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Just tried Build 41 and put 30+ hours into it, here's my indepth thoughts and suggestion so far


SVAFnemesis

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Parts marked in red are important, others are less important

 

Table of content
1. JUST SKIP MY INTRO
2. ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
    The manuever player wants to do and how effective it currently is;
    The dilemma of how effective players should be in combat;

    What we could do;
3. MOVEMENT PRECISION
    Unintentional strafing;
    Bobbing camera;
    Aim control;

4. SIGHT DIRECTION
5. STEALTH PLAY STYLE
6. THINGS THAT HIT THE SPOT
    Characteristics;
    Animations;
    Details;
7. BUGS AND MINOR IDEAS
    Bugs
    Ideas
8. THANK YOU

 

 

1. JUST SKIP MY INTRO

 

I only started playing PZ recently and I think this game is absolutely amazing. I'd say it is one of the best survival management game I've ever come to known and perhaps the most immersive game I've ever played. I've been playing the public build for almost 2 weeks before I decided to try out this build 41 that everyone's been talking about, and oh boy here we go...

 

First thing first build 41 is AWESOME! The things you can do, the details that are added and the improved animations and models and everything, I just wanna give a huge shoutout to the dev team who after all these years were still able to bring this game up so much level!

 

However I'm really here to give thoughts (feedbacks) and I fully understand that this build is currently still undergoing heavy tweakings. I hope my profession as a character animator and my game company background (not a game animator, just cgi) may offer some helpful suggestion.

 

2. ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

 

Character movement. It's a huge improvement, but also a huge problem directed at gameplay. I'm sure the dev has heard enough already. I did googled many other people's review and many talked about the same thing which I mostly agreed on. But I wanna get into details on this issue.

 

                The manuever player wants to do and how effective it currently is;

 

I won't be using words like oh my character turns like a fish in water it's unrealistic blah blah blah no I'm going to look at it from gameplay perspective: with currently movement control what changes was forced upon the gameplay as a whole? It's simple, we are now pretty much denied the ability to safely disengage and run when we think we are about to get overwhelmed, we are also no longer able to quick react during a sudden close quarter encounter, for example a zombie lurking in the corner out of sight. It's not impossible, it's just you can easily failed and in this game instead of a set back it's game over. Zombie's new grabbing ability probably contribute to it quite a lot but it's hard to say which one is more problemetic. I personally liked the zombie grab, it's just not being able to perform quick runaway is putting me off.

 

                The dilemma of how effective players should be in combat;

 

I understand that this animation was part of an effort to prevent kiting which enables player to 1 vs horde. But I think currently the slow 180 turn thing or the movement delay as a whole is really just discouraging player to take even the smallest risk or just about doing anything. So in a way it is discouraging player to just, well, play the game.

 

To further show the impact of this mechanism, I have tried lower the difficulty to weaker than "initial outbreak" settings and what I noticed is that I still get pretty much the same amount of scratches from the casual single or double encounters. Now the game is already looking boring with such low difficulty due to having just 3 to 4 zombies for an entire block and they don't react much to me, but that 3 to 4 zombies is just going to scratch me at some point. ALL OF THEM are resulted from bad movement control, NONE was caused by my bad decision making. Back in public build the gameplay is mostly like: the shop is right there, the horde is over there, should I run for it or should I lure them away? And when I get myself killed I think: damn, shouldn't have underestimate the number, shoulda been more patient. In Build 41 it's mostly like: Oh are you kidding me you miss shoving that one slow ass zombie right in front of you?

 

                What we could do;

 

My suggestion for this particular issue is that we should definately take a much more responsive approach for movement control, player should be able to traverse with ease in a close quarter situation. Perhaps the nerf is instead focus on combat action. For example, here's what I can think of: you hold LMB to charge up attack power, maybe it'll take 1 second to reach full damage, then release to blow, while you charge, if you moved your charge drastically slow down and your movement will severely impaired. This will discourage player to kite indefinately while facing a sizable horde. Players are also rooted during swing, and if you release RMB before releasing LMB it immediately cancel action allowing quick disengage. Just a quick thought, or could be some better solution.

 

3. MOVEMENT PRECISION

 

This is very much similar to the issue mentioned above, but instead happens mostly during down time. So with the much bigger turning curve, walking or running from place to place indoor or in tight spaces becomes quite a hassle. There's two parts for this issue. The unintentional strafing caused by the curve, and the current camera tracking method that greatly reduces player's precision.

 

                Unintentional strafing;

 

What happens now is that when you turn 90 degree trying to get thru a one tile gap such as door, you are likely to take one more step to the side and miss and hit the wall, and then you have to scrub the wall a bit before you go thru. This happens way more often when you try to run indoor. This ruins a lot of immersion because many great moments happen when you're just enjoying the down time at home, cooking doing laundries watching TVs and bang you hit the wall and you're like: urgh...just..trying to...squeeze thru this door to use the bathroom... *phomp* there! This probably shares the same problem from not having a responsive enough movement control so I won't have any more suggestion to it.

 

                Bobbing camera;

 

It's not really "bobbing" it's just now it seems that the camera is tracking either the hip joint or head joint? Whenever we change character body direction now the camera wobbles a bit, this greatly reduce the accuracy of player's movement and sight direction control - especially during combat - and that is on top of the now turnning curve we have to deal with. I think this is more of a bug, cause I think the dev was meant to have it tracking the root ring? Perhaps it'll be fixed in the future.

 

                Aim control;

 

Oh boy I'm gonna try and suppress my emotion here.

 

bad.jpg.b93061b6b94a43181b3809d76b99ab89.jpg

 

This is bad! it's bad, it's really really bad! Forgive my insensitive wording but God I can't stress enough how much I hate this mechanism. Just make it like this:

 

good.jpg.caa75059059dff07f0c89ec6dfdb7486.jpg

 

It really is just every gamer's instinct to align directions from root of the character to cursor on the ground.

 

Also the camera bobbing has severely impaired player's ability to hit zombies right in front of them. I believe it's a bug and the devs are already working on, hope it'll be removed soon.

 

4. SIGHT DIRECTION

 

Right now the way we control our character's sight direction is way too slow. I don't think I like how the sight is bind to the direction of torso, this is causing certain amount of unpleasant in the gaming experience especially when things are tensing up and you want to be at top alert of your surrounding.

 

May I make a suggestion here cause I really like to see this happen: we now have stealth, right? I love it, I like implementing stealth and make it an important part of the game (althought more tweaking required). So now that we have a designated stealth, can we make RMB a sight direction thing without activating combat/stealth mode? Perhaps we can separate body motion with head motion, for example when players are moving, sight direction spins freely; while standing still body will try to turn towards sight direction. Maybe we can now look around while in vehicles. I really like being able to look around while walking running and doing other bar loading stuffs such as picking doors or maybe just resting on ground. Perhaps we get a slow panelty for the bar while looked away, that'll be fun! Scanning parameter is a huge part of zombie survival game like PZ and if we're allowed to do that it'll add SO MUCH immersion to gameplay! Please please make it happen!

 

5. STEALTH PLAY STYLE

 

I really like the idea of having stealth play as part of the strategy, especially for early games when players are more vulnerable. However when I was trying it in survival mode, I just don't think the stealth has much of an effect. I feel like the zombies are just going to see me from miles away anyway regardless of how dark and slow I am. Often time I feel like it's much more easier if I just do the good ole run and grab. Stealthing hasn't been much of a success for me in terms of going in for the loot. Also because of the thing I mentioned before, sight directions are way too slow so I can't keep a full awareness of my surrounding, I just feel like I'm not the one who's stealthing, it's more like zombies are stealthing me instead.

 

I think stealth can use a bit of a buff, it's going to create a much more exciting early game experience!

 

6. THINGS THAT HIT THE SPOT

 

There are things from build 41 that has really elevated this game from its previous build, things that adds a great deal into the immersion of this genre and deliver a much better gaming experience. Sometimes it's more important to know what you did right rather than what you did wrong, because it is the rights that set the direction of where we should be going in the future.

 

                Characteristics

 

Clothing! Variaty of clothing is one of the best thing we ever have from this build, it gives so much to the character we play, it makes our character much more alive than ever before. Oh we have slippers and pajamas now?! Can we have a sleeping bonus when wearing them to sleep?

 

Managable hair style? Holy shit! I remember coming back home from looting and fighting zombies and then I go to the bathroom to wash off my blood, and I take off my beanie and loosen up the pony tail, I can almost feel the relaxation from my character! Can we now make those combs mirrors razors and hairspray useable now!

 

                Animations

 

Combat motion. It's just great, coming from a fellow animator, I'm loving this animation overhaul! The way the character holds heavy weapon such as wood axe and sledge by the balance point? This is better than many of the game animators out there I know! I like to critize them a lot because I'm a character animator and we have much higher standard in CGI animations, but I'm totally loving this one.

 

More interaction animations. The tiny suble motions when the character is doing stuffs is just so properly done, things like eating, washing, grabing stuffs from chest and from ground or even reloading firearms, they are really bringing out the immersion of things! Oh and I love how some of the things can be done while sitting on ground! So can we finally sit in chairs and sleep in beds now please?

 

Wounding, limbing and tripping. That's a big plus. It really force you to be more aware of your surroundings and not just to look at them as obstacles. One morning I ran through a bush without wearing pants, and I scratched my leg. What else was I expecting right!

 

I notice vehicles have physics now, it feels good!

 

                Details

 

Firearm system is DOPE! Whoever designed this, you're a genius and I salute you.

 

Corpse decomposition and skeletons. I knew we'll have this some day. Thank you for indulging us.

 

Rain puddles, NEAT!

 

Frankly I can go on and on but you know how it goes. We'll always be excited for any details and interactables that are added to games. This is the very reason why PZ is unique!

 

7. BUGS AND MINOR IDEAS

 

                Bugs

 

Clip on tie currently is only visible on the inside, it appears that any layer will cover it.

 

Clothing icon color sometimes does not match up with actual color.

 

Trench jacket model can be see thru from below, this is quite distracting when zombie dies and you see thru it. Maybe there's a flipped normal or something.

 

                Ideas

 

Sit on chair, sleep in bed.

 

Tea comes in boxes, coffee comes in bags so that they won't be consumed for just one use.

 

Alarm clock can be placed on top of some table tops so that we can hit the stop button.

 

Does bread dough consumes the entire bag of flour? Maybe make it just half, or a quarter.

 

Firearms probably needs a little buff so that we can quickly kill off a zombie at point blank regardless of skill level. I agree we must regulate power of firearms, but not being able to kill of zombies in point blank kind of put off the purposes of having them in the first place, I mean they are kind of a last resort thing that will result in you having flea the area quickly after all, it's not like you get a shotgun and you immediately go fully Jill Valentine.

 

I have many ideas but I don't want to shovel them all in this articles. I'm sure devs have many great ideas for the future release, for now priority should be the major issues.

 

8. THANK YOU

 

At the end I wanna say thank you Indie Stone for making such a great game and keeping at it for so many years. I wish I know this game earlier and now that I do, I hope for the next release this game will rock the foundation of all management genre. Let's set a new standard for any survival games to come, coz why not.

 

I know devs are probably at the end cycle of next beta test release so my opinion probably comes either too late, too weak, or maybe just too non-mainstream. I'm looking forward to the next beta release and as a survival game lover, I hope that I will be able to give more useful feedback. And last but not least, to all the devs, I don't know where you are but please stay safe and don't let the virus get you. Yes the one that's out there right now. By the way who put a bunch of toilet papers in Cortman Medical Clinic and replace all the medical supplies? F*** you I died because of that! (JK)

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Great post and useful feedback, thank you.

I just wanted to address one thing and leave the rest for others to discuss publicly.

good.jpg.caa75059059dff07f0c89ec6dfdb7486.jpg

If we made it like you're proposing, aiming at the body or upper body would essentially aim in the direction of that chair in the background of the image. I reckon we'd get similar feedback for that. 

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27 minutes ago, nasKo said:

If we made it like you're proposing, aiming at the body or upper body would essentially aim in the direction of that chair in the background of the image. I reckon we'd get similar feedback for that. 

Thank you for reading my post. I understand some player may have an instinct to click on the body while some like me who's accustom to moba game and stricly use ground plane to aim. However regardless which preference same problem can happen when trying to engage a zombie coming from top, as you can imagine the ring may fall below player's root causing the character to turn to the wrong direction. Perhaps this could be tweak in the player settings? It'd be great if we can get to choose between having this offset and not having it.

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For the record, I don't agree with the aiming issue.

 

It's been many months since I played PZ before I picked up v.41 again, so whatever movement sluggishness is there feels pretty normal to me. I would agree that kiting while walking backwards, then turning to run when things get hairy is often how my characters have gotten killed. I have since used the approach to rather keep facing the zeds, to keep swinging and using the push attack rather than running.

 

Increasing the turning speed, for example as nimbleness stat improves, I think would not be a bad thing. But it's not as bad as OP makes it out to be.

 

But I will say that walking and turning is still a little 'off'. For example, give your character something to eat, and while he eats try walking in serpentines. It feels like you're controlling a drunk or a train on rails.

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I agree with the slow turning animation, it's a frequent cause of death for me - just as you said: I want to disengage and run, but get grabbed from behind for a free bite.

 

I also don't mind the current aim cursor.

 

Edit: I'm also playing with sprinters, but my character jogs faster than zombies.

 

Edited by Geras
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10 hours ago, crossed said:

The aiming is weird for me because when zombies are kinda hunched over you actually have to aim above their heads (or it feels like it anyway)

I got used to it but aiming at stomach height would be my preferable way :D

That's a viable suggestion. Let's hope in the future we can choose this offset distance.

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