Dead State's biggest flaw -- zombies are not a threat

[just.dont.do.it]

One of the most disappointing things I've seen in the game (for quite a while, it was even discussed all the way through beta, but to no avail) -- is the fact that zombies are at most "an annoying background", not a primary threat to deal with. The lone zombie's threat level is exceedingly low due to the fact that you can freely approach from behind and smack it to death (and given a miss, other characters may try or you can just re-engage). Also due to that fact, any zombie presence except tightly-placed groups equals to that of a lone zombie (because as long as you can whack them one-by-one, it doesn't matter if there's 10 or 100 zombies).

Early POIs offer way too little zombies to ever pose a problem, and late POIs have rather sizeable zombie groups, but by that point you are already have proper equipment and more than enough backup tools to deal with them.

Outside of shelter management and RPG bits (both are great, and I have zero complaints with those parts), the game is essentially very long and very boring "whack-a-zombie" simulator, with occasional shootouts with looters (which are marginally more fun than sneaking up on zombies, but only marginally -- looters' AI is still extremely stupid and abusable in a number of ways).

Even considering looters, I find it extremely irksome that only looters (and only some looters) are posing any real threat in tactical combat. In a game about zombie apocalypse one would think that that dealing with lots and lots of aggressive corpses would be, on the whole, more troublesome than dealing with occassional survivors.

PS: The glaring consequence of zombies' weakness is the fact than in the late beta, people were absolutely serious about "farming zombies" (that is, attracting them via noise and killing for loot).

[Drunk Zombie]

In true zombie lore zombies aren't the threat, other humans are. Zombies are meant to be more like a natural disaster. Its humans that always make trouble for other humans. This is how ds uses zombies. Only fps feel the need to make special zombies for a challenge. They should just use mutants or aliens instead and not ruin zombies

[Beewo]

What if zombies sight and hearing area got increased though? So when you try to whack away a single one close to a group you alert a larger amount.

[ZombieBisque]

Like DZ said, zombies are intentionally weaker than they are in most games and the humans are meant to be the true danger, which is a trope present in the vast majority of zombie stories.

I think their big problem is that they just stand around, which makes most maps a sort of puzzle where there's a "best" path through the zombies that allows you to 1-hit KO all the zombies on the map from behind. Personally, I'd like to see the zombies doing a bit more wandering/shuffling.

[whit]

Well just being honest here - in this games lore the military should probably be a cake walk..but they're(rogue soldiers) really the only threat in the game. Wearing/using their gear basically negates all damage from everything else...even most fire arms.

edit: I agree with the wandering/shuffling bit

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by Drunk Zombie:

In true zombie lore zombies aren't the threat, other humans are.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. If zombies are a natural disaster (a rather severe one, I must add), then it's the disaster itself that is a MAIN threat.
Only when you have dealt with it, at least temporarily, you can go on tangents, like exploring how other classic threats (including other humans) will affect the situation. All "classic zombie lore" (films, etc) follows this model. The main threat is still the zombies, other threats are secondary.

But that's not even really important here. It's philosophy, but my post was about the gameplay. What's important -- is the boring gameplay outside of shelter management / roleplay events. Repetitively whacking zombies on each POI map is the biggest part as to why it's boring.

[Akumos]

Yeah, if enemies moved around more the game would be harder, as it is I like how zombies are(threat early on, weak mid-late game) but it's too easy to stealth around 1-shotting them.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by Befram:

What if zombies sight and hearing area got increased though? So when you try to whack away a single one close to a group you alert a larger amount.

I'd say increasing zombies' perception will go a long way towards making POI maps more interesting. But it was suggested quite a lot of times already (since early beta, I think), yet nothing has changed so far.

[VG Purist]

Having any of the NPCs moving/shuffling about would be nice. Dead State really feels static because even if I hit on a door to make the "live" npcs move to a spot, then they will be at the same exact position days later.

[just.dont.do.it]

I think I should further clarify -- the root problem is not even "zombies are not a threat", it's "tactical gameplay is extremely repetitive and unrewarding". Every POI brings quite a lot of tactical combat, and quite a lot of this tactical combat is absolutely the same ALL the way through the game.
Whacking zombies from behind. Dividing big groups of looters into smaller ones due to their abysmal AI. Focus-firing hard targets. Each repeated ad infinitum. There's not enough tactical variety for the amount of POIs the game offers. And there's not enough other gameplay on POIs as well: you can fight there or you can loot. That's all (yes, sometimes you can also talk, but that's a very small minority of cases).

I know there were talks about "ironman mode" (single save, tougher and more perceptive zombies, etc), but that essentially won't do much with tactical combat being boring -- it will make it even more time-consuming and thus more boring.

Ironically, "special zombies", despite not fitting the game's lore, would actually address the boredom problem much better than, say, just adding difficulty, because of all the new tactical situations that these new zombies could create.
(yes, yes, I know that this idea was discarded, and I'm not really agreeing with it as well, I'm just stating that it could've helped)

[GuiJay]

Personally I think the number of zombies attracted by sound should be a lot higher, so it's not an issue of individual strength but rather that there's SO MANY OF THEM, and having a prolonged 200-DB fight with a pack of human bandits would just attract a THRONG of zombies, which becomes a threat in its own right, just because they can keep knocking you down and eating you down on the ground and there's so many of them that you can't run away if you tried to stay and fight.

Otherwise I like the fact that there's only slow "weak" zombies and that humans are more dangerous - IT JUST MAKES SENSE. Zombie strength has always been in their ridiculous numbers.

[Akumos]

In the future they can just make enemy AI use equipment and position better.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by GuiJay:

Personally I think the number of zombies attracted by sound should be a lot higher, so it's not an issue of individual strength but rather that there's SO MANY OF THEM, and having a prolonged 200-DB fight with a pack of human bandits would just attract a THRONG of zombies, which becomes a threat in its own right, just because they can keep knocking you down and eating you down on the ground and there's so many of them that you can't run away if you tried to stay and fight.

Sadly, given the current combat rules, it would still be abusable, as one could pack everyone into a room, and have their strong/melee fighter block the exit and whack everyone one-by-one without much problems.

The game's combat mechanics must see quite a lot of additions first to prevent such things. I.e. zombies freely walking / exchanging positions through other zombies, people having "stamina" and not just hitpoints, maybe some other things. Without them, even a throng of zombies is just mild (and boring) annoyance at the moment, as long as you have at least one strong melee fighter.

That is, not even considering technical aspects here, like lots of zombies slowing the game down considerably on weaker PCs, or pathfinding issues for hordes, or other things like that.

[Skaldy]

Originally posted by Drunk Zombie:

In true zombie lore zombies aren't the threat, other humans are. Zombies are meant to be more like a natural disaster. Its humans that always make trouble for other humans. This is how ds uses zombies. Only fps feel the need to make special zombies for a challenge. They should just use mutants or aliens instead and not ruin zombies

Come again, true zombie lore? Which are you reffering to? DnD zombies? As far as i remember Resident Evil was the first game which took zombie apocalypse in a large scale disaster. Then somehow industry grow larger. First of all you are very very wrong. Zombies are threat because they are dangerous in groups and they dont get fatigued or get tired so they can get you when you are most unprepared. In Dead State, which i argued about it since the begining of EA, you guys killed noise and science behind it. Also you guys killed herd and headshot rules which i can respect because we can treat this as a new angle on the zombie stuff. But i dont understand one thing, if the dead people are not a threat to us why didnt you put more of them into the game. There are seriously broken mechanics in this game because Brain wants to appeal to Cawadoody community or just fill his pockets with indie-casual community money. No other explanation i could find so far since i asked these for fricking 3 months now.

[Blackadar]

I find it interesting that this thread gets a reply but the "positive community suggestion" one doesn't.

What we see in this thread is a wide variety of wants, all of which can be accommodated with just a few selection sliders that modify the AI behavior.

- The ability to set the lethality of zombie bites. Right now they don't seem to do anything beyond basic damage. Getting bit is no different than getting a paper cut where I would like the opportunity to play the game worrying about every single bite possibly turning into a zombie infection. Depending on how infection is modeled in the game, this might be a simple slider or require a more involved programming solution.

- The ability to set zombie speed. Instead of Dawn of the Dead zombies, userscould use the slider to see how they might fare against 21 Days Later fast zombies. This is literally just a slider to add a certain amount of AP to zombies (+1, +3, +5) and should be easy to do.

- The ability to set zombie awareness. Again, this is simply a slider to add to their awareness radius (+1, +3, +5) and should be easy to do.

- The ability to set the size of zombie hordes if you make too much noise. For instance, I should be able to set up the game so that if a firefight escalates to 200 db, I should have to deal with literally 50-100 zombies (provided the game engine can handle it). This has already been tweaked by the devs and should again be an easy slider to implement.

These things would allow the user to set their own difficulty and add to the replayability of the game. At least 3 of the 4 should be quite simple to add to the game.

[just.dont.do.it]

Hopefully, you're right on "quite simple" point. Because detailed settings such as these would indeed add quite a HUGE amounts of replayability to the game (not sure if they do much with tactical combat being very repetitive, but still it would be a large positive change).