This was probably mentioned before already but anyways…
The thing that really bothers me is balance between early beginner character and three-day-character. I’m taking 3 days as a milestone here because I can see example in my latest game. It’s a beginning of 4th day. Third of a town is looted and explored. I have 5-8 guns with appropriate ammunition stocked, tons of food and cooking supplies, every tool you can think of, lots of batteries, threads, duct tapes, younameits. Atomic coffee maker and nightlight damnit. All my clothing is sewed till reinforced, refitted, lined or padded. Ordinary zombies are none of a threat anymore. Cash, gas, vehicle.
Item spawn rating is 0.5 and I still find full fridges once in every other house. If you set this too low there’s just trash on rare occasion.
Tailoring is too quick. I dont know how to wield a needle in my hand and if I was in need of refitting/enchancing my clothing I’d spend weeks doing so.
Is there a way of making the game slower-paced? Or this is exactly what is planned for skill overhaul feature?
They are planning rebalancing of some skills, but until then I’d suggest adjusting skill rust, increasing mob spawn rates, and playing around with hordes to increase the difficulty.
You can also up the rate at which more challenging monsters spawn, which is… let’s say “interesting”.
Keeping an open world game more or less linearly difficult is a really hard design problem.
Currently, the idea seems to be mostly to make the zombies (and other stuff) advance in difficulty with time, while slowing down player advancement.
A relatively recent change allows zombie spawn group to advance with time. It’s currently just a single step and it doesn’t do enough to make the game as hard later as it is at start, but it is a good step.
Tailoring is quite slow to level and to produce new stuff, but yeah - the repairing is really fast.
Also, the whole reinforcing thing is bad for balance - it makes clothing shops completely useless, makes scavenging for clothing only worth it when it’s for the rare or hard to craft stuff like survivor gear or kevlar vests and makes it necessary to re-fit and reinforce all clothing to make it really useful.
It’s also simply not realistic that you can make stuff more resistant than brand-new stuff without making it any harder to wear.