Recent reviews by drade

Hello everyone! Thank you for taking the time to look at my review. My review is going to be covering different issues currently present and a means to fix said issues. The topics covered will be labeled as followed-

1. The Hud
   
2. Chat
   
3. Coop
   
4. Quests
   
5. Combat
   
6. The Infected
   
7. Looting

The hud system needs to give a better sense of direction to where you're going while seamlessly providing necessary information.

First, I feel that once you enter a floor or room, the room name and floor should be displayed as it does when you initially enter a zone or building. Also, providing the general location of keys and quest item locations would eliminate time-consuming bottom to top building searching. Atm, you need to memorize the vast corridors you explore so that you don't double check an area(refer to "Infected" for my recommended implementation). Next, within safe zones such as the starting area police department, I feel that NPC locations should be labeled. But outside of safe zones, within a building for example, an excellent way to indicate the presence of an NPC would be an auditory "help!" or something along those lines. This is because NPCs are sometimes located in buildings where it's hard to find them. For example, there is a character that offers a quest for a burn kit in Princess Hotel that is on this building's second floor. I stumbled upon her searching for keys to a door but would have never found her if this building wasn't the location of another quest. Seeing this is the case, I checked every other building within that zone to see if there were other NPC's hidden within them. Lone behold, I now had 3 additional quests from different NPCs I would never have known were there! Too much time is wasted finding keys and quest items alongside locating NPCs within buildings.


Chat is virtually useless.

Currently, chat can only be used to communicate with people in your instance. I believe there should be a global, server, instance, whisper, and in the future party and clan chat. Subchats for trading, clan recruiting, etc. should also be introduced in the future. Right now it feels like I'm playing an old singleplayer game that just introduced multiplayer. This is a massively multiplayer online game, right? Everyone should be able to communicate and play together smoothly and efficiently. It feels like a singleplayer game because although I see the four people in my instance every now and again, this is all there is to communication and teamwork. I believe that the chatbox should work similar to World of Warcraft's chat system where everybody can communicate about anything and everything divided into their own discussion tabs. We want to speak to each other and work together. Make it easy for us to.


Implement player hosted sessions and the ability to follow someone like in Dead frontier 1.

I disconnect and reconnect from the servers frequently atm, making cooperative play laggy and inefficient. I expect server complications to arise as we are still in beta, so I'm not too worried about that right now. However, the possibility of privately hosted sessions would eliminate this issue inevitably since the connection can be based on a peer-to-peer or host-based connection. The next topic then- guaranteeing the same session as another player. Making use of the follow system like in DF1 would make everything so simple. Being able to stay within the same session as another player without complication needs to be efficient and straightforward.


Have quests reward you based on difficulty and have variation in the type of rewards given.

I think that rewarding something else alongside XP can be much more satisfying than simply cash. A lot of other games do this, and it prompts quest completion in return for something much more valuable than money. These rewards don't have to be items or experience at all. They can be permission to enter a specific zone granting better quests or a key that opens the door to a room which holds a unique item. Quests are far too linear atm which makes my drive to do them more of a grind than a quest at all. Provide more variation in quests to give that sense of fulfillment and achievement that is missing atm.


Make melee more flexible and rewarding while tweaking the critical hit system.

First, the melee animation is clunky and requires a technique to be considered safe. To safely melee zeds without getting hit and return, you must immediately turn after hitting an infected, gaining distance with the stepping motion of the animation. A way to change this mechanic while keeping combat engaging and interesting is to implement a new melee system alongside different infected attacks. The new melee system can be introduced as follows: Use a combat system such as For Honor's where an attack can be launched from any direction with varying speed and power. A simple tweak with the current melee system would make it so that left-click (more powerful but slower) attacks or right-click (faster but weaker) attacks can be launched from varying directions. After the left or right click input activates, the mouse is moved left, right, forward or backward which triggers an attack animation. These animations have their own range, power, and speed which have different effects on the infected. The animations can also be dependent on weapon type. This would make melee combat much more engaging and exciting. What about the infected though? The different infected also have different attack animations with varying range and damage. So certain attacks used on the infected will put you in a dangerous spot if the infected activate an attack with enough range or speed. This altogether would give combat a learning curve rather than left or right clicking and spinning in a circle. Give combat a sense of danger, skill, and variation.


Give each infected type a unique look and sound that can be identified.

For example: let's take infected that vomit on you and do damage. If the vomit does damage, then that signifies that it's acidic correct? If the vomit is acidic, then it's safe to say that the infecteds' throat and vocal cords are damaged or destroyed. Give this infected type a burned hole in the throat and the sound of gargling of some sort. This will make the infected encounter unique and identifiable visually, and audibly. Another example: infected that carry worms which are able to attack you. Visually, give that infected type a bloated stomach to show they are carrying these pesky little enemies. Alongside visual and sound cues, each infected has their own kind of attacks with varying range, damage, speed and effects as stated in the combat section. Following this, the infected should hold the keys to doors rather than them being looted. It takes an extreme amount of time to loot every last room of a multi-floor building to find each key. A solution to this would be to give the infected the keys and make them visible on the model. Each key would be shiny on the hip of the infected carrying it making it easy to spot. Make each infected type identifiable visually and audibly by providing each of them a unique look, sound, and set of attacks while allowing them to carry keys.


Make looting exciting and diverse.

At the moment, it feels as though looting is done only to fulfill a need or to obtain quest items or door keys. There is no excitement and subjectively no purpose. The loot table is currently much too simple, and the drop locations need to be tweaked in two different ways. Firstly, let's talk about how the loot table is too simple. There just aren't enough items to create a diverse and healthy marketplace alongside looting interest. Tweaking this would fix the current absurd market prices for the few list

Hmm... Where do I start... Man, a loot buff! That's cool! Other than the fact after looting for 5 hours and getting all the gear some freshspawn spawns in, charges to you and starts punching you to death. You think you can fight back? Lol, you can try considering punching does more damage than any melee weapon in the game. You're gonna shoot him/her with your ranged weapon? You can try, considering the fact the Ar-15 is the rarest gun in the game, being the best ranged weapon and any other ranged weapon is so hard to hit a person at any range. Anyone charging at you can't hit because of the terrible, laggy net-coding. Was fun the first 5 minutes when you could flick people-off. If you're gonna do anything, wait for this game to come out of alpha which Sony said the game would be released for free. Don't get scammed by this please. I'd give it a 4/10 for being in developement for like 3 years and still the game is quite garbage.