Overhaul to Mechanics

[Tamior]

The information will still be there, even for an underequipped survivor, it would just be vague or minimalistic in it’s description. Think of aiming, you get the option to change between bars and percents. The bars give a general idea, where as the percents tell an absolute value. As for your concern - weapons and damage, instead of saying this revolver does 30 damage, it would say something like “you think with a caliber of this size, it could leave a fist size hole in something”. This gives the character a sense of humanity rather than a static value freely given to you like a robot calculating it’s sense of damage, the idea is to become that robot calculating the damage via CBMs.

Again, valuable static information (i. e. things you can look up on the wiki) should not be hidden if possible.
It’s just a bad taste move that promotes explicit metagaming.

[Eastwardrope91]

Actually you could have it so a hidden stat for one sandwich is 7 iron and the next one(same kind of sandwich) has 32 iron due to the meat having more iron in it for some reason.

[Entity]

You could also look up mutations and the entire plot on the wiki, rather then experimenting and finding it out on your own. Knowing the absolute values of a weapon’s stats is completely unnecessary and irrelevant to gameplay, what with this not being a competitive game. Grab a flintlock rifle and attach a scope on it, then grab a Rivtech scout rifle at the end of the day you’ll find comparative results when taking out creatures from a distance as a skilled marksman. Personally I don’t care at all about the raw stats of the gun, I would never go out of my way to look on the wiki to see if my gun is the best gun. Rather I go off of what I have the most ammo for, what my character is most skilled with, or what the scenario calls for.

The way this could be implemented is by simply saying this axe will hit harder but swing slower than my currently equipped machete, or this sawed off shotgun has better mobility but doesn’t have as good of range as this unmodified double barrel shotgun.

If you absolutely must have raw stats for a gun, the info could be hidden until you actually use the gun or by having a skill book that could contain the info inside of it, or by instantly having it amongst a plethora of other details with the Scanner CBM.

[darktoes]

The vast majority of players are going to want to know the base stats of an item so they know if what they’re using is better or worse, and you can’t properly compare items without having some sort of quantified value to go off of. Plus, that means you have to carry around anything you want to compare a new item to, and people will just learn what the best items are without needing a scanner or high skills or anything like that. Wilful obfuscation of usable information really isn’t a good idea in a game like this.

Giving useful/unrealistic information based on skills or a scanner might be useful though. Things like showing the effects of a gunmod on a gun before you install it if your mechanics is high enough, giving the chance an enemy will dodge an attack when examined if you have high melee skill, or showing how long a deep bite has before it gets infected with high first aid skill could be really useful, but that’s all information that’s relative to the situation. You can’t just remember it or look it up.
In terms of a scanner, something like showing the exact time before something rots or the combat stats of an enemy on examination could be pretty neat, since those are still mostly relative and help the player without being a hindrance if it isn’t given.

[Eastwardrope91]

To add on to that idea maybe have the effective range on a enemy’s weapon with a high enough skill for such a weapon(rifle skill for rifle using enemies/those robomurder machines in guard camps) or having like a combat scanner so you get a detailed read out for enemies health and weaknesses so like how some zombies are basically immune to bashing weapons but weak to piercing weapons. It would make it a bit easier that and that information is on the Wiki. If someone really wanted to be a hardcore they could make a big list of weaknesses and then just use that to win instantly based on having three different weapons for any enemy(or a combo for beating some rare enemies).

[Entity]

Another small change I’d like to see towards vehicles would be that if all doors are closed, the engine is off, and the windshield isn’t broke, rather than being comfortable inside the temperature should get hot - very hot during the day time in the late spring, summer, and early fall.

[TheZoneWizard]

The game mimics reality that I can’t help but share in the laughter:

I view the game vehicles not far from this car.

[darktoes]

“Do you feel safe doing 80 in it?”
“Not even slightly.”

Yup, that’s Cataclysm.

[TheZoneWizard]

Thought folks round here might like this