A Question Concerning "Late Game" Fun and Playability.

[Desert-Mammoth]

Hello, good morning/evening.

I don't mean for the following question to come off as critical, or for it sound drastically stupid. It's an honest question, and whilst I have skimmed the forums from time to time for answers, I feel It's time I just went ahead and asked it directly to fellow members of the playerbase.

Do you guys get bored by this game after creating a self-sustaining base? And if not, how do you keep the game exciting? (If that is the correct word?)

Because me and my friends do, every run we've made, regardless of how much progress the game has made.

A bit more detail, you ask?

I bought it some years ago (I think?) and it was an amazing experience. Having to dodge the zombies whilst combing through houses for vital supplies - what a heart jerking joy it was!

And then I built a base, and grew some potatoes. That was the end of my first play through.

They released MP, and so me and my friends banded together for a second play through. We had a blast scaveging through the houses, dodging zombies, watching each other get eaten alive - it was so very fun.

And then we built a base, grew some pototoes... and that was the end of the second play through.

A long time later, perhaps a year, me and my friends return to PZ after noticing a surge in development progress and features such as herbalism, "roaming" hordes, and a bunch of other stuff.

So again, we had fun getting materials together, getting eaten, bashing in skulls - all good stuff.

And then we built a base, grew a variety of vegtables, gathered some herbs, fished a bit annnnnnnnnnnnnnnd that was the end of the third play through.

So. Are my and my friends just stupid? Are we er, you know, not "getitng" the whole fun aspect of survivng in an iron clad safe house completely removed from any and all threats?

Because that's my problem with this game, and I was wondering how you guys feel about it too, or rather, how you deal with it. Do you all just sit there for hours on end, patiently awaiting the arrival of winter to see if your character can survive it? Or do you think "Okay that was fun. Let's play something else."

Do you feel that the total absence of any kind of danger in a post-apocolapytic setting, once you have errected walls and sewn a few crops, is a catasrophic flaw - or a tempoary set back on the road to what will be a fantastic game? Is it an issue that should have recieved attention much, much earlier? Or something that can be adressed after we have better animations, drivable cars and workable petrol pumps? For me, I feel the latter are meaningless without the former.

What of natural disasters? Earth quakes? Raging storms? Actual herds of zombies that actually roam around (never really noticed it on our third playthrough, they seemed rather static)?

Dare I ask, in all seriousness and respect that the question deserves, what of roaming bands of computer scripted entities that WANT your stuff in your safe house? ... Though obviously this particular topic has been so far beaten over the head that it exists in a 2D dimension outside of time and space, so I'll say no more of it.

My point is, this game's playability and substance post-building 4 walls seems heavily lacking, which I find odd for a game of this calibre and design. It feels like we've been given, or are being given, a knife, fork, plate, glass, napkin - but no food. In fact, there's no talk of there even being a chef in the kitchen. And the barman has just resigned.

But I have been wrong before. I am a man, fallible and flawed (in the words of the mighty Beowulf), and I concede that it is entirely possible I have approached this game from the wrong angle, or that perhaps, I am not simply built to admire what so many others do. Or maybe it's just a case that I am not patient enough, or mindful enough of how this game needs to come together, and in what order and priority those pieces need to follow.

Because I am fully aware that there are many who adore the "end-game", and thrill of defeating winter. I wish I was among them, but alas.

I understand this game is an EA title, and there is much work to be done, but the roadmap and development priorities seem out of whack to me - but this is just my opinion. I am not a developer, I have no experience in this field, and I do not wish for this to come off as me judging them from an equal position. Rather, I am judging them as a consumer. An investor.

So, after all that, let's return to my original question.

Do you guys get bored by this game after creating a self-sustaining base? And if not, how do you keep the game exciting?

Many thanks for your time, should you choose to reply.

[WillieSea]

I have over 1000 hours in the game. If your getting bored with your game, decimating the zombies, then its time to go into sandbox settings and up the zombie counts and respawn. And turn off loot respawn.

Me and my friends have had to run to the next town to find needed supplies we wanted. The zombies attacking our base never quit because we turned on high respawn and migrations. With the nutrition system, you will starve if all your eating is potatoes. You need to fish, and trap game for a variety of food. And it takes a LOT of food to not loose weight ALL the time.

We built a base, with water purifiers, houses for each person, storage barns, entertainment house with the games, juke box in it. Placed generators for electric, collected all the gas cans we could find and filled them up before the power went out. Built a house for electronics skill storage, metal working, wood working, medical triage house. Kept the area around the base clear of zombies that kept migrating in. And we would divide the work, we had a medic, a cook, a carpenter, a metal worker, scavengers, defenders, etc..

The thing you and your friends have to do is set out tasks and then everyone works to complete them. For example, you have to visit a lot of different locations in order to get the medical unit setup. The IV bags can be found at the mall, along with the medical storage unit. The Medical bed, stool and medical degrees can be found in downtown West Point. Antibiotics can be found at the mall. And speaking of the mall, that is one place you and your friends can try to clear a path to, and then clear out of zombies. I had my most exiting time in the whole game when I was in the Movie Multi-Plex and it became overrun with zombies. The escape was epic!

But with any game, you get bored with it. No game can keep your attention forever.

[Desert-Mammoth]

@WillieSea

"But with any game, you get bored with it. No game can keep your attention forever."

Truer words have never been spoken, and perhaps this is the case.

So it seems to me that your enjoyment from the game stems from creating the ultimate survival facility. An organised base, with designated areas for various tasks. Joy was to be found in allocating tasks to each member of the group, so that they could narrow their focus to their respective roles.

In short, the construction of your survivor's paradise became the focal point of your gaming experience, your objective and ultimate quest... not unlike someone who plays a computer game, for a 100% completion rating.

Admirable and commendable.

Me and my friends, on our last playthrough, where weight loss was a thing, and potatoes weren't the miracle wonder food, did things differently to how we had previously. We're not stupid, we do look at guides and plan.

And we built our survivor's paradise. Perhaps not as highly functioning as yours, but it served the purpose. We had our roles (I was the Doctor and the Fisherman/Herbalist, for example), and we operated very similarly to how you and your fellows did/do. Given, we did not strive for the ultimate survivor base, but to us, so long as a it was serving all of our needs, then that was enough.

We went to the mall. We scoured all the towns (usuually searching for more axes!). We did a lot of stuff. Weight loss proved a small problem after we discovered what the nutrionist perk did. It seemed to us that at that point, only winter might prove a challenge - but we just couldn't be bothered to wait several IRL days/weeks for it to come, unfortunately.

And you talk of sandbox mode, of upping the difficulty artificially. I'm afraid that it is a flaw of me and my friends, to play games as they are intended to be played. For this reason, we stray away from mods also, unless they fix neglected issues (at the time, it was water purifying-related).

Thankyou for your reply. You have given me some things to mull over. Setting a certain objective for a fourth playthrough might help, certainly. Maybe talking my friends into upping the zombie count, and lowering the loot spawns might also be of service. We shall see.

Many thanks!

EDIT: Having discussed things with my hombres de le zomboid, we've come to the agreement that even if we errected a crystal palace the size of manhattan, with pirated alien technology and startrek warp drives attached to our fishing rods, we'd still hit the same problem.

There would be no danger.

Even if we upped the initial danger, we'd still hit the same issue. It would take us longer to get a base up, but in the end, we'd still be left without a challenge beyond errecting our base.

As my friend said quite brilliantly.

"The game says 'This is how you died', not 'This is how you lived the rest of your life in peace and luxury'".

And he has a point to a deep degree.

But again, thanks for your feedback.

[WillieSea]

Yeah, no game is fun forever. And sometimes a year or two later you want to play again. Sometimes for a while, sometimes it just can't hold your attention anymore and you give it up for good. That is the way of games.

I came back to the game in the last week, and I am building that base, again, on my own. I have already killed several thousand zombies, and just leveling my skills up to where they are now takes time. Reading skill books, practicing what I learn, and leveling up. All while looting and building my dream base.

My reason for doing it this time is to make a mod, of my base. So in any future games I play, I can have a fully stocked base and I can concentrate on exploration of the much bigger map and more specialized looting. Some things I never have time for because of my base building routine.

[print]

You're not bored unless you have the corresponding moodlet. My suggestion is to turn off most mods, turn on extremely rare loot, turn on random zombies speed-toughness-strength, and play alone (or PvP with your friends or the survivors mod).

[Desert-Mammoth]

@WillieSea

I'm happy that you are able to enjoy the game from that angle. Building not only an ideal base, but an ideal character. Being the best you can be, as so to speak. It reminds me of my World of Warcraft days, where I'd pour in hundreds of hours to attain a certain plateau with my monk character, in terms of level, skills, equipment and professions.

Where we diverge though, is that with World of Warcraft (and maybe this is a bad example), I was preparing for the next big challenge - the next dungeon, or the next boss.

With Zomboid, I'm easily able to "beat" the game by establishing a functioning safe house, stockpiling supplies and reaching a satisfactory level of self-sustainability that could in theory go on forever.

However, there is no "next stage", no dungeon or boss to look forward to (metaphorically speaking). And that is where I find this game sadly lacking, and the more I read, the more it looks less likely that this issue is going to be addressed any time soon.

Wouldn't it be fun, for example, if you were out in your garden, busy watering your tomatoes and keeping a very keen eye on them - eager to gather as much fresh food as possible before winter comes and takes it away when SUDDENLY a car ploughs straight through your zombie-proof outter walls.

HOLY HELL WHAT!

You run to investigate. What is this? A random event? An NPC of some kind? Did that car really just plough into my base?

Uh oh, it looks like it brought a herd of zombies with it. EVERYONE, TO THE WALL! PUSH THEM BACK!

And then a furious melee ensues as you try to fight back the horde, or lead them away, or cry as you and your friends succumb one by one to the inevitable and your safe house becomes a graveyard.

OR, and this is a big OR, guns suddenly have a purpose in the game like never seen before, and you are forced to break open your big-boys armoury to unleash loud but assuringly effecient shotgun related mass death upon the undead invaders in a last ditch effort to hold the line.

Now that's an end game level challenge right there. Though it would take a bit of work, I guess.

How about a gas explosion? that rocks the entire neighbourhood and swarms you with literally hundreds of the hungry buggers. Or a helicopter crash???

What if the MILITARY decided that an air strike was appropriate at your location, without realising you were there. You know, an itchy National Guard gun battery just opens up a brief salvo.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Some mid-level HE shells just tore through your base, and now you've got fires to put out, injuries to heal, dead to bury, and zombies to head off. Maybe they target an area you are moving through whilst out scavenging? Imagine running through an artillery strike, hopping over charred zombie corpses and dodging shrapnel... okay maybe that's a bit Michael Bay, but you get the idea.

I guess the easiest thing to do would be to make the zombies slowly congregate at your safe house, like they do at the mall in Day of the Dead. They're hungry, they haven't eaten in days, and even if you're making minimal noise and keeping your lights off, eventually one or two of them are going to notice you, and their buddies are going to notice them, until suddenly the whole of West Point is out side your house waving at you.

I don't know, I know some of these examples are a bit out there, but I hope you see what I'm trying to get at. This game needs a late game threat of some kind, something that will jump out at you from nowhere when you least expect it, and all the farming and fishing in the world aint going to save your bacon. A situation that puts your ability to survive to the test.

@Print

Thanks for chipping in, but again I feel these kinds of suggestions regarding messing with the sandbox settings only really apply for the early-mid game experience. They do little to alter the late game, unless you are planning on taking winter to task.

Even if you die 10 times doing it, eventually you're going to get your safe house built, and then you're back to staring at a wall for 24 hours a day whilst reading Expert Fishing and Master Carpentry :D

[WillieSea]

I like your ideas, those would be cool special events. Right now, all you have is the helicopter event. In sandbox, you can have this occur more often, and you never know when it will happen. And it will drag hundreds of hungry zombies to your location.

[print]

Originally posted by Pamster:

Even if you die 10 times doing it, eventually you're going to get your safe house built, and then you're back to staring at a wall for 24 hours a day whilst reading Expert Fishing and Master Carpentry :D

Well those are 10 playthrus...and nothing to sneeze at either because even after my couple thousand hours I still cant make it a month. Also, did you even try survivors mod with hostle armed survivors?

[FleхAir Pootis]

The answer is simple, and you have already said it: turn up the difficulty. No respawns, rare loot blah blah blah, but if having a base is a trouble for you, you can live like in The Walking Dead game - just mostly travel. No home, only temporary shelters for a day or two and then back to the road. Huge hordes may help by not letting you stay and destroying your shelters, making you run.

And it's not a case in MP but you can create new worlds every time you die just for more realistic experience, being always careful and scared to die.
You know, minecraft had that option - deleted your save every time you die.

Fear makes survival games much more interesting.

[Donttazemebro]

Hi. I agree it can be become boring late game if your play style allows it.
I've adapted my play style to counter it.
My current game has no loot respawn, helicopter event sometimes,trying to skill up all traits,also loot an entire town then move to another.
I like some of your ideas for late game events and they would help make it more interesting.

[Desert-Mammoth]

Many thanks to everyone for their continued input.

So it seems to me that sandbox mode is the way forwards for most, where the difficulty can be artificially altered to create a kind of Dark Souls theme. I can understand where that thought process has come from, and how people are able to gleam entertainment from it. After all, Zomboid's strongest selling point at the moment does seem to be the early-game period, where you have nothing, and are constantly scrounging for much needed supplies under the shadow of the valley of death.

Still, doing so doesn't really fill me with much excitement. If all this is going to do, is make it harder to find an axe and a box of nails, or a tin of tuna ($%&ing love tuna!!), or make it so directly stomping down a pack of zombies more tedious, then I'm just not sure it's for me.

Far from pros, me and my friends are competent and organised. We'd overcome scarcity of resources, so long as their availability made surviving an actual viable result, and we'd build our house again. And we'd get bored again.

The survivor's mod, as mentioned by Print, was a fun gimmick but it is a messy affair (judging from my experiments), and even worse, it is SP only unless things have changed. Controlling other survivors was time consuming and irritating, for me in any case.

I think it's a shame that the official NPC development has become such a controversial issue. I feel it has reached Duke Nukem Forever, or Half Life 3, levels of hype and animosity in equal measure. Whatever the devs finally decide to do with this key and in my opinion (and that of many, many others) core aspect of the game, they're going to encounter a lot of negative feedback - which is most likely why they're doing everything they can to avoid putting them in. At this point they know whatever they do regarding NPCs, it's not going to be enough to please anyone, and it'll be more trouble than its worth.

Obviously, having intelligent, armed and merciless humans walking about the block could instantly make this game 239480284280 times more interesting -- but at this moment in time, it seems as pointless talking about it as it does talking about how miserable the situation is in somewhere like Syria. We're just people, and the powers that be have a seperate agenda. Our words cannot affect something that we have zero control over.

So after stepping away from pressing the red button, and blowing this thread up with an NPC-nuclear bomb, I'd like to move the discussion on a little bit if I may.

You guys all seem to have found ways to make the game more of a challenge, via sandbox options and upping the difficulty manually by tweaking bits and pieces - or employing mods to fill the void left by official content (or lack there of).

What would you like to see in the "Late Game" phase of play? I listed some high octane examples, but do you lot feel there could be more in the game to distract you from simply reaching a level of perfection unheard of in any post-apocalyptic story known to man? Are there systems the devs could develop, outside of NPC-related hijinks, that would make the game less of a perfection grind, and more of a ball grabbing survival experience?

Do you feel that this game, when all is said and done, really challenges your ability to survive effectively? And if not, how do you think it could?

Once again, we all understand and agree that this is an EA title, liable to further updates and change, so what we are discussing may well be addressed at a later date (though I imagine we'll have grandchildren by that point :D). However, maybe a dev, jacked up on illegal conscious enhancing alien pheromones given to them by none other than Rick Sanchez, will stumble upon our calm and rational discussion, and defy all pre-existing logic by taking the issue to task.

If they did, in this fantastical scenario of mine, perhaps your input here may aid them in creating a roadmap of "Late Game Fun" development.

Or maybe I am just an idiot who likes to write thousands of words at a Steam forum.

It's 50/50 at this point :)

[havok6669]

I find the hydrocraft mod adds a ton more content to get used to and utilize to make an even better base. You can also as stated crank up the number and difficulty of the zombies in several ways making it harder to survive against them. The hydrocraft mod more than quadruples the content of the game through skills books and items and just mastering it will take you untold hours of playtime. Build a solar generator start producing gasoline craft mines and dig for ores in order to craft some of the more advanced items and structures used for crafting other things. Rememeber to craft at least a blacksmith apron or firesuit before smelting though or you will likely burn your face off XD I love the mod and can't imagine playing without it after trying it out. There are a multitude of other mods that add similarily fun content to tweak the game to exactly your liking.

[Desert-Mammoth]

@havok6669

I was looking at the hydrocraft mod the other day. It did look impressive. As someone who obviously uses and loves it, I have some questions for you:

1) Is it stable in multiplayer. Are me and my friends likely to encounter any major issues using it?

2) Is it stable in general? Does it come with game breaking bugs of any kind that I need to be aware of?

3) Does it break the game's balance? I.e, does Hydrocraft make the game too easy to the point where the game seems a little pointless playing, unless you have a completionist fetish?

Thanks in advance for your sound counsel.

[WillieSea]

The problem with hydrocraft is that it makes the game trivial to survive in. Food on every zombie, for example. There is no need to scavenge houses. And once you have built all those things from hydrocraft, the zombies are like ants, just a nuscience, not a threat. A lot of mods trivialize the zombies and make the game easy, and boring in the end.

Sandbox:
Crank up the number of zombies, make it a fear factor. You don't have to make them tougher, I like the challenge of a lot of them, but I don't like to have to whack them 20 times to kill just one. And make sure the zombies respawn! If they don't, then you will very quickly decimate the ones around you, and never see another zombie again. That is incredibly boring. I like to start with just a few zombies, and over 2 months, crank it up to large amounts of them. That gives me a little time to get setup for the coming hoards!

Loot, never respawn it. NEVER. If you do, you never have to go more than a few houses away from your base for supplies. A lot of mods also make scavenging a task you never have to perform. Get rid of those mods. Now, you will have to actually travel out there, risking danger, to find supplies.

Weapons. Get rid of the mods that trivialize killing the zombies. The whole threat in the game is zombies, with survival thrown in. You take the threat away, and now its just a walking survival game, and boring. A bat with nails in it, or an axe, that is the way to go. Or if you like a challenge, get good with the butter knife. lol

[Axz]

I've been playing this game since long before it was on Steam and I never made it that far. It's not that I couldn't, I could, very easily, but every time I started making decent progress another update would come out and I'd need to start again to get what the update added. This will continue to happen for the forseeable future so my advice is DON'T play that far, you'll kill all intrest in the game getting to the "end" 10 times and will even grow a little bitter / resentful as everytime you have built a mansion, you'll have to delete it and start again to get whatever they bring out next.

[WillieSea]

That is why I plan on making a mod of my base. I simply copy the map cells over to the new game, and there is my base. And I don't 'care' if those few cells dont have the new stuff, because its just trees anyway.
There are ways around it. Resentment is a choice.