PC Why are the devs screwing over agi/stealth in their POI design?

[meganoth]

I would call it sloppy design. But look at what else is cutting corners in this game because a small dev team is making a huge game on insufficient hardware (at least for the level of optimization they can afford). Too few zombies, no detection of inside/outside or walls between sounds, all to save CPU cycles or development time. The game has compromises everywhere. With a team 5 times as much as TFP has you could implement atomicUS5000 suggestions and it would be a full stealth game inside the game and still get all the other features they want in the game. Or not, Bethesda had developers galore and still their offerings had lots of holes to critizise.

It may be a cop-out to point to other sloppy stuff, but IMHO this small auto-aggro feature exists exactly because it allows the POI designers variation at the cost of very few lines of code.

 

[hiemfire]

So you can't imagine any scenario in which you make no mistakes but still fail?

Outside of basing decisions on false information? No. Even then the possibilities are the person(s) that gave you the information made a mistake in their assessment, the person(s) that gave you the information are relaying it from someone else who either made a mistake in their assessment or are lying, the equipment used to gather the information is faulty or miscalibrated, or you were directly lied to. That is assuming you made sure to confirm the accuracy of the information your basing your decision on, since not doing so is a mistake.

In every other case if you fail at something you made a mistake that lead to that failure.

 

[Kalen]

In every other case if you fail at something you made a mistake that lead to that failure.

Fair enough, I guess we've just had different experiences in life.

 

[th3s0n1c]

Why don't they make POIs with screamers, and the screamers can wake up the sleeping zombies? All while ensuring that screamers can be stealth-killed, but very difficult to do so?

You mean the suggestion I'd given on page 15? Yeah, people either completely ignored it or got worked up about that too lol

You do not fail because you were moving too fast, were careless or simply didnt have high enough stealth. You fail because the situation is scripted for your failure.

Its the same deal while several people hate ambush cutscenes in video games because it clashes with what was achieved.

Yeah, I had thought about that.. taking from games like Metal Gear, Dishonored, Batman Arkham series.. you can go about being out in the open and taking enemies down.. or you can go completely stealth without ever being noticed by  them. Those cut scenes are mostly intended for storyline plots or for boss fights, which makes sense for the game. But when it comes to 7DtD, that doesnt apply - unless auto aggro rooms were designed to be the "boss fight" of the POI (and it doesnt seem like it was).

@Roland you asked "People really want only that over and over again in every POI for 100’s and 1000’s of hours of gameplay?!" and the thing is: yes, some people do. The 1 shot kill is a reward for the perk in itself. But being able to clear an entire POI without once breaking stealth is a psychological reward for stealth players. And I understand that the game is not supposed to be a stealthy one - the stealth is just one option. But going back to that statement, isnt every other build just like that as well? "People going over and over again" walking into rooms and beating zombies to a second death with a club, sledgehammer, etc? Going over again and again into rooms killing zombies by shooting them with their weapons?

The only difference is: stealth thrives on avoiding direct confrontations and what consequences it may bring. I understand both sides: @hiemfire's and TFP's desire for forcing confrontation. But unlike those situations that I stated from the games above, in 7DtDT these confrontations feel very counter-intuitive. Having an event force confrontations because the Devs want it to happen, is ok.. but they seem kinda unearned as they stand.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

You mean the suggestion I'd given on page 15? Yeah, people either completely ignored it or got worked up about that too lol

Yes, like that one. I think maybe you got a little carried away with the details which may be why it was disliked and/or ignored. You also bunched it in with other ideas that others may have not likely (at least fully).

I like all the ideas in your post with the exception of some details on a couple of them. For instance, the warning sign. It would be a cool decal for the world, but I don't think it solves the problem and takes away from the surprise, which is what I am assuming the devs are trying to accomplish in the first place.
 
In general, many ideas can be simplified to a basic concept that the game lacks and I'm pretty sure most players would be in agreement with. Enemies are only aware of the player. The extent of their awareness of the world is strictly for pathing reasons. If an enemy does not have a target, it should be responsive to any sound, wake up if it needs to, and move to investigate. We see this a little with the rock throwing, but I'm going to guess that the zombie response is coded to respond to exactly that - a rock thrown by a player, and not the sound that the player thrown rock makes when it hits the ground. Even if it was coded for the sound of a rock hitting the ground, that might even be too specific. It should not matter what caused the sound or what was responsible for it. 

 

[Roland]

@Roland you asked "People really want only that over and over again in every POI for 100’s and 1000’s of hours of gameplay?!" and the thing is: yes, some people do. The 1 shot kill is a reward for the perk in itself. But being able to clear an entire POI without once breaking stealth is a psychological reward for stealth players. And I understand that the game is not supposed to be a stealthy one - the stealth is just one option. But going back to that statement, isnt every other build just like that as well? "People going over and over again" walking into rooms and beating zombies to a second death with a club, sledgehammer, etc? Going over again and again into rooms killing zombies by shooting them with their weapons?

The only difference is: stealth thrives on avoiding direct confrontations and what consequences it may bring. I understand both sides: @hiemfire's and TFP's desire for forcing confrontation. But unlike those situations that I stated from the games above, in 7DtDT these confrontations feel very counter-intuitive. Having an event force confrontations because the Devs want it to happen, is ok.. but they seem kinda unearned as they stand.

I do understand that there will always be people who want anything. The thing is that the auto aggro rooms are not YOU waking up the zombies. It is the situation you are confronted by. You didn't fail stealth and you can still claim 100% stealth kills for the entire POI even with auto aggro rooms. Again, I understand some people will not enjoy shooting mobile targets from stealth when they are so enammored with shooting stationary targets. so no design will please everyone. However, the auto aggro rooms don't force confrontation. They force a quick-thinking reaction if you wish to remain in a stealthy mode of clearing. At the beginning of this thread the assumption was that the only way to resolve the room was via guns blazing but that assumption proved false. So this idea that the devs want to limit us to one type of interaction with zombies makes for a dynamic sounding claim but it is just strawman that carries no weight in light of what has been discovered since the beginning of the thread.

 

[hiemfire]

@Roland The strawman is the assumption that we're complaining about not being able to 100% stealth clear a POI and you set that strawman out there for yourself to tilt at. The problem is that stealth is failing, if an entire @%$#ing group of enemies moves to attack you stealth has completely failed, not because of any mistake the player has made (other than possibly even bothering to try and make use of those perks and expect them to @%$#ing work as described in the game) but because of a Deus Ex Machina/ Skeweton King/ half assed "@%$# you" toggle that the devs are not up front about in game. The stealth system, perks and the descriptions of both in game are currently an out and out, bold faced @%$#ing lie from TFP to the player base and you're @%$#ing running purely dismissive spin and smoke for them. Nothing else a player can do in game has such a complete and utter "Nah, not happening here" counter mechanic directed squarely at it so exclusively. Maybe if roughly a third of ores were incased in bedrock, a crit effect existed that inverted the effect of Sex Rex and Cardio, and 1 out of 3 vehicles that someone tries to wrench blew up in their face the first time they even touched it, as equitable examples, Attack volumes would be "balanced and fair" compared to what the game does to other play styles. They currently aren't.

 

[Kalen]

@Roland The strawman is the assumption that we're complaining about not being able to 100% stealth clear a POI and you set that strawman out there for yourself to tilt at. The problem is that stealth is failing, if an entire @%$#ing group of enemies moves to attack you stealth has completely failed, not because of any mistake the player has made (other than possibly even bothering to try and make use of those perks and expect them to @%$#ing work as described in the game) but because of a Deus Ex Machina/ Skeweton King/ half assed "@%$# you" toggle that the devs are not up front about in game. The stealth system, perks and the descriptions of both in game are currently an out and out, bold faced @%$#ing lie from TFP to the player base and you're @%$#ing running purely dismissive spin and smoke for them. Nothing else a player can do in game has such a complete and utter "Nah, not happening here" counter mechanic directed squarely at it so exclusively. Maybe if roughly a third of ores were incased in bedrock, a crit effect existed that inverted the effect of Sex Rex and Cardio, and 1 out of 3 vehicles that someone tries to wrench blew up in their face the first time they even touched it, as equitable examples, Attack volumes would be "balanced and fair" compared to what the game does to other play styles. They currently aren't.

Dude, this a bit of an overreaction....

FIrst of all, your first mistake is thinking that there is such a thing as a stealth build.  There is not.   The agility build happens to have some stealth perks (2) but those compliment the build, not define it.

Secondly, you keep going on about stealth failing through no fault of your own.   You're right.... @Roland even addressed that in the post you responded to:

The thing is that the auto aggro rooms are not YOU waking up the zombies. It is the situation you are confronted by. You didn't fail stealth

There are any number of theoretical reasons stealth might fail without you making any mistakes... earlier @Roland mentioned those too.

A siren, a stack of boxes falling, a slamming door deeper within out of sight, a chicken running through, —some “bad luck” event that occurs beyond the player’s control but provides an understandable reason why they woke up. 

It would be nice if some of these bad luck events manifested in some way.... but unfortunately they don't.   The point is there are perfectly valid reasons why a bunch of zombies wake that have nothing to do with anything you did.   There are lots of things in the game that are abstractions, I guess we can consider auto aggro volumes one of those.

 

[Solomon]

FIrst of all, your first mistake is thinking that there is such a thing as a stealth build.  There is not.   The agility build happens to have some stealth perks (2) but those compliment the build, not define it.

There are multiple items encouraging a stealth build. Books, perks, armor, there is a steath build presented in the game complimented with everything needed for one.

 

[Kalen]

There are multiple items encouraging a stealth build. Books, perks, armor, there is a steath build presented in the game complimented with everything needed for one.

2 perks don't make a build.   Agility is the build.... stealth compliments it.

Stealth may in fact be over powered.   At the cost of 2 non combat perks you trivialize a large portion of sleepers.   Name 2 other non combat perks that do that.

Edit:

I just dug up some quotes from Joel to emphasize my point

Well it is truly an agility build, which encompasses more than just stealth

Stealth build is also agility build, meaning he does maximum damage with cheap 9mm ammo, nearly free bow ammo, and has the most powerful handgun in the world that will blow a man's head clean off, the 44 magnum. He slices and dices.

Being the best at stealth has its drawbacks, its not intended to be played as a pure build.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

And the club get´s all the kills for non stealth builds. It´s the opposite of playing stealth beeing as OP as killing sleepers with the bow. It´s riddiculous with sexy T-Rex and godlike with the books completed. Even on survivalist. Only clubbing trough a T5 quest? No problem at all. If you can´t stealth, wich does happen even with no auto aggro you are going to have a much harder time with a pure agi build and higher difficulties. 

And then there is ofc the auto shotgun. Boy, this thing rip´s trough everything easy af.

Not to forget the drawback of time when stealthing. Someone doing clubs and shotgun is WAY faster trough a POI. What you think you gain with easy kills, you loose on time. A lot of time. You don´t aggro any screamers tough, but tbh, you can simply ignore them most of the time when running and gunning. 

And if you use the SMG, even with silencer, you get screamers aswell.

 

[Roland]

Stealth is not for speed running efficiency players. I’ll grant you that. 
 

But then those players miss a lot more of the game than just stealth and feel forced into a much narrower set of tactics than how to respond to an auto aggro room. Of course, they set those limits on themselves and some of them even acknowledge that rather than coming here and complaining that the game screws them over....

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I would call it sloppy design. But look at what else is cutting corners in this game because a small dev team is making a huge game on insufficient hardware (at least for the level of optimization they can afford). Too few zombies, no detection of inside/outside or walls between sounds, all to save CPU cycles or development time.

I know you mean their hardware, but what we also need is that the game fully utilizes all cores of a CPU and not just 2. That would make a lot of things possible that are said to be to hardware intense right now. I get in the CPU Limit with a utilization of 30% on my CPU. I would have the power but the game doesn´t use it.

It´s 2020, no one plays on a dual core anymore (well hardly anyone) and a 6 core/12 Threads CPU is considered a budget option these days. Heck, you can get a R7 3700X with 8 cores and 16 Threads for 279€ right now.

 

[meganoth]

I know you mean their hardware, but what we also need is that the game fully utilizes all cores of a CPU and not just 2. That would make a lot of things possible that are said to be to hardware intense right now. I get in the CPU Limit with a utilization of 30% on my CPU. I would have the power but the game doesn´t use it.

It´s 2020, no one plays on a dual core anymore (well hardly anyone) and a 6 core/12 Threads CPU is considered a budget option these days. Heck, you can get a R7 3700X with 8 cores and 16 Threads for 279€ right now.

I was making the point mostly about hardware (i.e. the minimum specs), but also about dev time. Corners have to be cut to finish in this millenia as well.

 

[BaronSamedi]

I would like to offer my perspective on why this is an issue for many of us, myself included. I created my account just to reply to this thread. So, hello all!

It has been stated that TFP want moments of direct confrontation in POIs. An understandable design decision. But the current handling of auto-aggro volumes in POIs is bad design. And I will explain why I say this.

I currently have over 2000 hrs played, I mod my game to have to have 4x zombies with respawn rate of 4 times a day, and my wandering hordes are 20-30 in size. So I get plenty of direct confrontation in the game. And I have played practically all weapon builds. With that said, when a game, any game, offers stealth options as part of game play, I tend to gravitate toward the stealth/sniper style of play. I just find it very enjoyable.

Now, I think we can all agree that games cheat. They know things the player does not, and they make decisions for reasons of game play, optimization, or whatever. When I stealth through a POI, the game knows I am there. But for immersion it pretends to not know I am there. It needs to do this in a way that makes me, the player, believe it is my skill and my character choices that are being rewarded.

In the current form of auto-aggro volumes, no matter my level of skill or perks, even if my stealth meter is on 3. The moment I set foot in the volume, the Z's aggro. It does not matter what I do. Venturing through the same POI layout, the first time - "Oh, crap!". The second time - "Really?". The third time - "This is bull, the game is cheating." And I have played enough that I know where pretty much every single auto-aggro is. It is no longer "Oh, crap!", it's just "oh, this one again. No stealth here."

A simple change of making auto-aggro volumes not 100% activation can fix this. If they had some percentage chance to trigger, regardless the player's stealth, that adds your direct confrontation moments. But when done well the player does not get the impression the game is cheating. If we didn't know auto-aggro volumes existed, over time, a very astute player may figure out that certain areas of POI's are tricky and dangerous to traverse, but many would just assume bad luck. And there would be a lot more of the "Oh, crap!" moments.

edit - also add a delay, entry of the volume can trigger the event (percent chance), but the aggro action does not occur until after some random time has passed. This would make it harder for the player to determine a pattern, which is obvious as it is now, with immediate aggro.

 

[Kalen]

A simple change of making auto-aggro volumes not 100% activation can fix this. If they had some percentage chance to trigger, regardless the player's stealth, that adds your direct confrontation moments. But when done well the player does not get the impression the game is cheating. If we didn't know auto-aggro volumes existed, over time, a very astute player may figure out that certain areas of POI's are tricky and dangerous to traverse, but many would just assume bad luck. And there would be a lot more of the "Oh, crap!" moments.

edit - also add a delay, entry of the volume can trigger the event (percent chance), but the aggro action does not occur until after some random time has passed. This would make it harder for the player to determine a pattern, which is obvious as it is now, with immediate aggro.

Well done.... I think these are great suggestions.

 

[Roland]

I would like to offer my perspective on why this is an issue for many of us, myself included. I created my account just to reply to this thread. So, hello all!

Welcome to the forum and I am so glad a conversation such as this compelled you to sign up!

It has been stated that TFP want moments of direct confrontation in POIs. An understandable design decision. But the current handling of auto-aggro volumes in POIs is bad design. And I will explain why I say this.

This was stated near the beginning of the conversation BEFORE we learned that auto-aggro rooms do not, in fact, force direct confrontation. You can still use stealth tactics to react to those rooms and gain the benefits of your perk multipliers for one-shot kill headshots as the zeds wander around unaware of you. I do feel that the devs do want direct confrontation in the game but as of now, auto-aggro rooms are not necessarily one of those times.

I currently have over 2000 hrs played, I mod my game to have to have 4x zombies with respawn rate of 4 times a day, and my wandering hordes are 20-30 in size. So I get plenty of direct confrontation in the game. And I have played practically all weapon builds. With that said, when a game, any game, offers stealth options as part of game play, I tend to gravitate toward the stealth/sniper style of play. I just find it very enjoyable.

I hope you don't think that the developers need to design around your modification choices. They can't possibly know that because you have modded the game a certain way, that you have your fill and then some of direct confrontation. They can't remove instances of designed direct confrontation just because some people added more of their own in elsewhere. That was a choice to play a game you (or another modder) created and not the one the devs made.

In the current form of auto-aggro volumes, no matter my level of skill or perks, even if my stealth meter is on 3. The moment I set foot in the volume, the Z's aggro. It does not matter what I do. Venturing through the same POI layout, the first time - "Oh, crap!". The second time - "Really?". The third time - "This is bull, the game is cheating." And I have played enough that I know where pretty much every single auto-aggro is. It is no longer "Oh, crap!", it's just "oh, this one again. No stealth here."

I want to address this issue. Unlike other stealth games, this game does not have any awake enemies or guards on sentry duty. Every single enemy is dormant so the stealth is very samey. The auto-aggro rooms give us enemies that are awake and aggravated but they don't immediately target you unless once they come out they happen to see you. In some other game this would be like coming to a hallway with some alert guards walking their rounds. Just because they are awake and active does not mean your stealth has failed. It means you have to change your tactics-- but they are still stealth tactic. Same in this game. You can hide and throw rocks to distract and you will evade them. Then you can take your headshots from crouched position and get your multipliers and bonuses and not alert nearby awake zombies.

The developers cannot just put already wandering and awake zombies in rooms or they will tear things apart before the player gets to them. They wake up upon entrance so that they are freshly awake enemies but they haven't destroyed everything while waiting for the player. The distinction you have to understand is that YOU did not wake them up. They are just awake. You can still use stealth in reaction to their status as awake and alert and aggravated enemies if you want. You can also go guns blazing if that is your choice.

A simple change of making auto-aggro volumes not 100% activation can fix this. If they had some percentage chance to trigger, regardless the player's stealth, that adds your direct confrontation moments. But when done well the player does not get the impression the game is cheating. If we didn't know auto-aggro volumes existed, over time, a very astute player may figure out that certain areas of POI's are tricky and dangerous to traverse, but many would just assume bad luck. And there would be a lot more of the "Oh, crap!" moments.

edit - also add a delay, entry of the volume can trigger the event (percent chance), but the aggro action does not occur until after some random time has passed. This would make it harder for the player to determine a pattern, which is obvious as it is now, with immediate aggro.

Random chance for it to happen anywhere would be great. I agree with you that for those who are bothered by it, such a randomizer could make it so they don't notice or at least have a hard time ascribing it to a certain event. The delay idea....I think that would make it more of a death trap and more of an unfair event that you guys are already complaining about. Because it goes off the moment you enter the volume, you have time to react and space to backtrack to hide and re-emerge in stealth mode. If it delays and you are in the middle or far end of a room when it goes off then you really would be forced to shift into guns blazing because you could find yourself easily surrounded with no hiding places. What you propose sounds exactly like what you guys are complaining about right now whereas what we have right now is not a stealth breaker but a stealth shocker but the stealth player can react and continue to play in a completely stealthy manner to the trigger.

 

[theFlu]

Random chance for any room to start running at you..? Well, sounds better than a 100% at specific rooms. Maybe 20% for most (of the current 100%) rooms and that 100% for "boss rooms"?

I'd love to see a "lore mechanic" for it though... for example, stacks of empty cans, barrels, cooking ware, whatever excessively loud you can imagine falling over in the room. Sure it'll still feel unfair, as in "I wasn't even near that thing!", but piles of things may just collapse on their own over time. Alarms, toys, rotten ammo, animals (a chicken taking off and making noise).

 

[hiemfire]

The auto-aggro rooms give us enemies that are awake and aggravated but they don't immediately target you unless once they come out they happen to see you.

That was something Fataal was talking about possibly implementing as an adjustment, not what is in place. The testing done by meganoth, Boidster and Jugginator had the zombies time out. Zombies triggered by attack volumes are targeted on the player.

 

[Kalen]

That was something Fataal was talking about possibly implementing as an adjustment, not what is in place. The testing done by meganoth, Boidster and Jugginator had the zombies time out in their searching. Zombies triggered by attack volumes are targeted on the player.

I took @Roland comment to mean that since the game can't support having zombies already spawned in a room, auto aggro volumes are a way to simulate "awake and alert zombies".  Zombies that attack as soon as they "see" you, which they do as soon as you enter their line of sight (ie. their volume)