KickStarter Dead State: Reanimated

I wouldn't call it an awful demo, you can pretty much play that and call it a day. Very 90s shareware.

 

Agreed, there are far too many days in the game. Still the game does something right for me at least since i still play it regularly. Im in my new ironman-pc infected-hardcore pt now.

Combat isnt great but apparently entertaining enough for me. And in hardcore mode things are a bit more difficult, well at least from day 1 to 15 (ish) when morale is hard to control, plus your guys -even though your team is positioned 'perfect'- will occasionally take damage from undead (they aggro quickly and in at least 2 fights critted for 70+ damage). If you still have a small shelter crew (and no infirmary) this can become an issue. On day 25 my team assaulted the military outpost on the western edge of the map (only workshop weapon : silenced 9mm, mostly used on undead). Used 20 bandages and 3 adrenaline shots on this trip. So this is still fun, since you are not completely overpowered yet. The scene after a nasty grenade + assault rifle combo by the military:

 

Finally getting my Splendid Box: Deluxe Edition!!

 

Sheesh, if it wasn't for the physical rewards they could be 6 months into their next RPG dev cycle already.

No offense mindx2

 

I thought they gave up RPGs? Or was that just a comment on how 'meh' the game did, and not their plans for the future?

 

Something to the effect that doing RPGs is punishing and unrewarding, particularly so if you're not doing schlock fantasy. Yes, it did sound like they were abandoning RPGs. But as long as I'm dreaming, why not dream big?

 

Fair enough. A pinch of optimism wouldn't hurt anybody. Unless you go full-on delusional and get mentally scarred from the pain of dealing with reality.

But, yeah, optimism is coo' bruh.

 

So, I have been playing a lot of Dead State in the last few days after solving a technical issue I've had with it before which kept me from playing.

I am liking it well enough so far but I think I have come to a rough spot or rather drove myself into a downward sprial through a bunch of bad decisions and blunders.

I am currently on Day 20 and pretty well stocked on food, fuel and stuff. I just built the garage and found some horses and got okay gear so I'd be all set, however, my guys in the shelter are getting pretty unhappy with me. For one thing the generator broke and I initially just missed repairing it (I know, major fuck up). Meanwhile, I got pretty paranoid about my food supply cause there are more and more people in my shelter and I wasn't sure I could keep them all fed, so I told Davis to limit rations for everybody. That gave me a pretty big hit on morale and led to a crisis in which some kind of douchbag priest I let into the shelter and has influence over almost everybody there wanted me to actually hold a feast. I told him to GTFO but ever since almost everybody in my shelter is super unhappy. Taking big hits to morale every day. I have been giving out several little gifts but its not helping and I am not sure what to do.

What happens if morale in the shelter gets too low? People leaving? How can I make these people happy again? Cause giving them gifts isn't working or at least not to a degree that it could save my ass at this point. Any suggestions?

 

If they make a version where they rip out all the content they stole from The Walking Dead maybe I will consider it. Otherwise, fuck Dead State and the people who made it.

 

The gifts should help but if they are 'disgruntled' or whatever the term is it will probably take quite a few gifts. The 'morale is plummetting, lets have a party' crisis event was a good opportunity to get a morale boost btw, but you already had that presumably. And Todd is a dipshit but he actually creates a morale bonus by just being present (and doing nada but consuming resources since he has no skills). You could kill him or leave him for the undead somewhere. Probably not good for shelter morale so not really an option right now. Also a rec room can help i guess, just put your guys on the recreation "job". Plus of course getting lots of luxuries.

Missed opportunity btw, its not really an option to play an evil shelter lord , you are forced to play nice most of the time.

 

Keep playing; there is a low morale ending. I won't spoil it, but suffice to say the game doesn't devolve into an impossible spiral where you can't do anything. Fuck up bad enough and you get the dignity of a game over at least!

Of course, I hope you can fight your way out of it

As for suggestions, other than gift giving and PhantasmaNL's other advice, I'd recommend getting all the xp you can and pumping social skills; there are some Perks that give really nice morale bonuses. Not sure if it will be enough but it might help. Solving anagrams to unlock story content is a nice source of xp that's easy to neglect.

 

The little disks you find give you XP when you crack the code?

Yeah, I'll definitely keep playing and try to turn things around. Will report back in how it went in a few days most likely.

 

Yep! It's not a substantial amount unless you decode a lot of them, but there are a lot of them and it adds up.

 

I guess I was more bored that I thought because I ended up finishing after having to restart. I just rested every day right as they started for the last 10 days or so just because I had such a stockpile of goods and there was no places left to loot.

It was a fun game. Some complaints but definitely worth playing. Although maybe not finishing because the ending is lacklustre and there isn't much to do at a certain point.

 

Alright, I tried to turn things around, gifted everybody as many items as I could find and after building the recycler I was able to quickly build a ton of upgrades. Stocked up on food and fuel without end, with a thick fence and a watchtower and my very own garden which produced regular fresh food, I could afford to send most of my people to relax all day in our brand new relaxation center. Just when I prepared to take on the Coyotes and saw morale slowly climbing up again..

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..I got shot in the head by Davis. I guess my crew will now enjoy all the wonderful luxuries and security I gave them without me.. Fuck these assholes, everything was going so well.

I guess I am alright with that. I hear the game gets kinda boring somewhere between 30-50 days and I can understand why, combat isn't really fun and the stuff to explore becomes a bit samey after a while so maybe I should be glad it ended before it got lame? Up until now however, I had quite a bit of fun with the game. Since I fucked up early things got quite tense, with me constantly being under a lot of pressure to find good stuff, so that looting became kinda addictive and getting the statistics at the end of every day a nice motivation. Also, as I did not get too far into the game, there were always interesting events happening to deal with each new day:

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I enjoyed all these little stories around the people in the shelter, like Vic trying to find other policemen but they all gone rogue; the couple with the pregnant woman thinking about abortion; Anita reacting crazy mad that I got her daughter infected despite her asking me not to take her on scavenging parties and so on..

So I got my fair share of entertainment out of this. Shame it got cut off prematurely but on the other hand I don't see myself playing this until day 80 or even restarting anytime soon for that matter.

I guess I will have to accept my game over. So.. would anyone be so kind and tell me how everything ends? Any cool story I missed out on?

 

Did the Austin levels as soon as possible (around day 30, first went to the old army base for some goodies). On hardcore these fights were fairly interesting, some of these mercenaries had no trouble eating 3 combat shotgun blasts from close range and then doing a grenade - assault rifle combo in their turn. Even in decent gear they can hurt you badly (about 40 to 60 per normal ranged hit, advanced tac vest was the highest tier we had, from the old army base). Most trouble (still) was with the map. In one battle i was confined to 4 squares behind a door at the stairs, some mercenaries occupied 4 squares right after the door, so nowhere to move and fighting consisted of switching places and doing 1 attack. Also we were apparently a pretty attractive grenade target. I think i read somewhere they changed some of the maps there (or the transitions) i just cant remember what exactly. And the reanimated versions still has problems with the stairs and doors . The actual boss fight in Austin was much easier than those fights on the stairs.

 

Got this a couple of months ago in a Gog sale and decided to try out in my new laptop to see if it would run abd so far it is fun, the colors are a bit too drab and the item management between party members is frustrating but all in all it is damn decent and very Walking Dead vibe. Like the fact that the infection here can be treated and very recommendle for survival horror fans

 

Finally finished the game yesterday in honor of AoD. I really liked the early gameplay with the limited amount of survivors and tight resource management (at least on the hardest difficulty), but eventually all the fun got swallowed up by a mass of bloat. 43 survivors, most of them just standing around all day with no job, 6300 shelter morale, 3000 rations, over a thousand gallons of fuel, enough antibiotics to last me three years, and hundreds of luxury items I had to manually distribute to battle the constant mood drain. After day 50, I just went fishing every day. The cherry on top was when the regular survivor conversations stopped occurring around day 70 or so, because I'd simply run out of all content except for the finale. At that point I just went straight to bed every morning until I could trigger the ending and suffered no ill effects.

Did the devs ever do a post-mortem to explain why this massively screwed up pacing has persisted throughout all the patches and the Reanimated edition? Some of the endings might not be possible if you choose them on day 30, but the "let's get on a bus and drive the hell out of here" ending becomes eminently plausible right after the first few weeks.

 

I'm in the same boat, day 54 I think and I have nothing else to do. I think I'll just do what you did and sleep every day until the ending triggers. Which Day is that?

 

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I imagine they feel so relieved that they can finally put this behind them forever and move on to a nice, small scope Indie thing.

 

Might as well use your proven superior sleuthing skill and tell us about what they are working on now.

 

Still need to pick this one up at some point. I was looking forward to this when It was announced but didn't back it at the time as I missed the kick starter for some weird reason.