A suggestion for Zombie group movements

[Szkeptik]

Hi everyone! I found the game on steam, and decided to spend my self imposed monthly game allowance of 1 on picking it up.

 

I'm absolutely loving the game thus far, have put in about six hours of gameplay.

 

The atmosphere is right on the spot, I'm getting a Fallout kind of vibe from it with a hefty amount of extra depression, so five stars for that.

 

After taking a look of the what not to suggest list, I'm left with one suggestion that I'd like to share:

 

From scavenging the few sorrounding houses I managed to get so much food that I could sit around in my safehouse for a week if I chose to. This of course is kind of boring. Once I killed the 5-6 zombies in the vicinity, I only got a few extra runners when an alarm went off in one of the houses, and I was able to hammer those down as well. After that my safehouse was pretty much literally safe. No more Zombies came close anymore.

 

- Give groups of Zombies a wandering behavior: If small groups of Zs were wandering around the map instead of just standing and shambling randomly a little, it would make for a more eventful gameplay. I'm talking about 3-4 person groups at first, and then larger ones as months pass to simulate food getting scarce for the unliving. They could randomly stop at a house and break doors and windows, move around a little and then move on to another house. Of course not all the houses, and even if they manage to get into yours, you could still chose to hide from them or to fight.

[ZimTown]

similar ideas have been suggested and similar functionality should (or at least with be soon) happen with what they call meta-events which are random triggers in the game that cause zombies to come running or other things.

 

in the mean time you might want to play sandbox mode and set the zombie population to high, you could even make their hearing and sense of smell to high for a really challenging play through. "no more running up those stairs in the safe house without paying the price" ;D  hehe

[LeoIvanov]

What I see him suggesting differs from their initial plans of "meta-game", since it is about how the horde behaves, and not about "whether or not it travels or stays in place". Zombies already travel with the metagame events.

 

I could suggest a couple of neat things to stay afraid of zombies and kind of encourage amazing horde behavior. Let's say, zombies are similar to the Walking Dead ones (I know, beating the dead horse with TWD talk already). The horde behavior (atleast by the comics) goes like this : The horde only travels when they find a reason to (the direction may have humans to eat at the end). Passing helicopters, gunshots, all of that count. So, if nothing disturbs a zombie's mind, he stays idle. He may just fall down on the ground and stay in the "fallen" position with absolutely no movement, people may think it's dead. When something disturbs them, they get "awaken" and start wandering towards the direction they feel like going. If a group is largely packed, if 1 zombie, even accidently, touches the house with his hand, and another zombie sees it and takes it as an attempt to breach in the house, he will think that the house has living humans inside, and immediately starts attacking the house aswell. Then the first one (who originally accidently touches the house) thinks the second zombie tries to break in the house full of living humans, so he starts knocking on doors and windows aswell. Initially, the whole horde that is packed in the area will be soon bashing on that house.

 

I want things like these to be implemented. After all, the game might have a very well thought out fighting mechanic, making it difficult to fight hordes, but when you run 1 block away and about 2/3 of the horde just gives up chasing you it's not even a threat anymore to fight them, as you have to constantly press Q or shoot shotgun for the zombies to stay interested in you. I like zombies how they are, but I just WANT them to be scary for what they initially are meant to be. I want it so if you attracted horde on 1 part of the railway, and then ran all the way to West point without turning, initially that horde will travel all the way along the traintracks following you. I don't want them to loose interest whenever you run a few blocks away. I remember old game (1.0.5 versions) had this. And I know that the game is now loaded in chunks instead of being stored in memory, but hell, if you pull this off, there will be diamonds.