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Derleth

Some feedback and questions

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21 hours ago, Derleth said:

Well okay, perfect was maybe too strong a wrong word ...

You say "too strong", I say "factually inaccurate".

I fully understand how difficult coding effective and believable protagonists can be, however I would contest that in it's peer group (whether that be Miscreated, 7 Days to Die, State of Decay, Dead Island, Dying Light, Left 4 Dead or any other number of zombie open world survival games) it's easily the worst implementation. What's disappointing is that this element of the game has been core since the mod, and while the mod had clunky enemies that was a mod released 6 years ago. We really shouldn't be "at this position" so late in development. You can argue the engine, animation, character and all sorts of other elements have changed - and you would be right, they have - but that isn't an excuse for the state of them when you consider this is an official 1.0 release.

There is also the point that you can abstract the base elements of AI and work on them in isolation - essentially removing any potential bottleneck such as game engine, animation, character, etc and Bohemia have had a very long time to do this - it just seems they didn't consider it a priority in any sense. That's their choice, at no time am I saying they are "wrong" in the way the development has been done. Have there been mistakes? Sure, I think we all accept that, but simply as a game player I shouldn't have input into how they create their games. However I have an opinion on the end result, as do others.

Has there been improvements? Of course, although to be fair some of those were retrograde rather than progressive. I spotted zombies climbing a chain link fence the other day. Not sure if that is a 1.0 or 1.01 inclusion but I'd never seen it before. That's an improvement. It's not like I'm hating on the current system because I want to, it's just a reflection of the game outside an echo chamber and in comparison to it's peers.

Am I on record as saying the visual and aural environments, including the frame rate that it runs at, have been improved considerably? Yes, I am. I will also say the UI has also improved with the 1.01 release (albeit it wouldn't be hard to improve from the last iteration). It's not like I've seen the improvements made to the game and stubbornly ignored them, my issue is that the protagonists are key. Without them this is nothing more than a PvP game, and if we are being honest here there are numerous "by the numbers" PvP games out there that do what DayZ does but better.

Edited by rickyriot

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On 2/16/2019 at 1:27 PM, rickyriot said:

You say "too strong", I say "factually inaccurate".

There's certainly room for improvement. There are some glaring navmesh and collision issues in dire need of fixing, it is just not okay that they can poke their heads through solid walls and doors and hit you even though the room is closed off. Especially unfair since you can't hit them back... These issues have been coming and going, so I suppose this time around it has to do with the recent server performance optimisations. Maybe they tweaked collision detection on AI to reduce server load, with undesirable results?

Nevertheless, I will stand by my finding the zeds way more engaging now than in any previous version of the game I have played. Their senses seem fairly well balanced, and the way their screams aggro more can really mess up your day if you don't have an escape plan. Shooting in infested villages will get you in trouble, making the run and gun KOS playstyle more risky again. I am again being rescued by infected when murderous knuckleheads try to kill me for fun, which is as it should be.

But yeah, to be fair they are not near perfect yet. But if they get the navmesh and wall/door glitching issues fixed for good that will be a major step in the right direction. After that I just want to see want larger numbers, dynamic horde events, random stray infected out in the boonies and generally just a larger variation of zombies. On community servers with increased zombie count it is a bit too evident that there are still not enough different models.

And yeah, I still want them to feed on the fallen. Classic way to escape an angry horde - just pop your "buddy" in the kneecap and run... 

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