PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[trielkee]

The main incentive to kill zombies should be survival. You do not want your base wrecked, and you do not want to die. Zombies are now seen only as loot pinatas to be hunted down and rounded up anyway possible to gather loot, not to disperse a threat or to save your life. As a matter of fact very few kill zombies out of reaction unless a wandering horde shows up.

Well said.

I can get behind the idea that on a rare occasion there could be a backpack dropped from a killed zombie with some goodies in it (I imagine a situation in this case as someone allready mentioned, that after the outbreak survivors gathered loot in their backpacks and ran from the zombies, eventually got bitten and turned, with their backpack full of loot still on them), but to have every zombie drop something, as is the case now, makes the game quickly easy and dull.

There needs to be a way for the game to stay engaging in the long run, and I'm sure TFPs decisions for E17 that are currently disliked by some will eventually bring it closer to that goal as the development goes on.

 

[Gnomaana]

you still end up getting the same as you did before... random of course.. but you used to chop the tree and every swing get example... 1 wood per swing and then at fell point you got 15 plus chance of seed.
whereas now, you get the same amount and still maybe a seed.

we did not loose how many we get... its just all spread out now keep in mind various amounts per different tree types and random.

That may be true for stone/iron and stuff but there was definitely a drop in the amount of wood you got from A15 to A16. They ended up lowering the amount of wood to make frames and stuff to somewhat compensate for it.

 

[gav_328t]

i was hoping for a bit more in the video, like more gameplay, a horde night would have been great. Looking forward to the patch dropping

 

[bloom_meister]

One other thing.

MM and the devs have repeatedly, for a very long time now....refused to add in extra weapons, armour and legendary items. No reason has been given.

In the latest video MM mentions that now that they have texture streaming this free up memory for additional textures such as new guns as if this is the problem all along. Well I have to call total BS on that, if we had 3 types of pistols all with the same graphic but different stats (Glock, colt 45 etc) then the ONLY thing that needs adding is the item stats in the relevant database/xml entry, just like modders have been doing for years. You dont need new graphics, they can be added some other time, to add new weapons, armour and legendary items to the game so enough with the untruths on why we didnt get em yet.

We didnt get em yet because you did not want to give them to us, god only knows why but its as simple as that so dont pretend otherwise.

 

[Gnomaana]

We got rid of fire demons and we got rid of zombie health bars. Criticism before playing is helpful.

No idea what you are talking about with fire deamons but the health bars were never "in" the game. It was stated a ton of times those were for devs to be able to tweak things. At least I don't recall anyone stating they were in. There were a lot of assumptions but nothing official.

 

[eidobunny]

No idea what you are talking about with fire deamons but the health bars were never "in" the game. It was stated a ton of times those were for devs to be able to tweak things. At least I don't recall anyone stating they were in. There were a lot of assumptions but nothing official.

Fire demons, maybe radiated zombies?

 

[Gnomaana]

One other thing.
MM and the devs have repeatedly, for a very long time now....refused to add in extra weapons, armour and legendary items. No reason has been given.

In the latest video MM mentions that now that they have texture streaming this free up memory for additional textures such as new guns as if this is the problem all along. Well I have to call total BS on that, if we had 3 types of pistols all with the same graphic but different stats (Glock, colt 45 etc) then the ONLY thing that needs adding is the item stats in the relevant database/xml entry, just like modders have been doing for years. You dont need new graphics, they can be added some other time, to add new weapons, armour and legendary items to the game so enough with the untruths on why we didnt get em yet.

We didnt get em yet because you did not want to give them to us, god only knows why but its as simple as that so dont pretend otherwise.

Because this is Alpha and you don't need 30 different variations of the same weapon for Alpha. Things go into Alpha because they are useful to the devs to make a finished game. They are not added just to appease us.

 

[Viktoriusiii]

Fire demons, maybe radiated zombies?

he is talking about the first iteration of the firezombie which was bright yellow/red-ish and looked very cartoony. It was reworked after the community told him that it looked too cartoony.

 

[faatal]

That said the only thing I had issue with is the fast respawning sleepers. Way faster than now and now is a bug that needed fixing.

I will be looking at it. There is a lot more testing and refining to go.

 

[Guppycur]

No idea what you are talking about with fire deamons but the health bars were never "in" the game. It was stated a ton of times those were for devs to be able to tweak things. At least I don't recall anyone stating they were in. There were a lot of assumptions but nothing official.

I truly believe in my heart of hearts that the intention was originally to add health bars to all zombies, but that the backlash caused the current iteration of reasoning.

In short, I don't always believe MM.

 

[meganoth]

Except not all players are modders and the few modders here can only do so much. They are in no way responsible for making the game what it should be and they certainly aren't paid for that either. Sure we are not in the final version of the game yet, but once this game is released, the amount of modded servers will certainly be a significant indicator of how well the team matched the expectations of all their players.

There is no game what it should be! There is a game what it should be according to your tastes, there is a game what it should be according to MM, to me, to X,Y, Z. So many games actually.

And the AMOUNT of modded servers isn't already an indication: If half of them had reduced loot on zombies and half had more, then what?

 

[Tearstone]

Loot

So regarding Loot from Zombies.

I observed a few things during my first watch of the vid, but didn't really dawn on me until this morning when I went to watch it again.

Zombie loot drops might not even need to be something we worry about. And the answer is pretty evident the moment Joel starts the game up.

He spawns in very close to a car. And at that car is trash, a cooler, and a backpack and maybe something else besides the zombie. He immediately gets a decent set of loot. He was tripping over a decent amount of loot, even without the zombies dropping any.

So zombie loot might be completely moot (as far as brass, paper, etc goes.) Which, if that's the case, I'm fine with it. The rotten flesh might be more common in fridges now, and of course there's zombie dogs, zombie bears, vultures. Who knows what else? Maybe you can make rotting flesh from other things now like raw meat?

I had one other thing I wanted to bring up, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was now... *shambles off to another part of the house for now*

 

[Gnomaana]

I truly believe in my heart of hearts that the intention was originally to add health bars to all zombies, but that the backlash caused the current iteration of reasoning.
In short, I don't always believe MM.

Yeah, I don't make up stuff in my own mind and then assume it is fact and anyone saying different is obviously lying. That's just me.

I do believe it was possible they were considering it, especially for bosses, but that doesn't mean they ever decided one way or the other that early on in this Alpha stage. Plus, it IS really handy for a dev trying to debug, or even just balance, damage so I could see the work being done just for that purpose.

 

[meganoth]

You are talking about a custom setting.Important for a game is first of all to balance it for a "default" setting.

Besides: Arrows are craftable items. And even if you have a low number of them (cost of crafting), retrieving them 100% would still lead to an inflation in their numbers. So there needs to be a mechanic that wastes a portion of them. (Its not practical too have a separate durability for each arrow).

That can be a dedicated mechanic (% of arrows that can be plugged out), or an emergent mechanic (missing arrows fly off, and it is too cumbersome to find them again).

When plugging them out of a zombie, there should be some "break" or "success" notification. That could be a sound effect or visual hint.

There is another possibility: Bow could be designed as the basic ranged weapon (like a pistol is in shooters, where it often has infinite ammo but the lowest damage). Later in the game your bow has practically infinite ammo, but because of the rather low damage you don't use it anymore.

I don't think they'll go that way. Still, the A16 bow would be too powerful it stealth were working correctly

 

[Guppycur]

I do believe it was possible they were considering it, especially for bosses, but that doesn't mean they ever decided one way or the other that early on in this Alpha stage. Plus, it IS really handy for a dev trying to debug, or even just balance, damage so I could see the work being done just for that purpose.

So, even in your own scenario, you recognize the importance of people complaining before it's set in stone.

Glad we agree.

 

[Roland]

I truly believe in my heart...

You lost me here.

 

[Gnomaana]

So, even in your own scenario, you recognize the importance of people complaining before it's set in stone.
Glad we agree.

Oh yeah, i was never really disagreeing with your premise. I have just never let me agreeing with the premise stop me from arguing. Especially on the internet.

 

[faatal]

The main incentive to kill zombies should be survival. You do not want your base wrecked, and you do not want to die. Zombies are now seen only as loot pinatas to be hunted down and rounded up anyway possible to gather loot, not to disperse a threat or to save your life.

Well said.
I can get behind the idea that on a rare occasion there could be a backpack dropped from a killed zombie with some goodies in it (I imagine a situation in this case as someone allready mentioned, that after the outbreak survivors gathered loot in their backpacks and ran from the zombies, eventually got bitten and turned, with their backpack full of loot still on them), but to have every zombie drop something, as is the case now, makes the game quickly easy and dull.

There needs to be a way for the game to stay engaging in the long run, and I'm sure TFPs decisions for E17 that are currently disliked by some will eventually bring it closer to that goal as the development goes on.

I thought about it last night and real zombies would not be carrying a bunch of junk. If we all turned to zombies right now, what would we find in our pockets? Not much. Some people may have a backpack on with supplies they were carrying to bug out and then died and became a zombie, but not many.

The POIs contain the loot. Zombies block access. Kill/evade zombies to get at the loot. Yes, on your 100 dude server you would need to increase loot respawn or a bigger map, so you can drive farther to find stuff.

Bones from zombie corpses? Maybe corpses could stay around longer, it would look better, but on bloodmoons we remove oldest ones, so FPS does not tank? Would I really want to hack up zombies ever? Good way to get infected. I think more animals would be nice, to get bones and fat, with zombies killing them, so you need to thin out the zombie population to encourage more animals to survive, but if a zombie kills a boar, could you not just kill the zombie to loot the boar corpse? Lots of ways you can go with this.

Much testing and tweaking to go.

 

[eidobunny]

So regarding Loot from Zombies.
I observed a few things during my first watch of the vid, but didn't really dawn on me until this morning when I went to watch it again.

Zombie loot drops might not even need to be something we worry about. And the answer is pretty evident the moment Joel starts the game up.

He spawns in very close to a car. And at that car is trash, a cooler, and a backpack and maybe something else besides the zombie. He immediately gets a decent set of loot. He was tripping over a decent amount of loot, even without the zombies dropping any.

So zombie loot might be completely moot (as far as brass, paper, etc goes.) Which, if that's the case, I'm fine with it. The rotten flesh might be more common in fridges now, and of course there's zombie dogs, zombie bears, vultures. Who knows what else? Maybe you can make rotting flesh from other things now like raw meat?

I had one other thing I wanted to bring up, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was now... *shambles off to another part of the house for now*

Right,

So now you log in to a multiplayer server and all of those containers are empty.

It's the 7th night.

You harvest some wood and other resources to mock up a makeshift horde defense base. It gets completely destroyed. You die. None of the zombies you killed had any loot. You've gained nothing.

Well, I guess it will be "harder"

 

[DaVegaNL]

So, even in your own scenario, you recognize the importance of people complaining before it's set in stone.
Glad we agree.