Survival is not hard, but it's annoying.

[MadDan]

As much as I don't like dying before I reach the next day in all my playthroughs now, I genuinely think NPCs will balance these current settings out. The chaos at the beginning of the game will be massive with some NPCs running rampant, which will give other NPCs the time to relax, and the player too. All depending on how you go about things. Right now, the zombies are literally chasing after one person in the whole map. (Not exactly, but you understand, they can only be spread out by random noises and not other people).

 

Plus, people sometimes forget...

 

This is how you died.

[PPanda0421]

 

 

All the same, maybe those options shouldn't always exist.

 

Further, zombie respawn hours are already set to 72 hours and require a 16 hour period of that area being unseen.

 

What you're actually having difficulty with is the redistribution of zombies (every 12 hours).

Yes, but look at this in this way:

Hours to respawn on unseen area - 16 hours.

Redistribution of zombies - 12 hours.

If you will do simple math you'll know that there is a LOT of zombies spawning around your safehouse (not loaded parts of map) and a lot of these spawned zombies will come and visit you. +72 hours respawn even on parts where you are.

In general, you have new zombies around your safehouse *everyday*. If you're unlucky you may get new zombies respawned twice in only one day.

 

Zombies dont respawn in a location recently seen by your player. 

 

Your issue is solely with migration not spawning

 

Does SP allow the same manipulation of zombie respawn and migration options as MP does?  I can open a file and alter the fuck out of zombies how they respawn, how the group up or horde up, how they migrate, how long for each of those things.

 

No I have seen Zombies spawn in a location recently seen by the player. I have seen this on a few occasions in build 32. I have not played build 33 yet so I don't know if that was fixed. I'll give you an example: I found a two-story building. I proceeded up a set of stairs clearing all zombies along the way. The stairs led to a room with books. I cleared out the room and went into a room that had kitchen which was adjacent to that room and cleared out the zombies there. Then I went back to the with books but saw that my character was hungry. I headed back to the room with the kitchen and saw a zombie there! This was a span of 10-15 secs! The room with the kitchen did not have any other rooms and all this was on the second floor! The zombie definitely spawned when I left the room with kitchen.

 

I agree with the OP. Survival difficulty needs balancing and you can't just say 'Use custom settings.' If the majority of the users use custom settings why we do we need survival mode. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

 

In build 33 (I saw some previews) they added more options for different scenarios so I think that's good start.

 

However, someone mentioned that we should not be killing killing hordes upon hordes every day. I agree - I mentioned this before in one of my previous posts.

Maybe there's a spawning bug or there needs to be changes to the migration code or both (although I really doubt they'll change the migration code).

In a previous game I played on the default survival mode with Hydrocraft mod. I killed over 8000 zombies and still have to clear hordes every day. In my current game (still with hydrocraft) I used custom settings reducing the number of zombies in a group and some other settings with zombie behaviour. I also changed them to be tougher. I have over 4000 kills but still have to deal with hordes every day.

 

Leading them away or building/hiding some remote area doesn't do anything because you'll eventually have to deal with them.

Perhaps there should be a setting for MAX number of zombies. Obviously for MP the default will be a higher value.

 

Don't get me wrong I love Project Zomboid (it's one of my top survival games)! Just giving some suggestions to make it more fun.

[bobchaos]

The real problem here I think it's that people feel like NOT playing survival is "pussy mode" because in almost every other game in the universe, it is. Games like Minecraft conditioned us to think that "Survival mode" = "normal mode", but in PZ it's not, survival should read as "Uber-hardcore, pants-shittingly-brutal mode".

Really hard games are rare. People feel playing anything below survival makes them less manly or something...

 

I bet if they were to rename "the first week" to "survival" and "survival" to "uber hardcore" everyone with complains about the zombie pop/migration system would stop complaining. In the meantime, I know if you're posting in this thread you're looking for survival balance, but I gotta side with all the folks telling you to start a sandbox :/ If you've got a problem with a single, adjustable setting, well, adjust it!

 

*edit* I feel i also need to reiterate: If you wanna live in town and not have to murder 100+ zombies every day, get a sledgehammer, smash the stairs to your home, and then ignore the zombies.

[Marco1]

Before anyone start telling me to adjust difficulty mode to i my preference - i already did it. The thing is i think survival mode should be balanced better. It should be hard and should stay hard, but it shouldn't be annoying to player to the point where you just don't enjoy the game anymore. 

 

[...]

 

 People who played survival mode probably understand me, but right now if you survive to build a decent safe house, the only thing you keep doing every day is to repair walls and kills at the same time all zombies that spawned or moved to you during your sleep. Not to mention it takes almost entire day and sometimes you are forced to sleep when they are headbutting your fort. 

 

[...]

 

I think spawn system is a big problem of this difficulty. I believe spawning and zombie migration should be in this difficulty, but it should either tuned down or balanced in "smart" way. Currently you just constantly fighting horde.

 

 

I play survival and i completely agree with you!

 

However people that don't won't just get your point and also those who play the game with a different approach, for example: "that that's not how it is supposed to be played" (missing your point completely) will give answers that often sound like "you're playing it wrong" that are just...well, funny, but you can't really take seriously...

[Googz]

As much as I don't like dying before I reach the next day in all my playthroughs now, I genuinely think NPCs will balance these current settings out. The chaos at the beginning of the game will be massive with some NPCs running rampant, which will give other NPCs the time to relax, and the player too. All depending on how you go about things. Right now, the zombies are literally chasing after one person in the whole map. (Not exactly, but you understand, they can only be spread out by random noises and not other people).

 

Plus, people sometimes forget...

 

This is how you died.

 

You didn't read what i said, right? We aren't complaining about if the survival hard or not. People think that setting are not hard at all, but annoying. Please re-read what i said. This also to everyone above. 

[Googz]

The real problem here I think it's that people feel like NOT playing survival is "pussy mode" because in almost every other game in the universe, it is. Games like Minecraft conditioned us to think that "Survival mode" = "normal mode", but in PZ it's not, survival should read as "Uber-hardcore, pants-shittingly-brutal mode".

Really hard games are rare. People feel playing anything below survival makes them less manly or something...

 

I bet if they were to rename "the first week" to "survival" and "survival" to "uber hardcore" everyone with complains about the zombie pop/migration system would stop complaining. In the meantime, I know if you're posting in this thread you're looking for survival balance, but I gotta side with all the folks telling you to start a sandbox :/ If you've got a problem with a single, adjustable setting, well, adjust it!

 

*edit* I feel i also need to reiterate: If you wanna live in town and not have to murder 100+ zombies every day, get a sledgehammer, smash the stairs to your home, and then ignore the zombies.

 

You also probably didn't understand what i said. Survival is not hard, there are some elements that are annoying. I played myself hard games and tend to play every single player on hardest difficulty every time. 

 

Sledgehammer is a way to cheat the game... Let's ignore this option. 

[bobchaos]

@Googz Based on you latest replies, I can only assume that you want survival to be tweaked to suit your own play style only, but this is a large community and not all of us dream of farming in the middle of the city with hordes coming at us only when we please. I don't think there's any convincing you of any of that anyhow, so this will be my last post to this thread.

 

That said, here's something you should try that might make your games more entertaining for a while: adopt a nomad lifestyle. Sometimes I make a character and decide he's not allowed to sleep twice in the same location on any given week, for instance. Keeps things interesting.

[Zorak]

Ok so what if we just ramp up the difficult level. On every game mode it will get harder each day  In most Z apocalypse stories we can find similar timeline. Lets try to recreate them in PZ:

1) Start of apocalypse: first few days up to week: low zombie count, no respawn, minimal migration, no hostile npc

2) First few months: Zeds are main threat: zombie count medium, low respawn, moderate migration , low hostile NPCs

3) Power and Water shutdown (1-3 months into game); zombie count medium, same with migration and respawn, low hostile NPCs

4) 1st Winter same as above + winter so no fishing , farming you need to find some warm place to stay at night etc.

5) 1 Spring after apocalypse: zombie count high; high migration and respawn; more hostile NPCs + roaming bandit groups

6) end game: zombie count migration and respawn are slowly going from high to insane, more NPC bandits etc.

 

There would still be difference between survival and first bite (like starting days days for 1st bite last a whole week and in survival you have only 2-3 days). We can see our progress, less experienced players still wont make it past first month. The game will not last 5-6 h (if devs want us to survive about week or two in survival mode).

Im just shocked that devs "vision of the game" is to survive a week or two. Why to code all that fishing , farming, traping and other upcoming features if were forced to run and hide 80% of time.

Those who seek more hardcore game can still try sandbox or start a game in Fort Knox / Louisville (more dense Z population).

The current settings for survival are fine for 3-4 players , where we can have 2 guys on building and clearing duty and 2 on loot runs. Fore solo player you just live in woods or run most of your time.

[EnigmaGrey]

Ok so what if we just ramp up the difficult level. On every game mode it will get harder each day  In most Z apocalypse stories we can find similar timeline. Lets try to recreate them in PZ:

1) Start of apocalypse: first few days up to week: low zombie count, no respawn, minimal migration, no hostile npc

2) First few months: Zeds are main threat: zombie count medium, low respawn, moderate migration , low hostile NPCs

3) Power and Water shutdown (1-3 months into game); zombie count medium, same with migration and respawn, low hostile NPCs

4) 1st Winter same as above + winter so no fishing , farming you need to find some warm place to stay at night etc.

5) 1 Spring after apocalypse: zombie count high; high migration and respawn; more hostile NPCs + roaming bandit groups

6) end game: zombie count migration and respawn are slowly going from high to insane, more NPC bandits etc.

 

There would still be difference between survival and first bite (like starting days days for 1st bite last a whole week and in survival you have only 2-3 days). We can see our progress, less experienced players still wont make it past first month. The game will not last 5-6 h (if devs want us to survive about week or two in survival mode).

Im just shocked that devs "vision of the game" is to survive a week or two. Why to code all that fishing , farming, traping and other upcoming features if were forced to run and hide 80% of time.

Those who seek more hardcore game can still try sandbox or start a game in Fort Knox / Louisville (more dense Z population).

The current settings for survival are fine for 3-4 players , where we can have 2 guys on building and clearing duty and 2 on loot runs. Fore solo player you just live in woods or run most of your time.

Because you can survive longer by not being stubborn and saying "My base must be in downtown West Point."

As said long ago, the increase in difficulty just means altering your behavior to adapt.

 

Any pitch that's outright "Change survival entirely" or "Survival is really broken becuase of spawning" is just a non-starter as far as discussion goes.

[Zyklon-M]

3) We'll just have to agree to disagree. I don't feel it's necessary to give the player the choice of easy city living.

 

Would you then consider adding a sandbox setting where urban focused is changed to uniform as time passes? Not in a second, but rather as a slow process. I can see the point of huge hordes being assembled in crowded residential areas at the beginning of an apocalypse, but if zombies migrate by following sounds, the cities (and most certaintly small towns like M or WP) should after a while get a much lower zombie population than it had in the beginning. The zombies would follow gunshots from hunters in nearby forests or perhaps car sounds.

Also, I tried the uniform setting in sandbox mode with a zombie population of 0.35. I am about a month into the game. There is still A LOT more zombies in Muldraugh than out in the countryside. It will certainly ruin all of my fun to never ever be able to settle inside a city permanently, even in sandbox mode.

[Svarog]

Because you can survive longer by not being stubborn and saying "My base must be in downtown West Point."

As said long ago, the increase in difficulty just means altering your behavior to adapt.

 

Any pitch that's outright "Change survival entirely" or "Survival is really broken becuase of spawning" is just a non-starter as far as discussion goes.

I can see that Survival mode isn't so much a "Single Player Scenario" mode as much as it is a "Instant Action" kind of mode it does have some difficulty problems that are mainly there because the pacing absolutely sucks.

I'm a broken record at this point with this but survival just throws the player into the game with one option to survive. Run into the woods, there is no adapting going on, that mode literally only has one real viable tactic for playing. There is no breakthrough of Early, Mid and Late game in Survival, you start in Late game and you're told to just survive.

And that's broken for a number of reasons. The settings that Survival uses would be great for 6 months after the apocalypse where you could have a scenario of a survivor arriving in Muldraugh or West Point once the area was already taken over by zombies and then surviving there. But even then, not quite. See, the loot settings are not Hardcore at all, stuff is Rare but it's not super hard to find what you need.

Survival could and probably should make use of escalating difficulty, let's have it as a scenario where there was an effective evacuation, all loot is Very Rare, at first, low zombies, the player will make base near areas that can be looted, zombie population can grow over time (As world falls there is more migrating zombies), becoming an annoyance, then a danger, than the apocalypse, the player will have to scroll through all of the available survival options (Scavenging, Trapping, Foraging, Farming) before it really becomes really hard to survive in any of the above mentioned ways and the player is really forced to improvise every 5 minutes.

Survival is more like a challenge than a SP game mode. I know and understand that it is the flag mode of PZ but spawning the player in the middle of a huge horde is fake difficulty. We have challenge modes for Instant Hardcore Action.

I believe Survival should be difficult in a way where the player needs to really dynamically alter his tactics in order to survive, showcasing the amount of options PZ has for survival. Make it a mode that forces the player to go through as many of the features as possible in a setting where using all of those options takes a lot of time to set up right (Bet on rare loot and not abundant zombies) and where the player will never really feel safe but where any success in getting anything right is a moment to enjoy.

How? Make loot very rare with an offhand mention of a successful evacuation before setting up a quarantine zone, low to medium amount of zombies at start so the player can set up base close to towns living off of scavenging, buff the zombies as time goes by, force the player out of their comfort zone, force the player to find new sources of food and water, make them use foraging and trapping with occasional runs for some extra supplies in mid game until the end game which consists of farming and hoping that the huge amount of zombies everywhere don't happen to migrate to the player's position. And then just make it so zombies are everywhere and surviving a single day is an achievement, force the player to eat Dog Food and Worms until they die.

Idk, survival has a real problem where the starting settings poorly reflect on narrative and pacing. We have electricity, water, radios as well as thousands of zombies for no reason. That mode being THE mode for plaing PZ barely showcases all the available options and it's just super hard for the sake of being super hard without the difficulty actually feeling fair or justified by the setting.

I'm probably repeating myself at this point so I'll stop here.

[Zorak]

 

- snipe -

Because you can survive longer by not being stubborn and saying "My base must be in downtown West Point."

As said long ago, the increase in difficulty just means altering your behavior to adapt.

 

Any pitch that's outright "Change survival entirely" or "Survival is really broken becuase of spawning" is just a non-starter as far as discussion goes.

 

My point is not to force you or devs "change that coz i dont like it" i can bypass this using sandbox mode.

I just want PZ to great game for new and old players.

Now survival reminds me this super mario level:

is it hard ? YES, is it fun for most players ? NO.

Telling us that the only way to survive survival mode atm is to get out of the town at day1 sounds more like strategy for some challenge mode not "meant to be played" mode. This game have a huge potential to be perfect zombie game, just like The Walking Dead, and its not because you have to kill 100s of zeds, its because it shows that in real Zombie apocalypse zeds are just one of the many threats that awaits you.

I love TIS I love PZ and I hope one day it will be huge success like minecraft

[Svarog]

Exactly! Zombies should be one of many challenges the player faces and all of those challenges combined together should form the Survival mode.

Seriously, some of the skills and possibilities that PZ has are downright wasted in PZ's Main Mode. PZ already has so many more threats than just zombies, let the players starve, let them get dehydrated, make it so that the day they find dog food is a victory day. Make it so farming and trapping matter. PZ can do better and I want to see it do better with it's primary, default, "The way it's meant to be played" mode.

[Kirrus]

At the end of the day, the game isn't finished yet. You'll just have to wait and see, since the game as it's "meant to be played" includes a plot and storyline, which requires NPCs.

 

Closing this one, as I think everything's been said that's gunna be said.