Is PZ Just Going to Just Turn into "Minecraft Sims plus Zombies?"

[Bullet_Magnate]

Have to admit I'm becoming concerned PZ is going to veer away from harsh realism and end up as just another "crafting game" -- where Joe Average can walk out into the woods in 1993 Kentucky and somehow be smelting iron and building a locomotive in his backyard three days later.  That may be a slight exaggeration, but ... 

 

I think it's the overall commitment to realism -- even at the expense of making things unusually unforgiving -- that really sets this game apart from all the other survival / crafting / horror games out there.  It's that, "What would it really be like to be dropped into this nightmare" factor that drew me to the game and kept me in it for so long (1,200+ hours as of this writing, in both the current and prior build).  

 

As an example, it already bothers me a bit that the game assumes the average guy / gal off the street could just whip up serviceable stone tools at a moment's notice.  That's pretty obviously a dead / nonexistent skill set in modern society.  It should be locked behind specific professions / traits, or be part of a skill development tree that requires some significant investment to learn.  Realistically, it would not be a readily-available default option in 1993, absent unusual factors.  There are already a lot of crafting games that make it unrealistically easy for modern people with no special training to basically just pull a bunch of essentially forgotten Stone / Bronze / Iron Age skills out of their backsides. 

 

Also, even assuming the skills are available, how likely is it that necessary raw materials are going to be available in Knox County -- at least in a form accessible to the average person absent modern technology?  Would it really be realistic and accurate to, say, add fields of readily-harvestable Factorio-style iron ore in Knox County?  I doubt such a thing would realistically exist (though I am open to correction if anyone can confirm such things are in fact present).  Or, maybe, will obtaining things like raw ores at least be locked behind semi-realistic prerequisites  (like, say, needing the knowledge, tools, effort and time to locate a place where a primitive mine would be viable ... and then a long, backbreaking effort to actually dig one?)  

 

I'm not saying players should be forbidden from learning and developing primitive skills over time, but I hope it's accurately reflected that (a) they will likely be utterly lacking at the beginning; (b) it will be a huge and extremely long-term effort to attain many of them; and (c) the raw materials necessary to make a lot them worthwhile may be difficult or impossible to obtain locally.  

 

At the very least, it would be nice if there were sandbox-type options to place these sorts of limits on primitive skills and crafting.  Otherwise, I think the game is going to lose a lot of what sets it apart from other games on the market and truly makes it unique.  

 

[Pandorea]

Appreciate your concern, but... Afaik, there are no plans to allow everyone to craft everything immediately at the start of the game, instead, learning and skills will be harder to acquire out of the blue and specialization will be more important  I am sure more will be revealed as time goes by. 

[Bullet_Magnate]

1 hour ago, Pandorea said:

Appreciate your concern, but... Afaik, there are no plans to allow everyone to craft everything immediately at the start of the game, instead, learning and skills will be harder to acquire out of the blue and specialization will be more important  I am sure more will be revealed as time goes by. 

 

I appreciate the reply!  I just hope things unfold in such a way that PZ keeps its unique character -- which to me means remaining relatively realistic, brutal, and unforgiving in comparison to similar titles on the market.  It wouldn't be a concern for me if I didn't already like the game so much.   

[Cidxgaming]

While individual sandbox server settings can really help customize and control some of your concerns,

I get the point.

 

I think part of the fun of a sandbox game is you can play the way you want. I think if you play solo for

example in your own sandbox game, who cares if you do all of the crafting and combat skills yourself.

You'd kind of have to.

 

But if the end-game plan for the game is to have NPCs and/or play with groups of friends/players online,

then yes I fully agree certain players (or NPCs) should specialize in certain things only, and others should

be kind of locked-out of getting X skill so high, or whatever. That emphasizes the need for cooperation

and diverse player skillsets.

I *DO* think that the game could really benefit from a capped out skill system. Meaning you make a

Carpenter or Lumberjack (for example) who then can get to Carpentry skill of 10, but a Chef or Burglar

can only get their carpentry skill up to a max of like 5. Or your Veteran, Police or Security Guard who

can get to shooting, aiming, reloading skill 10...but other professions would again max out at say 5 or 6.

You could have skill perks then that offset that, and maybe you're a Chef who's a hobby shooter (perk),

and now this allows you to get an additional few boxes into shooting, reloading etc to get it over 5, that

would otherwise been capped for the Chef starting profession. Something like that. I think this would 

really add more depth into character development. 

 

Regardless which direction the game is developed, its incredibly fun to play.

[getstoopid]

Ancient knowledge/skills should be way harder to increase than modern everyday-skills. Maybe need double or even triple the xp, because everyday-bob lacks even the basic understanding how in theory these things should work. However there should be some literature on these skills helping you, but maybe less frequent?

[Cidxgaming]

Yeah for sure there are some things that are just not going to be learnable in anything under a series of years lol.

If you sent someone back in time with the knowledge of today, they probably couldn't even make a toaster. Let 

alone someone in a zombie apocalypse reading a few magazines and books and being ready to perform surgery. 

Even simple radio communication is lost on or unknown by a vast majority of the population. 

And again, this is why implementing skill caps for the professions makes sense (to me anyway).

[Wren]

If it's lack of realism we're concerned with, I'd say we're there already especially with respect to farming.  Anyone who thinks they can put a bunch of cabbage seed in the ground and end up up with a bumper crop a few weeks later should try it some time and see what the yield is really like.

[getstoopid]

Yeah you are right but the point is most people do know how farming works in theory and would succeed eventually but hardly anyone knows how to forge a sword.

[Cidxgaming]

23 hours ago, Wren said:

If it's lack of realism we're concerned with, I'd say we're there already especially with respect to farming.  Anyone who thinks they can put a bunch of cabbage seed in the ground and end up up with a bumper crop a few weeks later should try it some time and see what the yield is really like.

 

You have to spend some time and ammo sighting in various rifles and optics too, but no one is doing that in game. There of course has to be a healthy balance between IRL SIMULATOR 2.0 and a fun game. You're not wrong, it's just: what do the devs need to hone their time on?

[Bullet_Magnate]

An example I was thinking about this morning is crafting / manufacturing firearm ammunition.

 

In any crafting / survival game that includes firearms, most players are probably going to assume the game will include a mechanism for them to manufacture ammunition from scratch, so they can keep using their boomstick of choice forever.  I think there are a few post-apoc zombie survival type games that already include such a mechanic (though those games are also, I think, a bit on the campy side, such that any real concern for realism really isn't expected). 

 

However, based on my (admittedly incomplete) understanding, making ammo that will actually function with any degree of reliability in a modern firearm, and doing so from "scratch" -- meaning, starting with nothing but a bunch of material harvested from the natural environment and ending up with a quantity of nice, shiny, generally serviceable cartridges -- is an absolute pipe dream, absent very specialized skills and equipment (some of which would simply be unavailable and/or unusable in a primitive environment).  

 

Note that I am NOT talking about reloading ammunition -- that is, taking pre-existing expended cartridge brass / shells and returning it to a fireable state by restoring its powder charge, primer, and bullet (or shot and wadding, in the case of shotgun shells).  Reloading is absolutely a realistic option that could be included.  Skilled amateurs with fairly basic tools reload ammunition all the time, in many cases experimenting with custom "hand loads" to give their ammo specific characteristics.  Allowing players to reload ammunition to extend the effective life of their weapons is a very realistic notion.  However, it would require adding a fair amount of findable items to the game -- such as reloading presses, tins of smokeless powder, boxes of brass / primers / slugs, etc.  (This could also add the interesting mechanic of making expended brass a recoverable / reusable item -- that is, every time a player fires a gun, empty casings would be generated -- which could be retained for future reloading.  Even brass deteriorates over time, though, such that each discharge should only have a chance of generating a reusable empty shell.) However, even reloading / hand loading relies on availability of supplies generated using modern manufacturing -- such as the powder, primers, and slugs referenced above -- which brings us back to the notion of "crafting" such supplies in a primitive environment, from local materials.   

 

What I'm specifically talking about is "crafting" modern ammunition in the gaming sense -- that is, manufacturing it from whole cloth using resources harvested from the local game environment.  In a lot of "crafting" games, the player would just wander into the wilderness, find readily-accessible / harvestable quantities of lead, saltpeter, sulfur, zinc, copper, and magnesium lying around in clumps in the woods(!), stuff some in their pockets, take it home, grab their handy hammer, tongs, and anvil, and -- whack whack whack -- an hour later, 50 shiny, perfectly usable 9mm cartridges, ready to load in a magazine! 

 

Never mind that saltpeter and sulfur are to modern smokeless powder what horses and carriage wheels are to a Maserati; that making the primers alone would require a carefully-controlled, incredibly dangerous, multi-component industrial chemical reaction to create the ignition material (lead styphnate); and that the casings and slugs must be manufactured to very close tolerances to prevent them from constantly jamming and/or simply separating and falling apart when used.  

 

The bottom line is -- absent society staying / getting back on its feet somewhere, such that still-existing industrial facilities that manufactured this stuff start cranking it out and supplying it again -- manufacturing modern ammunition from harvested raw materials is simply not at all feasible.  Having a mechanism in the game allowing players to do so would not just be unrealistic, it would be cartoonish and ridiculous. 

 

That's the creeping unease I feel with some of the crafting updates -- I'm a little worried that I'm going to see "recipes" like the one described above that allow players to hand-manufacture things like modern ammunition out of stuff they find in the woods, when -- given any real concern for realism -- they absolutely should not be able to.  

 

But, I also get it that -- from a gaming / marketing perspective -- there may be a desire to balance realism against playability to, for example, allow players who want to do so to continue using firearms indefinitely.  The same concern could apply to any number of similar technologies.  Possible "non-crafting" solutions that occur to me are: 

 

     (1) Existing Supplies.  Just make sure there are enough existing stocks of ammo (and/or reloading supplies, if that gets added) that players will never realistically be able to run out.  This could include the placement of massive quantities in places where they'd realistically be (e.g., military depots, hunting stores, ammunition manufacturing facilities, etc.) -- preferably in areas that are dangerous enough to make them a challenge to reach.  To some extent, this already exists in-game, and the same approach could potentially be taken with other items that can't realistically be "crafted."    

 

     (2) Primitive Alternatives.  Limit crafting to lower-tech versions that players could potentially produce in a post-apoc environment.  For example, given time, survivors could potentially begin manufacturing their own pre-industrial era firearms and ammo (e.g., crude pipe weapons that can shoot a single round of modern ammo, and (eventually) muskets and muzzle-loading rifles using black powder and round, cast shot).  Some raw materials that can't realistically be harvested locally might still have to be imported, though (see item 3, below).  

 

     (3) Importation.  Once NPCs are added, include one or more traders who import (expensive) supplies from areas where manufacturing capability has been preserved or restored.  

 

     (4) Local Facilities.  Add some local manufacturing facilities to the map that could potentially be "brought back to life" with the right skills / equipment / supplies.  (Some raw materials might still need to be imported under option (3), though.)  

 

     (5) Story-Based Solutions.  Kind of a combination of (1) and (3) ... once NPCs are added, maybe include a "quest line" where a merchant / faction leader asks for assistance in securing an ammo cache, and in exchange agrees to provide the player a certain amount of ammo each week / month, indefinitely.  

 

To me, any of these would be preferable to the approach of simply throwing up your hands and letting players have the flatly unrealistic option of tink tink tink manufacturing modern ammunition from dirt and rocks in their basements (watch your step around the bathtub-batch lead styphnate, kids!) -- which, to me, would largely undermine the unique sense of realism PZ offers among other survival / crafting games.  

 

Note also that this is just one example -- I'm sure there are a lot of other types of item that, realistically, simply could not be manufactured in a lower-tech post-apoc environment. 

 

My hope is that we'll see the devs steer towards balancing / resolving these types of situations with a more realistic approach than simply allowing "crafting" of any and everything -- even when it doesn't make sense.  

 

[Bullet_Magnate]

(Accidentally duplicated the above comment somehow -- deleted.)

[ZombieHunter]

I would personally like to see less realism and more positive player gameplay mechanics

 

Car Modifications like Armor Plates and Engine Upgrades

I think most people in a real zombie apocolypse would try to first secure their car for travel. 

Add some bars on the windows so zombies can't just burst through glass

 

Custom Weapons + Modifications like making a Nail Powered Gas Gun

So it will be significantly quieter than a real gun. 

 

Using Magazines to make basic armor on arms

 

Making Trip wires 

 

Making Walls and Trees dampen sound. 

[Ciber Ninja]

This has been a worry I have had for awhile.
There are so many half finished things in this game and it's been in dev for so long that I feel like they've lost the lead a bit.
I'm not in principle against a more involved crafting system, but I've never once even farmed in this game. I want stuff that makes the early game good. That's what pulls in new paying customers. As long as the underlying system is available, modders will be happy to give that long term content.

[krilton]

Related/unrelated, years back there was a show in the History channel related to "if humans vanished" nature takes over and animals revert to their primal instincts. So, in some instances, that could apply and willingness to survive... so basically determination.