PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

  • <img alt=":)" data-src="" src="___base_url___/applications/core/interface/js/spacer.png" />

    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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Thanks for the reminder on the video. A few thoughts
-That video was very well done and is a pretty accurate depiction of A18 gameplay (e.g. spear, double barrel shotgun)

-I wonder how much they paid the actor to walk naked (or semi-naked) in the snow.
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It was Snowdog, he did it for free to be video taped walking naked. Yeah the video def was well done.

 
I will stick to my guns that the encounter system will do everything its meant to, which is sell the player into feeling like the world is teaming with zombies, without spawning guys that just sit there and eat cpu waiting for a player to stumble across them and count against maxalive. Your method (our old method) is careless and wasteful, we're doing something elegant we can control, and keep people at 60fps at all times. ONce the player leaves it despawns and we can send someone else an encounter. We can do mini blood moons in the near future, wandering traders, bandit patrols, wandering hordes, a few zombies eating a corpse, a damsel in distress, all game staged for the person we plan it for.
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Getting Red Dead Redemption vibes over here. I remember the encounter system in the Undead Nightmare expansion. You'd stumble across people mourning over their dead loved ones, just for their dead loved ones to become undead loved ones and chomp their mourning victims's faces off.

This is a wonderful idea. Please, proceed.

 
Well with a level 5 lucky looter I found a modded auger (iirc it came with the 50% gas mod), a level 2 m60, an ak47 , 2 junk turrets and maybe a beaker . Next couple days I found a steel pickaxe and two(!) irradiation removal mods.Put 1 part on lucky looter, looted 4 houses and could barely found an anvil schematic and an ak47. I'm also on a single player save with lucky looter 2 and I barely found 3 junk turrets on day 30.

I can't run looting tests but there's clearly a huge gap between level 1, 3 and 5 without accounting goggles. Maxed perk + goggles must give free beakers and engines methinks.
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Lucky Looter can also be rebalanced instead of removed. And you might just have been particularly lucky. It's not as strong a perk as you think it is because (as far as I know), game stage itself also dictates the quality and kind of loot you find, so the more you progress into the game the better stuff you also find. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. So all it does is have a better chance at finding it earlier.

This boils down to you preferring a more crafting-oriented approach for the game and the devs preferring a more looting-oriented approach. It's not a matter of right or wrong, it's purely subjective. If you don't like their approach, the game is very moddable, especially for this kind of dilemma.

EDIT: also, replacing Lucky Looter with Faster Looter would make it a really bland, kinda pointless perk, IMO. Looting speed is not really a big problem unless you're looting with a zombie chasing you, which you shouldn't do in the first place. It's not like looting a container takes 15 minutes, which would be a real game changer in terms of time management (and a real chore).

 
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Wait, so you never had much of a dilemma over this? With the way you take every side of the argument, I'm starting to think that you just like to complain.
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So you're saying that because I rarely scrapped iron ore into scrap iron I'm taking a different side? How's that? I am taking one side. I prefer to have to smelt the ore. I prefer incurring a LOSS to do it any other way with the ore. That loss is WHY I never scrapped ore except for D1. That's consistent, not taking "every side" of the argument. I'm not looking for TFP to "take away my dilemma's". That's the point. I WANT there to be dilemma's. I want there to be choices that have negative consequences.

 
MM, since you said that you are brainstorming a19. Consider this.

Most people arent in the forest or away from cities. so them being rather empty is understandable, but cities and town, that's where most people are and where'd we'd expect them to have died. it shouldnt feel so empty. I waited, did as you asked and played to see the feel. and it still feels empty. Can you beef up city and town areas? tie it into max alive, so many zeds in a town or city, kill them until the number say 100 for a small town, 300 for a city. reaches zero, have em respawn every couple of days. make the city feel like a threat again.

 
I would imagine this to be the case for almost everyone. And that is the reason why scrapping iron ore or not was never a hard decision nor an important decision.
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Oh but I don't agree at all. It was a very important decision. That's why I very rarely broke my decision and scrapped ore, thereby losing material in the process. If it were not important than I would have had no reason not to scrap ore. You completely missed my point. It was an easy decision for me to make because it was important not to waste a valuable resource.

 
So you're saying that because I rarely scrapped iron ore into scrap iron I'm taking a different side? How's that? I am taking one side. I prefer to have to smelt the ore. I prefer incurring a LOSS to do it any other way with the ore. That loss is WHY I never scrapped ore except for D1. That's consistent, not taking "every side" of the argument. I'm not looking for TFP to "take away my dilemma's". That's the point. I WANT there to be dilemma's. I want there to be choices that have negative consequences.
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But it clearly wasn't a dilemma.

I like dilemmas, and I think there are plenty of them in this game. This wasn't a dilemma. (Most inventory management in this game is not a dilemma.)

 
It is called LUCKY looter and not SPEEDY looter after all. It doesn't have to be magic. You can think of it as someone with that skill set can salvage what is there better than someone without that skill. They have the good eye that can spot the diamond in the rough.


Farming has simply been abstracted. It has been stated that farming is not a focus or a major feature of the game so it has a minimal design and attention is prioritized elsewhere. I can understand the disappointment of video game farming enthusiasts that the part of the game that excites them has been marginalized but TFP has the right to focus on the parts they deem to be the most important.

The game is also not a sim. It has a tongue in cheek sense of humor. Would we actually farm using rotten flesh? No. Would anyone actually name their day care Poopy Pants or their gas station Pass-n-Gas? Sham is made out of paint and rotten flesh and gives 0% chance of infection. It's a joke. If you want a serious gritty sim of post apocalyptic life you will have to mod that in because it isn't the goal of the developers.

Because that is how unviable the seeds are. What is being abstracted is that you planted all of the seeds from five pieces of fruit and only one seedling survived. The perk shows you growing and progressing as a botanist allowing you to get more yield from plants you have cultivated. Showing all of that is beyond the scope of the game so it is abstracted to 5 fruit yield one viable seed and as you get better at what you do you get more yield from your plants. Of course, this means that you can also do more with smaller gardens which also helps performance.

As for the rest I already explained the nature of the game. It isn't a sim.

Everything tier 3 in the game has a component that can only be looted and not crafted. Looting and exploring is viewed by the devs as the primary way to get what you need. Crafting is still necessary for many things but for some things it is simply a fallback if you can't find what you want. That is the reality of the direction of the game. With the huge popularity this decision has created I don't see them wanting to change that.

So in general, my answers are the same. Looting and exploring is proving to be fun for the greatest number of players the game has ever had. Crafting is still a staple of the game but not the necessary integral way to survive that it once was. You can still craft if you need to-- if looting and trading fail you. For the rest, let go of the idea that this game was ever meant to be a sim. TFP has a sense of humor and they design it into the game. It's funny that we can eat zombie meat.
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No one would disagree that TFP could easily have a larger playerbase by following the route other games took. One look at Fortnight numbers will show that. What we're saying is that the game itself will be made lesser in the process. This used to be a special game, it's losing that.

 
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