Good stuff. Can’t wait for August 8th!
Yay dysentery! Well ok, the rest of the update sounds awesome. Since I’ve been playing it like a roguelike and restarting every time I die, the random worlds will be really nice.
Finally started playing the Alpha. I Kickstarted this, so it took them a while to let us lower tiers in.
Amazing game so far. All the systems really come together, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.
However, I hate the company name. “Fun Pimps”? The logo is a terrible drawing of a white guy wearing a cliche 70s pimp hat?
Fucking video games. Keep those stereotypes going strong, guys.
amazingly, this isnt playable in steams offline mode , which was kinda annoying now I had time to try it out a bit.
Any idea how to open doors? I placed a Secure Door just fine. I could set a password, I could lock and unlock, but I could not open the door. When I tried, it’d play the sound of a door opening, but it wouldn’t open. Is this a known bug right now, or am I missing something? I was playing a Multiplayer game, but I was the host.
Is there an end game? Watched a few videos on this but I’m concerned once you build up and stock pile some there’s nothing left to do.
I have not had problems with secure doors or trunks. If you are the owner, you should just press (not hold) to open it.
No end game. No game other than survival. You do reach a point where you have done it all. I do believe an SP with a story line is planned.
Yeah like Mok said there isn’t anything yet. But then I’ve never made it close to being fully set up lol. I’m looking forward to the random maps coming in the next update. At least every attempt will be fresh and not just a run to my favorite gas station roof lol.
Update 9 with random world generation is out!
Evidently with Steam you have to delete it and reinstall. It won’t update.
Mine updated normally.
Wow, random maps with Fog of War really change the dynamic.
Almost as big for the immersion factor is the removal of the mini-map. Now you have no idea how close zombies are to you without directly looking. No more convenient red blips on the mini-map to gauge proximity of nearby previously detected zombies.
Just watching videos I’m surprised they removed the mini-map without fixing the sound yet. It’s all the same volume regardless of distance away and not positional.
Still haven’t fixed the positional audio?! Dangit, that completely breaks the game for me. Haven’t played since they broke it in the first place…
I definitely get distance perception for audio, but not directional.
Lots of other interesting changes in the patch notes, not sure how I feel about all of them yet. One big change is with the zombie speed. Now its a set, slow during the day and fast at night. So going into buildings during the day is much safer, while that campfire or torch you put up will no longer slow them down at night. The crafting and inventory menus seems nicer, but I only messed around for a little bit this weekend. I love that drinking water finally gives you the jar back! On the down side, they noted that it should be much harder to find complete guns and far more likely to find gun parts. That seems to jive with what I found scavenging around. Even a safe I opened up on the big city only had three parts, each for a different kind of gun.
After about 4 days of playing this, I’m happy with many of the changes. I don’t know how they managed it, but the world looks even better now with A9, which is something b/c this is a real pretty world. The random gen creates a new vista around every corner.
New recipes abound. Cloth clothing / armor, bandages, splints, (gunpowder / powder charges / tnt) as well as the recipe categories have all been reworked, making it much easier to find things.
The mechanics of leg breaking / dysentery / stunning are welcome new hazards that you have to worry about. It sucks to break a leg, but it makes you think completely different (no running for you!).
Books & plans are now in book-cases, making finding book cases like finding desk & gun safes.
Bees are very dangerous, they are opportunists and will wait for you to be distracted to pile on the hurt. They respond to you pointing a weapon at them by backing up & going diagonal, making it very hard to target them. And they are everywhere. Clever girl.
The random gen world is both interesting & boring. It’s cool to see so much variety, but the density of POI’s needs to be addressed as the only real reason to venture outside the city is to hunt/gather things you don’t have (meat / flowers / cotton / etc) because the city really provides. I’ve wandered pretty far in several directions and have only found a small number of POI’s. It’s to the point where you get about 4-5 in-game hours to look before heading back b/c otherwise you risk spending night out in the open.
My comment on the city being all providing - Heck, all you need is a single apt complex and you’re pretty well set. Just set up on the roof and loot the 10 floors periodically and you have very little to worry about.
While in the city - look for the deep craters. Often, there is a small cave with a gun-safe embedded near the bottom. The new parking garages, the movie theaters are nice add-ons. Think of the city as a larger Gravestown from the previous static-map.
As far as bugs - there are a number of ones right now that will be a future hot-fix. Most notably, you spawn above where you left, so often you’re on a roof, and the only way down is jumping - breaking your leg. The backpack pointing interface is buggy. There are gaps where if you click on them, the inventory drops to the ground, dirt that grows grass almost immediately, and in MP, you get to see everyone’s bedroll, regardless whether you’re friends or not. Overall, pretty stable considering the amount of change and they’ve already said a hot-fix is in the works.
I’m really liking where the game is going. The lack of mini-map makes sound so much more important - and getting positional sound accurate in the next release will hopefully be a focus.
So, this is our base. It’s the garage POI that we’ve beefed up with wood spikes all the way around in a moat. An overhanging lip prevents spider zeds from climbing the walls and it doesn’t take very long for a zed to die in the trench. It held up very well to the super horde that comes every 7 days.
The only problem, as it’s a POI, is that zeds occasionally spawn inside and we have to clear them out.
The garage POI comes with a 3 deep cobblestone brick base, which is really nice, so you just have to dig a trench around it. The log spikes, reinforced twice (once using wood, final reinforce with metal) look like this close up:
The current build, 9.1, has some problems for Single player, in that zeds respawn very frequently, but on MP, it’s spread out so it’s not too bad.
One of the developers, madmole, has given some hints on 9.2 which hopefully is coming soon.
Ok some people are asking what changes we’ve made. Quite a few. The biggest game changers are we now have a biome spawning masks, pathing & AI, and feral night hordes.
Biome Spawning Masks.
These basically make it so when you clear an area of zombies that area will not spawn zombies again for about 5 days. This gives the player breathing room to build a house or fort, or just stop to craft some things and have a breather from zombies. It is not a free pass from wandering hordes or noise triggered hordes. It also forces the player to travel to hunt as you clean an area out, there won’t be animals there for a while either so before I’d just sit and base build and snipe a deer every day and have stocks of food galore. Now you have to get off your butt and go hunting just like in real life.
Pathing and AI
Several improvements to pathing have been made. Its just an early start to a grander scheme but zombies don’t weave back and forth as much and path straighter, they will only walk off a ledge a certain height, they can get through doors easily now. They jump over fences instead of getting stuck and aren’t spinning circles any more. They get to where they are supposed to get now. We still need to improve staircase and long distance pathing but that is part of the grander scheme I mentioned.
I upped the speed of one walk type, the cripple looking walk with the long stride. These guys and gals are annoyingly fast now so you have no time to loot any more. They are in your face causing problems and reaching you faster than you anticipated they would. They look normal… but somehow a very slight speed adjustment has been a big game changer.
Feral Night Hordes
Added feral night hordes. Once per week zombies get really hungry and become feral. These feral night hordes can sense players and will find them regardless of how well they are hiding. Every week the horde grows in numbers until the 7th week.
This is just the first version of feral night hordes but we plan on adjusting their numbers based on how well the player is doing down the road. Also once we get the regional sound/noise/smell system working this will determine where the hordes end up going. So a smart survivor can duck or divert the feral night horde.
To me the early system is already great though. It gives you a reason to stock up on ammo and build the best base you can. Even in the aftermath I was happy repairing my base and looking forward to day 14 to see if I can make improvements to my base that make it easier to defend against the increasing zombie threat.
There’s a lot of other fixed and little things we’ve added too.