We need your opinion! (It may help us finalise a PR for the game!)

[Ice-o-metric]

There is a serious possibility that in the next version of C:DDA, newspapers, ads and survivor notes may feature… but trying to balance accurate levels of setting-accurate misinformation and game-useful knowledge and lore is a tricky thing, we could use your opinion on the following…

In one article we give away the VITAL piece of information that you should butcher defeated enemies, while trying to maintain the misinformation that at this stage, the government really isn’t sure who or what is attacking

[spoiler][size=14pt]ARTICLE:[/size]
“PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: ‘Dispose of dead’. Recognisable enemy dead left lying in the street may give away guerrilla positions. If forced to fight an enemy combatant please smash or butcher with a knife til unrecognisable”

Gotta say that I’d never expect to see this in a newspaper (mutilating enemy dead violates the Geneva conventions, etc.). It’s a useful in-game tip though so might be better cast as reports of remarkable healing powers requiring extra measures, etc.

[quote=“Ice-o-metric”]You’ve hit the nail on the head doubly… It is a vital piece of information to get to the player, but at the same time recasting the newspaper so they didn’t know the enemy was zombies until it was far too late suddenly brings the legal rights of enemy combatants into this… I’m torn between wether to out the Zombies or not, it’s only suggested they aren’t completely human in one other article[/quote][/spoiler]Your opinion on how much should/shouldn’t be given away woulld be incredibly helpful.

In another set of articles we deal with an injoke… that is also an ingame item. This leads to 2 ways of trying to decide how to treat it… on one hand, it was never meant to be taken seriously, on the other hand, this item can seriously modify your game, especially if you use it at the wrong time

[spoiler][size=14pt]ARTICLE:[/size]
“HE WILL BLOW YOUR WORLD: Scientist Kevin Granade invents ‘Reality Grenade’ based on teleport-tech… Could be used to weaken enemies or improve own troops. ‘We’re still in Alpha testing’ says Kevin, ‘It really needs a Bugfix’.”,
"GRANADE SEEKS FUNDING FOR GRANADE: Kevin Granade seeks funding for reality-warping weapon called ‘the Granade’. ‘It works by patching reality. I’m thinking of crowdsourcing via Kickstarter under the term Project Cataclysm’ "

[/spoiler]

I want to like this but keep thinking it doesn’t belong. Joke item having lore (even joke lore) feels like it un-jokes the item. :-/

Compare that with the possibility for confusion. I was recently lugging [one of these] arround for a week (before I found out) because i thought it was a just a personalised grenade… God help me if i’d pulled the pin on it like a regular grenade because things were going badly… like, fighting a ‘zombie hulk’ badly

Feel free to ask on the forums or otherwise check it out, too. If nothing else, have it be conspiracy-theory rumors or something, not "Rogue US scientist takes top-secret technology, goes totally public, asks for donations for his potentially world-ending project, no governmental repercussions happen, and he actually gets funding from non-anonymous public backers.

[dambuk1]

For the mutilation instructions - add another article that says something like “Due to the recent acts of violence caused by enemy forces president X declared Geneva Conventions and some human rights “temporarily void”.”. This way, it won’t be weird to see/hear announcments telling you to break those laws.

For “Granade”, i think the conspiracy theory variant proposed by KA101 to be the best way to both describe this item and not make the joke too painful.

[Antistar]

A different approach for the butchering/pulping one could be something like a news story on a ‘crazy person’ apprehended for killing people and butchering them. You know, all the while shouting “I had to do it so they wouldn’t rise from the dead!” or what-have-you.

[Bumpkin]

Doesn’t the game start a few hours after the apocalypse begins? I think the newspaper stories should be written from the perspective of people who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. “Return to your homes, there’s nothing to see here”, type stuff.

[kilozombie]

Doesn’t the game start a few hours after the apocalypse begins? I think the newspaper stories should be written from the perspective of people who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. “Return to your homes, there’s nothing to see here”, type stuff.

It starts 5 days after the actual Cataclysm starts- Hour Zero, if you will.

That’s why things have calmed down a bit, but they’re still awful.

[GlyphGryph]

Doesn’t the game start a few hours after the apocalypse begins? I think the newspaper stories should be written from the perspective of people who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. “Return to your homes, there’s nothing to see here”, type stuff.

Basically, things started going to shit for a couple days, building up to “day 0” when the bombs were dropped. Even then, people were still holding it together for a while - things didn’t fall apart everywhere, immediately, all at once.

By the time you come onto the scene, it’s almost a week after the bombs have dropped. By then, there’s not much left, but the collapse of society wasn’t immediate, just very very quick.

Still, I imagine any post-bomb/full-on-monstrous-invasion newspapers would be unlikely. But the zombies and other introductory events started before the bombs - like tremors leading up to the big quakes.

I’d love if we could get to a private computer that has the equivalent of twitter open, though. Now THAT would be fun, since we could actually get a few days of post-bomb or at least same day as post-bomb news updates that way.

[vache]

That’s sort of what I had in mind for the “Vox Populi” faction I mentioned in the drawing board. Basically a way to get semi informed account of what’s going on.