Zorngodofall
New member
So I've been playing this game since A4 or so and I've seen everything. From ancient memory leaks that made me play the game 10 minutes at a time to old times when we had things like hornets and invincible buildings built in water. From the times we made guns with molds and building blocks were cubes to schematics to what we have to work with today. Played a lot of navezgane and RWG. Came back to play the obligatory A17 to see what has changed.
I actually had what I thought was the best seed I had seen yet. Found a nice place to setup near a watersource, trader and trees. Found several cities that were almost chainlinked together. It was really cool, disappointing the map was only 8kx8k because late game you get bored of staring at the same scenery repeatedly.
Progression has become even more of a mess than it ever has before. Unnecessary level gates (have not tested P231), harsh limitations on resource gathering and basically everything we've had to deal with before being made more difficult, including very strange zombie AI. I think the main problem is that the game just keeps getting more grindy. Took like 8 hours to build a concrete bunker, which just seems to be a bit much. A16 had an OK balance of resource collections to available resources, things weren't too easy or too difficult- I still had concrete by day 7 in a17. People are going to break the progression system regardless of what you do. Honestly a reasonable resource balance with a bit less difficulty than a17 is what we need- A16 was fine. 6/10
Zombie AI. Revert it immediately. It's just complete trash for what this game is. Zombies have no place in the game pathing as they currently are. It's extremely exploitable and completely broken. And this is just by random things. I actually a group of about a dozen or so sprint around my base in a circle before they decided to stop and try and take out a block. Watched a horde during horde night randomly jump on one wood block and then off of it, running around in a circle trying to get to me. It's just really really bad. Zombies shouldn't auto path in broken ways like this and they absolutely should not path through mazes perfectly.
360 degree defenses around your base was how the game needs to function. The game is so exploitable atm, it's not funny. Just make a wall of concrete with a single path leading directly to you and it's GG; because they aren't even going to try and break out multiple zones of entry, which was one part of what made horde nights difficult at the later stages. This is just a joke. 4/10
Vehicles- The bicycle is worthless- the minibike is heavily nerfed, the motorbike is good and the jeep is ok. All the vehicles need to be upgradable- The engine quality system in a16 was a GOOD feature- It gave you another form of vehicle progression and there's no reason we shouldn't have that same feature, it would just go better with the current form of vehicle progression we have. 7/10
Looting & crafting resource acquisition: It's trash right now. Removing zombie loot was a bad idea. We got a lot of really important 'low tier' or 'common' resources from them. Like duct tape, bones and etc, all things which are vital to end game progression and crafting. I've literally been doing loot runs to go and find duct tape and bones- I shouldn't have to do that. 4/10
The new dungeon style POI's. I have to admit, those have been really cool and really good. It's clear a lot of work went into those things and you guys did a great job. A bit of work is needed to balance the zombies though. 8/10
Endgame
Endgame is as broken and boring as it's ever been. It literally devolves to going to your coal mine for a day, your potsassium nitrate mine for a day, hunting brass for a day, crafting bullets and miscellanious things and then base building for a couple of days. It's literally just a complete grindfest and the current state of looting and how the trader functions means this is all you have to do to perpetually progress through the game.
As an addendum to the loot debacle- Here's something you need to work on. Give me a reason to go out and loot past day 28. I don't need more shotguns and pistols, I don't need tools i can craft, i shouldn't have to specifically hunt for trash can level materials. For the love of god increase ammo drop rates - I should not ever spend more ammo than i get back when I specifically go out and look for it.
I'm guessing it will be an A18 or possibly A19 feature, but give us customizable guns now that you have the tools to do so. Allow us to go out and find m416's or g36c's or different varieties of weapons and put a lot of thought into that system- It would add a lot of longevity and replayability as well as a reason to loot at end game. I've had an AK since A13 or something and I'm pretty sick of it as my primary weapon.
bottom line I guess is we need more of an endgame than a bullet grinding and base rebuilding simulator, especially 5 years into development on what is basically the same game. 6/10. Things have improved, but not by enough or a lot, I'm still breaking the game by day 28 and getting bored of it after that.
Optimization: The change over to DX11 and building the basic framework for vulkan was an amazing realization, TFP. The game looks a lot better and I'm getting decent utilization out of my hardware on par with other games. It still needs to get a lot better. I shouldn't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be at 50fps on a 1080ti on 1080p. My frame rate should be 4x that if not more for the visual fidelity the game is at. It's still awful. You guys need to clean up the code for how chunks loads, clean up the zombie code and clean up the code around trees.
This needed to happen 5 alphas ago and the perpetual excuse that this game is 'early access' is starting to wear thin with people and it doesn't make sense for a game not to be more optimized than this, five years into a game. Cleaning up things isn't somehow going to make them more messy later on, especially when it comes to things like zombies.
6/10. Was playable and 60 fps most of the time on extreme overkill hardware.
Overall - I'm going to be generous and give this a 7/10. It's OK, it's not terrible, it's not great, it's more of the same with a little bit more content yet the same problems remain. I'm still hooked for a lot of the early progression and bored to death at day 30.
Wrapping up.
Please understand this. I only give you this criticism because of what this game means to me. regardless of the flaws this will go down as one of my favorite games of all time. I'm really just thankful this game exists at all despite the flaws.
I actually had what I thought was the best seed I had seen yet. Found a nice place to setup near a watersource, trader and trees. Found several cities that were almost chainlinked together. It was really cool, disappointing the map was only 8kx8k because late game you get bored of staring at the same scenery repeatedly.
Progression has become even more of a mess than it ever has before. Unnecessary level gates (have not tested P231), harsh limitations on resource gathering and basically everything we've had to deal with before being made more difficult, including very strange zombie AI. I think the main problem is that the game just keeps getting more grindy. Took like 8 hours to build a concrete bunker, which just seems to be a bit much. A16 had an OK balance of resource collections to available resources, things weren't too easy or too difficult- I still had concrete by day 7 in a17. People are going to break the progression system regardless of what you do. Honestly a reasonable resource balance with a bit less difficulty than a17 is what we need- A16 was fine. 6/10
Zombie AI. Revert it immediately. It's just complete trash for what this game is. Zombies have no place in the game pathing as they currently are. It's extremely exploitable and completely broken. And this is just by random things. I actually a group of about a dozen or so sprint around my base in a circle before they decided to stop and try and take out a block. Watched a horde during horde night randomly jump on one wood block and then off of it, running around in a circle trying to get to me. It's just really really bad. Zombies shouldn't auto path in broken ways like this and they absolutely should not path through mazes perfectly.
360 degree defenses around your base was how the game needs to function. The game is so exploitable atm, it's not funny. Just make a wall of concrete with a single path leading directly to you and it's GG; because they aren't even going to try and break out multiple zones of entry, which was one part of what made horde nights difficult at the later stages. This is just a joke. 4/10
Vehicles- The bicycle is worthless- the minibike is heavily nerfed, the motorbike is good and the jeep is ok. All the vehicles need to be upgradable- The engine quality system in a16 was a GOOD feature- It gave you another form of vehicle progression and there's no reason we shouldn't have that same feature, it would just go better with the current form of vehicle progression we have. 7/10
Looting & crafting resource acquisition: It's trash right now. Removing zombie loot was a bad idea. We got a lot of really important 'low tier' or 'common' resources from them. Like duct tape, bones and etc, all things which are vital to end game progression and crafting. I've literally been doing loot runs to go and find duct tape and bones- I shouldn't have to do that. 4/10
The new dungeon style POI's. I have to admit, those have been really cool and really good. It's clear a lot of work went into those things and you guys did a great job. A bit of work is needed to balance the zombies though. 8/10
Endgame
Endgame is as broken and boring as it's ever been. It literally devolves to going to your coal mine for a day, your potsassium nitrate mine for a day, hunting brass for a day, crafting bullets and miscellanious things and then base building for a couple of days. It's literally just a complete grindfest and the current state of looting and how the trader functions means this is all you have to do to perpetually progress through the game.
As an addendum to the loot debacle- Here's something you need to work on. Give me a reason to go out and loot past day 28. I don't need more shotguns and pistols, I don't need tools i can craft, i shouldn't have to specifically hunt for trash can level materials. For the love of god increase ammo drop rates - I should not ever spend more ammo than i get back when I specifically go out and look for it.
I'm guessing it will be an A18 or possibly A19 feature, but give us customizable guns now that you have the tools to do so. Allow us to go out and find m416's or g36c's or different varieties of weapons and put a lot of thought into that system- It would add a lot of longevity and replayability as well as a reason to loot at end game. I've had an AK since A13 or something and I'm pretty sick of it as my primary weapon.
bottom line I guess is we need more of an endgame than a bullet grinding and base rebuilding simulator, especially 5 years into development on what is basically the same game. 6/10. Things have improved, but not by enough or a lot, I'm still breaking the game by day 28 and getting bored of it after that.
Optimization: The change over to DX11 and building the basic framework for vulkan was an amazing realization, TFP. The game looks a lot better and I'm getting decent utilization out of my hardware on par with other games. It still needs to get a lot better. I shouldn't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be at 50fps on a 1080ti on 1080p. My frame rate should be 4x that if not more for the visual fidelity the game is at. It's still awful. You guys need to clean up the code for how chunks loads, clean up the zombie code and clean up the code around trees.
This needed to happen 5 alphas ago and the perpetual excuse that this game is 'early access' is starting to wear thin with people and it doesn't make sense for a game not to be more optimized than this, five years into a game. Cleaning up things isn't somehow going to make them more messy later on, especially when it comes to things like zombies.
6/10. Was playable and 60 fps most of the time on extreme overkill hardware.
Overall - I'm going to be generous and give this a 7/10. It's OK, it's not terrible, it's not great, it's more of the same with a little bit more content yet the same problems remain. I'm still hooked for a lot of the early progression and bored to death at day 30.
Wrapping up.
Please understand this. I only give you this criticism because of what this game means to me. regardless of the flaws this will go down as one of my favorite games of all time. I'm really just thankful this game exists at all despite the flaws.
