Can someone explain the plot to me

[Amorphis]

I dont mean to sound mean the game is great so far I love the gameplay but the story is...not good. Everyone talks goofy and John Hammond is running the place. I am going to be talking about the story from what iv seen so far here so expect spoilers.

So your some dude who is immune and gets rescued by a shelter of survivors. Great im on board with that. Dont much like that its another zombie game where the main character is immune but its fine. Almost everyone in the shelter is old. I assume I am in some rich old folks home. First order of business go save the missing Sheriff. Hes dead. Been killed by local bandits. Report back. Get told to kill the bandits at their hideout. Wait...the bandits live literally right next door to the sheriff? Their house is all raider looking and everything and the sheriff thought itd be a good idea to go to his house by himself to work on a car? Okay whatever maybe the raiders just moved in their recently. Kill baddies, report back. Get told to find some old dude and to check the local factions. Back to the same map with the sheriff and he has a cult of zombie worshippers also living right next door...ooookay. Doubt he was a very good sheriff if he was dumb enough to let raiders and zombie cultists just live right next to him.

Talk to cultist. Says they have some ritual to talk to the zombies. Watch as young man gets into cage with zombies and immediately get torn apart...okay then. Well the cultists are friendly enough to me what do I care if they want to feed the zombies with themselves. But honestly I should have just started blasting them. Im amazed the characters were not more shocked by seeing 3 dudes get eaten alive infront of them because of some ritual.

Meet the army dudes. They were fine they just play some game to sneak into the QZ and steal zombie teeth as fun. Somehow its framed as shocking because one dude is spooked by this but noone is being forced into doing it and the soldiers get benefits if they get some gold teeth. Days off and stuff. They seem chill. Sneak past zombies, find the old dude tell him to get back to the shelter all is well.

Bikers. Eh they are your typical drug dealing biker gang. All of em are friendly. One of them seems to be a bit dopey but hey they let me wander around. Dopey tells me to kill some drunk guys. I already killed them by then because some cowboy dudes just started blasting at me with sawn offs before I went to the biker camp.

Back at shelter and we tune in to the military radio to see if the zombie horde that I already told them is coming is actually coming. Shocker its coming. Emergency meeting. Which faction do we want to help us beat back this zombie horde. Obvious choice to me. The army! Okay cool lets get the army dudes to help us. In the meantime lets completely screw over the other factions operations and just openly attack them....wait what?

At this point I just stopped playing. I couldnt entertain this anymore. I have no idea why your shelter would just decide to attack the other factions who have done them no wrong just because I wanted to side with the army dudes. The other factions dont even seem to hate eachother that much they just think the other factions are dumb. They arent openly attacking eachother so its not like im choosing a side in some faction war

I just need the writing to be better. I need some clarification on why these decisions are being made. Just a bit more context or something because it honestly feels out of nowhere to me. are these other factions at war? I dont remember it being mentioned. The army dudes want to sit in their base and wait for orders. Bikers want to deal hooch and drugs. Cultists want to be left alone to their rituals. Why are we deciding to openly attack them?The game itself is actually awesome. I love the combat, the stealth, the crafting and building up your shelter. Where this game falls apart is the story and the dialog. I played the hell out of dead state and I loved that games story and writing. It wasnt perfect but it never annoyed me. This games story is annoying me.

[USG_Omucupixu]

Thank you for the feedback.

Points noted. If you have any suggestion how we can make the factions more credible, we'd be glad to hear your ideas. But the underlying strategic layer requires two things:

1. Only one (or none) of the factions must remain in the suburbs
2. The player needs to be the one who initiates their departure

Looking forward to hearing your suggestions.

[Amorphis]

Its not so much about making the factions credible. I get their beliefs and what they are about. I am just very lost on why we end up deciding to fight them.

[USG_Omucupixu]

Mayor explains it somewhere (if that text is lost, sorry, the RPG went through a hundred edits - base NPCs still don't have their backstory dialogue setup):

When the first horde forced them to barricade in, they allowed everyone to join. Then food got scarce, and this led to a riot that almost wiped them. Hence now they are locked in and paranoid.

What we have now in the suburbs is some sort of fragile peace. The news of a new horde and a new siege brings back ugly memories so the Shelter residents won't take the risk of getting factions that hate each other inside the walls - only for another riot/war to break out.

Maybe killing the moonshiners is a bit too brutal, but previously we had a mission where you only had to sabotage their booze truck. And it felt too easy.

The other two factions LEAVE ON THEIR OWN if you destroy their respective zombies so we looked to mirror the experience irrespective of your path. Except for the moonshiner part, which might be a stretch, the residents don't encourage any direct aggression

[Eight-Six]

Ok, but why would freeing up the military by covertly killing all the zombies keeping them in position cause them to vote for war on you? Shouldn't there be an avenue where freeing up military resources is seen as a benefit by them? If some amnesiac showed up and solved a problem for me I wouldn't suddenly be on board with killing a bunch of senior citizens. Also tying upgrades to this system seems very odd.

[USG_Omucupixu]

Good point with the army, maybe we can define it better. It does sound odd for them to be pissed cause you gave them a free ride home. We'll think of something better.

But you can't have 2 friendly factions, or the whole math won't work.

[Eight-Six]

Maybe add in radio chatter that the bikers hit their convoy on the way back to the shelter, then it at least narratively makes sense why siding with the bikers would piss them off. Or maybe an encounter where you find the remnants of such an ambush.

[USG_Omucupixu]

Yep, the radio chatter can be easily changed to something plausible.

[Jivebot]

Okay, firstly...i'm not doing the spoiler crap. The whole subject...as made plain in it's title...is about the plot. To anyone who enters a plot discussion and expects to be given spoiler tags, I say the following: you are the most wretched refuse of the human species and unfit to share my oxygen, let alone be given the grace of a spoiler tag. Do better.

Just do better.

Ahem...anyway. I'll speak up in defense of Sheriff Rodgers a bit here.

This is a small, rural town. It's likely that the Sheriff knew those boys from before the apocalypse and thought he knew how far they were willing to go, and thought he could handle them in the "unlikely" event they did prove willing to go further than he anticipated.

And for most of his life, he was probably right on both counts.

He just made two crucial mistakes: He underestimated how far they would go, and he over-estimated his own ability: A mistake common among hard men who fail to realize that age is slowly softening them up.

Also I don't think he was still living in that house day-to-day. He was in the main base, but still heading up to his old house to work on his old car, blinded to the dangers present by a mixture of over-confidence and over-familiarity. He probably still thought of the brothers as the same petty, two-bit, but ultimately harmless punks they used to be.

Another trap many people fall into as they grow older. Failure to recognize how much things around them are changing until the fangs of those changes are closing around their throat.

The rest of your complaints are fair though. I also am not seeing the point of picking fights with the other factions. Especially when there isn't even any open hostility between them. At least not to a noticeable degree.

The coming horde seems like a perfect reason to get the factions to unite, at least temporarily. And I very much hope that will be an option in the future.

[Eight-Six]

My concern is it's never made explicit you have to pick a faction way the hell at the beginning to side with, so I approached the beginning from a least harm perspective. Killing zombies? Actively helpful. Clearing an AO and sweeping for survivors? Same. Blowing up a bunch of dudes who just wanna get crunk on their lawn? Yeh that seems pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ for somebody cosplaying as law enforcement. So I think it's a consequence of starting at the ending (you can only ally with one faction) and working backwards by pitting them against each other in ways and for reasons that don't really make sense.

[RMP]

It could be as simple as tacking onto each faction some sort of VERY nasty secret or horrible trait past or present (Cannibalism, Slavery, etc), or maybe an awful thing they chose to do that allowed them to survive that would make eliminating them much more justifiable. Any group a couple years into this would've had to make some very harsh moral choices at certain points just to still be around. Maybe it could then be left to the player to decide what could be lived with as far as allies moving forward....could you deal with a group that ate their own to survive during a rough patch....could you deal with a group that sold some of their women or children to another group for life saving supplies. Something like that perhaps.
It could also help in the way of world building lore and back history of the immediate area as well, every group and survivor would have a history making it to this point after all.

[Jivebot]

Yeah if I have to wipe these factions out, gimme SOMETHING to dislike about each of them.

The Bikers are gruff, but amicable.

The Cultists are weird, but amicable.

The Military is just...amicable.

You could make it so that the Bikers are aggressively raiding/intimidating/murdering other factions. Or getting survivors addicted to drugs they brew up in some meth lab they're running somewhere. Or both. A bit cliche for a Biker Gang, but Biker Gangs are rather cliche by definition.

Maybe the cultists are sacrificing people to the zombies against their will. Or secretly planning to do some jonestown crap where they all intentionally infect themselves and try to infect the others. Though honestly, i'm so tired of seeing religious people ALWAYS portrayed as evil villains, you could pull off the most hilarious subversion by making them the most chill, cool, harmless group of weirdos in the apocalypse and i'd get a kick out of it.

Maybe make it so the Military is outright enslaving people under the guise of "Capturing troublemakers" and then "putting them to work". You could even easily see how it could have started out innocently enough. They had a bunch of genuine criminals on their hand. They didn't want to execute them now that there's so few living humans left. But they can't afford to just keep a bunch of useless mouths around either. So they forced them into a Press Gang. And it proved so helpful they started "rescuing other survivors" and "catching other torublemakers" and forcing them into dangerous, high risk work too.

Those are just a few ideas. It doesn't need to be Shakespearean. It just needs to make sense and work within the established setting.

[JoshuaAstray]

Got the same feeling about the plot and find this thread.
My suggestion is instead of wiping out two factions without good reason, set some emergency scenarios in every faction, and they expect MC to resolve it for them or they cannot hold current status. Yet the solution item/time/resource only allows MC pick one faction and solve their problem, leaving the other two disbanded/moved.

[BlackHawk0169]

Started playing Urban Strife cause its the closest thing I could find that would scratch the itch of missing Last Stand: Deadzone. Wanted to look at what others had to say about the plot as it is a little odd, but I fully understand why.

You're the last line of law and order, and the only thing you wanna do is provide safety and security to Urban. You are stuck in a hard spot with aligning yourself with the big 3 factions the game no matter how awful, and self centered they are. The blueprints you receive aren't just blueprints, but also the resources necessary and a helping hand setting them up or the now very rare ingredients they have in stock, given to you as a sign of respect for your deeds, since a lot of common items will become very scarce in a post-apocalypse setting or least known by others for the location of those items. It's unfortunate that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place for choices on who to Ally with, but if you do not, there's a large possibility of the Shelter not surviving a second horde. The reasoning behind each faction voting to war with you and the faction you choose could be seen as petty for the end of the world, but there's not much else holding them back from complete control of a town, its resources, and its people but you and the choices you make on helping what faction complete their tasks.

There are only a few things I have to say about the game and the first is that unfortunately doesn't fully hit the spot that Last stand: Deadzone left in my heart. I understand that it's still in early access so I am truly hoping then when it comes together in the end, there will be a lot more to enjoy from this game.

The second is mainly for the players, but one large thing I've encountered is that you're really walking a very thin line with these factions and have to follow the story or what some NPCs say pretty closely to get a grasp on what to do next, for one small step off that line or into territory they control could lead to war. Even if it seems like you're helping, it's showing incompetence and recklessness towards them.

The third would be only a suggestion to make things a bit more "realistic." To have a soft lock on certain blueprinted items or something. Make it so it either costs a bunch more materials such as 100 to 200 or whatever you see fit to unlock an idea of an inferior version of the real blueprint. Or make it that you could go out into the expanding town and find the "blueprint" that you want in random areas, specific stores, behind doors you have to break down, find keys, or fight large and epic battles to get to. Not just lock them behind faction favor to never be able to get cause you don't want to be sheriffs affiliated with tyranny.

Otherwise I definitely do enjoy the game for how early it is and hope yall keep up the great work with THE tactical zombie game!

[Keluric]

Why not have 1 faction ally with you and the others can be neutral, but the allies work together to defend against the horde and the neutrals either get wiped out into zombies or leave to consolidate a big base which is then a threat elsewhere for you.