PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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:bless_you:

My first thought was....

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(Of course this is my first thought about 44% of the time).

-Arch Necromancer Morloc

 
Astronomical said:
To be fair @Kuosimodo is not strictly a hater as many of his reactions are positive.

It's possible some people just don't appreciate your posts although with such copious and sprawling walls of text I can't imagine why? 😃
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Do u really think all this 40+ reactions (dislikes) given to such “copious and sprawling walls of text” posts, as my lasts ones?

 
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bachgaman said:
The animals in this game are really scarier than any zombie
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That is a solid truth in vanilla A19.  However, when I saw the "poison bubble guys" (don't know the official name), I put them in with the predator animals. 

Surrounded by them in a tight spot... that could be my first combat death in a long time (in the vanilla game anyway).

 
Aldranon said:
That is a solid truth in vanilla A19.  However, when I saw the "poison bubble guys" (don't know the official name), I put them in with the predator animals. 

Surrounded by them in a tight spot... that could be my first combat death in a long time (in the vanilla game anyway).
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You mean zeds covered in green goo a.k.a. radiation?

I never understood from what considerations you can meet a silent and fast Dire Wolf with 750 hp on the first day of the game

Astronomical said:
To be fair @Kuosimodo is not strictly a hater as many of his reactions are positive.

It's possible some people just don't appreciate your posts although with such copious and sprawling walls of text I can't imagine why? 😃
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Well, yes, because someone is arguing with me. Therefore, at maybe half of his reactions is not dislikes.

 
Roland said:
Alright, I'm game. What's the essence I ignored?
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It was a huge conversation about replayability, about new game world options, and not about whether it is a sandbox. The sandbox controversy was secondary and not important. There was a rather large post, from the middle of which you pulled out the phrase about sandbox, missing the main message, the original and main topic of conversation was contained in the same post, but you drew attention to it only after two posts, adding a paragraph to your last answer. I don't care how you call this game, I care about the replayability.

 
Gosh dang it, I refreshed and saw 19+ new posts and was hoping A20 was confirmed to be coming out on Friday for streamers,  and I missed something. Look at what you've done

 
I mentioned it earlier in the thread but just to repeat it here, if we go by how A19 streamer weekend was announced, even if it was this weekend (which I'm doubtful of) it probably wont get announced to us regular plebs until Thursday

But I'd really rein in expectations that it'll hit this weekend, I know that's what Rick was hoping for but to avoid disappointment I wouldn't get your hopes up

 
bachgaman said:
[...]

1) But we are talking about how the quests, that he gives out, have a very detrimental effect on the gameplay. First, they tie you to the area around the trader. Second, they force you to clear the same points of interest. Thirdly, you receive too valuable rewards, that speed up development too much, for completing quests. These are real problems, and I've come up with some simple solutions to all three. And this is not the removing of the trader.  First and second problem can be solved by adding option "All trader's quests are unique (1 POI = 1 use in quests)", third problem can be solved by adding option "manual setting of the assortment and trader's rewards in the world options menu". Simple rebalancing won't help those who want to play with 25% or 50% loot.

Recently i started a new game on Vanila in Navezgane at a fairly high difficulty. On the 12th day I have a auger, a grenade launcher, a truck, a concrete base, all kinds of electric traps and electricity, a lot of ammunition and grenades. On the 14th day BM will come and how do you think I will experience the pleasure overcoming the difficulties offered by the game on this day? And I would not say that I was speedrunning a lot, I was playing a very ordinary game. So trader's rewards and shop is really broken, because I bought concrete from him, from him I bought a crucible and some steel for the car, from him I bought an AK-47 level 4 and level 2 (on day 2), from him I received thousands of ammo for this AK, from him I received hundreds of grenades, from him I bought a grenade launcher and ammo for it, I bought a drill from him and much more. Not to mention the tens of thousands of experience as rewards and for items sold.
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Yes. But this is still a balancing problem that exists whether you have loot set to 100% or 25% loot. And I am absolutely on your side here as I have said on many occasions that the trader still needs toning down. The only difference between you and me, I know how TFP operates and I can wait. I know that TFP will not simply follow random guy even if he posts a convincing argument that **HE** can't play this way. Even if that guy were Roland, a respected modder or you. Because they look at new players and their difficulties as well.

They have their own priorities and a feature that they think worthy might turn up in a few weeks or in a year or shortly before going gold. For outsiders to the development process it always goes too slow. Whether the outsiders are right or not, this is the speed at which TFP develops and that won't change. And they view modding (not writing but using mods) as the door to endless replayability, now with an unfinished game in EA but also eventually with a finished game with steam workshop enabled. 

So I heard in A20 they toned down the trader. They surely will continue to tone down the trader if they feel it necessary, at a pace that clearly won't be to everyones liking. They surely will add more options, though as few as possible (because of screen space, testing effort, ...) and probably as late as possible.

For me this means that A19 traders are the past and not worth discussing much about, A20 traders are the new standard and if they still should be too powerful for my taste I will say so and probably have to wait another year for more changes. But before I haven't played A20 anything you or I are saying about the traders is just theoretical musing.

bachgaman said:
By the way, what kind of wasteland quests are you talking about? Those raw notes that give you 300 dukes and 500 experience and nothing else? From extreme to extreme
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What is extreme about it? A polished game can't have them drop in the game when they can't be completed. These are standards a mod can violate but not a game sold in steam as AA. Reviewers of game magazines would criticize this, reviews on youtube would make sarcastic comments about it. Since this is about polish it doesn't matter that their value is very limited and they can be ignored.

bachgaman said:
2) I did not know about this, but what prevents to dont literally remove the trader, but to make him uncommunicative, as an example? I don’t know, maybe you’re right and removing it is a more difficult thing to do than make him able to setting up.
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Maybe, but that could be really weird for players to see an NPC that is just doing nothing. Some of them would even guess this is a bug (they might not be the one that turned on the option and expect this but a player in a MP game). This is just a guess, I could be totally wrong here. But adding a substitute POI for the traders might not be that much more work (as part of the work is offloaded to a POI designer) but feels much more polished so that I think they would take the alternate POI solution.

bachgaman said:
3) In general, I assumed that all this future content would disappear with him, but we dont have it yet, so what are we talking about
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When you expect something from the devs, you have to take into account what their ultimate plans are. And they have all future content in mind when they think about new stuff to add. Lets assume for a moment that the Navezgane map gets an end-game goal that is only reachable after collecting enough reputation with one of the factions and the only way to gain reputation is either with normal or special reputation quests given out by the trader. So removing the trader would make the end-game goal unreachable. And that would be unacceptable.

We don't know what their plans are in detail. But we can list this as a **possible** reason they might not be too keen on adding a "no-trader" option. Which should be ok since you would prefer a "trader-nerf" option anyway.

bachgaman said:
4) The trader is also not part of anything else today. I proceed from what we have now and in the next few years.
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Proceed to where? You want something from TFP and they will probably not listen to arguments that do not take the future into account (like the trader nerf in A20 which we only can fully evaluate after having played A20). Also for TFP the trader seems already to be a central element of the game, as you can see with A20 adding another dependancy to the trader in RWG.

 
I'm currently playing 7D and while I "fully" use the traders, I put nothing into the trading perk and only a single point into Adventurer.

Without the high level secret stash it's a lot more reasonable. Occasional cool things but I can't afford any, yet. At day 20 or so. (I play with a chill 50% XP)

 
Gazz said:
I'm currently playing 7D and while I "fully" use the traders, I put nothing into the trading perk and only a single point into Adventurer.

Without the high level secret stash it's a lot more reasonable. Occasional cool things but I can't afford any, yet. At day 20 or so. (I play with a chill 50% XP)
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I feel you. I prefer 2 hour days instead of 50%XP. It would be cool to have even harder trading bia options. I love trader perks, but indeed there's no need to invest in them unless you are greedy and love material things, lol.

 
bachgaman said:
You mean zeds covered in green goo a.k.a. radiation?

I never understood from what considerations you can meet a silent and fast Dire Wolf with 750 hp on the first day of the game
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Yup that's them, I have a feeling one of my characters will meet their end, in a small space filled with them!  :)  

The "Kill order", Day 1-5 Pack of  zombie dogs with one or two zombie bears has been around for some time now.   This is fine for people who like to use the "Death Bonus" but is against the progressive increase in abilities, loot and difficulty the rest of the game has.   Not a fan, but it does make me cautious the first few mornings.

 
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SooooOooo......any Kraken sightings?  My bro's and I are burned out on SB and DU with Zomboid starting to get stale.  Figured we are about due for another build test soon here.

 
Guppycur said:
Grab the creature pack and enjoy ...

A20 ideas have been flowing, as well; xyth (main creature guy) has had "jiggle tech" for a while now.  And no, I'm not saying the pimps stole his idea, calm down people, I'm merely pointing out that jiggle tech isn't a new concept for some modders. 

Are these client side mods?  Yes.  Will that matter later on in development?  No.  Not very likely. 

Bottom line is that uma going away isn't a huge deal imo.  Also, even though the players won't be uma and the support for uma is going away, I doubt the functionality of it is going to be removed to the point where modders can't still abuse it. 
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Yeah well @khzmusik change xyth  zombie pack in nice way.  Well i hope it will be more mods with new types in future.

Btw i think "stealing" ideas is nothing wrong - well i think if 7dtd his own version of l4d2 gore system would be cool. And honestly i think always modders can add something sooner that devs ( well if 100 people will make randoms mods is almost 100% chance to be something similiar in official updated) . So idk why people thinking" it was stolen from x mode" using this logic another TES can't exist because everything was added to skyrim before 

 
I am just curious where everyone stands on food in alpha 20.

we have all observed from the alpha 20 dev streams that Lathan was almost ALWAYS hungry or on the cusp of starting to slowly die of starvation

Is that  a result of bad rng? or just not focusing enough on it in the early game when it is most challenging

I understand that food is easy for veteran players to deal with but how much do new players and beginners struggle with it?

I know they said they have tweaked loot alot in A20 and food should be found in more places you would expect to find it so maybe this is something that they can gather more feedback and makes balance changes around once A20 goes experimental.

by balance changes I just mean slight adjustments because I don't think food is too far off from being in a good spot

 
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