What do you guys think of Erosion as it stands?

[Lightning Flash]

This is my opinion of it. Feel free to share yours below!

 

If there's one thing I love about the post-apocalyptic genre, it's that the remains of the old world get taken by by nature. Seeing towns and cities becoming overgrown with plants and vines is always great, and really gives us a sense of "Oh shit, this is really the apocalypse." Of course, other than the zombies.

 

However, personally, while I enjoy the erosion, I feel like it's not only very little, but it's also too fast.

 

In six months, your world can go from clean to 'overgrown'. Some places, I would understand, but the majority of the place should still at least somewhat resemble the world in the first 24 hours. However, I feel like the overgrowth at six months should be set at roughly one year or maybe even three years. Of course, the weather and climate can also play into this part.

 

When I say very little, I mean it seems a tad bit...disappointing. After a year, that's it. The erosion stops, the grass stops growing, the vines stop climbing, and it makes it feel like time isn't passing that much anymore. Even after a year, the roads, though somewhat cracked and growing grass through said cracks, still looks clean, like they were paved or refurbished yesterday, even though it's been twelve months since anybody fixed them. I made a suggestion that the erosion should go up to twenty years since the apocalypse, and I still believe it should be that way in the future.

 

Twenty years would create a whole new game in the sense that it will be harder to survive in every sense of the word, not to mention how the world would look then. Take a look at this screenshot from The Last Of Us. This is meant to be Salt Lake City twenty years after the apocalypse, and you can tell - from the cracked, faded, and mossy roads, to the grass and trees growing through, to the abandoned, rusty, abandoned vehicles, that this is a world two decades later, forever frozen in time with nobody to pick up the pieces. This is a street curb, covered in moss and grass, with an abandoned, rusty car. While I'm not saying the world should look like this only a year after the apocalypse, I'm saying that the world should show more signs of physical and environmental decay as time goes on, rather than just vines and grass popping up.

 

Perhaps as time passes and the more houses that have broken windows, the more dirtied up the streets become, with papers and debris and garbage that was moved around by zombie hordes, animals, and so on. Look at this clip from 28 Days Later as Jim explores London. The streets are empty, but the littering remnants of civilization blow in the breeze across the landscape. It gives a better sense of desolation. (And hey, with the vehicles, it'd be cool to have overturned cars, wrecked/burned to show the panic). It's not as if nearly everybody turned overnight. It was over several days, leading to panic, potentially some riots, and large amounts of gridlock. I feel that it should show and become more visible as the days, weeks, months, and even years pass.

 

This can be seen as somewhat of a suggestion, but it's generally how I feel about the erosion. I feel that it could create many more vibrant and devastating scenes if it was upped for several more years. Seeing a near unrecognizable Knox County twenty years after the outbreak would be beautiful, haunting, and difficult to survive in. And with the NPCs (if they're still a thing), it could fit for that.

 

But enough about me, what about you?

[Brex]

The game still feels too "clean" too me. There needs to be stuff like scattered garbage across the streets, makeshift barricades, collapsed buildings, vehicle wrecks, overgrown lawns, messages scrawled on walls, broken windows and busted down doors, fallen lampposts, holes in roofs, flooded basements, wildfires, crashed helicopters, mass graves, body bags, scattered tents and makeshift shelters, abandoned safe zones, scattered leaves, rotting wood walls and fences, dust everywhere, dried bloodstains, skeletal corpses, roadkill, rusted fences, water filled with bloated bodies, collapsed bridges, and much, much more. 

[Lightning Flash]

1 hour ago, Brex said:

The game still feels too "clean" too me. There needs to be stuff like scattered garbage across the streets, makeshift barricades, collapsed buildings, vehicle wrecks, overgrown lawns, messages scrawled on walls, broken windows and busted down doors, fallen lampposts, holes in roofs, flooded basements, wildfires, crashed helicopters, mass graves, body bags, scattered tents and makeshift shelters, abandoned safe zones, scattered leaves, rotting wood walls and fences, dust everywhere, dried bloodstains, skeletal corpses, roadkill, rusted fences, water filled with bloated bodies, collapsed bridges, and much, much more. 

 

This plus my original post. I feel like there needs to be signs of sheer devastation, even in the first few days, though have it look clean, then as time goes on, more and more of this piles on with time, either by survivors or nature.

 

It needs to be at a point where eventually (twenty years, let's say), the game world looks like this.

[Magic Mark]

Ehh, I kind of lean towards the opposite, but for entirely different reasons.

 

This stance of mine has been discussed to death, but erosion as it stands happens unrealistically fast. Vegetation growth is one thing, and it's fine but your floors and walls don't realistically start cracking after 2 months. Living in a relatively rural town myself, a lot of families have lived in the same plot of land for many decades, even a century, and the place is still livable by today's standards without having been rebuilt.

 

I understand trees growing and what not, that's totally fine, but if somebody is living in it, and they are taking care of it, their house isn't going to fall into disarray for many years as long as it's not left to the elements.

 

If we are going to go down the route where people can survive 20 years, I want the ability to maintain my farmhouse out in it's secluded land to come first. Pulling weeds out of the crack in the driveway is something that's probably going to get done if there's a community of survivors and they at least have some time to manage the property.

 

If we have 20 people maintaining a community, then the town should have ways to keep the same appearance of today, 20 years from now, even if the power dies.

[Lightning Flash]

59 minutes ago, Kim Jong Un said:

If we have 20 people maintaining a community, then the town should have ways to keep the same appearance of today, 20 years from now, even if the power dies.

 

I'd really like this. It'd be really cool to have a single town, run by generators, fed with gardens, and quenched with rainwater, that looks as it did during the initial outbreak twenty years before, and outside its gates, the rest of Knox County is just overgrown. That'd be ominously cool.

[BayCon]

13 hours ago, Lightning Flash said:

*snip*

 

 

After 1 - 3 years? No. No one will survive that long. It already takes surviving the length of most game campaigns for anything to happen. Some things have to be less realistic for the sake of gameplay. What's the point in having the feature in there if .00001% of players will survive long enough to see it?

 

 

[Magic Mark]

1 hour ago, BayCon said:

 

After 1 - 3 years? No. No one will survive that long. It already takes surviving the length of most game campaigns for anything to happen. Some things have to be less realistic for the sake of gameplay. What's the point in having the feature in there if .00001% of players will survive long enough to see it?

 

 

Well, for starters, you can choose how late you want to start via sandbox settings. Some people want that "world already dead" feel when they start, which I think is part of what the OP wants.

[OffitMan]

39 minutes ago, BayCon said:

 

After 1 - 3 years? No. No one will survive that long. It already takes surviving the length of most game campaigns for anything to happen. Some things have to be less realistic for the sake of gameplay. What's the point in having the feature in there if .00001% of players will survive long enough to see it?

 

 

 

This exactly. Whilst I'd like to see more variations in the type of erosion we see, like the scattered garbage and makeshift barricades mentioned above, PZ is a game above all else. I'm up for realism where appropriate but having features that are only visible after in game years is not logical in my opinion. But as the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea said above, this is where Sandbox comes into its element, as any erosion settings can be adjusted there. 

[Lightning Flash]

7 hours ago, Kim Jong Un said:

Well, for starters, you can choose how late you want to start via sandbox settings. Some people want that "world already dead" feel when they start, which I think is part of what the OP wants.

 

That's more of the main reason. While it would be very realistic, it would also be extremely fun to play and survive in. I'm pretty sure that at some point, most of the players will have tried it out via sandbox, servers, split screen, etc.

 

If there were to be some kind of TLOU styled RP server, a feature like this would give it more sense.