PC Pimps: please leave us some basic POIs

They're just there to scare the player. Once you've gained enough experience, you know what to look out for and how the level designers think. You develop a feeling for where a zombie hides.
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I don't mean I can't handle the dungeons.

I mean that people don't group up and hide in wardrobes after they have been bitten by zombies.. this is what makes it silly. The dungeons just doesn't make sense.

 
100% agree. I do love the POI dungeons, but I think making nearly every house/building like this is a bit tedious.
I miss just finding a standard house that I can turn into a base!
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What dungeon style house exists that cannot be turned into a base? Give me seed and coordinates and I'll be happy to prove you wrong or to die being proven wrong myself.

I don't mean I can't handle the dungeons.
I mean that people don't group up and hide in wardrobes after they have been bitten by zombies.. this is what makes it silly. The dungeons just doesn't make sense.
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But....people DO get bitten by zombies...?

I can think of a few fictional reasons why they might end up in rafters and in wardrobes that aren't any less plausible than the silly idea of zombies existing in the first place. Since we are making up the monsters it isn't beyond the pale to make up reasons for their behavior. It's all make believe. You don't like it and that's fine. I do and that's fine.

BTW, I often look up into rafters and shoot drapes and wardrobe panels and there is no zombie there. I think that's fantastic.

 
The ranger station is a nice POI as is for becoming a base.

Flagstone base, just fill in the windows and door. Upper floor for living, walkway around that can be converted to bars.

I love that place as an early base.

Forge house (the one that had the balcony, and side door with stairs?)

Not a bad layout, but working forge. mmmm.

Besides, the dungeon POI are used in quests, so while we could use them as a base, if we then take a quest that sends us there, we're screwed.

Currently, we have no way of telling where the quest is going to send us exactly until after we take it.

 
What dungeon style house exists that cannot be turned into a base? Give me seed and coordinates and I'll be happy to prove you wrong or to die being proven wrong myself.


But....people DO get bitten by zombies...?
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hehe :) yes, after accepting the first "what if", (if there were zombies) ;-)

I'm just saying what I feel right now.

I will continue to play with an open mind.

Thank you for responding

 
In the developer commentary for one of the Half Life games, one of the devs makes the comment that - after observing their playtesters - a headcrab in every vent was boring, but a headcrab in one vent in five was terrifying.

I think the same principle applies to the zombies "hiding" in walls and dropping down from ceilings and the like. They should be rare enough to get you paranoid and occasionally take you by surprise. If too many buildings have them, they become routine and lose their shine.

 
I think simple houses with sleepers out in plain view have got to be the most boring POI's there are. I groan whenever I find another one of those and I seem to find them everywhere so I don't even agree with the opinion that all the POI's are dungeon or even that too many of them are. I think people must be exaggerating this.
The ramshackle wilderness cabins and shacks will always be the boring simple POI's. You can always learn how to use the prefab editor and make a whole bunch of simple houses to import into the game and change your mix.
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And for those of us who run a vanilla server? Just left out in the cold I take it? Not everything is hey just mod it out guys you know Roland. There needs to be balance. Not everyone thinks oh yeah the old poi's are boring so lets just remove them.

 
In the developer commentary for one of the Half Life games, one of the devs makes the comment that - after observing their playtesters - a headcrab in every vent was boring, but a headcrab in one vent in five was terrifying.
I think the same principle applies to the zombies "hiding" in walls and dropping down from ceilings and the like. They should be rare enough to get you paranoid and occasionally take you by surprise. If too many buildings have them, they become routine and lose their shine.
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Exact this

Question is what you want

Alien 1 or Alien 2 or "Call of Alien"

 
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What dungeon style house exists that cannot be turned into a base? Give me seed and coordinates and I'll be happy to prove you wrong or to die being proven wrong myself.
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I never said that a dungeon style house couldn't be turned into a base. I prefer to do that with non-dungeon style houses.

 
I think simple houses with sleepers out in plain view have got to be the most boring POI's there are. I groan whenever I find another one of those and I seem to find them everywhere so I don't even agree with the opinion that all the POI's are dungeon or even that too many of them are. I think people must be exaggerating this.
The ramshackle wilderness cabins and shacks will always be the boring simple POI's. You can always learn how to use the prefab editor and make a whole bunch of simple houses to import into the game and change your mix.
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The definition of boring is "not interesting; tedious."

...that pretty much nails the dungeon crawls at this point.

You said it yourself... walk in, shoot the drapes, shoot the cupboards, tap the floor for traps, look up in the ceiling, repeat.

In. Every. Room.

 
Besides, the dungeon POI are used in quests, so while we could use them as a base, if we then take a quest that sends us there, we're screwed.
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If you find a quest really uses your base (and the chances are pretty slim as a developer said unexplored houses would be prefered by the algorithm) then just abort the quest and get a new one.

The bad stuff (i.e. reset) only happens when you click on the exclamation mark at the quest site. Don't do that, problem solved.

 
If you find a quest really uses your base (and the chances are pretty slim as a developer said unexplored houses would be prefered by the algorithm) then just abort the quest and get a new one.
The bad stuff (i.e. reset) only happens when you click on the exclamation mark at the quest site. Don't do that, problem solved.
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In singleplayer

 
The definition of boring is "not interesting; tedious."
...that pretty much nails the dungeon crawls at this point.

You said it yourself... walk in, shoot the drapes, shoot the cupboards, tap the floor for traps, look up in the ceiling, repeat.

In. Every. Room.
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Fine but now reduce that by 1000 and that is the "not interesting and tedious" characteristics of a simple rectangular house open to view. Stand in doorway, shoot sleeper a b c and d all within line of sight from the doorway.

I do shoot drapes and panels and test floors but they aren't ALL filled with zombies and not ALL floors break. I still don't get this 100% of all houses have zombies in rafters, behind panels, and false floors narrative. To me it seems somewhat like what Cup of Tea posted. Perhaps not 1 in 5 but certainly not 5 in 5 like people are claiming. It's probably 3 in 5 to be honest.

But I'm not against reducing the gotcha moments down more. I'm against simplistic houses that have zero challenge, zero blind corners, and zero fun. Sure...once you you learn the dungeon it isn't as much fun as it was when you didn't know. Sure...once you know where the best loot is you can go directly there and take it bypassing the rest of the house. But if that is your complaint why would you want to trade that for something that is stupidly unfun even the first time you enter? Who doesn't know to go directly to the ladder to the attic in all those houses from pre-A17? The A16 houses have nothing to bypass in the first place....

I really am at a loss here that people are actually putting forth the argument that houses with nothing at all to be bypassed in the first place are preferred to houses packed with content just because that content can be bypassed if you choose to do so.

 
A sense of proportion is a good thing, but it's not available to everyone.

I think i speak platitudes, Yes?

Why not stop and come up with a new feature, for example: Attic-style

or - add more ruins.

In the developer commentary for one of the Half Life games, one of the devs makes the comment that - after observing their playtesters - a headcrab in every vent was boring, but a headcrab in one vent in five was terrifying.
I think the same principle applies to the zombies "hiding" in walls and dropping down from ceilings and the like. They should be rare enough to get you paranoid and occasionally take you by surprise. If too many buildings have them, they become routine and lose their shine.
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This!

 
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Is it seriously possible to reset someones base if they use one of the new POIs on a multiplayer server using the quest system?
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Pretty improbable. They would have to first disable your landclaim block and destroy your bedroll and that is only if your chosen POI was selected as quest destination in the first place.

Do people who play PVP even make their base out of dungeon pois? Seems unwise to me even without taking this possibility into consideration.

If you are playing PVE then why would someone invade your base and destroy your LCB and bedroll in order to reset your POI? Seems contrary to the game mode.

Worried about griefers? Most likely they would have screwed you over anyway since they have been screwing people over for many an alpha before quests were a thing.

 
I agree with the OP. We really should have been discussing this back when Madmole showed the first new Diersville house, before the level designers put thousands of hours into the new dungeon POIs.

It probably isn't the case, but it feels like the proliferation of the dungeon maze-like design was inspired by all the pre-A17 fourm users who were shouting "We want more content. More POIs, more looting, longer endgame. Get this update to us ASP and stop bothering with that unity update BS and overhauls". As it turns out, a house that takes longer to empty out is NOT automatically more fun.

Dungeons are a nice icing on the cake of a great game. It adds a little bit of flavor, a little bit of variety. You're playing a natural-feeling nonlinear game for hours on end, then run across a dungeon and suddenly "Wow, I'm playing a Level. This is different. This is fun". A lot of games have sudden tone shifts, like when a FPS suddenly becomes a 2D hacking puzzle minigame, and they were fun not only because they were different, but because they never let you play it long enough to get bored. With A17, the cake seems to be mostly icing, and it's kind of gross.

If all the dungeons all feel the same, then all the crawls should be wrapped up into a few massive POI instead of spread out everywhere. How would the dungeon crawl junkies feel about a nearly infinite underground complex with randomly placed modular rooms? (think minecraft strongholds)

 
I agree with the OP. We really should have been discussing this back when Madmole showed the first new Diersville house, before the level designers put thousands of hours into the new dungeon POIs.
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Why, the new pois are great. But they cant replace the few Pois you need at start.

Maybe we simply need a small set of 5 "Normal" pois

* Small

* Starterloot

* Sturdy enough to claim it for horde 7, 14 and 21 (with improvements)

And maybe we can set these few pois as Decoration ?

Means they can spawn everywhere (no streets needed)

....

Hmm looks like i need to mod that for testing. But not today, i am in a game i play with fun ^^

 
I do shoot drapes and panels and test floors but they aren't ALL filled with zombies and not ALL floors break. I still don't get this 100% of all houses have zombies in rafters, behind panels, and false floors narrative. To me it seems somewhat like what Cup of Tea posted. Perhaps not 1 in 5 but certainly not 5 in 5 like people are claiming. It's probably 3 in 5 to be honest.
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I think the incidence of zombie closets and other gotchas is being judged on a logarithmic scale. To me at least, the difference between 3/5 of the closets being filled and 5/5 is really NOT that significant, considering 1/100 would probably be enough to keep players on their toes.

 
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