PC First impressions A21

[Blasphemous]

Just thought an appreciation thread would be welcome.

I really enjoy the new version of the game.

- Traders are amazing now, visually speaking. I had no idea how much they sucked before, I suppose you don't see this, staring right at it, but once somebody gives you another point of view, you suddenly can't imagine going back. I will miss the secret stash for a game or two and then move on

- Water is a scarcity now, and so is glue. Just before this, I played alpha 20.7 and had massive glue farms and whole purified water boxes, I think it makes sense to keep it as something you need to continuously think of. I don't really like the extra long time it takes to boil it, or for that matter to prep any food but I get it, the survival aspects needed to leave their impression on more than just the early game

- The PoIs now are even better - I just walked into a lone desert gas station with two lines of cars piled in front of it and the immersion hit me like a hammer. Yes! Cars that waited for gas and never got it, when the apocalypse came. And the cars themselves - nice variety now, which expands on that previously poor subset

- Skill progression. I think it's something people need to get used to. I kind of enjoy the new system though I miss occasionally getting an early blueprint for motorcycle or a recipe for sham chowder. I see how I can steer the loot RNG to where I want it to be and sure enough, on day 5, I got a magnum at level 5. It's a riot.

- It's darker withing PoIs and that's a good thing. It forces players to make the difficult choice between seeing mines or collapsing floors or sneaking past sleepers. Until night vision I guess. Also, with the skills the way they are now, players are sort of forced to go through the pipe weapons and then progressively more advanced and higher level stuff, I like this. It gives you an appreciation of the progress you've made so far. In 20.7, I could get a real gun on day one and never bother with pipes. Now, it's different and in a good way

- I have noted some improvements to the graphic engine and that's cool, I just hope this won't affect the frame rate on large city maps

- Obviously, I have yet to explore a lot of the world, but with a char at level 24 at the moment, I am very happy with the direction this game is taking. In fact, I think such change of rules and balance should be a mainstay, not just in 7D2D but in other games as well. I like the idea of immersing myself in a familiar world, just to rediscover aspects of it that are radically different now. Keeps it fresh and quite exciting.

- There's of course lots of room for improvement - more zombie types or even just reskins of the existing ones. They have a small set of animations so getting some variety there would be very nice. I can imagine mutated zombies that have developed means of climbing walls. All those open top towers suddenly don't seem like such a good idea. My last game in 20.7 boiled down to getting explosives at level 5 and nuking zombies with a rocket launcher from above, standing on a platform attached to a 10x10x6 steel base. Extremely effective and extremely boring.

- More customization in RWG would be nice. Stuff like "one massive city + satellite towns" or some other variety. I can still use teragon for that and definitely will, but it's just a thought

Generally speaking, I love the improvements and I'm looking forward to discovering new stuff in this world that I know so well.

Great job Pimps.

 

[ElCabong]

Agreed. This is much better than a 20

 

[Cattrina]

To balance the feedback, in this Alpha 21 release I LOVE:

*The enhanced pathing of the zombies, they crawl and do not get stuck that often. Love it!

*The better graphics

I cannot say anything about performance, as I have a new computer now.

 

[Aphrodite]

I can definitely say that the visual appeal of the game is fantastic; however, I am completely bumfuzzled with a few changes and some old issues that remain.

First, why in world would you remove glass jars and tin cans from the game? I understand you want people to use the new dew collector, but having the jars and cans add to the realism of the game. In my opinion, this change is definitely for the worse.

Second, I'm not sure if it's just me, but after firing one arrow from a bow, the arrow no longer aligns with the crosshairs. The arrow points slightly to the left of the crosshairs. After switching to another weapon and then back to the bow, the arrow alignment is correct...well, until I fire an arrow...lol!

Third, I was really hoping that the "it takes 5 pieces of meat to make one" thing would be changed. For the sake of immersion, one piece of meat should make one piece of cooked meat. If the developers feel that too much meat can be gathered from one animal corpse, simply lower the harvest amount. 

Finally, for goodness sake, PLEASE make a toggle to turn off screamers!! As a single player who love to glean every available resource from the places I loot, having a screamer pop up every couple of minutes gets old real quick! Disabling the screamers would be a dream come true!

 

[Old Crow]

I can definitely say that the visual appeal of the game is fantastic; however, I am completely bumfuzzled with a few changes and some old issues that remain.

First, why in world would you remove glass jars and tin cans from the game? I understand you want people to use the new dew collector, but having the jars and cans add to the realism of the game. In my opinion, this change is definitely for the worse.

Second, I'm not sure if it's just me, but after firing one arrow from a bow, the arrow no longer aligns with the crosshairs. The arrow points slightly to the left of the crosshairs. After switching to another weapon and then back to the bow, the arrow alignment is correct...well, until I fire an arrow...lol!

Third, I was really hoping that the "it takes 5 pieces of meat to make one" thing would be changed. For the sake of immersion, one piece of meat should make one piece of cooked meat. If the developers feel that too much meat can be gathered from one animal corpse, simply lower the harvest amount. 

Finally, for goodness sake, PLEASE make a toggle to turn off screamers!! As a single player who love to glean every available resource from the places I loot, having a screamer pop up every couple of minutes gets old real quick! Disabling the screamers would be a dream come true!

They don't want realism in the game unless it comes with something detrimental to the players.

In all.. seriousness? They felt it was too easy to deal with water and thirst in the early game. So they made it easy anyway, just in a different way.

I agree with you on the meat, and seeds too. It shouldn't take 5 pieces of meat to make a single cooked meat, nor should it take 5 veggies to make a single seed. But that just goes back to my comment above about no realism unless it's detrimental to players.

 

[ZehMatt]

I'm inclined to agree on all of the things. Jars just vanishing into oblivion is not about realism but it breaks the expectation which is immersion breaking, just make getting "clean" water hard and boiling dirty water should not turn it into clean water that is just cooked dirty water, quite basic and easy to grasp for players, so why remove the jars? Same can be said about food in cans, where does that can now suddenly go? There is quite a difference between realism and basic expectations. I seriously think that TFP has no idea about game design in general especially if you look at the evidence on how often everything is being changed over and over, I understand that to some degree you have to test and re-evaluate the systems but if you constantly keep doing that it just tells me you have no bloody idea what you are actually doing which is also known as brute force. To me a good game is not a game that has the best graphics in the world but rather well designed game mechanics otherwise we would all have hated the old games which looked pretty @%$# by todays standard but are typically praised to be the best games ever made. There are just so many things wrong with this game and each update I'm hoping it gets better and I stay away from the dev log thread to go into the next version without a bias and every time when it comes to me playing the next update its just massive disappointment. What frustrates me most is that there is this huge potential in a game where you can build and destroy everything but then restricts you in such odd ways just because TFP says so.

 

[8_Hussars]

I can definitely say that the visual appeal of the game is fantastic; however, I am completely bumfuzzled with a few changes and some old issues that remain.

First, why in world would you remove glass jars and tin cans from the game? I understand you want people to use the new dew collector, but having the jars and cans add to the realism of the game. In my opinion, this change is definitely for the worse.

Second, I'm not sure if it's just me, but after firing one arrow from a bow, the arrow no longer aligns with the crosshairs. The arrow points slightly to the left of the crosshairs. After switching to another weapon and then back to the bow, the arrow alignment is correct...well, until I fire an arrow...lol!

Third, I was really hoping that the "it takes 5 pieces of meat to make one" thing would be changed. For the sake of immersion, one piece of meat should make one piece of cooked meat. If the developers feel that too much meat can be gathered from one animal corpse, simply lower the harvest amount. 

Finally, for goodness sake, PLEASE make a toggle to turn off screamers!! As a single player who love to glean every available resource from the places I loot, having a screamer pop up every couple of minutes gets old real quick! Disabling the screamers would be a dream come true!

Performance and overall look on my crappy old systems is significantly better.  Loving the new POIs as well.  Could do without the difficulty meter on mouseover.  Would prefer it as an alt mouseover. 

I don't miss managing jars and cans at all.  I don't subscribe to the expected realism slant.  If that was the case: players would be clamouring for glue containers to craft glue and them then being returned and where do the bowls come from and go to in the prepared meals?  Shouldn't using corn return corn husks (plant fibre)?  People like what they are used too and players are used to jars and cans.

I will have to check out the bow alignment bug.

The arbitrary piece of meat is just that an arbitrary size chosen for scaling.  Nowhere is it ever stated it is a meal.  It is there to make the math work when a player has a 20% reduction in food preparation costs.  What does reducing the meat return of a chicken/rabbit to two pieces of meat (meals) and a Doe down to 4 mean in the long run, the scaling is the same.

Interesting.  I am on Day 13 and have not had a screamer yet.  (well one but they were a sleeper in a POI)   There are a couple of vids out on the A21 heat mechanic.  Will have to see what I am missing. 

 

 

[Old Crow]

Interesting.  I am on Day 13 and have not had a screamer yet.  (well one but they were a sleeper in a POI)   There are a couple of vids out on the A21 heat mechanic.  Will have to see what I am missing. 

 

I was getting them Day 1 on my single player game, which I use for testing things. Had about 7 of them show up over a span of 2 days.

 

[boban]

Interesting.  I am on Day 13 and have not had a screamer yet.  (well one but they were a sleeper in a POI)   There are a couple of vids out on the A21 heat mechanic.  Will have to see what I am missing. 

In one of my recent games I wanted to call screamer to farm xp. I put 12 fireplaces and waited for a few minutes... nothing. So I entered dm and seen that heat was below 80% (don't recall exact number, but it was yellow not red). So I pulled out my pipe pistol and started shooting. After a few clips I had finally called a screamer. I proceed to dispatch the small horde it summoned with my fists (no dogs, just regular zombies, IIRC not even running ones or just a few). The horde had another screamer, who called another mini-horde. I dispatched 2 or 3 additional hordes like that, before I took care of final screamer. But in my "base" I haven't got a screamer yet (but as I mostly loot now I don't have a lot going on there, forge and 2 campfires only, no chem station yet).

 

[Aphrodite]

I was getting them Day 1 on my single player game, which I use for testing things. Had about 7 of them show up over a span of 2 days.

Same here. When I go into a structure to loot. I destroy it down to the bare bones. I break down everything. Once a screamer shows up, I drop what I'm doing, run out to kill it, then return to looting. The issue is that after destroying a couple of cabinets, another screamer pops ups. It's a never ending cycle of running out to kill them and it does get tedious after a bit. I would love to have the option to just disable them. Wandering groups of zombies? Cool. The lone zombie bear that sneaks into the POI that I'm deconstructing? Awesome. An endless stream of screamers. Not cool.

Performance and overall look on my crappy old systems is significantly better.  Loving the new POIs as well.  Could do without the difficulty meter on mouseover.  Would prefer it as an alt mouseover. 

I don't miss managing jars and cans at all.  I don't subscribe to the expected realism slant.  If that was the case: players would be clamouring for glue containers to craft glue and them then being returned and where do the bowls come from and go to in the prepared meals?  Shouldn't using corn return corn husks (plant fibre)?  People like what they are used too and players are used to jars and cans.

I will have to check out the bow alignment bug.

The arbitrary piece of meat is just that an arbitrary size chosen for scaling.  Nowhere is it ever stated it is a meal.  It is there to make the math work when a player has a 20% reduction in food preparation costs.  What does reducing the meat return of a chicken/rabbit to two pieces of meat (meals) and a Doe down to 4 mean in the long run, the scaling is the same.

Interesting.  I am on Day 13 and have not had a screamer yet.  (well one but they were a sleeper in a POI)   There are a couple of vids out on the A21 heat mechanic.  Will have to see what I am missing. 

 

For me, not having a way to collect water presents an issue for crafting as well as hydration. I'm not gathering nearly as much murky water as I did in older Alpha versions of the game, so I'm having to boil my murky water to make clean water to drink. Can I drink from a pond or stream? Yes, but as often as my character is thirsty, I'd almost have to remain very close to a water source at all times. As I'm now having to use my murky water to make drinking water, I don't have murky water to make glue. I really feel like this will be an issue that is going to have to be fixed in some way in order to prevent hinderances in that game.

 

[Doctor Mobius]

Overall, I'm enjoying Alpha 21.  The graphics seem more grounded, the smoother roads, and hills are wonderful.

Things that concerned me going in:

Crafting Level Books: - Happy
I was skeptical about the system of using stacks of the same books for crafting skill quality.  Overall, it's fine.  It probably needs some balancing, to tweak it.  I don't love or hate it, really, but it feels a bit more genuine in the way it progresses.  In co-op games it makes looting interesting.  You want to give all of one type of book to one player, so they can learn to craft quicker than if you spread the books out. 

Dew Collectors: - Unhappy
This isn't working for me, so far.  They are big, weird looking, and the inability to just boil water, makes little sense.  Water is one of the first things you have to attend to, in a survival situation, so it made sense that figuring out water was something you did within the first week.  The system pulls me out of the immersion, when I'm bicycling past lakes, in rain storms, but I'm worried if my dew collector has enough water in it.

Vehicle Damage: - Good and Bad
I like the idea that vehicles take significant damage from ramming a brick wall, at top speed.  It makes me be careful.  I also like the notion that it takes more than one little repair kit to fix a big honkin' jeep.  I do not like that my bicycle loses 17% of it's health, because I nudged a traffic cone, or any real damage by going slowly over a high curb.  Keep the major damage boosted, but maybe just take out the damage for hitting small stuff, like cones, and curbs.  It feels like the vehicle equivalent of when we used to break our leg by walking off a half meter drop, at an angle. 

Things I wish I'd seen:
More zombie types.  Give us more to think about, and more variety in how we have to address a fight, when we loot a POI.  Fast crawlers, sneaky, hard to see, sideways running, special attacks, etc...  It's well past time we had several new types of things to fight.

Terrain specific POIs.  I don't mean biome, though that's cool too.  I mean let's have some POIs that only exist on islands, in the middle of a lake, on top of a mountain, down in a canyon, on a mesa.  Then make us go to them as part of our "unlocking trade routs" quests.  In the past, I've driven past, or flown over beautiful scenery, that's basically just an obstacle.  Give me a reason to climb it. 

A map that I can zoom all the way out on:
Come on;  The preview, when the map is generated, fits on your screen, so why can't I zoom out to that level, and get a good sense of the layout of the map, as I explore it.  As is, I snap a quick image of the map, when it's generated, for reference.  I'd rather not be doing that, and be able to see everything I've explored, at once. 

Things I love:

New POIs:
The new POIs are fantastic.  I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of them, but even the ones that I pass, like the roadside checkpoints, look fantastic, and add to the immersion, and the tone of the game.  It really adds to the Apocalypse feel.

The new Trader Forts:
The new trader locations are really wonderful.  I've seen three so far, and they're all different and interesting, yet fit within the world. 

The new Art:
This also looks wonderful.  Often the only time that anything looks like blocky, is at a distance.  Looking around a forest, or a dense part of town, I often don't even feel like I'm in a game made of 1m squared blocks. 

The new graphics:
I'm not a huge graphics buff, but it feels like there have been some understated changes to the graphics, that make the lighting, and feel of everything just a bit more grounded.  Less flashy, and more real. 

Difficulty Skulls:
These are just handy, for both knowing the danger, and having a name for each POI, that everyone on a team can use.

This is just first impressions, mind you.  I'm in it for at least four or five blood moons.  I feel, however, that first impressions matter a lot, as many players may never get past them, and play further.  Overall I'm happy, but I feel it should be better, by release.

   - DM

 

[Zerginfestor]

I haven't even bothered with the Dew system because of the requirement of a water filter, and it's production is so slow, that it's function becomes rather either pointless due to the murky water you find or you hit a critical mass of a Dew farm to make it where you no longer need to find said water, which is I guess fine in SP, but in MP, it's more of a "in case of everyone somehow didn't find a single bottle of murky water" emergency tap. It's a poor attempt into trying to make a system 'harder' when it doesn't make it harder, but rather tedious. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" is usually the antithesis of innovation, but in this case, I don't really care for trying to 'complicate' a starter survival system that, generally, every survival game out there has left in beginner status for good reason. 

As for the vehicle damage system, I'm not for it. Always have been a 'stick to the roads' fella with vehicles just due to the clunky nature of this game and the interaction with something moving can make things hairy, but now the slightest bump can suddenly do solid damage to your vehicle is just silly. Reminds me of older games with vehicle damage. 

 

[garybrunsvold]

Overall,  I am very happy with A21 so far.  I enjoy the new new learn by reading system.  The graphics are much improved and the world generation is vastly quicker than in A20.  I have started 2 maps so far, 1 for each exp version.  The one thing that does annoy me, espcieally with the new vehicle damagew system is the fact that the cities do not appear to be attached by major roads any longer.   The new infested clears are fun and early game, very challenging with the slower weapon unlocks with this version.  I have only run into  1 legacy POI that did not receive any update love so far, and that is the Don Delgado? residence.

On a personal note, I still wish there was a way to change the color of a weapon crosshair ass I make a naked mole rat seem to have 20/20 vision.

 

[ElCabong]

It's been fairly bug free. There are some issues. Traders need to be worked on. I completed a tier four quest and my best choice was a tier 1 pistol.  That point I put in daring adventurer really paid off for sure...

This business with the z that won't spawn unless you find the right trigger in a mission needs to be fixed. 

I would have quit and started a new game by now but I'm staying with it because of the new skill system. Just made my chemistry station and gasoline is not a problem anymore.  If keep on playing I will be able to make stuff that I want whereas before it was by chance and I didn't see the sense of staying on. 

 

[Khalagar]

HOW DARE YOU?! THIS FORUM IS FOR RAGING ABOUT EVERYTHINGINGINGIGNING

WHY DEVS CHANGE MRUKY WTAR???

For real though, Alpha 21 is pretty good over all IMO.  It does have some issues that I'm sure they will work out, but I think it's a nice update. Learn by reading is an interesting idea and I think it will need some tweaks but the foundation is there

 

[Stranded_Napkin]

So, I was initially not a fan of the idea of learn by looting. My big issue was that there was no skill that allowed you to improve your situation simply through xp. Still an issue, but not as significant as I had thought it would be. The system works.

I typically play my games on 200% loot abundance and no loot respawn. I like to give the zombie apocalypse stock boy the playthrough off, he doesn't get paid enough for that. lol. I noticed though that stackable items often only said 1. Typically the way that 200% loot worked, it would double whatever the RNG roll was so everything would be at least a 2 in qty. Was this system changed? The release notes mention nothing about this.

Lastly, this is the first playthrough where a trader has fallen through the floor. Unfortunately, it's trader Jen so she's entirely under the floor. I have to go use the debug menu to get to her. This doesn't appear to be a new thing though. Eh, enjoying the alpha so far. Anybody know a fix for this? 

 

[Khalagar]

I've not had many bugs in A21 so far. I'm liking it over all. It does need some tweaks, but I'm sure TFP are working on all the janky things

 

[Riamus]

So, I was initially not a fan of the idea of learn by looting. My big issue was that there was no skill that allowed you to improve your situation simply through xp. Still an issue, but not as significant as I had thought it would be. The system works.

I typically play my games on 200% loot abundance and no loot respawn. I like to give the zombie apocalypse stock boy the playthrough off, he doesn't get paid enough for that. lol. I noticed though that stackable items often only said 1. Typically the way that 200% loot worked, it would double whatever the RNG roll was so everything would be at least a 2 in qty. Was this system changed? The release notes mention nothing about this.

Lastly, this is the first playthrough where a trader has fallen through the floor. Unfortunately, it's trader Jen so she's entirely under the floor. I have to go use the debug menu to get to her. This doesn't appear to be a new thing though. Eh, enjoying the alpha so far. Anybody know a fix for this? 

My understanding is that setting loot abundance to 200% should give you 2x quantity of every stackable item you loot, as you said.  It wouldn't double a non-stackable item and I don't think you were suggesting that.  If it's not doing this, I'd suggest submitting a bug report with log by clicking the red banner for submitting A21 bug reports so they can look into it.

As far as the traders dropping through the floor... yeah, this has been around for quite a while.  I am not sure why there isn't at least a workaround that will replace them where they are supposed to be at the beginning of each day, at the very least.  Basically a check that the trader is at the exact height they are supposed to be based on the tile's height and respawn them at the correct height if they are not.  That doesn't fix the actual problem but at least would fix it in a current save without having to start a new game.  I'm not positive if chunk reset will resolve this but that could mess up your base if you build it close to the trader, so isn't an ideal fix either.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

 The system works.

In SP and only if you like to be all your playtroughs the same loop of going looting all the time to keep up with your gamestage. Seriously flawed for MP Coop if you have players who don´t like the going looting part of the game. It forces a playstyle and everything that forces a playstlye is bad by default tbh.

@Riamus You can spawn in a new trader easily, just activate debug mode and then press F6. Don´t forget to set it to static spawn or the trader will dissappear if you log out.

 

[RipClaw]

Was this system changed? The release notes mention nothing about this.

Yes, there has been a change. A variable has been added that causes the loot abundance setting to be ignored for certain loot containers.

• Set ignore_loot_abundance to true for several important loot containers such as loot room chests, store crates, safes, air drops, mailboxes, and more to prevent empty loot when playing with lowered loot settings 
  

So, I was initially not a fan of the idea of learn by looting. My big issue was that there was no skill that allowed you to improve your situation simply through xp. Still an issue, but not as significant as I had thought it would be. The system works.

However, the system has inherent limitations. The starting point, for example, matters a lot for progress.

If the first trader is near a big city, then you have a much faster progress than if the trader is next to a small city.

I watch the videos of a youtube content creator who must have rolled a very bad map. So far 3 traders, two near small cities and the last one is in the middle of the desert and the only POI nearby is a campsite.