PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Kage848]

I get what you are saying. But I do feel like you are looking at it from the wrong angle.
First: this is not about difficulty, but complexity. To make fighting Z's less monotone. So turning up the difficulty doesn'T change that.

ALTOUGH changing the speed of the Z's does change the momentum a lot. But this is about variety. A bit up unpredictableness.

Second: yes and no. You are obviously right that one can spin this narrative in both directions...

But if someone is seriously overstrained by zombies on the absolute lowest difficulty (so difficulty, speed, no running and all that), they should probably go into gaming journalism (Ha! Cuphead reference, and yes I know the full story )

No but seriously. A horror survival game SHOULD challenge you. But you can not cater to everyone. And those that are THAT bad at the game... I'm sorry... but either need to adapt or play minecraft

You will never catch me saying "give every difficulty a 50% increase in difficulty". But you WILL hear me advocating for bigger Z's, more dangers and so on.

Make the game more complex. Give it more variety, even if, in the end it increases the difficulty a bit.

Tl;dr:

With this argument "oh will someone think of the new players" you can advocate against any change that brings complexity. "Oh why is there 3 new crafting recipes? Even more to learn for new players!" and so on.

Just tell them to lower the difficulty, speed of Z's and to use a bow if they have trouble in melee. At least until they have guns.

I'm sorry but hampering the development to accomodate new players is not the right way.

MAybe you could add a new entry into that weird tutorial manual thingy that no one ever read

Like when you get hit the first time:

"Close combat with Zombies is dangerous. Make sure you are prepared. They can make you bleed,stun or even infect you. If you feel they are too overwhelming avoid their range by using a bow!"

(and I know I do not sound as articulate as others... but that is the problem with speaking a second language )

Didnt even know English was your second language. You speak it very well.

So we are going to agree to disagree on this I see. Seems to me the only argument your making that I can kinda see you having a point is complexity to melee combat.

I think melee is very exciting. I have been playing this game since 2013 and I think it's the best it's ever been.

But your right, it's not very complex. I dont nessisarially see complex automaticly equaling fun though.

But if the fun pimps give us cool new toys, and it seems they are, that would be a cool way to balance out the unnecessary difficulty boost.

Tldr:

Game doesn't need a difficulty boost

Melee could be more complex

Give cool new toys to deal with difficulty boost of rage mode

?????

Profit

 

[archergod]

You can't have boats because there isn't enough water. You can't increase water because there are no boats. Do you see the problem?

But why we need more water? except making crossing harder it is no fun. we cannot fight zed there, we cannot do much there. It is just something we have to have for environment authenticity ... for that I think we have enough of water. Deep lakes really add nothing for gameplay.

 

[Viktoriusiii]

didnt even know english was your second language. You speak it very well.
thanks

[...]

basicially yes.

tldr:

Game doesn't need a difficulty boost

a "hell on earth" wouldn't be something i would say no to tho

melee could be more complex

*thumbs up*

give cool new toys to deal with difficulty boost of rage mode

*thumbs up* also they are. They give us better armor and more variety in weapons and scrapturrets and all that!

?????

Profit

yaaay

 

[The Gronk]

But why we need more water? except making crossing harder it is no fun. we cannot fight zed there, we cannot do much there. It is just something we have to have for environment authenticity ... for that I think we have enough of water. Deep lakes really add nothing for gameplay.

Water is no fun because there are no threats, there are no water threats because there isn't enough water.

That's pretty much a perfectly circular argument.

 

[archergod]

Well, it is no problem to argue both ways, it is just a design decision, i.e. how the designer wants a game to work, how he wants difficulty to scale. Especially short games with high replay value (like rogue-likes) have no problem with such a dynamic. Longer games (with replay value or not), like the "panzer general" series by SSI, showed that players need a lot of frustration resistancy if fight after fight got harder and they practically had lost the game hours before the final defeat. Or conversely got bored by easier and easier fights because they got too far ahead of the enemy.
We know how TFP generally wants their difficulty curve to work because there is gamestage. Since gamestage has the contrary effect to this idea, I assume they don't want beginners to get on a negative difficulty spiral while experienced players get dissappointed by the follow-up BM hordes, fault or not.

PS: You seem to have missed madmole's posts where he said that they don't want to make vehicles totally deactivate on BM. And very probably a hotel at the trader is coming into the game, so there will be no unavoidable force to fight BM.

I see your point and healthy discussion is not a argument. So I disagree that we are arguing. We are brainstorming from my point of view.

I didn't know about Trader hotel. It is good to have, though I am never going to use it... Let see how it turn out if it comes...

I love this game even now in 17.4, I actually didn't like just one thing in game, it is that when I swing a Melee weapon with z in 1 block away, he still manage to dodge it by just moving its head right to left. same when you shoot. they should not predict or dodge at all. Player miss them on arrow because of distance is one thing, but how can one miss swing of a club.

 

[archergod]

Water is no fun because there are no threats, there are no water threats because there isn't enough water.
That's pretty much a perfectly circular argument.

Actually with water as I said before it just another thing for making it look good environment. you are expecting it as one of Biome thing. it has its own threat and way to handle it. More than boat I really want to see Diving Tanks so we can pick those airdrops.

 

[Ezed]

But why we need more water? except making crossing harder it is no fun. we cannot fight zed there, we cannot do much there. It is just something we have to have for environment authenticity ... for that I think we have enough of water. Deep lakes really add nothing for gameplay.

As mentioned previously, there used to be a lot more bodies of water in RNG worlds. The rivers dividing biomes would have made excellent waterways for boats or rafts or canoes. In a later Alpha, that went away but there were huge lakes. Nowadays there is very little water in RNG...too little IMO, it can be very hard to find even a small pond as a water source. Hopefully we'll see more water in A18 and then, some sort of watercraft.

IMO, any of the motorized vehicles are a bit out of place. The gas spoiling issue for one, but also, in a post apocalypse without the noise pollution of our modern RL world, the sound of a single motorized vehicle would be heard for miles. Bicycles or horses or canoes make for mostly silent travel which I think would be beneficial not to give away your location to zombies and bandits.

 

[KingSlayerGM]

But why we need more water? except making crossing harder it is no fun. we cannot fight zed there, we cannot do much there. It is just something we have to have for environment authenticity ... for that I think we have enough of water. Deep lakes really add nothing for gameplay.

The gameplay it adds is having an obstacle to overcome and taking advantage of it by traveling faster by boat than by land. Take Minecraft for example, living near an ocean is very convenient because you can quickly sail far away and find new biomes and villages. It helps with the exploration. Imagine having an island base and knowing that if you go in a direction you will find a city, and if you go in another you will find the trader. That's so cool.

One more thing: Minecraft, after many years of waiting, added tons of content to the underwater world. New pois, new monsters, new animals, new treasures.. which I think it's tfp's vision too.

That said, I wouldn't put too much water in a world.

 

[Guppycur]

Isn't that only the case if you damage multiple zombies at the same time? It seems this speed-boost is triggered by that.. So if you pick off one zombie at a time, I don't think anything changes.

Well he gets knocked back and sometimes down and then is in the middle of the pack...

 

[Ouch Quit It]

Water is no fun because there are no threats, there are no water threats because there isn't enough water.
That's pretty much a perfectly circular argument.

But M60 lying around is a lot more realistic along with vehicles that help you avoid zombie interactions as well....that to me isnt fun

- - - Updated - - -

Well he gets knocked back and sometimes down and then is in the middle of the pack...

I get knocked down

But I get up again

You are never going to keep me down...

 

[Hamburglar]

@Madmole

Could you please implement the ability to crawl?

Maybe as a skill in the skill list?

It shouldn't be hard since there is already crawlers, so just use a similar model for the player?

But i would be amazing because there are some impassable crevices that it would make sense for one to be able to crawl through. Also allowing for other options regarding movement like escaping a clutch situation like a player being surrounded by a horde and narrowly escaping through a gap on the wall.

This would be limited by lowered movement speed and inability to use certain if at all any item.

This would also provide some loot-hiding or progression scenarios like a crawlspace here and there.

It would certainly add to the immersion.

 

[The Gronk]

But M60 lying around is a lot more realistic along with vehicles that help you avoid zombie interactions as well....that to me isnt fun

The availability of weapons and various fixes for vehicles have been discussed ad infinitum over the course of the past few months.

<satire>Why not just bypass the problem by removing the zombies?</satire>

 

[madmole]

exactly.... And on a side note... I'm on vacation next week and the wife is going through menopause....

Get her to an anti-aging holistic hormone doctor right away. The few months of adjustments are worth it.

 

[madmole]

A trail of whole ore voxels straight from the surface? I'm already liking it.On the same topic, the amount of bullets is not very huge, and steel bullets were a life saver back in ancient a17.
I might be talking ahead of miself (about a18), but I really think brass might not be enough to enjoy the full extent of, for example an AK player. Even with doorknobs, ammo find boost and a couple of other brass rich items it might still not be enough, after all,from the gameplay perspective, brass IS an ore and it is used as much as lead.

Man, I really wouldn't mind small patchs of rare metal debris ore that gives brass. That, or npcs with ammo?. Actually.... well, a man can dream.

thx for the info about mining!

I'm doing the fortitude build right now (which governs fists and ak/m60). I'm doing ok but not swimming in ammo but I've no GP, loads of brass. Once the mining rocks are in I should be able to find the ore I need to mass produce ammo. In my previous builds I had no shortage of brass either.

 

[madmole]

If the player could interact with loot containers etc. while F7 was enabled then that would solve all problems. People who wanted to play without on screen aids could just press F7 and play and be able to fully function in the game until they were sick of it and then press F7 again to have it all back. Think about it for the future. The world looks awesome with F7 enabled but you can't do everything unfortunately.

Its really painful to keep reading about these hardcore fantasy versions of 7 days. If you can't imagine us doing it, lets not talk about it. I can assure you we will never publish a hudless version of the game. This belongs in mod requests. I might as well start talking about religion and politics in here, that is how alien most of these ideas feel to me.

 

[madmole]

This is what I'd encourage... Finding a watch and compass in game.

Clogging up yet more precious inventory space over tedium. Remember in 17 when you started out gimped and worked towards being "basic". Nobody liked it. Rust gave up on this idea and has out sold every survival game out there. This belongs in mod discussions.

 

[madmole]

Only 2% water? No way. The Navezgane map is more like 10 to 15% water and that's not counting the streams and such.
I thought the idea was to add two different types of boats. Once small and one large enough to be a dock for the little boat and act like a small base.

OFC it's been awhile since anyone talked about it.

I don't see it happening unless we get some advanced RWG down the road that increases water and fix water issues. Its kind of pointless since we have real vehicles. Its honestly fluff like scrap tools, its just fluff we have stone/iron/steel. It prevents us from getting npcs and bandits in.

 

[madmole]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the amount of water on the map could be easily changed if rafts or boats were to be introduced.

And I will too, doing all that work will shelf bandits for another 6 months to a year. We've been shelfing them for micro features for years now, and look where it got us.

 

[madmole]

Hmm. Well...
If this is a serious answer and not an excuse... if XP for spike kills are compatible with your design goals, and the problem really is only technical...

...Then you could give the 'shared XP' value to any player that's near a zombie when it dies. Period. Don't even track what killed the zombie. Ignore the block involved.

This sounds radical, and requires a change of thinking. "But what if a zombie dies from walking into a cactus? Or falling down a naturally occurring ravine? The player didn’t do anything to cause that and shouldn’t get credit for it."

But let's think about it. If the player steers or funnels or 'tricks' a zombie into hurting itself on something they didn't craft themselves... didn't the player still do the key part? Which part of that interaction is more worth rewarding: the wood-chopping, spike-crafting, block-placing part; or the 'finding a way to dispatch the zombie' part? You already get some XP for those first parts. There will be the occasional freebie where a zombie really does die through nothing a player did. But I would say 99 times out of 100, zombies die because of something the player did.

Even the exploits that would crop up would arguably not really be exploits. If you steer a zombie into the existing traps in an unmodified POI (which would only be unpowered), or even into your enemy's defenses in PvP... that's not exploiting. You're still reacting to and taking steps to counter the zombie problem, just in a more resourceful, Macaulay Culkin-type way than we're used to. And if killing zombies merits a pat on the back in the form of XP in the first place... you might as well do that in a way that doesn't pick and choose which ways are 'right'.

Even if it were possible, Im generally against it. You cannot specialize in spikes so its not something that needs to grant XP. Explosives, turrets, etc can be specialized in, and are specific components to specific archtypes so its needed. Spikes are just generic entry level stuff and don't matter IMO. They require no specialized knowledge and do not need to give players XP.

 

[madmole]

You can't have boats because there isn't enough water. You can't increase water because there are no boats. Do you see the problem?

You can have bandits and npcs, or boats. Do you see the problem?