KickStarter Dead State: Reanimated

The combat is easy enough as it is. I don't understand why a turn based game should automatically have any kind of automatic push back or passive free move. Your character's chance to not "just stand there" occurs during your turn. That's how turn based combat typically works. You can initiate combat at any time and gain initiative by doing so. If anyone in your party is in a position to take a lot of damage from zombies in this game, that means you've really screwed up.

 

The game should give you automatic push back because your opponents are shuffling, brain-dead zombies who can barely stand upright. There shouldn't be a "chance" of not standing still, there should be a 100% guarantee. What human being stands still and watches a zombie shuffle from one side of the room to the other and then bite them on the neck? Even in turn based combat it makes zero sense; it's a sad joke that really goes to show why dead state sucked as hard as it did. The game was riddled with game breaking flaws, from an inane and intolerably bad combat engine, to piss poor dialogue and plot development and awful mechanics. It's the Sword Coast Legends of the indie world.

 

I liked most things besides the zombie fighting and pacing. RPG treasure hunting for toothpaste and bags of beans in Texas McMansions and Taco Bells is neat... for about 1/6th as much time as Dead State gives you to do it yes but the maps were really good. The writing in the computer files is extremely good, the character writing was OK filler aside from a few fun ones like Doug or Fiona.

There's also a lot of "hidden writing" I'd never see in a game because it would require you to fuck up really bad to see (e.g. I think there is writing where characters get Zombrosis and you kick them out of the shelter to die. Like 95% of characters are totally unsuitable to be in the looting party so how are they gonna get zombieism?). I imagine that stuff is good.

 

When my characters were within range of zombie attacks, it wasn't because they were "just standing there". It was because they were engaged with the zombie in melee combat. Turn based combat is an abstraction of events that are occurring simultaneously. While you are attacking a zombie, the zombie is attacking back. If your characters are just standing around waiting to be bit, it is your fault.

And why bother making a zombie game at all if you're going to make zombies a complete non-threat due to automatic knock backs and character movement?

 

And there's the rub: it's okay for them to get bit when they're hemmed in by multiple zombies. That's how a zombie gets a person, either by hemming them in, overwhelming them with sheer numbers, or somehow surprising them. It is totally inconceivable for a person to be bitten after watching a zombie waltz over from the far end of the room. Zombies are a threat, but not when they are alone and in plain sight. A single zombie should never be able to walk up to you and bite you, ever. It's common sense; unless you have a "suicidal" trait, the very mechanics of the game should stop it from happening. The player needs to get an automatic interrupt, or step back until he is trapped against a wall.

Turn based combat is an abstraction of events, and this game fails at that abstraction. Instead of an interrupt, or a push back, or retreat, or anything of that nature, you instead have people standing around like goons and getting bitten on the face. It's hilariously bad. The Dead State team failed at zombie vs human combat; do you realise the magnitude of that fault? A zombie game that cannot competently render zombie vs human combat is a total steaming pile of dogshit.

 

I would agree with adding such a mechanic IF successful zombie attacks had a much higher chance of resulting in infection. I agree that the "zombie biting character's face" animation is overused in the game - especially when those bites have no real consequences most of the time. Ideally, that animation should be a real "Oh shit" moment for you as a player.

It is not that I disagree with you from a realism standpoint. But from a gameplay standpoint, the zombies are too weak as it is so I don't see adding realistic mechanics that make the zombies even less threatening as a plus.

 

Turn-based combat should be a perfect simulation of real-time combat!

 

Couldnt disagree more about the combat; zombies are only dangerous in combat in big numbers which is pretty consistent with the setting, and having an auto knockback would remove pretty much their only attack threat. Their swipes dont do much to an armed chracter so it is pretty much their best bet to damage you. The game is no masterpiece but this angry rants about the game beign shit are really unfair, the combat is fine with enough strategy to be fun at the higher difficulty levels and it is a shame we wont probably see anything like it again

 

Auto push-back? What on earth kind of idea is that? Might as well remove the enemies completely and just have the corpses lying around waiting for you to loot in entire game.

If zombie can't get to you, than it can't do anything to you at all. That's not tactical combat. That's brainless slaughter.

Dead State's combat was absolutely fine. There are problems with it, but they come from the setting itself. Zombies being what they are, they need to overwhelm you with large numbers, and large number of opponents means every combat is going to either endlessly drag (TB) or get far too hectic (RTwP).

 

Consider me a heretic but i actually think in dead state, rtwp combat would have been superior. It would have been better at transfering the pressure of being swarmed by mindless limping zombies. Tactical turn based combat gives you time to think. In a zombie game, time to think should be a very rare luxury. And it would also implent the game world more properly as you would be in need to navigate more careful through the towns to avoid being pushed back into a dead end.

Also it would take a LOT of time consumption out of those countless trashmob encounters.

 

You want to see good turn-based slow-zombie combat but can't accept the idea of auto push back? Get battle brothers. Wow. So good.


There are ways of doing good turn based combat with zombies. Dead State shat the bed, though. Doktor is right, RTWP would have been a better choice given what we got.

 

The 7.62mm style RTwP it would need would be just as tedious as TB with decently filmic numbers of zombies and as much fighting as the game had with an emphasis on quasi-stealth. Only DAOish "let my AI party members automatically mow down MMO spawns" RTwP could handle that much map lawnmowing of zombies, and that's incompatible with a level of horror tension where a single zombie can theoretically kill or infect someone.

 

Yeah, but here's a thing. Zombies are not supposed to be the biggest danger in a game like this. People are.

I definitely would love if they were able to capture the terror of being swarmed by pack of zombies. But, I'm not sure if its possible to pull it off, without making zombies the biggest threat in the process. And if you do that, the entire Dead State's theme gets its head cut off. Its supposed to be game about how survivors behave in an apocalypse, how much of their humanity they give up to survive, and so on and so on, you get the idea.

If you're more worried about the zombies than about other survivor, the whole game becomes pointless.

 

It's also a genuine advantage of an 'evil manipulator' playthrough. Mia and her sister present a problem - the sister is useful bordering on critical, being the only one other than the player who can make apocalypse armour, and probably the NPC you're relying on for antibiotic production and other high-science needs. Mia is not only useless, but becomes actively damaging once her plot arc starts. A goody-two-shoes player just has to wait that shit out and wear the loss from having Mia in the shelter...Grant presents a neat alternate option for less moralistic players

 

There are some nice moments that react to you taking useless characters out into the field, e.g.

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

the preacher having a meltdown if he get injured enough to panic in the field. He begs you not to send him back out of the shelter ever again, and you can then blackmail him for his support in crisis events.

 

Not necessarily; just larger than your party. Sure in an open environment, it's kind of necessary to have a large block of Zombies to make it threatening. But it doesn't have to be the case in a storeroom, for example. In that situation, you just need enough to block off exits and make it a challenge to kill all of them or find a way out.

 

You're right, but then, DS storeroom fights were ok, no?

Its only when I managed to aggro the whole parking lot or whatever, when I went "oh God, not this shit again".

 

Modern Disease-Zombies are a shit tier monster from the get-go. Because they're essentially humans without tools or intelligence. Or, basically shit.

Should the dev attempt to give players any kind of control over the characters whatsoever, then the players'll immediately put on human-teeth-proof armor, grab a weapon, and go to town all over the zombie threat. Easier than killing kobolds. Pretty much the equivalent of whacking rats. The only threat zombies ever represented was their mass psychosis. Go to sleep one day, and wake up the next and all your friends are suddenly pod people communists zombies. The tension lies in the hopelessness of the situation, the inevitability of your own conversion. But that very concept goes against everything the modern game stands for.

Okay, one potentially could make a good zombie survival RPG, but it would be working heavily against the grain of what the zombie threat represents. Rather instead, one could far better and far more easily make a good RPG by making the player the zombie and having him go out to eat human brains. That's a much more suitable tale for an RPG.

 

Agreed. Unlimited potential for roleplaying right there.

Dialogue option 1: Eat Brains!
Dialogue option 2: Eat Brains!
Dialogue option 3: Eat Brains!

Someone needs to do this just so I can read Metacritic comments.

 

"0/10 Game has too many dialogue options. My brain hurts"

 

"I tried to romance but all I could do was eat brains. 0/10"

 

That is a great movie.