Right now we got a time that stopped right at the hour X. The hour of apocalypse.
Every kind of supplies is infinite, because if you ran out of them in one town or one military outpost, you can just move to another one, and there will be unplundered gun shops and everything you need.
Firearms are far more powerful than melee, and ranged characters dont even need to engage in melee, because with 5 skill they can do up to 200 damage per turn on every distanse.
Craft isn’t so nessesary to survival, because everything that you need you can get in another nameless town.
There is something that needs to be done. There is my simple example, maybe community can improve this idea.
Day 1. Everything is untouched, guns on their shelves, food in refriegerators, dogs locked in houses. There is A LOT of NPC around.
Day 3. Some of the shops are plundered (gunshops and grocery mostly), but not completely. There may be some rifle or shotguns left, but almost no ammunition. Most of the NPCs are dead, and you can find their bodies. There is no more not wrecked cars.
Day 10. There is only 10% chance, that shop will not be empty. 60% of gasoline pumps are out of order. Windows broken, zombie corpses everywhere, but there is still a lot of survivalists and military remains.
Day 14. In addition some of the military outposts, FEMA camps and bunkers are looted. There is only 20% chance, but…
Summer, day 1-10. Everything around is looted, cities are mostly burned down, 90% of gus pumps are out of order, destruction and desolation all around you. There is only a few mostly agressive NPCs around, and you are only on your own.
Hardcore summer suvival. Maybe starting season may be changed to fall, and in the beggining of new era of desolation there would be a message: “Winter is upon you.”.
No. Because that would conflict with the lore. The zed stuff started 4 days (I think?) before the start of the game. I doubt therell be much people alive 4 days after the infection…
But yeah, I think theres too much food and weapons in shops.
If NPCs were around, I’d accept their looting things. As it is, invisible NPCs that make loot disappear just by time happening…seems like a good thing for a challenge mode.
Re lore: The US, at least, is around 99% zombified by day 4 or so, IIRC.
Re “too much” loot: Sometimes, not enough. My latest character is missing the Shovel & Wood Axe. So I’m stuck using stone tools. Got about 4-5 nailguns though, so if you want one, let me know!
Way I see it, the cure for “more loot than necessary” is to fix NPCs. I don’t need 5 flashlights (and that’s before Mutagen) but perhaps my backup might want some for that Mine op. A pile of wood axes isn’t that much better than one, but that’s because there’s only one character to use them. If the player recruits a faction and wants to make a fort, those extra axes would probably help, though.
Agreed. Magical looting fairies that randomly make everything disappear just sounds obnoxious. On the other hand, actual NPCs wandering around looting would be fair competition… after all, you could track them down and kill them, if they have anything particularly important. Finally, once you’re successful and starting to build up heaps of extra stuff, being able to trade your excess to a faction would neatly deal with your too much loot ‘problem’.
Just the New England area actually, the lore implies that the US is still fighting it and working on isolating the problem farther west, but have already given up on the New England area as totally lost.
I think places have already been looted. That’s why you sometimes find pharmacies with no meds, gunstores with very few guns, houses with stuff thrown around the floors (though I feel like the ‘looted’ houses should have broken windows, busted doors, or at least unlocked doors). You’re often just seeing the scraps that are left over. I mean look around your house/apartment and see how much stuff you’ve got. How many pots and pans are in your kitchen? How many pots and pans are in the average house in DDA?
Honestly, there’s enough ‘stuff’ in New England to keep an entire population supplied. That’s the point. There’s always enough ‘stuff’ in circulation to meet the needs of the consumers. If you cut the population down by 75% or more, 25% of the population (or less) won’t be able to use up the existing ‘stuff’ for a very long time.
Cut that down to 1% of the population and it makes you wonder what a handful of people would need tens of thousands of guns for.