Lost all motivation to play Zomboid

[Modin]

I love games, I love challenge and I love apocalyptic scenarios. I love Zomboid.

 

Countless times I died.

 

Most of the times from my own mistakes. I hate it, but I also love it. It just means I have to get better.

 

Some of the times from some absolutely weird thing the game does which I couldn't possibly predict, and which feels unfair. I also hate this, but it usually stems from a mistake, or at worse is something I could just learn to predict and get better at. So I learnt to predict them.

 

Rarely from some non-game related bullshit, like some program forcing an alt-tab, or my wireless keyboard running out of juice. These I just accept I have to "fix" by using -debug, which I'm very thankful for. It feels dirty but what else is there to do.

 

But right now, in my longest and most successful playthrough, which was simply amazing and exciting to continue playing every day - which I only got to because I learnt to predict and address all of my common mistakes, and predict almost all the bullshit stuff the game throws at you - in my most treasured run, I died from some next level bullshit I still hadn't encountered thus far, without any warning. The death was instant and thus undebuggable.

 

I was going up a staircase in a house, with noises coming from the second floor.

 

I could've very well died to that single zombie which lunged me from the void beyond the top of the staircase - I would've accepted that - yet another bullshit unfair way to kill you, but at least it would've been my mistake - of course don't walk up a staircase when you hear noises, since you can never see the second floor until you're at the very top, possibly in the middle of the 10 zombies you couldn't see one frame ago. Of course.

 

I could've died there and it would've been infuriating, but I would've probably stubbornly restarted, making a mental note not to ever walk up a staircase ever again without yelling 50 times from the bottom and waiting for the zombies to destroy all the doors (because they get stuck to them for some reason and refuse to come down, but still camp the very top of the staircase ready to pounce you).

 

It's bullshit, but it's bullshit you can predict.

 

But when I evaded that one zombie, killed it, went back up (don't ask me why - there were still sounds), and instantly died at the very top of the staircase, somehow, who knows why, from some obscure fall damage bug, I assume, something which I could never in a thousand years have predicted, and instantly lost my treasured run without a chance to hop into debug?

 

The only option being to re-create the character, debug back all the gear it lost (or kill its zombie in debug mode, why not), and somehow painfully extract from the depths of my mind the vague and imperfect recollection of where my skills were at to try and paint a gross imitation of what it might've looked like before - to end up losing the days survived and amount of zombies killed anyway?

 

Not good enough, not something I want to bother doing, and no motivation to restart a run knowing that no matter how well I play - no matter how meticulously I analyze every single detail of this fascinating game so I can utterly master it - I may die at any moment from this kind of unpredictable and unfixable bullshit.

 

Which makes me very sad.

 

PS ~

 

I hope at least the post was somewhat entertaining!

 

The run was good enough that it deserved the rant.

 

I know I'll keep playing the game every now and then, but never with the same glitter in my eyes.

 

To the devs, thank you for the experience.

 

At least the game made me feel something. That's the mark of a truly good game.

 

Die well.

[orikamii]

I died to something similar very recently on a long run as well. Staircases man. My sympathies. Have some pie.

[Papa Juliet Whiskey]

1.0 will be here someday.

 

You will be back.

[Papa Juliet Whiskey]

Also, quite a nicely worded piece of critism. A nice change from the standard, whiny vitriol tossed around by most folk who seem dissatisfied by an unfinished product that is in no way advertising itself as being anything but.

[Josko]

For this very reason I almost never go up the stairs, there is never any good loot there anyway so its not worth the risk, however, if you run, the zombie wont be able to grab you!

 

This is something I do when I go upstairs and it works every time.

[getstoopid]

Very well articulated criticism and deserved too - it is indeed frustrating to lose a good run to some weird behavior of the game engine =/