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Is PZ Ever going to get finished?


DizzyCrash

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I have been playing this game since the very first demo ... which must have been 8 years ago or more now.. almost a decade. And I played the hell out of it at first thinking it would only get better, thinking they would be improving on that little charming map and world they first showed us..

But since the game has not added almost any of the features that it said it would have that got me excited like NPCs, Quests, Dynamic wounds like cauterizing and amputations, Human enemies, Diseases, Sanity. It was shaping up to be an amazing little girl but i feel like the game has only gotten uglier since the old days of wife smothering...

The graphics have been downgraded from the charming pixel art it had, the wordl feels empty and unchanging and prone to glitching or exploitation. Every year that crawls by i see almost no changes in the development.. No closer to the game they promised.  It feels like the game has been abandoned. 
It just gets uglier and buggier with every year with no end in sight. Why they didnt build on that initial framework i do not know. But can somebody please tell me what the state of this game is.

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I just remember the old days with the steller little tutorial with your wife and  having to fight off the gunman from shooting her, and just being able to see how amazing this was going to get, thinking they would just start adding things and improving on it.. but instead focus seemed to shift to changing the artstyle, expanding the world to a less interesting more sparse and empty one   ( which woulda been one of the last things id expect to add only after the other more important features were in place ) 
And than just meandering around with that for like 8 years.

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12 minutes ago, DizzyCrash said:

Why they didnt build on that initial framework i do not know. 


Go to projectzomboid.com and read all mondoids from around the time you stopped playing to today, I read just about all of them there are a year ago out of curiosity mostly and I'm pretty sure most of the big changes and shifts in "current primary focus" were explained.

At least it's what I usually do after I come back to PZ after a break, I just read the weekly updates I missed and it usually gives me a pretty good idea of what changed and why.

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2 minutes ago, Svarog said:


Go to projectzomboid.com and read all mondoids from around the time you stopped playing to today, I read just about all of them there are a year ago out of curiosity mostly and I'm pretty sure most of the big changes and shifts in "current primary focus" were explained.

At least it's what I usually do after I come back to PZ after a break, I just read the weekly updates I missed and it usually gives me a pretty good idea of what changed and why.


It just feels like from playing it no big changes have occured in years.. I cant help but feel the devs are sick of it by this point devoting nearly a decade of there lives to this one project and just dont have passion for it anymore.
Honestly I wish  the changes were apparent from playing the game cause it feels stagnant and i just want one of the cool features they said they would add to come.. NPCs, Sanity, Normality, Cleaning wounds like.. the way they had this pitched to me initially was like Zombie survival sims with a bunch of meters and goals and fun little events. but instead it seems there priorities have been on the least interesting aspects of PZ for god knows how long.

 

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1 minute ago, DizzyCrash said:


It just feels like from playing it no big changes have occured in years.. I cant help but feel the devs are sick of it by this point devoting nearly a decade of there lives to this one project and just dont have passion for it anymore.
Honestly I wish  the changes were apparent from playing the game cause it feels stagnant and i just want one of the cool features they said they would add to come.. NPCs, Sanity, Normality, Cleaning wounds like.. the way they had this pitched to me initially was like Zombie survival sims with a bunch of meters and goals and fun little events. but instead it seems there priorities have been on the least interesting aspects of PZ for god knows how long.

 


Eh, I've only been playing PZ since 2014 and I wouldn't say that it's stagnant. And I'm not even talking about Vehicles here. That the development is slow? Sure but it is occuring.

In the 4 years that I played this game got a whole bunch of upgrades, none of which might be readily apparent if all you do is boot the game up, start survival and run around for 15 minutes 'looking' for new stuff. Then yeah, the only thing you'll notice is the higher res terrain sprites and pretty much nothing else that was added in the past 3 years.

Most of which might sound insignificant but makes the game far more enjoyable on longer sessions. I'm talking about stuff like Erosion (Nature reasserting itself over time), there being a story that you can hear on the radios, the ability to really spice up your hideout by being able to move every piece of furniture, there being some really damn nice improvements to the way zombies behave and move around the map, a realistic nutrition system that eliminates the possibility of surviving off of chips alone, whole bunch of other stuff and let's not forget that vehicles are soon going to be getting dropped into the official build and they significantly alter the way the game can be played and also serve to make all of that "empty" space between various locations feel a lot less expansive and a lot less empty.

Idk what build you played last but I'd suggest taking the vehicle Beta build out for a spin and just playing for a few in-game days. Or try the multi player out, it can be pretty damn fun if you're biggest turn off is the "I'm the last man on earth" aspect of the SP.

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1 minute ago, Fenris_Wolf said:

Is it ever going to be finished? I sure hope not. The day PZ is officially finished is the first day I have nothing new to look forward to, and the inevitable loss of interest in the game.

What is there to look forward too? The games been in a state of stagnation for years and years and years.  I feel the same about dwarf fortress, i look forward to every new release, but thats cause every new release feels special. PZ has been promising some very basic features for almost a decade.. every update just seems to make the game worse, ( at least worse than the initial demo )  with the world seemingly more empty and bland. 

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Well its not up to me to tell you what you have to look forward to, that's something you'll have to decide on yourself.  For me its new features that let me mod the game into something my own style, something I really enjoy playing. Personally I can't wait for vehicles to be officially out, not so I can drive them around the map, but so I can see exactly how I can screw with them and what creative things I can do modding.

The expectations and excitement over new features its going to vary from person to person.

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Cauterizing wounds could be done modding...hell it wouldn't even really be that hard. Sanity is actually in the game (sort of), it has a value, and I've watched it slowly drop the other day while I was testing custom phobia traits and eating mass amounts of sleeping pills. Not sure it has a effect when it gets low enough, but since the value is there its something i fully intent to play with and make work for my own server.

NPC's well there's already a mod for that too, its not perfect but its something.

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1 hour ago, DizzyCrash said:


It just feels like from playing it no big changes have occured in years.. I cant help but feel the devs are sick of it by this point devoting nearly a decade of there lives to this one project and just dont have passion for it anymore.

 

Hell, they ban any dissenters. They have become utterly cynical about it. They're a small team, and the amount they make from monthly sales isn't negligible.

You look at the steam reviews "Most Helpful" page for the last year, you'll see what the community really thinks about this game.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/reviews/?browsefilter=trendyear&snr=1_5_reviews_&p=1

There's a very vocal minority that seems to seriously believe that if we just give them 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, that they'll come through with it.

 

If that's true, why do they ban people for saying otherwise?

 

 

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5 minutes ago, TheGrifter said:

Hell, they ban any dissenters. They have become utterly cynical about it. They're a small team, and the amount they make from monthly sales isn't negligible.

You look at the steam reviews "Most Helpful" page for the last year, you'll see what the community really thinks about this game.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/reviews/?browsefilter=trendyear&snr=1_5_reviews_&p=1

There's a very vocal minority that seems to seriously believe that if we just give them 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, that they'll come through with it.

 

If that's true, why do they ban people for saying otherwise?

 

 

They ban people for what? For saying they dont think they will finish the game? 

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3 minutes ago, TheGrifter said:

Hell, they ban any dissenters. They have become utterly cynical about it. They're a small team, and the amount they make from monthly sales isn't negligible.

You look at the steam reviews "Most Helpful" page for the last year, you'll see what the community really thinks about this game.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/reviews/?browsefilter=trendyear&snr=1_5_reviews_&p=1

There's a very vocal minority that seems to seriously believe that if we just give them 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, that they'll come through with it.

 

If that's true, why do they ban people for saying otherwise?


Eh, 3+ years in this community and I never really saw someone banned for "dissent" as you call it unless the kind of dissent they had was flinging verbal feces at everyone around them.

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2 minutes ago, Svarog said:


Eh, 3+ years in this community and I never really saw someone banned for "dissent" as you call it unless the kind of dissent they had was flinging verbal feces at everyone around them.

How about this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/6rbit8/dev_we_want_npcs_its_half_a_decade_plus_two_years/

 

67 comments, all disappeared. I've seen "certain people", who will ban you if you name them, bait people into frustration, and then when they express their frustration, they're mocked, censored, and banned.

 

It seems that the punishment for verbal spats only goes one way.

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1 minute ago, TheGrifter said:

How about this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/6rbit8/dev_we_want_npcs_its_half_a_decade_plus_two_years/

 

67 comments, all disappeared. I've seen "certain people", who will ban you if you name them, bait people into frustration, and then when they express their frustration, they're mocked, censored, and banned.

 

It seems that the punishment for verbal spats only goes one way.


Well, that's just reddit being reddit if you ask me, that entire containment site of echo chambers is like that in my personal experience. I was referring to the Forum here. Hell, even on the steam forums people don't generally get the banhammer unless they get really rude far as I've seen and I've seen quite a few "dissenter" threads.

Also, I recommend this fairly fresh thread about NPC Question if you're looking for fresh Dev response @DizzyCrash

https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/23437-seriously-no-non-player-character-survivors-in-single-player-mode/

 

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2 minutes ago, Fenris_Wolf said:

Not sure whats wrong with your browser, BUT I just manually counted well over 50 comments there, not disappeared. Both positive and negative.

Mind screen shotting it?

 

All I see is what appears to be 67 disappeared posts, on a topic "they" despise when we talk about it.

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1 minute ago, Fenris_Wolf said:

1.thumb.jpg.1fef08fac20714d4d5006235e3563428.jpg

 

Topic title and posts by the initial thread starter highlighted

I suppose it only displays to those who are logged in, or perhaps it's a CSS issue.

 

You ever read the radio in this game?

 

https://pastebin.com/cBQVMzCG

 

"Everything is fine in Project Zomboid, and just because the lines of communication are being disrupted doesn't mean people are being strung along. Return to your homes."- Our own "General McGrew".

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8 minutes ago, TheGrifter said:

I suppose it only displays to those who are logged in, or perhaps it's a CSS issue.


Checked, I don't have an account and I see all 67 comments too. Not a single one was deleted in that thread. Maybe you have some browser extension that breaks it.

6 minutes ago, TheGrifter said:


Sometimes I wonder if I enjoy PZ as much as I do because I missed out on some initial hype, wasn't promised anything and bought it because "OMG Isometric Zombie Survival Game!" and just decided to stop caring about updates after a while, PZ is what it is and I like it for what it is today. These threads are not for me :P I'm missing out on some crucial part of the whatever makes people annoyed.

Edited by Svarog
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2 minutes ago, Svarog said:


Checked, I don't have an account and I see all 67 comments too. Not a single one was deleted in that thread. Maybe you have some browser extension that breaks it.

I suppose so. Still, the sentiments expressed in that thread, "mean" or not, are valid. There's a lot of things in this world that aren't nice.

 

We've been told to be patient, not to ask for deadlines, for seven years. What has that resulted in?

 

https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/reviews/?browsefilter=trendyear&snr=1_5_reviews_&p=1

 

This is a list of the Most Helpful reviews for the last year of Project Zomboid. Some of those people recording those reviews have hundreds of hours on them. Most of them have around 40/50 hours. And the sentiment they are consistently expressing is the feeling of being led on. Of being told to be patient. Of being told to be patient for seven years...

 

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