Gun toting zombies I’m reminded of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games where zombie soldiers stagger towards you while firing but their aim is awful. I think the lore says something like they still have enough muscle memory to use the weapons but hitting things is nigh impossible until you get really close.
In the CDDA world they would certainly bring a lot of attention from wander spawns even if they couldnt hit you.
I think one of the big things with CDDA is the fact that its a sandbox game, which can be a good and a bad thing.
On the plus side it lets you ramp up the difficulty form minor to beyond impossible levels if the game is too easy (improved zombie speed, health, item spawn etc) and start with stats you find appropriate (only starting with 0 or negative point cost characters if you find positive ones too easy). When you do really well with a character at one difficulty you can play with another weaker starting character or tweak the settings to see if your strategy still works.
At the same time though I feel like its hard to feel a sense of accomplishment playing CDDA. whenever my character is doing well I always think to myself “Oh, well I just made it too easy by not picking a harder starting class / difficult scenario / playing with certain mods on or off.” The fact that you can do nearly infinite things to make the game harder makes it nearly impossible to have a “standard” play through experience - for me at least it feels like there are too many personal rules I have to follow to keep the game interesting without feeling bad.
One thing I guess I would like to see in the future is more challenge / limited starting scenarios that allow you to use everything you have to complete a certain objective or challenge without having to feel like you need to hold yourself back.
I wonder if you can flag things that so things that are too difficult doesn’t spawn in first map. So the end game stuff is there but not there.
When building a world, just select the no Corrosive/Explosive/Fungus/Triffids whatevers. I get that you’re probably talking more about restricting things like Hulks from showing up early game, but the closest you’re gonna get to that would most likely be in dialing back the monster evolution scaling factor when you build your world.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t see the point in disabling things that are “too difficult”. When you see something like that, you run, you don’t try and fight it out just because every other game coddles the player and makes them feel invincible.
Well, I’m currently working on a mod. It won’t be for everyone but all the things I’m adding in the mod (monsters) that ramp the difficulty will be gated in specific locations.
IE: The basic monster groups that can spawn randomly in the world will not contain those difficult monsters. Only the monster groups that appear in advanced locations will spawn things of high difficulty. Mostly, anyway.
The base game of Cataclysm is not set up like this, so changing monster groups to reflect various stages of ‘difficulty’ would take quite a bit of work, I think.
I mean if zombie evolution was furthered in maximum extent and worked as intended the game would surely be a lot harder and make raiding places earlier with worse equipment make sense, because highly evolved zombie soldiers, firefighters, cops would be pretty scary.
So we’ll get there.