Warning: Wall of text inc.
New player’s take on A17.2. I had never played this game before this alpha.
- I started playing with a friend until about day 45, where he got bored and quit (level 65ish). At that point we had a farm going, adequate water supply, good defenses, etc. So no challenge left.
- Initially I was super scared to go toe to toe with anything, but getting the hang of the controls, most zombies are pretty easy to deal with.
- The fire axe is by far my favorite item/tool in the game.
- Coal feels REALLY scarce in Navezgane. I’ve mined just about everything else in abundance but zero coal anywhere.
Skill trees:
- I specced up in intelligence first because I love crafting in any game, but:
o It is not satisfying the way item quality works, where only really the amount of mod slots change (durability is a non issue by the time you can make high quality stuff anyway). Higher quality items should have either higher damage, faster swing speed or whatever else that can differentiate them in a useful manner.
o The massive amount of level gating is annoying and feels unnecessary. The whole point is you spend the skill points to do what you feel is worthwhile at the time. I would rather the most powerful perks cost more skill points instead, such as steel worker for instance (that one probably needs a level requirement too, to be honest, but you get my drift).
o The upper tiers of advanced engineering, cooking, etc. don’t seem useful at all really. Most skills that don’t give a percentage increase of some sort are better left alone after level 3 is reached more or less.
o Getting barter 5 and intelligence 10 is awesome. The trader is my main source of ammo, I go loot a few houses, sell all the junk to him and buy enough ammo for the next horde night.
- Sex Rex sounds much less useful than it is. I don’t know if there’s some weird stacking thing going on, but the low percentage bonus in the tooltip seems deceptive somehow.
Food and drink:
- Cooking was fun, getting new recipes and stuff, but now I find I just make a whole lot of steak and potatoes and that’s it. There could be more variety in the sorts of benefits different types of meals give.
- All the basic drinks suffer from the same thing. Making tea, coffee, yucca juice etc. all feels very same’y. Either there needs to be more variety in main effects or there should be more defined secondary effects, such as heat/cold resistance. And for coffee actually maybe addiction. I don’t know. Any variety is just welcome.
- “Recog” is cool and all, but the effect is SO short lived and the side effects are SO bad, that I would never in a million years use it for anything serious. I tested it once and stashed the rest. I would suggest a smaller damage bonus for a longer duration and a lower chance and lower duration of the side effect. Downside is too great.
- Grandpas recipes need better descriptions of what they actually do imo.
Trading:
- I have relied a lot on trading, which I LIKE is a viable strategy in this game. Please don’t tone that down, it’s where it needs to be barring exploits for dukes.
o The trader really favors high quality items, which is good I guess, but the price difference between low and high tier with more expensive base items does seems a little over the top sometimes.
o I make money making tier 6 iron clubs, sledgehammers and leather armor for the most part, then I make a run to all 4 traders in a day making 12-18.000 dukes, and spend it all on ammo, gunpowder and whatever else I need for the week. No complaints.
o The price for acid at the trader is WAY too high. At barter 5 it’s like 111 dukes, and military fiber is 39. So you need a 111 duke item to craft a 39 duke one – does not make sense.
o The price for mining helmets is high, I get almost 2k for each tier 6 helmet I make. This is probably a little too high, but considering you need two random drop items to make them, it probably should be expensive (maybe like 25% less so though).
Tools, crafting and building:
- The steel tools feel underwhelming when you come from fully modded iron tools. Like I had a tier 6 iron shovel and found a tier 3 steel shovel which was actually way worse. That’s not great.
- I don’t see the point of the nail gun compared to the already excellent clawhammer.
- The auger is something I had waited the entire game to try, but with a shovel that clears dirt in one swing, a pick that clears rock in two, etc. it did not feel worthwhile. Especially since it breaks super fast, takes a ton of fuel, and makes mining more chaotic. I no longer use it.
- Military armor salvages to too many fibers (9) compared to what it takes to make (12). This makes taking low grade military drops, salvaging them and crafting high tier stuff too easy.
- It took me until like day 60 to find any beaker at all. Then on that day I found 3. FML
- Farming. I like that you don’t destroy crops when you harvest them, but sometimes seeds just randomly disappear. Is this intended?? I can clear a row of corn, then go to the other side of my field and clear coffee or whatever, and when I come back there will be one or two corn seeds missing. It’s weird.
- Harvesting coffee especially is annoying because the hitbox is that 2d image the plant consists of. It’s hard to hit when next to other bulkier plants. The opposite goes for Yucca which is all over the place.
- Repairing barbed wire fences is a nightmare, because the hitbox is so limited. You have to hit the slender wooden legs of them, so it’s way too fiddly.
- Repairing iron spike traps is bugged. The first time you repair them, they will go to 100 %, but still look damaged. This will let you repair them again for no durability increase, so it’s only cosmetic. This means they essentially cost 2x the materials to repair fully of what they should. Also the hitboxes again are fiddly.
- I like the building system in general, however, as a new player the learning curve is quite steep. Like which materials can you use horizontally for how far, what upgrades to what, and how do you rotate properly. I was lucky to play with someone who knew a lot of this.
- Crafting is for the most part pretty satisfying. I like that you need schematics for more exotic items, but it’s just plain weird that they are one-use. Increase the material cost instead, please.
- I love reinforced concrete. It looks really nice. It took me a while to notice that rebar frames upgrade straight to that though, so I have wasted a LOT of materials upgrading all the way from wood over iron, to concrete to reinforced.
- I think glass should be a recipe you make with sand instead of just melting sand in the forge (which is not intuitive btw and took me ages to find out).
Biomes:
- I appreciate the concept of the biomes, but in practice it’s not working for me at all. The weather effects being local to a biome is one thing, but the block to block border thing just kills it. I know it’s a challenge to do anything more gradual, but perhaps for instance let each biomes placeables (litter, plants and monsters etc.) spawn up to 30 blocks into the neighboring zone so you get a sort of mixed flora and fauna on the borders. It would make it less jarring to go from one to the other, I think.
- I just stay away from the wasteland. I don’t like the aesthetic, there are vultures everywhere and there is no upside. I like forest and snow in general both in look and feel. More zombie variety in snow would be good.
- Desert looks cool, but the way heat works and with how hard it is to prep yourself for it, it’s not worth it. I go there for the trader, for my initial aloe farming setup and that’s it. There are not enough clothes appropriate for it in the game (with high enough heat resists), whereas there are plenty for cold.
Vehicles:
- I like the bicycle and the motorbike the best.
o The minibike doesn’t actually feel faster than the bike (by any margin that matters), so it felt a bit pointless except for storage.
o The motorbike feels GREAT, mostly because of the sound probably and that it feels heavy to drive.
o The 4x4 is pointless. Not much faster, a little more inventory but by this point in the game that doesn’t matter much, and it uses a TON more fuel.
o Generally, fuel consumption goes up too fast with vehicle tier I think for not much of an advantage to the higher tier vehicles.
Other stuff:
- I set my friend on fire accidentally by using the flaming hilt mod for my axe. Zombie caught fire, friend caught fire, friend panicked and died. Friend was not happy. It’s weird that I had to watch YouTube videos to find out that drinking water puts the fire out.
- The FPS in this game is poor, and I absolutely understand the engineering challenge involved since everything is destructible and surfaces depend on how much durability a block has etc. But it must be possible to optimize rendering further still. The game doesn’t seem very CPU dependent, though, so maybe something could be offloaded from the GPU. What do I know. On a GTX 1070 I should not be getting 40-50 FPS on a regular basis (with a lot of stuff turned down or off), however, if you want to give people a good experience come release time.
- The number of screamers I get poking around my base in a day is a little much. Hard to craft in peace
(and it gets a little repetitive with the same mobs always poking around)
- The HUD is too limited I feel. It’s very simple, which is good, but a lot of need to know data is "hidden" in your character sheet when it doesn’t need to be. A better balance would be towards the more informative I feel.
- I don’t understand people bothering with ramp exploits etc. Horde nights aren’t that hard to begin with if you just play the game like it’s meant to.
I could go on for days probably, but I’ll stop before every one of you loses the will to live.
