PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
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I love how people selectively choose when realism rules apply. Its quite humorous. Since anyone can use it whenever they wish to state their point is correct, and then go and turn around and say it would not work because its just a game.
Like you get mad because zombies are supposed to be dumb and its just not realistic they would know where you are, then we can say the idea of farming being safe would not work because MUH REALISM.

I was just trying to throw people a bone in this debate. Personally i love the way it is now. And farming is STILL too easy. Prove me wrong.
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You can't farm farm boxes any more in the next patch, so I think its pretty rewarding getting a small farm up.

Realism is great unless it interferes with fun, then we use abstracts to achieve our goals.

 
Not really. The fact that multiple people can take on those POIs. Iآ’m not saying your point isnآ’t valid. Iآ’m sure it is... in MP.
You say youآ’ve played SP, but you are also playing enough MP to make these observations. There hasnآ’t been enough time for you to make conclusions about the ammo loot in SP.
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I normally play MP, pretty much exclusively. However, I haven't set up a server yet. We've just been playing it here and there on SP seeing how it goes before we spend the time getting a server going. In A17, we immediately set up a server like we normally have done, but found we all burned out on it really quickly. So, this time we are just kinda waiting it out and seeing how we like it before we do that.

In SP, ammo (and just about everything) is a cascading event (at least for me) - to where if you strategize how you use the ammo - you will almost always come out with a net-gain. Every moment in the game your stronger than you were the moment before. Always been that way..Be hard to make an enjoyable game to where it wasn't like that. But, this curve is too aggressive. I want the game to last longer before I am at a point to where I just use guns all the time. The primitive stage of the game has been deducted from more and more over the last few alphas. I tend to be in mid-game very early, there's not much of a period where i'm fighting for my life with sticks and arrows other than just the first few moments when I first start a new map. It all goes downhill pretty quick.

You asked about horde night - well, I just tend to stick to one ammo type for looting and another type for horde night. I'll just typically use small caliber for looting with maybe a shotgun for backup - and stockpile all the large caliber ammo and avoid using it until horde night..This is in addition to making any supplemental ammo at night to give me something to do. Though, looting at night inside of a POI is not really any harder than during the day (especially once your GS starts getting high, at that point any challenge between daytime and nighttime becomes virtually indistinguishable) . So you might as well just go into a large POI at night and loot to get even more stuff to sell and shoot with. The shotgun I might use for both situations as a quick backup - but I tend to separate the primary ammo types for each use type so that I always have a positive cache for horde night.

The default difficulty was lowered by one - so zombies die a bit faster than they normally have. Which also reduces overall ammo expenditure. For testing exp, all I did was bump it up one notch above the default - which is the old default. And, it could be said - well just keep raising the difficulty until you start struggling with ammo - but that's not fun - that's tedious..the only reason you would struggle with ammo is just because you're standing there shooting the same zombie in the head over and over when the difficulty is maxed. It's just tedious.

I am hanging on to the hope that when bandits are finally introduced it will create a new layer of depth and challenge that will make you WANT to be so OP so early on. Similar to in TWD to where as the apocalyptic world went on - the zombies took a backseat as far as danger in the world and it was the living you had to worry about. I hope it will be much more fun and justifying to have so much ammo and gear when other things are shooting at you.

 
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what difficulty etc? idk ive have bad rng my 2 maps. I buy the forge perk what happens? i find the schematic.
See you also go into a poi for horde night or whatever. i say ♥♥♥♥ it and run around like a lil piggy:P
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1 above default, so 3. Yeh I really really suck at meleeing multiple running zeds so I usually end up on a roof somewhere. =) Loving the book drops, but they seem to be plentiful too... there's a lot of points I don't need to spend sitting on shelves, which I agree with to an extent, but not this much.

 
I normally play MP, pretty much exclusively. However, I haven't set up a server yet. We've just been playing it here and there on SP seeing how it goes before we spend the time getting a server going. In A17, we immediately set up a server like we normally have done, but found we all burned out on it really quickly. So, this time we are just kinda waiting it out and seeing how we like it before we do that.
In SP, ammo (and just about everything) is a cascading event (at least for me) - to where if you strategize how you use the ammo - you will almost always come out with a net-gain. Every moment in the game your stronger than you were the moment before. Always been that way..Be hard to make an enjoyable game to where it wasn't like that. But, this curve is too aggressive. I want the game to last longer before I am at a point to where I just use guns all the time. The primitive stage of the game has been deducted from more and more over the last few alphas. I tend to be in mid-game very early, there's not much of a period where i'm fighting for my life with sticks and arrows other than just the first few moments when I first start a new map. It all goes downhill pretty quick.

You asked about horde night - well, I just tend to stick to one ammo type for looting and another type for horde night. I'll just typically use small caliber for looting with maybe a shotgun for backup - and stockpile all the large caliber ammo and avoid using it until horde night..This is in addition to making any supplemental ammo at night to give me something to do. Though, looting at night inside of a POI is not really any harder than during the day (especially once your GS starts getting high, at that point any challenge between daytime and nighttime becomes virtually indistinguishable) . So you might as well just go into a large POI at night and loot to get even more stuff to sell and shoot with. The shotgun I might use for both situations as a quick backup - but I tend to separate the primary ammo types for each use type so that I always have a positive cache for horde night.

The default difficulty was lowered by one - so zombies die a bit faster than they normally have. Which also reduces overall ammo expenditure. For testing exp, all I did was bump it up one notch above the default - which is the old default. And, it could be said - well just keep raising the difficulty until you start struggling with ammo - but that's not fun - that's tedious..the only reason you would struggle with ammo is just because you're standing there shooting the same zombie in the head over and over when the difficulty is maxed. It's just tedious.

I am hanging on to the hope that when bandits are finally introduced it will create a new layer of depth and challenge that will make you WANT to be so OP so early on. Similar to in TWD to where as the apocalyptic world went on - the zombies took a backseat as far as danger in the world and it was the living you had to worry about. I hope it will be much more fun and justifying to have so much ammo and gear when other things are shooting at you.
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Are you fighting irradiated zombies and ferals? I wonder if you will feel the same way once you hit a higher gamestage. If you do, fair enough but I can't imagine too many people are at a high gamestage so hard to judge if ammo is too plentiful or too scarce yet I think.

 
Not really. The fact that multiple people can take on those POIs. I’m not saying your point isn’t valid. I’m sure it is... in MP.
You say you’ve played SP, but you are also playing enough MP to make these observations. There hasn’t been enough time for you to make conclusions about the ammo loot in SP.
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That would be a false assumption. =) With regards to the last patch, true, but that didn't change any of the observations I'm making.

 
Are you fighting irradiated zombies and ferals? I wonder if you will feel the same way once you hit a higher gamestage. If you do, fair enough but I can't imagine too many people are at a high gamestage so hard to judge if ammo is too plentiful or too scarce yet I think.
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If we've thousands of rounds and concrete before we see glowies, are glowies even going to be an issue? Sure, the first day is tough, but that can be attributed to a18 learning curve (i.e. bows/arrows are useless, and clubs hit distance is well within zombie reach distance), but you find items pretty quickly to bring you to mid-game well before you face mid-game threats. I think that's the overall point. I've zero interest in playing a threatless mid-game for real time hours and hours just to get to late game to even find out the answer to your question, but I suspect the answer is "I'll feel the same way".

- - - Updated - - -

Bottom line are that all of these are balance issues and of course due to the streamlining to cater to newbies. A18 is a solid, solid alpha in terms of performance (for me, sorry guys!), quality (looks and sounds great) and mod-ability (for the most part, but I know it's going to come full circle). It's 10x better than a17 and is what a17 should have been.

 
1 above default, so 3. Yeh I really really suck at meleeing multiple running zeds so I usually end up on a roof somewhere. =) Loving the book drops, but they seem to be plentiful too... there's a lot of points I don't need to spend sitting on shelves, which I agree with to an extent, but not this much.
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Agreed, i love the book abundance, but holy they are not rare drops. the only rarity is the fact tat i keep getting dups of them and not the ones i need XD

 
That has been my experience as well. It was like that in A17 for me too, and I QUICKLY burned out on it because of it. This particular part of the game is even worse than A17 was, imo. There's just so much loot without any risk. The game is virtually over in just a few game-days. There is almost always a net-gain in ammo after shooting and looting your way through a POI. No sense in stealth..it takes more time..and it's not necessary when you can just blast through it quickly. The towns are empty, so there's little threat at all in the town - you can strip all the cars, loot everything laying around town in a couple game days and maybe encounter a dozen zombies over the course of those two days. There's very little risk, but an overabundance of reward. There's so much ammo now that the game is essentially a zombie shooter more than anything else. There's much less things you need to actually craft and the things you actually need once you're established - are junk items like glue, brass, etc which you can just get in abundance outside in any trash pile.
For me anyway, Food poisoning is just a non-issue due to all the magic vending machines. Just sell all the loot, and buy the clean food. Hunting, Farming, etc is really just a role-play thing - you don't NEED to do any of those things.
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This!

 
If we've thousands of rounds and concrete before we see glowies, are glowies even going to be an issue? Sure, the first day is tough, but that can be attributed to a18 learning curve (i.e. bows/arrows are useless, and clubs hit distance is well within zombie reach distance), but you find items pretty quickly to bring you to mid-game well before you face mid-game threats. I think that's the overall point. I've zero interest in playing a threatless mid-game for real time hours and hours just to get to late game to even find out the answer to your question, but I suspect the answer is "I'll feel the same way".
- - - Updated - - -

Bottom line are that all of these are balance issues and of course due to the streamlining to cater to newbies. A18 is a solid, solid alpha in terms of performance (for me, sorry guys!), quality (looks and sounds great) and mod-ability (for the most part, but I know it's going to come full circle). It's 10x better than a17 and is what a17 should have been.
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fav mod = 50% more in tank for auger/chainsaw. got a lvl 1 chain saw with a 345 tank day 3 and shop had that mod for 350.

Best.Investment.Ever

 
Okay, so are we finally past the "wow and wonderment look at a18 and how pretty it is" stage to talk about some glaring issues?
...it's boring.

Sorry MM, I know you think you're great at this game, but the fact remains that as long as you dumb down the game to meet your skill level because you think xyz is too hard, you're ostracizing the rest of us.

Threats are few and far between, going into poi's is even a yawn fest, blood moons end at midnight and there is no depth.

Yes it's prettier, the sun is brighter, the sky is darker, the weapons are shinier, blah blah blah, but the game itself, although MUCH more polished than previous versions (lots of placeholders replaced), it ends at about day 28.

I predict:

I will be shut down quickly because I'm probably posting this prematurely, and all of the people who eagerly awaited a18 will still be fawning over it, but in a month or so others will share my sentiment
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Lets see what you think at level 80. Turn up the difficulty if you think its too easy. "The rest of us". I'm so sick of single guys trying to add weight to their post using we or us. So you are 10-20% through the journey IMO and making rash decisions. This is a 100-200 hour game now not 28 hours. You have barely scratched the surface.

 
Seeing legendary zombie bosses in the f6 spawner, are these in the game yet and finished? Haven't spawned one in my game cause i did not want a behemoth with no hit box running around the server again lol but gonna make a new game and do some testing but figured i would ask first.

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Release the update kraken!

 
I'm playing on pregen01.
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Me too, and I love it so far. Does not feel like an RWG. I usually stick to Nav because it always felt so much better than RWG ever did, mainly due to geographic features like the mountians, canyons, etc... until this alpha. These pregens, and RWG in general, are distinctly improved in the right ways, mainly the landscaping. Doesn't feel generic like it used to, I am really digging it.

Took over that A-Frame by Trader Jens in the forest, is a great location, and is making for a really fun POI base-flip. Built my BM tower nearby in field between it and the trader, connected via tunnel. Overall it's working out great so far. The thing I like most about RWG is how you can find certain POIs in the forest biome this way, where-as many of the ones I liked were in other biomes. So I'm super glad you guys have upped the RWG quality now, really ups the overall replay value.

 
Dude Guppy, you need to move on to a new game then, don't you feel like your wasting time/essence into raging about a game? Sure you can fanboy post and have rage posts, but to "Us". "We" feel that "We" want youto move on.

"The community" as spoken for "us"

At this point, seems like your just trolling or need a new hobby...

 
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Thanks. I appreciate the time you took for all this information, but that information is useless for me as I have played this game solo for enough years.

What about the information I was looking for?

I am hoping to see settings (number of hordes, number alive, day length, difficulty, loot chance), day #, gamestage, and how much ammo you have in storage at the moment.

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That would be a false assumption. =) With regards to the last patch, true, but that didn't change any of the observations I'm making.
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That's not the point I'm making. The point I am making is that with the amount of time you have been spending in MP this alpha, it is not humanly possible to put enough time in SP to be able to draw a valid conclusion that there is too much ammo loot.

 
Lets see what you think at level 80. Turn up the difficulty if you think its too easy. "The rest of us". I'm so sick of single guys trying to add weight to their post using we or us. So you are 10-20% through the journey IMO and making rash decisions. This is a 100-200 hour game now not 28 hours. You have barely scratched the surface.
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I can kill a horde with shiv. And I find a18 to be perfect (playing always warrior level). It is rewarding and fun and not easy. This game was a polarizing bunch of clunky systems mixed with some good mechanics. Now It's the opposite. I feel I can play it past day 28. That's huge. If you can make this game function perfectly without bandit/campaign content, steam library will have only 1 game for me when those are in.

 
One of the perk book allows me to craft AP arrows but I cannot find any AP arrow or armor piercing arrows in the craft menu. Is it a bug or is the book wrong or am I missing something?

 
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