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Difficulty progression and power creep


sprkng

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First off I'd like to point out that this is not a complaint, it's just something I've been thinking about and thought it would be interesting to discuss. I'm also aware of PZ being a beta and not a finished product, so the devs might already have plans for this.

 

Many games start out easy, and gradually become more difficult as you progress. I feel like PZ has the opposite difficulty curve - it's difficult in the beginning when you have nothing and then becomes easier with time. Here are some examples:

 

* In the beginning you need to explore and loot for food. Late game farming, fishing and foraging provides large quantities of food with very low risk to the character.

* Fighting zombies becomes easier later when you've found better weapons.

* Fighting zombies becomes easier when you level up your skills.

* Fighting zombies poses less risk to your health later when you've found clothes with better protection.

 

There are of course some things that could make the game progressively more difficult:

 

* Increasing zombie populations. The problem with respawning is that it's super annoying when zombies keep appearing inside your walled off neighborhood, and other areas that you have cleared. It also makes it feel pointless to spend a lot of time clearing out an area if you know that it will be crawling with zombies again soon.

* Water and electricity shutoff. Provides a difficulty bump mid game, but late they are almost completely mitigated by rainwater collectors and generators that can be refueled from gas stations.

* Resource scarcity. Food doesn't run out if you build a farm or have access to fishing, and even on the rarest setting you find weapons faster than they wear out.

 

In addition it feels like new changes are more likely to inadvertently make the late game easier (e.g. the new clothing system added survivability, new end game weapons such as machete and katana). While changes that make the game more difficult (zombie window lunge attack? :) ) are less frequent and tend to affect all stages of the game equally. Don't get me wrong, I think these are good changes and it's not a bad idea to give the player progressions and better equipment they can try to acquire. It's just that I think it would be nice if more things were introduced to balance them out, but unfortunately I don't have any good suggestions for how at the moment.

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I think NPCs will help once introduced. At the moment, the risks you take are completely voluntary, you're out looting and see a bunch of zombies, it's your choice whether to engage or back off, or you may have decided not to go out looting at all, avoiding risk entirely. NPCs will hopefully thrust more varied interactions to the player with running away being a less viable option, since people are smarter than zombies.

 

Whilst I'm always up for more challenges, I feel PZ has a good thing going currently where when i die, I feel 99% of the time its my fault and not the result of the game screwing with me and hope any new introductions would build on this and fall into that mold, and not just add abitrary mechanics solely to increase difficulty like a horde coming out of nowhere one day to ruin your life. I'm not against hordes but they should form, not appear.

 

I feel the main problem is once you're set-up, you rarely need to leave your base and I'm not against that entirely as I think the zombie apocalypse would slowly get easier with each passing day, the more loot you find, the more your crops grow, the more you cave in undead skulls etc. I've written a short list of some things I can think of now that won't increase difficulty exactly but some could make players leave their base more often, increasing risk indirectly:

 

Make player made structures able to break, i.e the shelves/bookcases you build at lower carpentry levels are able to break. You come home one day and the shelf you placed all your Spiffos, dolls and rubber ducks on has collapsed and your prized possessions and unusable wood are all over the floor. A small change and one involving RNG that I was kinda arguing against earlier but it wouldn't kill/hurt your character in anyway except pride and would make you think about going out to get more planks/nails etc, unless you just want to leave poor Spiffo on the floor and live like a sacrilegious slob. Or your rain collector splits and breaks, forcing you to search for more garbage bags.

 

Tools should also be able to break, like saws and can openers. If the saw doesn't break then it should eventually become dull so you have to find a way to sharpen it. Kitchen utencils break all the time, partly because I'm cheap and partly because they are used everyday.

 

Make destroying things with sledgehammers louder/construction as a whole louder. I'm a big fan of smashing the stairs in and living that above ground floor life because its exactly what I'd do in a real apocalypse, but destroying stairs should be louder and take longer. Currently, its like the cillit bang of destruction, 4 swings and the stairs are gone! IRL my neighbours down the street are having work done on their house and everyday I can hear most of what they're doing, whether it's sawing (albeit with power tools), hammering, plumb-ing, swearing etc. If you're hammering 16/20 planks outside to cover the windows, during an apocalypse where everything is really quiet anyway, zombies should hear and be drawn to that more so than they currently are.

 

Once NPC animals are a thing, allow us to have farm yard animals like cows and chickens. They'll not only make noise that'll attract zombies but I might finally be able to use one of the recipes that involve eggs and milk. Not once have I baked a pie or bread in PZ in the 7 years I've played.

 

TLDR: Organically force players leave their base more, make things more noisy.

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First of all, I'd say this is not a PZ-exclusive problem; on pretty much every survival game I've played, at some point in the end-game I reach this threshold in which I barely have ANY reason to leave my base, AT ALL. It's that moment when you've gotten all the stuff (weapons, loot, materials, base upgrades, etc) you could possibly get and become more-or-less self-sufficient. At those times, you usually either go on with the main plotline to finish the game (State of Decay, Subnautica, NEO Scav, The Long Dark, any modern Fallout, etc) if there's one, or just keep messing around and surviving day-to-day, which at least to me leads to boredom and moving onto another game.

 

And PZ has this in spades; once you've found all the skill magazines, all the XP books, at least one of every weapon, a decent amount of canned goods, 2-3 sets of your favorite clothes, plenty of ammo, your car of choice (with good parts), decided upon a base location, and modified it to fit your liking, there's... really nothing to do other than exploring just for the sake of it, fight whatever Zed get close to your base or beat on your barricades, feed yourself whenever you're hungry/thirsty, and keep your plants watered and healthy. IMHO, this is kinda the intended "You beat the game" moment; you've pretty much survived and set yourself to make your daily routine on this post-apoc world, leaning the hows and whys to continue living on it.

 

IMHO, I doubt that any amount of additions will ever change that, because no matter what kind of new things the Devs throw at us, we'll eventually find a way of getting used to it and incorporating it to our routine. I think it's the intended progression for any survival game...

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I've noticed from non-cooperative online play that having to share a community full of resources with other people greatly changes how the meta for supplies is handled.

 

In a world where you can't fish idly for hours in a safe spot because of the risk you will run into a person, and one person can decide to empty out the grocery store where 10 other people will now have to go house to house - it is definitely a different experience, and one where "resource scarcity" might mean that they have been moved elsewhere on the map. When the consumption of easily acquired food multiplies by 3x just because you are playing with some friends, you feel the difference. And there is no convenient time skipping, especially in games which run on real time or have very long days.

 

Of course, some of this translates well into singleplayer when NPCs are implemented. Now you'll have other people fishing and foraging out in lakes, and you'll have to figure out if them being on your territory depleting the natural resources will be something you can tolerate in your routine. 

 

The dynamic should not change.

 

I said it. Everything you described for getting food should still work, and building a strong base should work. For a survival game, it's a bad idea to have built-in recurring failures that the player cannot control, and cannot recover from. These left-field hooks make the game frustrating and counterproductive, and only serve to create work-arounds and stuff like the "sky base". The helicopter alone used to terrify my party, now we just pack up and come back when things die down or move. Adapt and overcome. 

 

 

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