PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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A21 is great.

But I'm disappointed by the water survival changes. Haven't seen anyone in the streams struggle for water, even just a bit, in the first few days.

This part of A21 was kind of underwhelming. I expected better "water survival" and I see a change that will only achieve to remove empty jars from the inventory.

It was intended to make water an issue again, at least in the first days/week, but it missed the mark in my opinion.

I hope they'll do a balance pass during experimental, and lower how much murky water or drinks you find in loot.

Does anyone else feel like that?  :confused2:

 
Jost Amman said:
A21 is great.

But I'm disappointed by the water survival changes. Haven't seen anyone in the streams struggle for water, even just a bit, in the first few days.

This part of A21 was kind of underwhelming. I expected better "water survival" and I see a change that will only achieve to remove empty jars from the inventory.

It was intended to make water an issue again, at least in the first days/week, but it missed the mark in my opinion.

I hope they'll do a balance pass during experimental, and lower how much murky water or drinks you find in loot.

Does anyone else feel like that?  :confused2:
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I take it you've been watching... less casual streamers?

I watched jawoodle, guns nerds and steel, and khaine and they all seemed to be struggling a bit with food and water. Buuut they are definitely not... the best at the game, let's say.
I think for the casual player it makes it more difficult. For those of us who are very experienced I think it will just take a little bit of adaptation and we won't struggle at all.

 
Gronal said:
I take it you've been watching... less casual streamers?

I watched jawoodle, guns nerds and steel, and khaine and they all seemed to be struggling a bit with food and water. Buuut they are definitely not... the best at the game, let's say.
I think for the casual player it makes it more difficult. For those of us who are very experienced I think it will just take a little bit of adaptation and we won't struggle at all.
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No, I actually was watching pretty casual streamers that don't play the game too often.

They just need to do POI quests and loot everything, and they'll get enough water to not have any problems.

It doesn't take a genius to do that lol

 
Jost Amman said:
But I'm disappointed by the water survival changes. Haven't seen anyone in the streams struggle for water, even just a bit, in the first few days.
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I think it depends a lot on your play style. I've seen streamers who were questing a lot and streamers who were more casual looters and mostly just wandering around. The second group struggled a lot more.

 
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faatal said:
A21 RWG time on an AMD 7950x, 64GB RAM, g4 NVME with default settings is:

4k 0:50.

6k 1:50.
8k 1:56.
10k 4:16.

You will get a fairly big pause at "Smoothing street tiles", but it is still working. Times do vary some with seed.
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Holy crap, look at those times. Excellent work and thank you for breaking it down so specifically.

this is great news, I can generate a world while we all get into discord.

 
One thing I've noticed is that the loot boost you get from the Perks doesn't seem to be as subtle as it's always been said. It's always been said that it's mainly a safety net so that you're guaranteed to find magazines and parts that fit your specialization, but the differences are very clear.
 

This is good for single player but in co-op it could be a disadvantage.
 

 
Jost Amman said:
It was intended to make water an issue again, at least in the first days/week, but it missed the mark in my opinion.
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I've done 2 short runs so far. 1 solo prestream, the first quest reward was a stack of 10 waters, by day 3 I can build the dew collector. Not much struggle. The second was onstream with my partner and we've been surviving on drinks from the vending machine. Day 4 nowhere near being able to build a water collector. Just enough struggle for it to be a concern, with no surplus. Which is pretty much how it was described when the removal of the jars thing first came up. 

It's a small sample size but RNG seems to play a pretty big role in whether or not water is an issue. Food on the other hand...

 
Jost Amman said:
I hope they'll do a balance pass during experimental, and lower how much murky water or drinks you find in loot.

Does anyone else feel like that?  :confused2:
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I always thought that the game was balanced towards Co-Op so dealing with multiple survivors working together.  So a single player who only has to watch out for themselves would not struggle as much under default settings as a group of 4+.

 
One of the purposes why streamers are few hours ahead of us is not only to give some feedback about bugs, just before public release (remember why it is called experimental) , but also balance, as we`ve seen it in many alphas before. 

For so far this release is rock solid, in a proper way to gold version. 

Also, thank you all of you streamers, who read this forum (and for some reason stay quiet here), keep up the good work. 

 
A21 will change many people's idea of what a strong build is.

From what I've seen, the perception build is now very strong and at the least, it's a viable build for most situations.

 
khzmusik said:
I was watching a few streamers today. It looks like the answer for most containers is "no." Once you loot a container, it no longer has an inventory so you can't put anything into it.

I definitely do not like this change. For example, I always choose a home base with a lootable fridge in it, since I like the "realism" of keeping food in a refrigerator.
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Players have been able to craft those cupboards and cabinets. I wonder if those blocks still work in A21. Folks who like to renovate houses tend to use those blocks.

 
So, when A21 stable comes out, will we all have to start a new world? Can't wait to play it but if we are going to lose our progress in 20-30 days after experimental release, i'm rather wait for the stable version instead 

 
Scarman422 said:
So, when A21 stable comes out, will we all have to start a new world? Can't wait to play it but if we are going to lose our progress in 20-30 days after experimental release, i'm rather wait for the stable version instead 
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I think I only recall one jump from experimental to stable that required a new map.

Could be mistaken, though.

 
Laran Mithras said:
I think I only recall one jump from experimental to stable that required a new map.

Could be mistaken, though.
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Yeah, in the last couple of Alpha's i've kept playing my experimental save after Stable dropped with no issues.

I would expect it to be the same now.

 
Wulf said:
Yeah, in the last couple of Alpha's i've kept playing my experimental save after Stable dropped with no issues.

I would expect it to be the same now.
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Me too. I think the only reason we would have to generate a new world moving from experimental to stable would be if they made changes to existing POIs, RNG or add new blocks. This could cause errors if the game expects a POI to have one attribute and it has a different one. If I recall correctly, when they were working on some art upgrades during experimental this made old worlds incompatible with the new version of the game.

 
Jost Amman said:
I imagined someone would reply something this stupid.

Your suggestion would work perfectly, if I wanted all loot to be that way and not just water.  :rolleyes2:
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Not all loot. According to the patch notes, some loot tables are exempt from the loot setting. But yes basically most other loot would be reduced too but at least you would no longer have a reason to complain about too much water.

 
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