I like these ideas. I also like the idea of having an option to make the game decide to get dynamically harder when you do better. You can add a difficulty level which can let the game get unfair at points. I don’t like the idea of making mobs ‘stronger’ than they normally are, but I like situations where they throw more of them at you.
–your going around. all of a sudden (and out of no where) the building you are looted is surrounded with 50 zombies.
–your injured a little and then game decides now is a great time to screw you so spawns some zombie dogs and ‘faster’ mobs since the pain makes you slower.
–you wake up in the morning and raise your weary head to find your shelter surrounded by 200+ zombies(maybe 1000 if your in a city apartment). so you better have traps and stuff prepared. --Basically just auto-spawned. Game can give you some time, but this makes securing your shelter with traps and boards, and lots of guns and stuff critical. Makes strategy important. do you have lots of pits? to slow down the bad guys. or do you mix with 1 off traps to damage or kill some as well. but once these are gone, they get through. Do you board up all doors and windows (save 1 window) to pin them down. eventually you gotta eat though? You could also do additional construction to funnel the zombies if they get in.
– do you have heavy furniture in behind your doors that you can quickly move to make it harder to bash doors (this is not in the game yet. furniture doesn’t block doors.
– do you have a getaway car with a stash? , but you gotta get to your car… and then drive through the zombies.
longer you live, the harder the game can get. this needs to be an option cause if your not experienced its pointless. right now, there is not alot of sense of urgency. your only urgency is ‘get water’ and way to purify water early. after that, nothing is really ‘urgent’. with these types of things, securing your shelter is really important and its ‘urgent’. you will need to carefully decide which skills you want to work on in preparation for the coming hordes. You dont have time to get good at everything. you need to work out strategies such as the best way to lay traps. where to stockpile ammo, rocks, etc… in your shelter. how to construct your shelter. do you want a second wall around it? A fence in front of some doors?
I’m not a big fan of the auto-magical ambush horde that spawns surrounding you, but once we have wandering hordes this kind of event can evolve naturally. I think there should be two ways of preparing for something like that: The way where you get advance warning and avoid it, and the way where you murder everything that moves (or just enough of them to escape).
The auto-spawning horde limits you to two options, fight or die, unless you happen to have a motorcycle you dragged into the grocery store and can drive out the window, which would be both awesome and ridiculous.
As far as survival goes, I don’t even bother getting water to purify early on, you can find plenty drinks to last for a week or two just wandering through houses at the edge of town. By the time I run out of that I generally have a pot, 40 lighters/matchbooks, a pile of junk food, and hopefully a shopping cart to drag all my crap around in.
I don’t think the game needs random events. Careful planning and slow accumulation of wealth is sort-of the name of the game, and having a random dice roll interrupt you to poo on your game is just losing in a big way for absolutely no reason. Wandering hordes will provide a similar challenge but are still something you can try to prepare for.
Some sort of “end game mutations” switch you can toggle that eventually replaces mobs with more difficult evolutions of those mobs as your world gets older would be neat though. It would give you a second wave of punishment to look forward to as your world gets older.
Reckoned that by the time we hit beta release or so, we’d have some epic challenges within the lines of "That Zombie’s back is lit, his arms are roughly molded in plastic, hands twisted and sharp and his eyes spark from a devious glow. Unholy stench of his serrated limbs had drawn many peers, and now he’s turned his gaze towards you."
See, when you generate a map tile (discussing static here, as always) you get a fairly balanced chance of surviving the further, dynamic spawn that goes on. In this case it won’t be just a bear/wolf/b_widow family, but much, much worse. And, you could have “Hideous the Dangerous” listed in your Kills sheet!
Probably implement this as a scaling factor, e.g. how fast the enemies scale up in these various ways.
Not a fan, I’m not opposed to ambushing the player EVER, but when it happens I want it to make sense. Like you open a door and there are hundreds of zombies, or you make a noise and zombies start smashing through walls behind you. In both of these cases though, it’s not spawning the zombies, they’re there the whole time but bottled up, if you detected or suspected the ambush you might be able to work around it.
A major design point for me is that the game world doesn’t care about you, it’s just doing its own thing, and you’re caught in the middle.
Auto-spawned no, but where sensible have your actions atract zombies from a wide area. Loud noises? Light exposed at night? Scent trails cris-scrossing the countryside? All of these could attract enemies.
Actually it does. It doesn’t give you any feedback on it happening though, so of course you wouldn’t know about it.
This should just happen, no scripting required. Conversely it should be possible to plan for this kind of thing and have a sheltered garage you can launch out of if you need to.
Yea most of this is wandering mob territory, if there are enough of them even random would be enough for them to occasionally come across you, especially at night.
I think we should not forget that even at pro level, there are different play styles. I for one gave up on driving a deadly car or dwelling in a secure fortress made of boards and nails.
Before the delevopers have to add some really stupid stuff in order to make this game “2 hardcore 4 all ya n00bz!!11” one might at first just change play style.
I for one stopped using cars and bows and keep on dragging my shopping cart with my trusty roll mat from place to place. What I want to say is that there is still enough room to set your own challenges, this begins with character creation.
I would rather not see some features added only for the sake of difficulty. Also we do not know about the development of NPCs or even factions!
What if you become an enemy of a faction and they will try to hunt you down with assassins and mercanaries? This might add some difficulty but still has a role in the game.
[quote=“Rookie, post:27, topic:3196”]I think we should not forget that even at pro level, there are different play styles. I for one gave up on driving a deadly car or dwelling in a secure fortress made of boards and nails.
Before the delevopers have to add some really stupid stuff in order to make this game “2 hardcore 4 all ya n00bz!!11” one might at first just change play style.
I for one stopped using cars and bows and keep on dragging my shopping cart with my trusty roll mat from place to place. What I want to say is that there is still enough room to set your own challenges, this begins with character creation.
I would rather not see some features added only for the sake of difficulty. Also we do not know about the development of NPCs or even factions!
What if you become an enemy of a faction and they will try to hunt you down with assassins and mercanaries? This might add some difficulty but still has a role in the game.[/quote]
Supporting Rookie; opposed to youtoo. Difficulty for difficulty’s sake makes the game less accessible. Not so good, IMO.