What I really want to get is the sense that the world has been nearly wiped out. Having everything look fairly pristine gives you a sense of the rapture, and not what would have been a crazy fight for survival until all the humans were gone. There would be lots of burned buildings with no fire dept to put them out. The burnt forest needs more burnt/destroyed buildings in order to "Sell the idea" you are in a burnt forest. Right now its mostly just ground clutter. I'd like to see whole groups of buildings burned down, some partial, some to the foundations.
Wasteland, more rubble, more destroyed buildings. The ground texture looks like London in WWII after a carpet bombing yet nearly all the buildings are perfect and very little rubble or piles of things.
You could solve performance issues by using sub biomes. This would create specific areas instead of random scattering.
I just want to see the apocalypse look less like the rapture happened, and more like a fight for survival took place.
I think there are options to make it look appropriate for the biome without requiring remnants. As I said, I'm fine with buildings that look partially destroyed as long as they are real POI. That means a real zombie presence and appropriate loot. All these tier 0s are just wasted space. Sure, they can *look* okay, but they're not exactly limited by biome in almost all cases, so it doesn't really fit anyhow. But they are just boring. I'd rather POI that I will actually do something with rather than POI that are just there to look "pretty". Stand Tower was a fun example, though unrealistic, of how to make a destroyed building fun and not make it a tier 0.
They used to have a lot of broken sections of buildings (as parts) all over the place in the wasteland. It looked appropriate, but from how people talked, it seemed that most people, including myself, felt that it was just too annoying to drive around the wasteland with all that stuff in the way. So they removed it and I like the wasteland a lot more now.
Sub biomes aren't the fix. Remnants are there mainly to improve performance. They can toss a few into areas with larger POI and the remnant, with it's far lower tri count will keep the area from being too performance heavy. A sub biome that groups remnants together just puts them away from where they can improve performance, and one that groups non-remnants also prevents the remnants from improving performance. That isn't to say that sub biomes aren't a good option to improve how biomes look. On that, I absolutely agree. However, it isn't a fix for the performance issues that remnants are intended to address. That's already addressed with how remnants are placed in RWG.
In any case, we don't know the story yet. It could be that most people fled or became zombies very quickly. Obviously people barricaded themselves, but that might have been just for the first week or something and then every left alive fled. That would have resulted in the type of world we see... lots of mostly intact buildings. Now, I'm not saying that's the story since I don't know the story, but it's a valid option for the story. I don't really see zombies doing a lot of damage to buildings if people aren't there. Why would they? So having most being mostly intact makes sense to me.
Instead of worrying about making broken POI that I think most people might like the general aesthetics of, but not the gameplay of, they could look at doing some overlays on the POI... snow piled up if in the snowy forest, burnt sides if in the burnt forest, sand piled up in the desert, vines growing up the sides in the forest, and cracks or something for the wasteland just as some general examples. These could be done without changing the POI themselves.
Love seeing this. PLEASE move in this direction regarding new POI. We don't have nearly enough broken and destroyed buildings.
