional to amount of zombies outside of such obviously handcrafted traps?
4) Zombie loot bags have rather great content right now - great, except that it seems their spawn rate was adjusted to be "fine" with Pine Forest default zombie spawn rates. Move into a more dangerous area, and bags suddenly become way too common for their amount of loot, do a bloodmoon - and the problem gets ridiculous, you're spending stimulants and grenades to actually *obtain* vast amounts of ammo from bloodmoon! Do that in a wasteland, as per #1 point, and you might actually get back more grenades than you spent as well.
And then, there are issues that's with us for a while now, but nothing was done about them in A20:
1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.
2) Biomes. Current iteration is going long enough to be alarmed by it. For the current (ridiculously simple and extremely unbelievable) biome map - a lot of stuff currently hangs on biome type you're currently standing, and I'm very much not liking this. No, stepping 1m into the desert for a few minutes shouldn't immediately spawn a bunch of vultures all around and shouldn't get me a heatstroke. No, deserts shouldn't be bordering snow areas. No, stepping into the wasteland shouldn't make it like it's raining zombie bears immediately. This is both ridiculously-looking and prone to lots of abuses, especially with the loot stage modifiers we have right now.
3) Zombies still just pop into existence around you up until you kill enough to "drain" current chunk. I even remember the time (quite a long ago already) when it was first introduced, replacing zombies that clearly wander into you from somewhere much further away, and for all the outcry it was called "temporary". A couple of years later it's still there, there's still no concept of gradually clearing zombies, no wandering hordes (they're "popping in" hordes now), and no improvements over that very ground-level "let's spawn them around the player(s) constantly!" concept.
4) Loot abundance modifier. It never worked too well, but with the introduction of loot stage I think it works even worse. Setting anything below 100% causes you to encounter a ridiculous amount of empty containers early, especially those "piles of X" (food/medicine/ammo/etc) that are removed when looted; but a little bit later it "fixes itself" - does loot abundance modifier apply to loot stage and cause it to be set very low early?
I also really like the general loot rarity changes (and other ways to get stuff, like farming) in A20 as well, even though there are rough edges - still, it's way better than A19 and a few of A's before that. No sudden "I've got T6 shotty on day 1 by pure luck", food has a possibility of running out now (which could pretty much never happen for quite a few versions before), some items are appropriately rare to provide meaningful blockers on the way to better equipment. The POI update is also pretty great (but again, not without rough edges).
However, there's a lot of changes particular to A20 that do raise an eyebrow.
1) Biome loot modifiers. They are so incredibly gamey that after just one try my immediate knee-jerk reaction was to mod them out to nearly nothing (compared to vanilla values). As it stands, instead of giving the incentive to move to harder biomes, they are way too good - and instead they provide all the incentives to "cheese" yourself into obtaining better loot as soon as it's humanly possible. Plus, binding biome loot modifier to the player (instead of POIs, for example) is especially appalling, as it allows much more abuses - for example, killing the bloodmoon horde at the edge of the wasteland to get much better content in their loot bags.
2) Further reduction in spawns. Come on, guys, this is going long enough to turn the game squarely into a "28 days later" game (even though default settings do not reflect that) - as it stands right now, spawn rate looks like it was tailored specifically to make Insane/Nightmare/Feral Sense starts doable. Well, what the hell everyone else is supposed to do? "Enjoy" whacking one, rarely two zombies at once in a pretty long while when outside of POIs? Trying to play with "always run" (not "sprint") zombies and feral sense reminded me of A12 or A13 at the release - where we had a single zombie constantly spawning somewhat close and homing onto you constantly (so you had to whack exactly one enemy every X seconds, like a clockwork). "Walk" speed zombies might as well not exist with the current spawn rate.
3) It seems that current design ideas for the sleeper zombies is clashing really badly with other systems. I'm basing it on the fact that POIs gravitate heavily towards "trap rooms" and zombie activations that might as well be "let's just spawn zombies out of thin air". It looks like the concept of taking sleepers down one by one with stealth isn't getting any warm feelings from TFP, so sleepers now mainly activate in ways that make stealth pointless. I'm not the one for stealth builds in a zombie game - but I'm the one for keeping suspension of disbelief in check, and currently the amount of zombies coming from places where you generally wouldn't expect a humanoid being to be is getting ridiculous. Can we keep the amount of zombies in vents / suspended ceiling panes / closets / etc at least proportional to amount of zombies outside of such obviously handcrafted traps?
4) Zombie loot bags have rather great content right now - great, except that it seems their spawn rate was adjusted to be "fine" with Pine Forest default zombie spawn rates. Move into a more dangerous area, and bags suddenly become way too common for their amount of loot, do a bloodmoon - and the problem gets ridiculous, you're spending stimulants and grenades to actually *obtain* vast amounts of ammo from bloodmoon! Do that in a wasteland, as per #1 point, and you might actually get back more grenades than you spent as well.
And then, there are issues that's with us for a while now, but nothing was done about them in A20:
1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.
2) Biomes. Current iteration is going long enough to be alarmed by it. For the current (ridiculously simple and extremely unbelievable) biome map - a lot of stuff currently hangs on biome type you're currently standing, and I'm very much not liking this. No, stepping 1m into the desert for a few minutes shouldn't immediately spawn a bunch of vultures all around and shouldn't get me a heatstroke. No, deserts shouldn't be bordering snow areas. No, stepping into the wasteland shouldn't make it like it's raining zombie bears immediately. This is both ridiculously-looking and prone to lots of abuses, especially with the loot stage modifiers we have right now.
3) Zombies still just pop into existence around you up until you kill enough to "drain" current chunk. I even remember the time (quite a long ago already) when it was first introduced, replacing zombies that clearly wander into you from somewhere much further away, and for all the outcry it was called "temporary". A couple of years later it's still there, there's still no concept of gradually clearing zombies, no wandering hordes (they're "popping in" hordes now), and no improvements over that very ground-level "let's spawn them around the player(s) constantly!" concept.
4) Loot abundance modifier. It never worked too well, but with the introduction of loot stage I think it works even worse. Setting anything below 100% causes you to encounter a ridiculous amount of empty containers early, especially those "piles of X" (food/medicine/ammo/etc) that are removed when looted; but a little bit later it "fixes itself" - does loot abundance modifier apply to loot stage and cause it to be set very low early?
