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Dcar

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  1. Okay, so, I've spent time making this game work more reasonably on my hardware and I have specific complaints against b41. It's a bit of a rant, and I'm sorry about that. <rant> The player is expected to shove zombies and stomp their heads as a starting combat mechanic, except it's not feasible to do this when there is more than one zombie which can see you. Even if you don't have bad attack timing, the b41 character animation makes facing the correct direction and standing in the exact right place a chore because minor character collisions can rotate the player character enough to put you at a bad angle, and being at a bad angle means you'll miss your push attack while being rewarded with a bite wound every single time. Supposing you do find yourself in a place where you can stomp through several zombies, you'll quickly find yourself barefoot as the durability of your shoes makes you wonder if they were made of thin strips of old wood. You'll be putting on zombie shoes several times in your first game day just to keep shoes on your feet. Good luck losing zombies around buildings to spread them out because the initial population prohibits the player from not being actively tracked by several zombies once you leave your starting house and they don't individually follow you long enough to be able to kite a significant population away from any point of interest with anything less than a considerable time investment. Maybe you'll get lucky and find a car with a key and some gas in it, but you'll quickly realize using vehicles is a mistake in b41 since fuel mileage feels 1/10th as good as it was in b40. Even assuming you had a full tank, you can expect your tires to fall apart in about a game day of driving regardless of whether you stay on pavement and drive responsibly the entire time. </rant> Design suggestions: 1 - The player character should auto-face the nearest upright zombie when making a push attack, assuming you're more or less facing one in the first place. Assuming there are no upright zombies, the stomp attack should auto-face the nearest zombie since it also moves the player a slight amount and that creates a problem. 2 - Various item/equipment durabilities need to last a lot longer. I also realize fuel mileage in b40 was pretty high, but b41 should partially approach b40 levels unless you're planning on adding a way to refine a fuel of some kind (ethanol & etc) 3 - Initial zombies should be at 1/10 (or less) of their current starting population. 3a - Increasing individual zombie difficulty would be reasonable to maintain the world difficulty. The ratio of zombies against the sum of beds & vehicles is kind of crazy. 3b - Zombies cluster too aggressively. Kiting a few of them around the back side of a house and checking on them a few minutes later commonly finds that they've recruited quite a few friends. This doesn't add up because they weren't already clustered to their desired level after the player character apparently cowered in their house until supplies ran out in the first place. It goes against behavioral expectations based on the environmental cues. 3c - Ramping up the overall zombie population over time would be reasonable since it'd emulate the zombies realizing some of their friends are wandering in a certain direction for some unknown reason (some of them found a living human) while also pushing the idea that the player can have a chance to loot something halfway useful before being set upon by the local horde instead of being set upon right away. Alternatively, start with a lot of human survivors running around fighting zombies and have that justify the ramping up of the horde over time.
  2. A different problem that's not for everyone, but is certainly for me, is that I have an older PC and b41 tries to peg my system even when turning all the rendering to potato mode. I'm hoping there are plans for reimplementing a b40-style option to only fully render the nearest so many character/npc models while offering a less-specific render for the remainder so we can keep some of our low-end FPS going stronger for longer. Since I'm griping, I'll share one I know is an easy fix everyone will enjoy - can we make the inventory expand/contract arrows on the left edge of the line items ... wider? Like, a lot wider? Please?
  3. I'm on the Steam version, which is in the title. Checking my client again, it still says v40.43. If it was fixed in v41, then that hasn't apparently been distributed to Steam just yet outside of experimental builds.
  4. When a zombie is knocking against a window, there doesn't seem to be any good way to stop it aside from hitting it to knock it down and force it out of that action cycle. This means any window a zombie is attracted to must always be considered broken because swinging a weapon to hit the zombie also breaks the glass even if the player is facing away from the window during the attack. The problem this creates is a new character cannot dream of putting supplies in any house for very long since barricades aren't an option at first. Suggested solution: make zombies tapping on windows/doors react to noise and smells around them. Make them willing to change their current action when fresh tasty brains are near them on their side of the window or door on which they're tapping.
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