PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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Khalagar said:
It kind of hits two targets, but I don't think it sweeps as much as a sledge or anything. I would compare it's AoE to a club, which can also sometimes stagger two targets I'm 99% sure. The only times I've had the pipe baton do it, is when I use the power attack and they are lined up to both get poked by the thrust, so its' not exactly reliable AoE and I don't feel like the pipe baton is staggering any more than a club does, so it's not really carving out any kind of niche besides just "It at least scales with your perk stat and has cool animations"
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Are you sure you are not just seeing grazing hits that were introduced in A17 or A18?

 
Oh yeah, when Trader Jen closes it's still the default male voice, is that ever going to change or is it just going to be flavor text.

 
Darthjake said:
Oh yeah, when Trader Jen closes it's still the default male voice, is that ever going to change or is it just going to be flavor text.
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Yes Jen needs her own closing & opening notifications. Her voice is super sexy 🤤🤤🤤🤤

And Pimps.....where is her jiggle tech??!! 🤨 This IS Alpha 20 after all......

 
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Quick comment on my new favorite feature:  Feral Sense.  My friends and I are 'good' at this game and usually have very few deaths.  We had early game down to a science and used to get well established very quickly.  On warrior difficulty with feral day & night on we are getting our butts kicked a lot!  The game feels super scary again which it hasn't for a long time for me.  It was rare to be surprised before and it happens all the time now.  I had about 10 nearby zombies visit me in a house while doing a tier-1 fetch... it didn't go well, but was so much fun.

If you are a veteran player and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it!

 
I know that melee weapons were doing grazing hits in A19 as well, so no surprises there. The zombies, on the other hand...holy crap! I've had it happen three separate times where I'm playing the door-in-face game (zombie beating on an unlocked door, wait for zombie to swing, open door, pound zombie in da face, close door again) and after about the third swing, I opened the door to take another shot and the zombie ducks under my swing and swipes my kneecaps!  I've observed zombie dogs surrounding me when I'm standing on an obstacle, as opposed to the swarm beneath you or as close as they can get to you. This looked suspiciously like strategy and pack hunting! Awesome if it is and keep an eye out if it's not planned behaviour!

overgoat said:
Quick comment on my new favorite feature:  Feral Sense.  My friends and I are 'good' at this game and usually have very few deaths.  We had early game down to a science and used to get well established very quickly.  On warrior difficulty with feral day & night on we are getting our butts kicked a lot!  The game feels super scary again which it hasn't for a long time for me.  It was rare to be surprised before and it happens all the time now.  I had about 10 nearby zombies visit me in a house while doing a tier-1 fetch... it didn't go well, but was so much fun.

If you are a veteran player and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it!
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Oh yeah! I used to only die in early game if I did something stupid. Feral sense at night did me right the f00k in! I was (imo) quietly raiding a building I'd cleared (one of the fast food joints) and started hearing a "couple" of zombies beating on things outside. I made the mistake of not planning a quick egress when I first heard them. By the time I realized that I had a problem, it was too late! It was almost like a screamer horde! 6+ dogs, 3 or 4 spiders, multiple ferals of various flavours, and they were at every door! Their pathing seems to have improved quite a bit!

 
MisutoM said:
I hate to necro the new farming complain train, but I had a shower thought that might put some players mind's at ease about it. 

We have to remember that we aren't playing this theorycrafting game with a full deck of cards, the devs know what is going to happen in future updates so things that come out today might be setting up for future things.

In this case, they did give us a teaser over a year ago that likely most of us forgot about:

View attachment 21549

A lot of these bonuses didn't sound good back when they were revealed... but suddenly they look pretty spicy. Granted, this all got delayed to a21 (hopefully) and obviously anything could change and numbers aren't set in stone. But let's consider that this is roughly what they are still looking at and math out how crazy late game farms could be for an actual dedicated farmer.

With a quality 6 farmer armor (farmor?) set, we'd be getting an extra crop per harvest and a 60% chance at a seed. So in the 10 crop example, for a19 you'd get 30 crops per harvest. In the optimistic future of a21, this set combined with maxed LOTL would give 90 crops (2+1 base times 3 so 9 per harvest) and average 6 seeds per harvest, resulting in a staggering 70 crop profit; more than double that of the a19 system. Heck, even if you massively low roll and get 0 seeds back, you'd still see a 40 crop harvest after crafting 10 new seeds thus exceeding the previous alpha even in a catastrophically unlucky scenario. But, having to find high quality of this armor which would likely be loot stage gated is going to push this to a much later point in the game compared to a19 where you could set up a passive farm in the first week or so and remove hunger forever.

Basically, farming may be intentionally nerfed at the start especially for players who don't perk into living off the land, but if you want to fully invest in farming, it may end up being even more rewarding than what we have now. I'd pay the cost of re-sowing my seeds each time if I were able to get double the rewards in the future. We may just have to suck it up for a20 for the promised land future of a21 lol. Super corn aside, casual farming is still fine averaging only 0.5 crops less per harvest if you have 1 point in the skill. (seriously though, farm bundle 3 needs to give 2 super corn seeds to remove most of the feel bad moments!) 
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As with anything planned, stuff will need to get rebalanced to fit the current system once it's implemented.

 
I'm so happy to hear everyone is enjoying the new challenges of A20. I really enjoyed feral sense and the extra spawns downtown has. Random gen cities/towns have some areas that are sort of closed off so you can take a wrong turn and have to back out and be in serious trouble, where before it was so spread out you could always turn a corner and lose the pursuing zombies so having some dead ends was a great improvement.

Traveling at night on foot with feral sense on is pretty risky. Food management feels great to me and farming is a short bandaid to a constant problem. Eventually I got a lot of food, but I never was able to eat unlimited stews, I had to make whatever I could scrounge up, buy every can in every vending machine, kill every chicken, etc for at least the first 30 days. It feels good when you are constantly worried about honey/antibiotics/food. I never did get a surplus of big med kits or casts in my 70 some day game, and I had so many times I was beat up with 4+ crits on my screen and very close calls, that to me is what makes a memorable play through.

 
So far A20 is definitely as great as I'd hoped. RWG looks amazing, the new weapons are fun, and the level design team have really outdone themselves. I never thought we'd see such awesome towns and cities in this game! Even the grass looks fantastic! 🙂

One problem I have encountered is that the indestructible zone surrounding traders needs to be shrunk. With the current, very cool way that A20 stacks POIs so closely together the trader zone can bleed over making a POI unlootable and even creating a situation where players can get stuck. For an example just hop into the pregen 10k map and check out the POI right next to the first trader the quest points you to.

 
just some short impressions I wanted to cummunicate, before stepping back into an evening session...sorry if it has been already adressed or even been fixed.

World feels much more immersive/real and "vivid" (don't know a better word, sorry, I know that's not the most fitting term for a postapocalyptic scenario)

No fix needed here by the way 😀 great work TFP!

boars are now the fierce things they should be, attacking spontaneously instead of just stepping around waiting for the first hit. Love it! (made me poop)

some issues/odd things i came upon:

doubleswing/unwanted extra attack animation is back with the bone knife

Am I really supposed to be able to loot a handful of garbage bags on the streets and then have the mats and being able to craft a pipe MG from my backpack?

Also some 7,62ammo was there lying in a small barn (well, leaving out the short episode me being almost killed by wolf inside that barn...made me poop again)

So I had a DPS monster available before noon day 1 with almost no effort. Hm. Felt strange. (felt like bachgaman 😀)

Thats it for now. Have to settle in that abandoned gas station for the first night, so bye again.

 
Astronomical said:
One problem I have encountered is that the indestructible zone surrounding traders needs to be shrunk. With the current, very cool way that A20 stacks POIs so closely together the trader zone can bleed over making a POI unlootable and even creating a situation where players can get stuck. For an example just hop into the pregen 10k map and check out the POI right next to the first trader the quest points you to.
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Yeah, there's still stuff that need fixing/tweaking.

Hopefully, we can help them squash  :smash: as many bugs as possible before stable. 

 
Heyo, great update. Really enjoying it so far, since I couldn’t really play a19 when it came out due to inadequate hardware, which didn’t get fixed until a couple months ago. 

so something I’ve noticed, and can’t find any answer or info on it is this. 
Every time I move my mouse to look around or when I move my character, there’s this quick dimming effect taking place, it’s most noticeable when outside. When I stop moving, it brightens back up/ gose back to normal. 
so when I move my mouse really slowly in a slow scanning of my surroundings motion, that dimming effect becomes a flickering because of the raid switching between moving and stopping. It’s kinda annoying to see that constantly. 
man’s i don’t really no if that’s normal or something that can be fixed. I hope it can tho, but I haven’t figured it out, so hoping to see if anyone here has any insight to this. 
Ty

 
madmole said:
I'm so happy to hear everyone is enjoying the new challenges of A20. I really enjoyed feral sense and the extra spawns downtown has. Random gen cities/towns have some areas that are sort of closed off so you can take a wrong turn and have to back out and be in serious trouble, where before it was so spread out you could always turn a corner and lose the pursuing zombies so having some dead ends was a great improvement.

Traveling at night on foot with feral sense on is pretty risky. Food management feels great to me and farming is a short bandaid to a constant problem. Eventually I got a lot of food, but I never was able to eat unlimited stews, I had to make whatever I could scrounge up, buy every can in every vending machine, kill every chicken, etc for at least the first 30 days. It feels good when you are constantly worried about honey/antibiotics/food. I never did get a surplus of big med kits or casts in my 70 some day game, and I had so many times I was beat up with 4+ crits on my screen and very close calls, that to me is what makes a memorable play through.
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@madmole please ! i have small request : could you and team talk about adding old skeleton prop - like skeleton in rags sitting on chair or lying, please 🙏

 
Food is not a thing unless chickens don't respawn.

I "drove" my bicycle to another town (The trade route quest) and back and ended up with 100 meat. (7 chickens and a deer) with 1 point in cooking that's 200 food "grilled meat".

Just killing the chickens on the road with pistol ready while riding bike.  Quickly hop off bike, crouch for accuracy then fire pistol.  Boom repeat.

With dying:

My first (and still no deaths) is a hard push on clubs/shotty with 1pt in cooking and 1pt for the forge.  Probably not going to die now.

My second and third were a perception/archer focus and a fortitude focus.  They both died.

I like the archer, its strong but I don't play that well yet.

 
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I understand they worked the block health but Im not sure why they removed reinforced concrete Because it was just another type of block you could build with and it just seems like a interesting removal  

 
My first-look review, just like other people do now :)

I playtested it for a short amount of time and the towns and RWG is, as everyone is saying here, amazing. It feels so much more real and scarier and more epic.

However, I do feel that I have gotten too much loot in this very first stage in the game. I already got more than 60 ammo rounds after looting just one kinda basic POI, and even found 2 guns (while I wasn't even in a boosted biome, I was in just the plains). I personally like it more if I have TOO LITTLE ammo VS too much ammo. This way we have to strategically think about wether we have to use our scarce ammo or not, which makes it a lot cooler IMO. In alpha 19 my friends and I came across our first gun at around day 15 or something (which felt very epic), and now I already got 2 guns before the night in the first day, which feels OP and not special anymore because I already have a lot in a very short amount of time. 

The amount of ammo I got and schematics I already learned also feels too much. I hope this will get fixed by stable, because this is my single ONLY very bad feeling. The rest is AMAZING, but even those amazing things will quickly feel not special anymore if you already have multiple guns by day 1. I remember playing at day 120+ in alpha 17 and still finding new cool loot, while now I think I would have everything by day 30.

I hope this will be read by the fun pimps and balanced by stable, because I love this game and also see that multiple people think the same as me. Trader ammo rewards are halved but personally still feel a little too much.

Long story short:

In my opinion, especially ammo and guns found in loot early-game need to be lowered. For the rest it's amazing.

 
I'll do a formal bug report if necessary but I've got a dedicated server running the pregen 8k map and one of my players is getting the "no trader" message when trying to complete the starter quest.  Any quick/easy way to fix this?

 
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Burrfly said:
However, I do feel that I have gotten too much loot in this very first stage in the game. I already got more than 60 ammo rounds after looting just one kinda basic POI, and even found 2 guns (while I wasn't even in a boosted biome, I was in just the plains). I personally like it more if I have TOO LITTLE ammo VS too much ammo.
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While I haven't jumped into A20 yet, you can adjust the loot rate to something less than 100% to correct too-much-loot problems.

-Arch Necromancer Morloc

 
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