Wow, what a mixed bag A17 is. There are definitely some amazing things in the game, but also we lost some great things. Let me give the good and the bad as I have seen it so far in experimental.
Good:
1) Vehicles. Love love love the bicycle, motorcycle, jeep, gyrocopter.
2) XP system. I love the fact that I want to kill zombies. Making zombies a key source of xp totally makes sense. I used to avoid them, now I seek them out. Hopefully you don't keep nerfing this. Beginning of A17 was better than current state. More wondering hordes please!
3) New POIs. The dungeons and interesting things that have been done on these is incredible. Lots of time and effort was spent here and it shows! Nice work. Love the exploration into tunnels and things you weren't expecting to be there.
4) Perk system overhaul. I wouldn't say this is perfect, but I do like some of the changes here. I think the amount of points you get and the pace of unlocking is pretty decent.
5) Quests! Amazing work on this. Love having these, keeps the game fresh and fun early game. See suggestions below
The bad:
1) Passive leveling gone! I love leveling up things passively by doing something. If I loot an empty cabinet at least I was leveling my scavenging. When I hit rocks over and over and over at least I'm leveling my mining. Taking this out of the game was a big loss imo.
2) Item quality. I get that making tools over an over just to level the quality up was dumb, but this change is way to far the other direction. Making item quality only a durability gain is bad. I want to see real improvement in an item when I can make higher level items. Yes the extra mod slots are there but mods are too rare at the beginning for it to matter. I literally don't want to use the iron or steel to make better tools because there is no benefit that matters to me. They should be better as they level, do more damage, protect more, etc.
3) Weapons. Finding weapons is too easy, and now they are almost worthless. One part of the "end game" would be to acquire the best weapons but now quality is pretty irrelevant and you find them everywhere that you have guns right away.
4) Looting items. It is disappointing to have things unlootable like open drawers or cabinets. I guess its more immersive and realistic to have things half looted already but it is not as interesting as it was before when I could open every cabinet. Not a major issue, just an unnecessary decline imo
5) Looting zombies. Why can't we loot bodies and break the gore blocks up? Part of the fun of horde night was going down and looting everything and chopping up all the bodies for fat and bones which were used in crafting. The loot bags are too rare and disappear too quick. They should never disappear, at least for hours. Loot bags vs looting zombies is an unwanted change and I don't know why it was made.
6) AI pathing. I was excited this was being overhauled but I'm disappointed. My first horde night they tore down so much of my prefab house trying to get me to fall which I thought was amazing, BUT they were too smart about it. Avoiding my spikes to funnel down the one path they broke out is too much. They should still take a direct path toward me or my supports. The cheese that is out there with the ramps is just embarrassing and honestly pretty game breaking for me. I can't ignore good strats and build things that get destroyed knowing I can avoid that pain of rebuilding by using a cheese strat. There shouldn't be obvious and simple exploits of the AI like that, it ruins the game.
7) End game - What is it? We get everything so quick now and as people complain they get things even quicker. To me the end game just seems like farming bullets for 6 days until horde night so we can kill the crazy waves of things that come. But to what end, there is no need for the xp when you have everything unlocked and you've presumably saved the least important perks for the end so you aren't even excited to unlock them. You've explored as much as you want, been to tons of traders so you have everything you want item wise. things don't really seem to keep getting too much harder. The ability to build a solid defense with traps overwhelms any horde after you are well established. I was really really hoping something new would be coming to this game to keep me playing. I'm not seeing it.
8) Quests - Cheesy to clear the building find the treasure spot, then start the quest and have zombies spawn. Letting you loot the house twice and kill the zombies twice like that is not good. Can you just have them active when the quest is picked up from the trader or something?
9) Traders are OP. Buying things at a trader is too cheap. The game gets ruined when you can just buy anything you want there at affordable prices. Prices should be outrageous. It is great if you are lazy or have bad RNG to be able to get something at the trader but it shouldn't replace looting buildings. Need duct tape for the mini bike crafting? cool they are 1000 dukes each then. Ouch! Guess I should go loot then. but paying 50 dukes or whatever they cost now is nothing and way easier than looting so why wouldn't I just buy them all then? This problem contributes to the lack of end game too early. When I have everything I want why tackle a hard poi?
10) Vultures and vehicles. When I'm on foot I can run out of range of a vulture usually and they piss off generally. When I'm on a vehicle they can catch me! How? They are so fast when I'm driving and they follow me for WAY too long. This doesn't make sense to me. Vultures should be basically irrelevant when I'm driving at top speeds on a road.
11) Crossbow fire rates make this basically useless and it was a go-to item. I don't have the points to spend on making this good early game. It should be a great replacement for a bow early - mid game and instead it is unusable it is so bad. Especially on a horde night when you have so many zombies destroying your base. No time to shoot once every few seconds like that.
Random suggestion
1) Please allow trader to buy everything, the limit of 3 (or less) is not helpful. definitely add some diminishing returns on it so you can't just get rich off all the pistols. But me holding on to tons of pistols is dumb. I want to sell them all even if the last couple i have are worth almost nothing. maybe reset the pricing each trader item refresh and have it go down each time you sell for those few days.
Wonder if anyone will read this wall of text! Ha Anyway looking forward to stable A17.
