PC How do you like A17 experimental?

[calebelt]

Why is everyone afraid of zombies? Very primitive AI. I've been waiting a year and a half for 17 to come up with a new AI.

Impregnable base can be built very quickly if you understand how to work AI zombies. They're stupid and direct. They're also very slow. Even from running zombies you can easily strafe and make them get stuck in objects and other zombies.

You can make ladders and laugh by shooting stupid zombies. You can dig a cave at the bottom, and put on top of the cage and barbed wire that would shoot at the stuck zombies. You can put spinning traps on top of each other to the top hit on the head, and the bottom on the legs. You can make the base triangular and one wall next to the seller. It is possible to dig out a hole and from above a lattice through which to shoot. You can dig a mine in which zombies will fall and just forget about them. And you can just climb on the roof of a stone building and jump on the stairs sideways (zombies do not know how), they will destroy a few blocks in the walls and all you can live there forever.

Personally, I want the game to focus on AI zombies, from which it is impossible to hide and impossible to build an indestructible base. I don't understand "survival" for a spoon in vanilla yogurt. "Oh, please make it scary, but behind the fence".

The player must always build and rebuild the base. Each time the Horde must become stronger and sweep away any obstacles on its way. This is what makes sense: 7 days to prepare. And then to the last bullet, the last trap, the last block of the wall and eventually fight with a chainsaw.

I want like in the movies. To adrenaline boiled.

 

[InSanity]

So far so good overall, I have some gripes with the quality system and loot tables as far as early game tools and especially weapons are concerned, however, I have been enjoying this iteration quite a bit and look forward to playing more as the game progresses further. Glad to finally have gotten the new alpha and will absolutely play when I can in the future.

 

[HerrKingsley]

Try creative mode.

Try to be in a creative mode when replying.

 

[Kam R.]

Mention of creative mode reminds me:

No more fast flying and weird wobbling/jittering of the vision when strafing – what's up with that?

 

[Vedui]

Overall I like it, it's got a number of things that opens up possibilities which are fantastic! Mods? xpath modlets? New buffs? Yummy!

What I dislike are generally things that can be tweaked and balanced, but some significant ones are:

1) Slow tedious progression. Can be fixed by increasing resource yield, and bumping xp for actually non-killing stuff.

2) Zombie AI. The new pathing is great.. for POI's. For hordes it's terrible. A ramp/stilt base or maze/pathing base works 100x a base design from previous alphas. A bunker? nah sucks. Make a ramp up instead and see them lemming and fall. - This is a bit harder to fix, I'd start by keeping the new ai pathing to poi sleepers, but hordes stop pathing the crazy way they do now, stop them all digging and detecting players 100 blocks underground. Let us have our bases please! They all run to the same place and bash through now, or gang up and do so much damage to walls that have less HP than before. It's a disaster in combination.

3) Difficulty scaling seems off. I like idea of harder/easier POI's to explore, but it seems as you gain levels it becomes the same problem as A16, meaning radiated cops/wights/ferals in every room, with 30 in a house. If it was 5 in the house with 1 radiated fine, but people literally enter rooms and see multiple radiated. That makes exploration mid-late game pointless and tedious, as you're not gonna find 200 bullets in loot, and you'll use that to kill the zombies.

4) It seems there's been great thoughts to negate players playstyle so people who play a certain way can't. As opposed to expanding the way people like to play. I think that causes issues, as people play differently.

Like to build? Sorry. Zeds tear the base down during hordes.

Like to solo? Sorry, level gating is real.

Like to mine and gather? Sorry, no xp for you! (or resources for that matter)

Love underground city building? Sorry, zeds WILL dig down and wreck it, no place is safe.

Love to explore and fight? Wonderful! Just don't be too high level, or too low level, or lack weapons, or lack stamina, and you're good!

So the "foundation" in A17 is great. But it requires tweaks to bring back possibility for people to play the game they way they want to, like they could in previous games. So I'm optimistic!

/V -

 

[Ghostlight]

This literally always happened. In every alpha. There came a point where there was no point doing anything. Your base was up and running. You don't care about screamers. You don't need loot. Without any end-game goals or a "win" state, eventually the game grinds to a halt because you've got all the things.
This is not new.

It happening by day 30 is new. Every single run as well, since every run will now be the exact same in as far as what you have at a specific level.

 

[gwensparkle]

I voted "In general I love it" about a week ago. If anything my impression of the game features has gone up. For reference, I've played single player on default settings (except video quality greatly reduced) and the multiplayer server with friends is on easy setting to accommodate the range of players' experience with the game. I liked the sandbox approach, but I also do like the new leveling system from a game standpoint. Just different and I like both types of games so I'm cool with it. It reminds me of my early MMO days starting with Everquest. I take the attitude I'm in the Fun Pimps world now and it's up to me to figure out how to survive in the new system. I never was one to rush, even in a level-based game, so I'm finding my approach to the game doesn't need to change all that much. I'm enjoying the new dungeonlike POIs. I can see so many possibilities for expanding the quest system as well. Performance is an issue for me, but I'm trusting that will come in time. Good work Fun Pimps!

 

[Corbit]

Why is everyone afraid of zombies? Very primitive AI. I've been waiting a year and a half for 17 to come up with a new AI.
Impregnable base can be built very quickly if you understand how to work AI zombies. They're stupid and direct. They're also very slow. Even from running zombies you can easily strafe and make them get stuck in objects and other zombies.

You can make ladders and laugh by shooting stupid zombies. You can dig a cave at the bottom, and put on top of the cage and barbed wire that would shoot at the stuck zombies. You can put spinning traps on top of each other to the top hit on the head, and the bottom on the legs. You can make the base triangular and one wall next to the seller. It is possible to dig out a hole and from above a lattice through which to shoot. You can dig a mine in which zombies will fall and just forget about them. And you can just climb on the roof of a stone building and jump on the stairs sideways (zombies do not know how), they will destroy a few blocks in the walls and all you can live there forever.

Personally, I want the game to focus on AI zombies, from which it is impossible to hide and impossible to build an indestructible base. I don't understand "survival" for a spoon in vanilla yogurt. "Oh, please make it scary, but behind the fence".

The player must always build and rebuild the base. Each time the Horde must become stronger and sweep away any obstacles on its way. This is what makes sense: 7 days to prepare. And then to the last bullet, the last trap, the last block of the wall and eventually fight with a chainsaw.

I want like in the movies. To adrenaline boiled.

Totally agree with you on this. A couple of friends and I used a small POI with the trailer and destroyed corner building for first bloodmoon. We prepared best we could (spikes here and there and destroying anything they could use to reach us on the trailer and broken building) but still had no idea if it would be good enough. I was quite excited leading up 10pm and the initial horde but soon realised that they just couldn't touch us.

They didn't do much damage to the place, it was perfectly viable to use it again for 2nd bloodmoon, if only we had realised cops were no on the menu :/. Even on the 2nd night, there wasn't all that much damage to the POI. Its only a small one, it should have been wrecked!

After that we used a tall destroyed building in town for bloodmoons, added some concrete in a few places to increase the floor height. Most of the work was destroying stairs and making openings to shoot through. They just ran about like idiots below us and we murdered them using the gaps we left. That was the 3rd bloodmoon, game beat with a pick and a small amount of concrete. Pretty sure we didn't even need to kill them, they weren't getting up to us. Gamestage was quite high at that point, we were getting loads of irradiated wights, cops and spiders. Did a few more bloodmoons there before starting a new world.

I used to feel excited and scared for the next bloodmoon, not knowing what was gonna happen and everything I did was to prepare for that night to come. Not sure when I lost this feeling, probably before a16. Now i'm looking at perks and thinking about what i'm getting next to make the game easier, a day before bloodmoon I prepare but already know the outcome.

Our current base had a huge ramp up to a platform with a door into a tight corridor leading off to 2 more doors and some slits covering the door. Put a ceiling on it with some bars so someone could shoot down. Stuck a load of barb wire at the bottom of the ramp. All the walls were cobblestone. We all sat at the top of the ramp shooting as they got stuck on the wire, then they got past the wire and we ran screaming like little girls through the door. they starting smacking walls and the door randomly and we had it under control until we didn't . They got in so we retreated out through the last 2 doors and started firing in but they didn't take long to get through. Luckily that was mostly the end of the horde, one of us died but we managed to mop up the rest. I think they destroyed like 8-10 blocks, that number would have been 0 if I had used reinforced concrete.

It was the most fun I had in long time playing, lots of shouting and laughing on discord. We had to purposely make the defences flawed for this.

 

[SgtThompson]

Mixed.

I like the graphical improvements, but those are countered by extremely bad frame rates.

I like the new attribute system, but I think it's a little too limiting.

I like the weapon modding capabilities, but I don't think I like the way schematics are consumables instead of acquired knowledge.

I like the changes to hot and cold on clothing, but its improvements are countered by extremely limiting stamina.

Stamina changes are probably my least favorite.

I think it has a lot of potential, but it also needs a lot of work.

 

[MasterP]

Sadly i cant play it anymore due to worst performance ever, not even on lowest graphics settings.

 

[SgtThompson]

Sadly i cant play it anymore due to worst performance ever, not even on lowest graphics settings.

Yeah, it's pretty bad right now. My frames dropped by half, and my wife pretty much lives in a 25fps finger painting.

 

[Zorngodofall]

So i've played since alpha 4, way way way back in the day and played this game on all sorts of different pc hardware setups. Alpha 17 seems about as hard to run as alpha 16 was, maybe a little less. With the FOV being what it is probably makes it looks like it runs better but overall I don't have issues. I actually turned the game up to 2560 x 1440 because it kept hitting about 100 fps. Primary base is or was near a lot of trees and it seemed fine. the transition to DX 11 seems to have done good things for the game.

Even during horde nights or in a city with a lot of zombies I'm not seeing the same kind of frame drops I saw in a16. No idea what's causing people to have such bad frame rates. It could just be old hardware in some peoples cases not running dx 11 properly but I know some peoples setups who play this game and they still have issues, so it's hard to pinpoint.

What probably happened was a17 now uses dx11 so it can utilize hardware a lot better, but the requirements to run the game have probably gone up significantly as well. That's the most likely case I can think of. Because I'm running the game on a ryzen 1600x and a 1080ti and it runs better than it did in a16. One thing to keep in note is that DX11 uses the CPU more efficiently so it's not as tied to single core performance as it once was; it still heavily is, but not by as much.

On a different note. The game is infuriating to play. I think i ended up with just about the best setup I could hope for. Multiple biomes in close proximity, a close trader, water source is really close, found mining spots early and got a decent amount of progression done in 21 in game days. Overall the gamestage is broken and the amount of loot we get, is also broken.

Day 21 with 96 gamestage or something stupid. I'm modding my xml file just because it's gotten so out of hand. I shouldn't spend more ammo than I get when i go looting a building, looking for ammo. Had to kill 3 irradiated wights and a cop just to get to the second floor of a book store. promptly ran out of ammo said "wtf?", alt f4'd and am promptly editing the game stage file to something not as insane. Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to. Loot isn't anywhere near as abundant as it needs to be. Various kinds of gun spam aren't good because of the trader limitation on buying things. Also the amount of zombies in POI's is insane. Not gonna spend 15 minutes clearing 50 zombies to get 2 schematics.

Basically, the balance between difficulty and having enough things to progress through the game hits a hard wall past level 50. That needs to not be a thing. Endgame zombies need to come into the game once you've actually reached endgame, not midgame, hell day 21 can be considered early game still. Honestly I can play it as it is as i've done all kinds of different worlds it just requires a different way of doing things.

Basically, after you tech up to electricity and have sufficient guns. Just stop looting and spend days inbetween horde nights farming bullets. I generally quit worlds when i get to that point because the games pretty over at that point, but I think the point being made here is obvious. We shouldn't have to spend a week grinding for a day 21 horde, not getting to explore, loot, scavenge and etc. The overall difficulty and progression wall is out of

hand and is in need of fixing.

EDIT: I'm not actually at day 21. I'm at 14 and running into irradiated wights in book stores. Progression is indeed broken.

I have a LOT of positive things to say about this game that i haven't been able to say in many alpha versions now, but it's so overshadowed by these things that just ruin the game that I feel like it's not even warranted to mention them until these issues are resolved.

 

[Jugginator]

Day 21 with 96 gamestage or something stupid. I'm modding my xml file just because it's gotten so out of hand. I shouldn't spend more ammo than I get when i go looting a building, looking for ammo. Had to kill 3 irradiated wights and a cop just to get to the second floor of a book store. promptly ran out of ammo said "wtf?", alt f4'd and am promptly editing the game stage file to something not as insane. Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to. Loot isn't anywhere near as abundant as it needs to be. Various kinds of gun spam aren't good because of the trader limitation on buying things. Also the amount of zombies in POI's is insane. Not gonna spend 15 minutes clearing 50 zombies to get 2 schematics.

.

I'll be honest there, I do think there's little difference from earlier gamestages and later ones. I prefer a challenge and am a tactician (been playing games like such for 20 years now lol), but not everyone enjoys it. My last dead is dead run I noticed the same difficulty spawn wise in POIs from gamestages 50-100 and the max I was at when I made a dumb move and died on day 58 with gamestage 230 or something. It definitely should be tuned a little, maybe less tuning the higher difficulty you go. I adopt a hit and run guerilla-warfare style approach to sudden feral/rad sleeper spawns, and it works, but I can see how not everyone wants to spend 3/4ths of an in-game day clearing one POI when they wanted a little easier difficulty. So, maybe tune it based on selected game difficulty?

 

[rubenjonathan]

I have to say I love the challenge. Got destroyed on day 7 by 6 or 7 cops I didn't expect so early on, but I liked it. Only thing I hope will be fixed is RWG. No towers makes it super boring for me. Also a bit too much burned forest for my taste. Hope that will be fixed asap. Overall I like alpha 17 and I think balancing has been done well. Love it so far.

 

[Zorngodofall]

I'll be honest there, I do think there's little difference from earlier gamestages and later ones. I prefer a challenge and am a tactician (been playing games like such for 20 years now lol), but not everyone enjoys it. My last dead is dead run I noticed the same difficulty spawn wise in POIs from gamestages 50-100 and the max I was at when I made a dumb move and died on day 58 with gamestage 230 or something. It definitely should be tuned a little, maybe less tuning the higher difficulty you go. I adopt a hit and run guerilla-warfare style approach to sudden feral/rad sleeper spawns, and it works, but I can see how not everyone wants to spend 3/4ths of an in-game day clearing one POI when they wanted a little easier difficulty. So, maybe tune it based on selected game difficulty?

Difficulty is fine. Absurd difficulty isn't if I wanted to play on insane I'd do that. But day 14 rad zombies doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the game. The idea is that you progress, build a bigger base, loot progress and etc. my suggestion is to tune the deaths more properly, they should have a significant impact on your current gamestage, because the game is designed to get more difficult the higher and faster you climb through the game. I shouldn't be at ammo farming vs rad hordes on day 14. that's more day 50ish from my experience if you're just playing the game.

I did a playthrough of an a16 world where I had 1k gamestage at day 7. Basically streamlined loot progression to get as far as possible in the shortest amount of time. That would've been a fun world to play on if i didn't mind dying a dozen more times that horde night.

the a17 world i'm working on is on warrior difficulty.

 

[warmer]

The pacing has changed significantly. Leveling seems like an actual achievement and your characters power increases substantially now as compared to in previous builds. There are also so many new POI that I often don't see any that I recognize from the previous build when entering a small town.

Overall I greatly enjoy the difficulty in combat coupled with the option for power strikes. It makes choosing how to approach situations a lot more meaningful. The way you engage a POI has significant consequences and I truly like that. There is no running in like a mad man anymore. Doing so nearly ensures you are going to die. You need to be careful about what you are doing. Much more true to the scenario if applied in real world terms.

However, like many people have already complained about, the death penalty is VERY heavy handed. Either tone down the severity, or lessen the time line you are affected by it. Once you die during horde night you are effectively done for the rest of the night and you are going to get ground to dust by morning. In solo play the penalty is way over powered because of this.

 

[OnionRings]

I would love to put my opinion in, but I cant play because of the bad frame rate. I wait patiently for you guys to get it running good, then ill happily play the ♥♥♥♥ out of it and give my honest opinion.

 

[gozer]

so, A17 ... game performance certainly went down the drain, the insane fps drops when indoors that is some serious nonsense

 

[Ghostlight]

Deaths aren't impacting game stages as much as they need to.

Gamestage = (player level + days alive) x difficulty multiplier

So deaths affect GS much more than they ever have.

Or maybe a better way to put it is that not dying increases GS faster than it used it.

As it is, once you are level 100, if you feel GS is too high, you can drastically lower it by performing a controlled suicide. GS drops considerably and the death penalty is irrelevant at that player level. Being able to eat glass is now very useful.

 

[ricp]

The more I play the more I enjoy that cupboards and searchable items show as open if empty. I remember having to go through each and every f*cking cupboard just to find one tin can and a bit of nitrate, and that has been pretty much the same since God knows when (I started playing 7DtD seriously about Alpha 8 and I think cupboards were the same mechanic then!).

Not needing to search each and every corpse (especially after horde night) then having to wait for them to break down to gore so you can remove them is also a really helpful thing.