PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

Quoting this because every time this is brought up, there is never an answer, only crickets.I have always felt that the bad parts of LBD were the results of how they were implemented in the past in this game, and not inherent of the concept itself.

Melee and ranged combat are the easy ones. What about heavy armor, crafting, disease resistance, metabolism, cooking, bandaging, etc etc etc. There are too many activities that lead to a spam to win scenario. Don't you see it already? "How do I raise my heavy armor skill?" "You die 5000 times with heavy armor on, or go teabag a cacti." The current system isn't broke, its just not balanced yet. Have some patience we'll get there. I can go on with 1000 stupid spam to win or counter intuitive solutions on LBD skills systems. Get sick to raise fortitude. Get hit to raise armor skills, run, jump, fall to raise athletics. Starve to raise slow metabolism skill? What if you just can't find enough ammo to raise your favorite gun skill due to bad luck, or bad aim prevents you from raising your gun skills? That player can never gain enough skill to buy enough perks to actually get specialized and good.

At the end of the day you guys haven't sat around and thought about all the flaws with LBD like we have. Its a casual thought and emotional impulse to you guys. It was mostly a placebo effect in A16 to be honest the meatier gains were in perks and gear you got; the skill that slowly improved didn't have that much influence. We could probably put in some achievements that make you feel the same way, like walked 10k miles and get a popout, hell maybe even a free perk might pacify some players for some LBD achievements. But limiting my perk buying ability by a LBD activity always leads to a spam to win scenario.

Did nobody here play fallout 3 or 4? FFS, great games. No LBD, just gain xp by killing, questing and building and cooking. Worked fine, I never once raged they removed LBD from Oblivion when they made fallout 3 in 2008. I was like hell yeah, I can play this without mods and enjoy it. The problem is change, not that the new system is bad. No new players come in and say WTF this skill system is crazy. Its just not the case. New players like it just fine. It just needs balanced better.

 

[madmole]

The "Shoot-n-Loot" game play style is a popular format for many games. But because of the fully destructible environment, 7D2D could be much more involved than most games and could make it easier for realistic playstyles.
However, for better or worse, I think TFP will leave a lot of that to mod'ers.

There are 256 shades of cool greys

 

[Roland]

Madmole, please ignore this loon.

No xp for killing zombies? Thats a horrible idea. What if down the road we get options to disable traders? I want to play an all snow rwg world with no traders for a hardcore play through and I'd need my xp from killing zeds.

Loon neutralized....

 

[DarlingCows]

@madmole

I know melee is now specific to class. Will armor be too? Sorry if said previously.

 

[Damocles]

The air drops are Noah spreading the good will to survivors so they join his cause against the Duke.

... Supports me in my opinion NOT to have a storyplot and lore in a sandbox gameworld..

 

[robnar]

Just some simple quality of life suggestions for map view: Differentiate the map waypoint icons a little more. Right now you have a cave, an X, and 8 icons for buildings/houses. We don't really need icons to distinguish between a log cabin and a modern house, for example, when we could use the waypoint name for that. Something along the lines of the following would help make scanning the map at a glance a little easier:

1) Cave/mine

2) House

3) Skyscraper

4) Castle

5) Safe icon

6) Food icon

7) Gun icon

8) Tool icon

9) Med kit icon

10) $ icon

11) ? icon

12) X icon

Suggestion 2: Add a way to toggle waypoints on/off so they can be in map view but not on our compass, which gets cluttered up and unusable pretty quickly.

Suggestion 3: Add more automatic icons besides land claim, vehicle, and bed. Ideally traders, workbenches, mixers, etc. would show up on the map but could be toggled off and on as needed.

Just some ideas for consideration. I love this game!

 

[AtomicUs5000]

Melee and ranged combat are the easy ones. What about heavy armor, crafting, disease resistance, metabolism, cooking, bandaging, etc etc etc. There are too many ... snip

We understand all of that. Truly. We are just looking for a little out of what is easy, feasible, and makes sense. Especially what makes sense. Such as the easy ones you mentioned above and not the other bad ones you mention above.

The descriptions of specialization for A18 seems like it will help some. However, another guy with the same number of points can choose to skill the same way as I did. If I am known to get say 8 out of 10 headshots and the other person gets 1 out of 10 on average, that person could still kill me just as quickly as I can kill him with a lucky shot. If LBD, perhaps I would have a real advantage because I have literally skilled myself and the game rewards me for it. Bad aim prevents from leveling up in that area? Of course! It means you suck! Since when is it up the game to fix that for someone? So, specialization should help with this a little and I look forward to that... and I suppose that’ s going to have to do.

 

[art1336]

Melee and ranged combat are the easy ones. What about heavy armor, crafting, disease resistance, metabolism, cooking, bandaging, etc etc etc. There are too many activities that lead to a spam to win scenario. Don't you see it already? "How do I raise my heavy armor skill?" "You die 5000 times with heavy armor on, or go teabag a cacti." The current system isn't broke, its just not balanced yet. Have some patience we'll get there. I can go on with 1000 stupid spam to win or counter intuitive solutions on LBD skills systems. Get sick to raise fortitude. Get hit to raise armor skills, run, jump, fall to raise athletics. Starve to raise slow metabolism skill? What if you just can't find enough ammo to raise your favorite gun skill due to bad luck, or bad aim prevents you from raising your gun skills? That player can never gain enough skill to buy enough perks to actually get specialized and good.
At the end of the day you guys haven't sat around and thought about all the flaws with LBD like we have. Its a casual thought and emotional impulse to you guys. It was mostly a placebo effect in A16 to be honest the meatier gains were in perks and gear you got; the skill that slowly improved didn't have that much influence. We could probably put in some achievements that make you feel the same way, like walked 10k miles and get a popout, hell maybe even a free perk might pacify some players for some LBD achievements. But limiting my perk buying ability by a LBD activity always leads to a spam to win scenario.

Did nobody here play fallout 3 or 4? FFS, great games. No LBD, just gain xp by killing, questing and building and cooking. Worked fine, I never once raged they removed LBD from Oblivion when they made fallout 3 in 2008. I was like hell yeah, I can play this without mods and enjoy it. The problem is change, not that the new system is bad. No new players come in and say WTF this skill system is crazy. Its just not the case. New players like it just fine. It just needs balanced better.

At the end of the day you guys haven't sat around and thought about all the flaws with LBD like we have. Its a casual thought and emotional impulse to you guys.

I simply have to disagree since we all grew up playing the same games that had lbd in it. Some poor, some better. Yeah, plenty of people have done modding, and everyone and their grandmother modded Morrowing 3 and loved the skill system. Cheesey, yes, we all complained about it, but we spent weeks and months doing exactly what you just said we didn't.

 

[unlike them]

... Supports me in my opinion NOT to have a storyplot and lore in a sandbox gameworld..

I support you, but I know we gonna lose it.

 

[Death2gnomes]

Melee and ranged combat are the easy ones. What about heavy armor, crafting, disease resistance, metabolism, cooking, bandaging, etc etc etc. There are too many activities that lead to a spam to win scenario. Don't you see it already? "How do I raise my heavy armor skill?" "You die 5000 times with heavy armor on, or go teabag a cacti." The current system isn't broke, its just not balanced yet. Have some patience we'll get there. I can go on with 1000 stupid spam to win or counter intuitive solutions on LBD skills systems. Get sick to raise fortitude. Get hit to raise armor skills, run, jump, fall to raise athletics. Starve to raise slow metabolism skill? What if you just can't find enough ammo to raise your favorite gun skill due to bad luck, or bad aim prevents you from raising your gun skills? That player can never gain enough skill to buy enough perks to actually get specialized and good.
At the end of the day you guys haven't sat around and thought about all the flaws with LBD like we have. Its a casual thought and emotional impulse to you guys. It was mostly a placebo effect in A16 to be honest the meatier gains were in perks and gear you got; the skill that slowly improved didn't have that much influence. We could probably put in some achievements that make you feel the same way, like walked 10k miles and get a popout, hell maybe even a free perk might pacify some players for some LBD achievements. But limiting my perk buying ability by a LBD activity always leads to a spam to win scenario.

Did nobody here play fallout 3 or 4? FFS, great games. No LBD, just gain xp by killing, questing and building and cooking. Worked fine, I never once raged they removed LBD from Oblivion when they made fallout 3 in 2008. I was like hell yeah, I can play this without mods and enjoy it. The problem is change, not that the new system is bad. No new players come in and say WTF this skill system is crazy. Its just not the case. New players like it just fine. It just needs balanced better.

Speaking of armor perks (heavy and light) I'd like to suggest adding reduce mobility penalty to the perks, the top 3 perk ranks could reduce the 6% down to a 3% penalty, not including mods.

 

[madmole]

EDIT: ...which I'm contributing to, so I'll stop now.

Wise words, I will TRY to follow your example.

 

[madmole]

Had a pretty busy few weeks and couldn`t play, but only read around. Finally found a time to have some fun on a17.2. Hell of a fun, lots of cool moments and thanks guys for your work. You are on the right way no doubt.

This is encouraging. I think 18 will be like 14 was to 13.

 

[madmole]

Madmole, please ignore this loon.

To late I already responded lol. Just because you can math, doesn't mean you can design

 

[madmole]

I mean, Borderlands have a trading system and its a 4 player coop max. Diablo, Titan Quest, Sacred, Torchlight, etc. Non of those are MMO, all of them have trading system, so i don't know what you mean.
- - - Updated - - -

True.

Roland can I get a boot to trading system graphic please? No we're not adding that when there are several ways to trade items in the game already.

A, drop it on the ground, have your buddy pick it up.

B, Put it in your vending machine and have him buy it.

C, Put it in a container and have him loot it.

D, Sell it to the trader and have him buy it.

E, Kill him and put it in his backpack.

F, Kill him and put it in your backpack.

G, Suicide and have him loot it from your backpack.

H, Suicide and have him put it in your backpack.

I left out several examples, but it seems there are ample means here to trade without an interface that will get you both killed.

 

[madmole]

Is this going to be canon in the game?

Yes. The player now spawns with a nasty note from the Duke.

 

[madmole]

Madmole ....any chance we will ever see wind power to generators in game...I think that would be more attainable in game as a starter....then eventually being able to build a solar system??.....???
Regards

Ouch

Maybe in a later alpha or post gold patch.

 

[madmole]

Please also give some love to the tools. In my opinion, these have not been given enough attention in A17.

What would you have me do?

 

[madmole]

Loon neutralized....

Give me a boot to the loon graphic please and thanks

 

[madmole]

@madmole
I know melee is now specific to class. Will armor be too? Sorry if said previously.

Already was and will be. Heavy armor is fort and Light Armor Agility.

 

[madmole]

... Supports me in my opinion NOT to have a storyplot and lore in a sandbox gameworld..

You can go ahead and support yourself as long as you like. Its not changing our KS goal to make a survival RPG with story elements.