Zombie difficulty, and adaptive loot.

[electron84 3]

Currently, the zombies are rather weak and more of a nuisance than a threat. I know they are completely re-working the AI for this and i assume they will be quite different than what they are now.

 

Anywho, my suggestion is that you create 4 (or more) different types of zombies, with varying skills and difficulty. Here's a basic outline of what i have thought of so far.

 

1. Easy - Slow zombies that give chase for a bit before giving up, equal speed as today, and they take some time to kill you on their own.

2. Normal - Slow-ish zombies that give chase for longer, spots you faster, and are slightly more dangerous than the easy one, say 5 hits has a high chance of giving you an infection that you need to take care of.

3. Hard - Fast zombies that attract attention from other zombies some distance away, say 100m. They are able to sprint for short distances. They easily hurt you so that you get infected. They also chase you for a fairly long distance.

4. Insane - Very fast zombies that chase you over long distance. Very easy to spot you by vision/sound/smell(?). Very lethal, one or two hits gives you an infection, a few more leaves you unconcious. These monsters can sprint for a long distance, making fleeing from them difficult and un-wanted. Going melee is dangerous, so you might have to shoot them to get away. They are also very loud, attracting zombies from far away.

 

Now for the complicated portion.

 

Obviously, filling the world with 5000 insane zombies would be way too hard. Instead i propose that the server adminstrator can adjust the amount (in percentage?) of each zombie type, this should be reflected in the server details, this could make it easier for new players to get into the game, and give the more experienced players more of a challenge. Depending on which server they connect to.

 

For players to easily identify the difficulty of the server, it should have a "zombie index", a simple number that tells you the difficulty of the server, this also ties into the loot system, the more difficult the server, the more/better loot you find.

 

Example: 5000 zombies could give this index:

500 easy = 250 points (0,5 points per zombie)

3000 normal = 3000 points (1 points per zombie)

1400 hard = 2800 points (2 points per zombie)

100 insane = 300 points (3 points per zombie)

total = 6050

 

Divide by amount of zombies and you get  1.27. That is a 27% higher chance of finding more/better loot. The math obviously has to be balanced for this to work efficiently.

 

Please discuss this constructively. I'm open for thoughts and ideas.

 

Regards

electron

[theswedishcathead 59]

I like your idea thought insane zombies should be harder and give a infektion by one hit. Also the härader the better the game becomes i want really hard zombies to make dayz perfect.

[Korsbaek 1778]

Yeah, and then we should get some super zombies like the tank in Left 4 Dead...

 

You people have to understand that the zeds in this game are people with a disease. They are not dead and have never been. It's like the rage thing in 28 Days Later.

You do not get super powers from a disease!

[electron84 3]

That is true, but isn't it safe to assume that the 28 year old martial arts instructor is more deadly than auntie Olga who had her 73rd birthday yesterday? I feel it would make it more dynamic, and more accurately portrait the infected.

[Monkfish (DayZ) 339]

I'm not so sure I'd like specific 'classes' of Zombie, although I do like the idea of some being faster or having better eyesight than others.

I am unsure how they work at the moment, but if they had values (like sight, hearing, speed, stamina and aggression) that all varied slightly from zombie to zombie then you'd end up with quite a dynamic range of zombie abilities. Some might have relatively good eyesight but low speed, others might have excellent eyesight and very low speed, whilst others might have poor eyesight but be relatively fast (possibly faster than the player. but only slightly). This would be somewhat representative of the variance in capabilities of a large group of people whilst not tying those abilities to a specific class of zombie (which may have a unique appearance). I imagine it would give some quite tense moments sneaking past a bunch of zombies no knowing how good their hearing/eyesight is, or how fast they can move if they hear/spot you.