Zombies don’t break legs, slow-on-punch, and threat-scaling?

[GuyFugly 6]

With the forthcoming patch including the ability for zombies to tackle players to the ground, I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t time to sunset the zombie’s ability to randomly cripple players. Instead, I'd like to suggest a slow-on-hit mechanic that would make the zombies more threatening in different ways, particularly in groups. (I think these two ideas are pretty inter-related from a balance perspective, so I decided to put them both in the same thread)

Here's a preemptive tl;dr with the basic bullet points

• Remove the zed’s ability to permanently incapacitate a player by breaking his legs
  
• Instead, shift the focus to temporary incapacitation (knockdown, rendering unconscious, reducing their running speed, etc)
  
• Make it so every hit slows the players speed for a few seconds
  
• Slowing the player’s speed means zombies will be harder to ignore. If a zombie lands a hit, and the player cannot immediately maneuver to safety, the zombie will be able to score successive hits, forcing the player to kill the zombie or continue taking damage.
  
• Slowing the player’s speed also means greater risk in drawing aggro from multiple zombies. If a player is kiting a horde, there is almost a 100% chance that if he gets punched even one time, the rest of the zombies will have a chance to close the gap and slow him down further, giving him no choice but to turn and fight.
  
• Single zombies become a manageable, but still potentially lethal, threat.
  

That's the short of it.

Now, some elaboration

Justification for removing leg-breaking: From a gameplay standpoint the reason I think leg breaking is more problematic than, say, rendering the player unconscious, is that it’s an attack that permanently incapacitates a player until they can find a very specific item to fix it. Getting an infection gives you some worsening status effects until you find a cure. Getting a broken leg is often an invitation to just give up and start over, if you don’t have any morphine handy. Which makes sense, in the real world it’s an awful injury with hugely negative ramifications. But in practice, it’s a pretty harsh penalty to hand out just because a single zombie grazed you with a lucky punch while you were running past him.

From a realism standpoint, it takes a lot of force to fracture one of those bones. If you were standing upright, even with augmented zombie punches, a zombie strike to your leg is almost certainly more likely to knock you over than fracture a bone outright.

I can understand why it was implemented – most likely to give players a reason to hesitate before engaging even one zombie – I just don’t think it necessarily makes the game more interesting, especially when coupled with all of the other ways a lone zombie is capable of ruining your day (infection, open wounds, unconsciousness, etc). Zombies are pretty threatening as-is, and even removing leg-breaking, a bad run-in with a single zed can still carry a hefty penalty.

Justification for slow-on-hit: This is actually pretty similar to how Left 4 Dead handles it’s threat-scaling for zombie hordes, but I think it’s a function that could translate pretty effectively to DayZ, even when coupled with the existing mechanics. From a gameplay standpoint, it adds a consistent threat to the player that has to be accounted for in every encounter. Rendering you unconscious or tackling you to the ground are mostly a high-stakes RNG game. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but it’s almost entirely based on chance. Plus, while they make a good hail-mary play, zeds knocking you down or knocking you out doesn’t happen often enough to really make players pause that much before diving into a horde. Kiting a horde and getting punched once or twice by the pack-leader carries a low chance of turning out poorly for you, and encourages pretty reckless behavior.

Slow-on-punch, is a mechanic that could be fairly forgiving (in the case of a few zeds) or hugely punitive (in the cases of provoking a larger group of zombies). The threat-scale is organically related to the size of the zed group, in a way that the random mechanic couldn’t achieve on their own. It gives the player the ability to do better threat assessment, feel slightly more in control and, therefore, less cheated if things go south. Finally, being able to predict outcomes means players can know exactly what the cost of failure is. “If that zombie catches me, that will give the others time to catch up”. I think knowing that for certain will add a kind of anxiety that random damage and status effects can’t.

Lastly, from a realism standpoint, if a zombie is able to punch you hard enough to cause you to start bleeding profusely, it only makes sense that it would slow your progression for a few seconds.

--

These are just some basic ideas. I have no idea if anything like this has been tested already, or how it might actually play out in the game, but I thought I'd present my theories on it. My hope is that it would be a good way to add an additional threat to people engaging in firefights in zed-heavy areas as well, since it would make maneuvering that much more difficult.

Edited June 6, 2013 by GuyFugly

[aarnoman 13]

I have to second you there. In my humble opinion, zombies are not nearlly threatening enough as a group, as you can always outrun them. This would fix that very effectively, I belive.

[Chris529 380]

Good ideas but what if you can't kill the zombie chasing you and it is constantly just beating your ass as you try to run? I mean is that a death sentence simply because you can't get away from it? Gotta agree though the whole broken leg thing is silly. I think you also bleed way too easily, I mean are they hitting you or slashing at you with knives for goodness sake.

[GuyFugly 6]

That is the biggest hiccup. If I recall SA will be implementing some sort of hand-to-hand, so there is at least some option if you don't have any other weapons on hand. But it's a suggestion that would require tweaking with other mechanics in order to make it fit without being unrelenting and frustrating. I fully understand it may not fit within the scope of the mod, or even the standalone, without knowing more specifics about it's new melee options.

[Edit] It could also be that the period of slow-down is shorter than the cooldown between zombie punches. This would mean an individual zombie couldn't "stunlock" you, but multiple zombies would be a lot more problematic to engage in the early game.

Edited June 6, 2013 by GuyFugly

[Chris529 380]

That is the biggest hiccup. If I recall SA will be implementing some sort of hand-to-hand, so there is at least some option if you don't have any other weapons on hand. But it's a suggestion that would require tweaking with other mechanics in order to make it fit without being unrelenting and frustrating. I fully understand it may not fit within the scope of the mod, or even the standalone, without knowing more specifics about it's new melee options.

[Edit] It could also be that the period of slow-down is shorter than the cooldown between zombie punches. This would mean an individual zombie couldn't "stunlock" you, but multiple zombies would be a lot more problematic to engage in the early game.

yeah that would fix it, it's just that it would be really annoying to have no weapons and one zombie chases you for a kilometer slowly beating you to death.

[Sutinen 635]

You can also get infected if you are bleeding and you attack zombies with a melee weapon. Getting zombie blood in your system can't be good.

You might want to shoot those zombies instead of risking it, right?

[UmBe 125]

You can also get infected if you are bleeding and you attack zombies with a melee weapon. Getting zombie blood in your system can't be good.

You might want to shoot those zombies instead of risking it, right?

maybe the survivors are immune to the Infection ?

[Sutinen 635]

maybe the survivors are immune to the Infection ?

Yes, I didn't mean the zombie infection, but a normal infection.

[GuyFugly 6]

While I think that's a system that could work to make the individual zombie more threatening, it doesn't address the problem that the threat-scaling mechanics still exist within each individual zombie, and don't necessarily result in a dynamic increase in threat when the number of zombies rises.

Ultimately, RNG values like "chance of infection", while they may result in harsher penalties for the player, are still a random chance associated with the individual zombies. Including more zombies in the equation doesn't necessarily mean greater threat, because each zombie has a set chance to cause the effect, irrespective of the other zombies.

The reason I think slow-on-hit is such a good effect is because it becomes compounded with multiple zeds. Unlike the other effects, it is guaranteed to be less threatening at lower zed counts, and more threatening at higher counts.