PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Krougal]

This is an interesting take. The general consensus I've seen is that the game is trending more towards FPS/ action-oriented and away from survival/RPG. The game has definitely has been trending towards guns and heavy looting since I first started playing in A15.

Level grinding and skills are RPG to me. I mean don't get me wrong, when I was young I enjoyed it.

As an old man I just want to jump in and play. I get enough spreadsheets at work. I also like to start fresh maps frequently but it gets to be a chore doing the same old grind over and over to get decent skills.

Granted this game is not as bad as many these days, at least I'm only joking about the spreadsheet for 7D, I can't say the same for some others.

Rust is a prime example of a more FPS game that is somewhat comparable. There are no levels, no skills. There's the @%$#ty tech tree, but that's just a matter of getting stuff.

You can use whatever you find just as effectively as the next guy. That's how this game used to be and that was what I liked. There was no min/maxing of a character build or equipment, you used what you found or could make with what you found. And you explored, because the maps while far from perfect were worth exploring. You never knew what you were going to find. Now the biome layouts are all more or less the same, we go from trader to trader and POI to POI and how good a map is can be rated strictly by what POIs it contains or doesn't. The game has lost a lot of its charm.

 

[Khalagar]

This is an interesting take. The general consensus I've seen is that the game is trending more towards FPS/ action-oriented and away from survival/RPG. The game has definitely has been trending towards guns and heavy looting since I first started playing in A15.

Yeah, the game is definitely turning way more into a looter shooter FPS than an RPG, I'm surprised anyone would feel the opposite. The survival stuff goes back and forth between patches, but it usually still feels important to the design, but as seen by the Anti-Intellect Defense Force™ that argues against focused and optimized  builds that focus on one attribute, by saying "just use shotgun on all builds lol" and "game isn't balanced around focusing on one attribute", the RPG side definitely has been falling by the wayside for a while.

You can still gimp yourself by roleplaying a narrow focused build, but it doesn't really feel supported / intended / balanced for. Like with your entire stealth build not even working on the most important night of the week or 80% of the intellect tree perks being completely useless compared to just finding schematics / getting rewarded the item outright by traders

 

[Blake_]

In a game played with my son, where he hosted and generated the map, we definitely spawned in the desert with the forest quite a hike away. That map did not have a forest town or trader though.

I didn't do a bug report because when i asked, he had not cleaned all a19 files from his game. He cleaned, we restarted on a new map, and everything was normal. Every map i have generated in a20 has also been normal.

I wonder if the people having these spawning issues are not doing a thorough clean of a19? or maybe just coincidence.

I see, that must be Multiplayer then. I've only tested in Single player.

 

[Callum123456789]

very small thing but paper should have the corrected description to not include blunderbuss ammo 

 

[LostBoy]

Something seems off with the weather.

I'm in the Forest, and I'm getting two to three rain sessions each day.

Quite a few storms as well.

I've looked at the Biome settings for Forest and it looks like rain 7 and storm 3 should only give a 10% chance of rain.

Seeing a whole lot more than that.

Is there a multiplier somewhere for this ?

 

[Exxodous]

Yes. I was about to post -- after I caught up on this thread -- if QA wants a reproduction. I have a solid reproduction for it with a save game backup. Just start horde night, and the sledge falls through a full block.

It doesn't have to be just horde night.  Mine fell through the blocks twice while just working on the base.  Of course it also happened about half way through horde night.  Almost got wrecked.  It's a shame too because I built my base relying on a little help from a couple of them, which is why I spec'd heavy into intellect. 

 

[Roland]

Yeah, the game is definitely turning way more into a looter shooter FPS than an RPG, I'm surprised anyone would feel the opposite. 

Depends on when you started playing most likely.  To me, the game is still firmly on the RPG end of the spectrum compared to when I first started. 
 

To someone who started in the last few alphas, some of the changes may seem like a trend towards FPS, but to me it is just a small fluctuation and one that will probably continue until the devs settle on the exact mixture they want for this hybrid genre busting game. 

 

[Callum123456789]

for me it feels kind of like a looter shooter compared to the older alphas but its mostly rpg based for me too

 

[wolfbain5]

Waifu, already tested and confirmed. sorry about the caps. definitely solidly in the wastelands. sorry about the confusion
 

 

[Aldranon]

If they also drop the forge or simplify it any more, then it will be mostly in the Looter/Shoot category.

Now, if I squint my eyes a bit, its still a survival game with Loot-n-Shoot aspects. 

As I'm still having fun, the active player numbers are high, so a part 2 is a done deal IMO.  Which is a win for gamers!

 

[Geoarrge]

So you actually wanna make the game easier? Sorry but I can't get behind that idea at all.  My biggest complaint with the game in the past is that it's been way TOO easy.  Even playing perma. By day 30 your almost invincible regardless of settings. That's what I do like about the new feral system (which I always set to all and have NEVER played with other settings).

Well, no. Not the entire game. Day 1.
I may be getting a distorted impression from one game in which Day 1 RNG was extremely unlucky.  After more games in this alpha I'm starting to see that this was an extremely unusual case.  
On that game I was finding no glue/tape, no ammo for the gun I had, no healing (every med pile had either basic bandages or drugs), and the trader didn't have any meds, ammo, or glue either.  Which made questing in the city seem particularly brutal. 

I still think some fine tuning is warranted for wandering zombies in city areas. In later days when you have decent weapons and plenty of ammo, it's possible to farm them almost indefinitely from a secure perch. 

 

[Red Eagle LXIX]

I'm also a bit sad that snowberries aren't in the game any more, but I guess the writing was on the wall for them anyway.

Don't feel too bad.  Their annoying growths will still block building.  You just get grass for punching them out now.

 

[Laz Man]

Level grinding and skills are RPG to me. I mean don't get me wrong, when I was young I enjoyed it.

As an old man I just want to jump in and play. I get enough spreadsheets at work. I also like to start fresh maps frequently but it gets to be a chore doing the same old grind over and over to get decent skills.

Granted this game is not as bad as many these days, at least I'm only joking about the spreadsheet for 7D, I can't say the same for some others.

Rust is a prime example of a more FPS game that is somewhat comparable. There are no levels, no skills. There's the @%$#ty tech tree, but that's just a matter of getting stuff.

You can use whatever you find just as effectively as the next guy. That's how this game used to be and that was what I liked. There was no min/maxing of a character build or equipment, you used what you found or could make with what you found. And you explored, because the maps while far from perfect were worth exploring. You never knew what you were going to find. Now the biome layouts are all more or less the same, we go from trader to trader and POI to POI and how good a map is can be rated strictly by what POIs it contains or doesn't. The game has lost a lot of its charm.

Can't say I remember a past alpha where exploration was more rewarding / immersive than it is now.  More POIs added/updated  then ever, the tile system more seamlessly connects everything in different configurations.  POis don't repeat within the same towns/cities like in the past.

It should only continue to get better. As more POIs and tiles get added.  Keep in mind different variations of each tile type can be made quickly for even more variety. (E.g. downtown_straight_02, 03, 04)

 

[Callum123456789]

both of these poi buttons to open the doors arent opening when i pressed it it turned green nut nothing opened so gonna guess this is a bug?

 

[Roland]

both of these poi buttons to open the doors arent opening when i pressed it it turned green nut nothing opened so gonna guess this is a bug?

Weird. Two of the doors in my base kept opening and closing for no reason!!!

 

[dcsobral]

View attachment 22222View attachment 22223

both of these poi buttons to open the doors arent opening when i pressed it it turned green nut nothing opened so gonna guess this is a bug?

Worked for me on a restore the power quest. It just happened to be the last quest I did today before stopping. 

 

[Darklegend222]

What you want and what needs to be done are two totally separate things. We, the 1000+ hour players who want and love depth, are simply not the target audience, and that isn't an outcry, that's just life. That's just business. What's bad for business is a new player attempting to figure out what to do with the forge, getting frustrated, rage quitting the game, and leaving it a bad review. A good mainstream game should have every mechanic be easily accessible and easy to understand at the snap of a finger. It's a major problem, if you follow the subreddit - new players being puzzled with the mechanics of the forge (or "smelter") happens a lot more than you'd might think.

Regardless of what we want, the best possible system imho is for the forge, campfire, chem station, and cement mixer to be deleted and for the workbench to be the end-all-be-all, and for it to be simplified as well - no schematic, and only crafted with wood, glue, and short iron pipes. Additional pointers and hover over text would be beneficial as well.

Or at the very least, forgetting all that is above, a tutorial map that the game defaults to when creating a world.

I have to disagree very hard, the game literally has a tutorial button. You just have to use it. I used that button so much back in A17 because I had no idea where to find lead, iron, or nitrate. It's there for people to use

 

[dcsobral]

Waifu, already tested and confirmed. sorry about the caps. definitely solidly in the wastelands. sorry about the confusion
 

Still all in the forest for me. Granted, I've generated it on b238 and it's quite possible you have done so on an earlier build. This is what I get, with the spawn points being the little red dots on the roads: https://imgur.com/UTRn2Nn

 

[MechanicalLens]

Just curious, is there a way to edit the XML files to add more options to blood moon range? I was slightly disappointed that it skipped from 7 right to 10...

 

[katarynna]

I see, that must be Multiplayer then. I've only tested in Single player.

It was nothing to do with multiplayer i don't think. The map itself was bad too. No forest city so no forest trader. "no trader" glitch after completing the starting quests due to that. we just also both spawned in the desert.

I suspected it was because he did not wipe a19 data and that screwed up map generation.

No world i generated have had any of those issues. No world he generated after wiping a19 data had any issues.