Out Of The Gate B42 Impressions & Feedback

[TheOofertaffy]

I want to start this by stating I don't have much of a deeper connection with this game as a lot of you who may be reading this, so I believe my point of view comes from a bit more of an unbiased angle. With that being said, let's begin.

This Thread will be going into some of the things I've seen from the update, and community concerns, and I will be putting my opinion on them.

Performance:
Probably the biggest change for myself. My computer. struggled on fresh saves in rosewood with the zoom being all the way out despite my PC being a mid-high range PC (R7 3700X-4060ti for those who are curious). On B42, I have framerate locked to my refresh rate of 144, and it's 99% of the time up there when zoomed all the way out. On B41, on a fresh save, and no zombie hordes in sight, and zoomed all the way out, I got 45-65 FPS on average. Given I'm hitting the FPS cap, it's fair to say performance has drastically improved.

Muscle Strain:
This is a major point of contention for a lot of players from what I've seen. Personally I think it's a great concept, but it does need a few tweaks in my eyes. First I think-
1. Along with other players, it should be tied to not only weapon level, but fitness, and strength.
2. Early weapon levels should be much easier to achieve.

I believe #2 is the main issue in my eyes. Muscle strain is great in concept. I think it should primarily take weapon skill into account, while having minor boosts for fitness & Strength levels.

By early weapon levels, I mean an XP table that looks like this
LVL 1: 2.5XP
LVL 2: 7.5XP
LVL 3: 20XP
LVL 4: 80XP
LVL 5: 200XP
LVL 6: 800XP
LVL 7: 2,500XP
LVL 8: 6,000XP
LVL 9: 15,000XP
LVL 10: 50,000XP
This would model a more progressive levelling system for weapons and indicate a more "Easy to learn, Hard to Master" kind of a leveling system. It's easy to get into it out of the gate, but if you want to get really good at it, it will take time, obviously those exact XP's may be too much, or too little, I have no clue, it's just an example for ratios essentially.

I believe that would make muscle strain as a feature more well rounded and complete, as the feature isn't bad, just needs a few tweaks in my eyes.

Traits:
While this specifically isn't directly tied to B42, I still think it's worth mentioning. Negative traits are much worse than good traits, and often times, it may not even be worth taking an additional negative trait, to get that one subpar positive trait that is situational, or may not offset the bad of the negative traits. I propose a rebalance of the negative traits. I believe the game not only needs the negative points to be more fair, but we need more variety. We currently have quite a lot of positive traits, but not as many negative traits. I don't want to get into the examples of negative traits, I just know that we need more. Then we also have the amount of points the negative traits give back. I think it would be benefitial for negative traits to go as so:
1 Really Bad Negative Trait = 4-5 Mediocre Positives / 2-3 Good Positives / 1 Amazing Positives
1 Bad Negative Trait = 2-3 Mediocre Positives / 1-2 Good Positives
1 Inconvenient Negative Trait = 1-2 Mediocre Positives / Maybe 1 Good Positive
Obviously this would be subject to balancing, but the current system seems to have a lot more "Bad" than "Good" with it's traits, it could be designed that way, but I think the game would be better off with a truly balanced system, where it's equal bad, equal good. Obviously players could still add the "free traits" in the sandbox settings, but this would at least get base game feeling a bit more balanced. Also, certain traits, like smoker for an example, should be able to be lost over time, if you don't smoke for maybe 2 weeks in game, you lose the trait. Normal characters without the trait initially could also gain the trait provided they smoke for long enough, a single smoke maybe wouldn't get you addicted, but if you keep doing it, it might give you the trait. This "quitting" may be already implemented in B42, but I'm not aware of it if it is.

Basements:
I quite like the addition of basements, and I think it suits the game well. That's pretty much for that section.

Lighting: I really like the lighting of this update, I think it really gives more immersion. I do think cat eyes trait needs a little bit of a buff, as I hear some of my personal friends that play this more than I do, say it doesn't make any real difference, so cat eyes may need to be buffed, but don't take that from me.

This is all I really have so far, as I've only been in the update for maybe 8 or so hours as of yet, and I'm still exploring it, but let me know what all of you think of my assessment. I may update the original post provided I think of more things. I know some steam discussions have character limits on the main post, so if I hit that, I might post additional points as comments in this thread. Thanks for reading!