I am really curious how this horde migration will work and feel for us as players. Before I stumbled upon PZ this fall, I played some 7 Days 2 Die. If you are not familiar with the game, let me explain one of the core ideas behind it real quick: The game doesn`t want you to be safe. Ever. So what happens is, that a horde comes visiting you. (Sounds familiar?) But HOW this was implemented is what really scared me away from the game. The hordes would come very regularly. Basically some time between 16:00 and 17:00 hours.. I could almost set my watch after those guys. And of course this horde would always aim with amazing accuracy at you. Doesn`t matter where you are, there WILL be a horde EXACTLY in your face. Third big point is what those zombies did to actually make sure, that they would be a "threat": They would rip down EVERYTHING in their path. I have seen Zombies demolishing massive stone houses and digging straight through hills to get to my fort. Ridiculous, really. So what did I do? Since any kind of structure would be torn down once a day and either rebuilding or setting up death traps would be really high maintenance I decided to go another way. I experimented with some designs and came up with a House built on pillars. I basically moved my whole setup into the first story, including vegetable garden. The Zombies would come and flood mostly around the pillars while I was cowering in my little house above their heads and watch them pass by through a trap door. When the horde passed I would come down and finish off the one or two stragglers nibbling on my pillars (sounds kinda wrong). At that moment I basically won the game by breaking this core mechanic. Well my point is: The whole experience of the game felt absolutely artificial. It was just too obvious that the game was trying to kick me in the nuts, just because the devs wanted to desperately occupy the player. This ruined the whole game for me... others may not feel so strong about this fact but I felt absolutely insulted by such an unrealistic zombie-behaviour. Seriously... digging straight through hills... Almost needless to say, that I do not want to see something similar in the future of PZ. If I sit walled off in my Fort of Impenetration and a horde strolls along, neither smelling nor hearing nor seeing anything of interest to them I simply don`t want them to rip down my log walls just because the game thinks it needs to keep me on my toes. Realistic (as far as we can tell ) Zombie behaviour is one of the big strenghts of PZ and regular, almost organised and intelligent attacks on a player base would be simply contradictory to that. Let alone the fact that most people struggle sometimes with opening a bag of chips but as undead they suddenly tear down massive walls and crack open rib cages. I am curious, what do the rest of you think about those possible base attacks? How should they work? Specific attacks or random encounters of huge hordes migrating in the ever more desperate search for food?
Really cool reading what you guys are digging out. I got finally around to watching Romero's movies. Watching Dawn of the Dead from 1978 right now. Zombies can at least partially use door knobs to open said doors in that movie, so much for the evolution of their behaviour. Gee, that's scary.