washburne

I was thinking about how to reward killing zombies. Right now, zombies are more a nuisance than anything. I don't really get anything for killing them, and they are almost trivially easy to escape. Part of this is just difficulty tweaking. I want to be scared of zombies again. But also, zombies are too predictable.. I know that if I am in the wilderness, I'm relatively safe, and if I'm in a city, I need to listen for zombies shouting at me. Instead, maybe the game can use something like the grid squares in the insurgency mission. There are hot and cool squares. Only hot squares spawn zombies. A certain number of squares start hot at the beginning of the game. Say, every square of city, like the zombie spawn pattern now. Then, as zombies wander, they can turn other squares hot. But, on the other hand, if every existing zombie in a square is killed, then the square is now cool, and does not spawn zombies until an existing zombie wanders in to turn it hot again. Obviously, to keep from having to simulate zombies with no players nearby, there would also have to be a heuristic for the spread of hot squares that is computationally simple. This would also mean that zombies can realistically wander into the countryside. I feel this would add a new dimension to the game. That is, there is a reward for killing zombies above and beyond just surviving an attack. Now you can potentially create "safe" spaces. To keep things from being totally safe, which would be boring, there could be a small chance for a cool square to spontaneously turn hot. This chance could increase, the larger the contiguous cool area surrounding that square, so that it wouldn't be realistic to expect to establish and defend an entire city, but maybe it would be possible to clean out a village or an apartment complex.

This game isn't supposed to be easy. I know that losing loot sucks, but it's part of the game. You'll find more of it. And why do you need more than a backpack worth of stuff anyway, unless you're using it to re-equip after dying? If anything needs to change, it's that we need better hiding spots for loot caches. They must be visible, but maybe not so obvious as the tents currently are. I wouldn't be as picky about caches being vulnerable if they were destroyed on character death. This would take some extra fields in a database somewhere, but it is doable. That would mean that players would be forced to start over on character death. We are supposed to be simulating surviving in a zombie apocalypse right? Not just a game where we collect loot? A real survivor would start with nothing or next to nothing, not an extensive network of equipment caches.

What I'd really like out of the game is a set of mechanics that allows for rudimentary government as an emergent property of player interaction. This means that there should be a more reliable method for enforcing "laws" than hoping you're able to shoot him before he shoots you. There should be a way to lower the paranoia to a more manageable level in certain select areas. Not safe zones, but less dangerous zones. Like it or not, there's not enough room on a server to get a large enough group to gang up and enforce their own protection. That works fine in the current game where the extent of player organization is just pick-up groups that cooperate, but never really create anything persistent. However, if we want to simulate civilization arising from the ashes, which I really, really do, we need something like a city or town or even just clan village/ base of operations that persists beyond the efforts of one determined individual to break it up. One thing I would like to see is friendly AI. If you build a base of operations, or your clan does, you should be able to have basic AI to help protect it. Think of the soldiers at base in the Domination Arma II mission. They do little more than man machine gun posts and shoot at passing enemies. Easily defeated in a full on raid, but enough to keep idle looters out. This could also help individuals who play lone wolf as I often do. They could build a small outpost in a remote part of the map with a guard and small stash of loot. Of course, this will have to be carefully balanced. After all, a critical part of the game is the chance of losing all the hard earned gear you've accrued. Another example of good use of AI could be a market place with AI guards who shoot anyone who dares to fire a weapon in the protected space. Either this can be another base element constructed by players, or it could be one central neutral location to force various mutually hostile groups to interact. I like the idea of a rich clan that barters for most of its supplies, and lone wolf players who collect essential supplies like food or petrol for trade. It basically lets play styles diverge even more than they do now. If I don't want to venture into dangerous cities, I don't have to. I can spend a few hours hunting, and trade the meat for what I need. Or I could run a lucrative business going into extremely dangerous areas for rare loot. Again, this couldn't be foolproof without ruining the paranoia of the game. The guards would have to be weak enough to be defeated by a determined group of bandits. This would just be a mechanism to lower the potential for frivolous, arbitrary banditry.