Dr Tomo
Learned
Welcome to the the VG industry standard modus operandi for PC titles, game unfinished? Patch it in later. Shouldn't be a surprise that it is a pc port.
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State of Decay
- Thread starter Monk
- Start date
Welcome to the the VG industry standard modus operandi for PC titles, game unfinished? Patch it in later. Shouldn't be a surprise that it is a pc port.
I hope this isn't still true, because this is a really solid single player experience that could prove to make a much better game if they developed a better story and presentation.
I've had a lot of fun with the game so far, but it does need a lot of improvement to make a proper PC game.
My only other problem is that other human survivors don't pose any danger at all. I mean you can expect a lot of people to be friendly and willing to cooperate, but so far the Wilkersons are the only predators in the post-apocalypse and I beat the game before their storyline even got to the point where I could fight them, if ever.
Topher
Cipher
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2007
- Messages
- 1,860
Since I'm playing through the game right now, PC version, I'll toss in a few comments.
First, I have been enjoying the game. Survivor perma-death is a great addition and I enjoy sneaking across town, ducking in and out of houses, hiding from hordes; even if hiding from zombies is unbelievably easy. I also really like bashing down locked doors, which is quite noisy, and searching for supplies, which is the bulk of the gameplay.
Loud noises attract nearby zombies, which is a standout feature and well implemented; as zombies will, once attracted, continue towards the noises origin long after it has stopped. For instance, driving a car around town will have zombies shambling towards you and you'll often find your parked car later surrounded by quite a few zombies as they've continued to track the engines noise, to the now silent car, from all across the countryside. Louder noises, such as an unsilenced rifle shot, will pull zombies out from nearby buildings and a single gunshot will echo through several blocks, drawing in all those zombies.
However, since every review heaps nothing but praise on this game, I'd like to point out it's two glaring flaws. First, the autosave feature. This is a PC game, let me manage my own damn save files, especially since it's easy to glitch over a ladder and fall to your death when all you wanted to do was climb down. Long and short of this issue, is keep a manual back-up, it's easy to do and you can alt-tab to swap saves while still in the main menu.
Second is the abhorrent persistent world mechanic; it's shit. Essentially the world keeps trucking along while you're not playing; I assume for one of the many reasons adults can't guarantee their time to play for several hours every single day. It's an antagonistic feature that the player is forced to manage and all it really boils down to are the NPC survivors eating all the food and generally pissing everything up while you're away for the weekend at a work conference. Thankfully it doesn't cripple the game but it's frustrating to leave the game with 25 food, or supplies, or medicine, in store only to come back a two days later only to have zero food, suffering low moral and exhausted survivors. Shit feature, period.
First, I have been enjoying the game. Survivor perma-death is a great addition and I enjoy sneaking across town, ducking in and out of houses, hiding from hordes; even if hiding from zombies is unbelievably easy. I also really like bashing down locked doors, which is quite noisy, and searching for supplies, which is the bulk of the gameplay.
Loud noises attract nearby zombies, which is a standout feature and well implemented; as zombies will, once attracted, continue towards the noises origin long after it has stopped. For instance, driving a car around town will have zombies shambling towards you and you'll often find your parked car later surrounded by quite a few zombies as they've continued to track the engines noise, to the now silent car, from all across the countryside. Louder noises, such as an unsilenced rifle shot, will pull zombies out from nearby buildings and a single gunshot will echo through several blocks, drawing in all those zombies.
However, since every review heaps nothing but praise on this game, I'd like to point out it's two glaring flaws. First, the autosave feature. This is a PC game, let me manage my own damn save files, especially since it's easy to glitch over a ladder and fall to your death when all you wanted to do was climb down. Long and short of this issue, is keep a manual back-up, it's easy to do and you can alt-tab to swap saves while still in the main menu.
Second is the abhorrent persistent world mechanic; it's shit. Essentially the world keeps trucking along while you're not playing; I assume for one of the many reasons adults can't guarantee their time to play for several hours every single day. It's an antagonistic feature that the player is forced to manage and all it really boils down to are the NPC survivors eating all the food and generally pissing everything up while you're away for the weekend at a work conference. Thankfully it doesn't cripple the game but it's frustrating to leave the game with 25 food, or supplies, or medicine, in store only to come back a two days later only to have zero food, suffering low moral and exhausted survivors. Shit feature, period.
bonescraper
Guest
1. You can't fall to your death in this game. Worst case scenario - you're miraculously "rescued" and return to your home base injured. It's another story if you fall down near a pack of zombies...
2. Presistent world is fine. Fuck casuals and their social life.
2. Presistent world is fine. Fuck casuals and their social life.
bonescraper
Guest
They do scavange.
Topher
Cipher
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2007
- Messages
- 1,860
It's nice to note that you can't die from a fall; I've ended up near death after a fall on more than one occasion, which has gotten me killed, and it's frustrating to suffer from what is only a small issue blown out of proportion by the the awful save system. Oh well, again, it's easily mitigated by manuel back-up's.
True and it's nice to find a new weapon or extra supplies when I log back on but it's an exception to the rule, at least in my experience, and i'd still rather have the 25 units of food I left them with instead of the measly 5 they managed to scavenge up while I was away.
Silva
Arcane
All this craptalking about the game is only making me more excited to try it.
Try harder, bros.
Try harder, bros.
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2013
- Messages
- 1,246
I haven't played it since it came out back in the summer, but just try the demo and leave it at that. The game is front-loaded as fuck, meaning most of the game (anything outside of the demo's time limit, in my experience) is just scavenging to get new supplies to build more useless shit while occasionally doing a story mission with horrible dialogue and characters.
Imagine grinding in an mmo for like 15 hours with some useless throwaway text from NPCs occasionally. That's State of Decay, just replace grinding for experience with getting supplies. There's some superficial leveling system for your boring team of survivors with no personality that doesn't amount to anything.
The point is to not buy the game.
bonescraper
Guest
I hope you didn't play Don't Starve then. It's pretty simmilar but without any missions, narrative, story or NPCs.
Or... maybe you just don't get the idea behind survival oriented games
Or... maybe you just don't get the idea behind survival oriented games
bonescraper
Guest
I finished the game, and left the remaining people on my last save without a medical tent. After 3 days they're still doing fine getting ammo, meds and food for themselves... Too fucking bad, i wanted at least one to catch black fever 
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2013
- Messages
- 1,246
I don't have a problem with resource-management games - the idea of surviving in a world infested with zombies is what drew to me to the game. The problem is that the actual act of gathering and managing resources is so repetitive and monotonous that it would have Adam Smith calling for state intervention to save me from becoming a creature as stupid and ignorant as is possible for a human to be. Hence why I compared it to grinding in an MMO.
Clockwork Knight
Arcane
Hmm...maybe the problem is that it's too easy to amass resources? Repetitiveness wouldn't be much of an issue if it was difficult to hoard shit so you couldn't do it on automatic pilot.
Dr Tomo
Learned
Is this game modable? If not is it worth full price?
Metro
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2009
- Messages
- 27,792
I hope you didn't play Don't Starve then. It's pretty simmilar but without any missions, narrative, story or NPCs.
Or... maybe you just don't get the idea behind survival oriented games
I played Don't Starve. Good proof-of-concept but shit as a game.
Your community is pretty ravenous whenever you're away depending on what kind of resource outposts you've set up. I'm constantly lacking construction materials for upgrades for instance because somebody keeps fucking up repairs and I lose 10 at a time from random events. Ignoring random missions also carries a danger of having valuable community members dying, so you can't totally ignore them.
Metro
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2009
- Messages
- 27,792
No on both counts. It still isn't even optimized for PC.
toro
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2009
- Messages
- 14,133
New patch is out.
Most of the changes aren't that impressive, but they threw in keybindings, allowed you to move the camera during cutscenes, and the framerate has been vastly improved. There's also DLC already. =/
http://undeadlabs.com/2013/11/news/state-of-decay-breakdown-coming-november-29th/
Notes for the pre-DLC patch aren't out yet.
Edit: New DLC Q&A
GAMEPLAY
Will players be able to skip the beginning stage and jump into a more difficult start?
Once you unlock a level, you can start subsequent playthroughs at that level. So if you unlock up to Four, you can start new Breakdown games at levels One, Two, Three, or Four.
Once a Hero is unlocked, I can choose to start with that Hero in a new game (and even if I don’t choose, he never needs to be unlocked again, and he’ll always be someone I might just run into randomly in one level or another)(see, I read the design articles). What else if anything can I bring from one playthrough of Breakdown to another?
Just the Heroes … and the weapons they come equipped with, of course.
How long does it take to get the RV and move on to a new level?
You can move on as soon as you’ve repaired and loaded up the RV. Repairing is what takes the most time — the deeper you get into the game, the more problems the RV has, and the more time it takes to get it ready to go. The specific amount of time changes on a case-by-case basis, but we’re trying to keep the worst-case scenario under an hour.
The other tricky bit is finding it — the RV is not in the same place every time. However, if you go for a while without tracking it down (again, under an hour), we pop up a mission to let you know where to go.
This is an interesting balance question. On one side, we don’t want this process to be onerous. On the other, we don’t want the game to breeze by so fast that you never face a serious challenge from the world before moving on.
How many survivors can get into the RV?
Six, including the character you control. The idea here is to focus the game on a cadre of core survivors, and challenge you to make the hard decisions about who comes along, and who doesn’t.
There was also the danger that players would feel obligated to “sandbag” their character rosters — recruiting heavily and grinding at lower difficulty levels to bring large numbers of characters into the higher difficulty levels as an insurance policy. This would be tedious and un-fun.
So with a tight limit, you can focus on moment-to-moment survival, and not on padding your bench for future disasters.
What exactly transfers to the next level? For example, if I research things in my library in one level, do I still know those things in the next?
Yes. And thank you for asking — your question reminded us to do it!
Can you elaborate on the limitations to the stuff you can take to the "new town" each cycle? Resources, items, gear?
Your Resources are capped — you can bring over enough Materials to settle in a decent home, but a very small amount of each of the other Resources. The idea is for you to arrive hungry, with a grocery list and a reason to start exploring. We also didn’t want to make players feel like they needed to “sandbag” their resources in advance of leaving — that’s far less fun than exploring the newly-refreshed, more difficult map.
All the Items in your magical Community Chest of Holding will come with you on the RV. At one point, we were concerned that this would lead to item bloat, but there really wasn’t a fun and fair way to limit the inventory, so we didn’t.
Instead, we’re relying on the rising difficulty level to kill you off periodically and refresh your inventory for us
What can I bring with me from the original game’s campaign?
The storyline of the original game is so deeply ingrained that we had to treat Breakdown as an entirely separate experience.
But really, that’s what Breakdown is all about, on a thematic level — letting go and starting over.
How many levels are there in the game?
Breakdown is an endless mode — that number will continue to go up until we run out of room for digits in the UI. And even then, the game doesn’t end. There is no “final” level.
Does each level get harder and harder, forever?
There are some natural limits on how dense we can actually make these zombie hordes, so it eventually caps out. But we’ve made the game so hard at this point that we can’t even survive.
Now we’re looking to you guys to show us how hard this game actually is. We think we’ve made it ridiculous. But we reserve the right to dive back in and make it even harder at a later point if you get in there and start steamrolling zombies like they’re made out of butter.
(Note to self for future updates — BUTTER ZOMBIES.)
Will difficulty also increase in terms of medicine and such becoming less effective?
No. But thanks for the idea!
Who will operate the radio for us?
Lily is still your radio operator. In Breakdown, she will also drive the RV out of town. (She doesn’t count against you in terms of the number of people you can bring along. So really, the limit is six-plus-Lily.)
ZOMBIES
Will there be new zombie types in Breakdown?
Nope. But the ones you know will become nastier as time goes on, showing up more frequently, and attacking more savagely.
Can you go into more detail about the zombie difficulty? Will zeds become damage sponges? Multiple headshots to kill?
We’re avoiding making the zombies into damage sponges. They may become slightly more resilient over time, but the effect will be subtle, and you will always be able to crit them and headshot them. The bulk of our difficulty work is focused on making the zombies more aggressive and damaging, and making you more vulnerable, not making you feel less effective. It has to stay fun, after all.
DETAILS
How much is this going to be?
At this exact moment, we don’t know. It’s up to our publisher to decide and announce the price. We’ll let you know when that happens, and update this post accordingly.
Will there be achievements associated with difficulty levels too?
Yes. The Achievements are all tied to the Hero Challenges. Since the Hero Challenges all have prerequisite difficulty levels, that means the Achievements do, too.
But none of them require you to play at the highest difficulty levels. That’s for crazy ninja players only. Getting to level six is enough to be able to earn all the Achievements.
When does Breakdown come to Steam?
It depends on how quickly we can get the keyboard and mouse interface up, and how fast we can implement your feedback. After we see how that goes, we can give you a guess. We expect our Steam players to get Breakdown pretty quickly after we move to full release status — Zip built out the PC bits of the DLC already.
Will players be able to skip the beginning stage and jump into a more difficult start?
Once you unlock a level, you can start subsequent playthroughs at that level. So if you unlock up to Four, you can start new Breakdown games at levels One, Two, Three, or Four.
Once a Hero is unlocked, I can choose to start with that Hero in a new game (and even if I don’t choose, he never needs to be unlocked again, and he’ll always be someone I might just run into randomly in one level or another)(see, I read the design articles). What else if anything can I bring from one playthrough of Breakdown to another?
Just the Heroes … and the weapons they come equipped with, of course.
How long does it take to get the RV and move on to a new level?
You can move on as soon as you’ve repaired and loaded up the RV. Repairing is what takes the most time — the deeper you get into the game, the more problems the RV has, and the more time it takes to get it ready to go. The specific amount of time changes on a case-by-case basis, but we’re trying to keep the worst-case scenario under an hour.
The other tricky bit is finding it — the RV is not in the same place every time. However, if you go for a while without tracking it down (again, under an hour), we pop up a mission to let you know where to go.
This is an interesting balance question. On one side, we don’t want this process to be onerous. On the other, we don’t want the game to breeze by so fast that you never face a serious challenge from the world before moving on.
How many survivors can get into the RV?
Six, including the character you control. The idea here is to focus the game on a cadre of core survivors, and challenge you to make the hard decisions about who comes along, and who doesn’t.
There was also the danger that players would feel obligated to “sandbag” their character rosters — recruiting heavily and grinding at lower difficulty levels to bring large numbers of characters into the higher difficulty levels as an insurance policy. This would be tedious and un-fun.
So with a tight limit, you can focus on moment-to-moment survival, and not on padding your bench for future disasters.
What exactly transfers to the next level? For example, if I research things in my library in one level, do I still know those things in the next?
Yes. And thank you for asking — your question reminded us to do it!
Can you elaborate on the limitations to the stuff you can take to the "new town" each cycle? Resources, items, gear?
Your Resources are capped — you can bring over enough Materials to settle in a decent home, but a very small amount of each of the other Resources. The idea is for you to arrive hungry, with a grocery list and a reason to start exploring. We also didn’t want to make players feel like they needed to “sandbag” their resources in advance of leaving — that’s far less fun than exploring the newly-refreshed, more difficult map.
All the Items in your magical Community Chest of Holding will come with you on the RV. At one point, we were concerned that this would lead to item bloat, but there really wasn’t a fun and fair way to limit the inventory, so we didn’t.
Instead, we’re relying on the rising difficulty level to kill you off periodically and refresh your inventory for us
What can I bring with me from the original game’s campaign?
The storyline of the original game is so deeply ingrained that we had to treat Breakdown as an entirely separate experience.
But really, that’s what Breakdown is all about, on a thematic level — letting go and starting over.
How many levels are there in the game?
Breakdown is an endless mode — that number will continue to go up until we run out of room for digits in the UI. And even then, the game doesn’t end. There is no “final” level.
Does each level get harder and harder, forever?
There are some natural limits on how dense we can actually make these zombie hordes, so it eventually caps out. But we’ve made the game so hard at this point that we can’t even survive.
Now we’re looking to you guys to show us how hard this game actually is. We think we’ve made it ridiculous. But we reserve the right to dive back in and make it even harder at a later point if you get in there and start steamrolling zombies like they’re made out of butter.
(Note to self for future updates — BUTTER ZOMBIES.)
Will difficulty also increase in terms of medicine and such becoming less effective?
No. But thanks for the idea!
Who will operate the radio for us?
Lily is still your radio operator. In Breakdown, she will also drive the RV out of town. (She doesn’t count against you in terms of the number of people you can bring along. So really, the limit is six-plus-Lily.)
ZOMBIES
Will there be new zombie types in Breakdown?
Nope. But the ones you know will become nastier as time goes on, showing up more frequently, and attacking more savagely.
Can you go into more detail about the zombie difficulty? Will zeds become damage sponges? Multiple headshots to kill?
We’re avoiding making the zombies into damage sponges. They may become slightly more resilient over time, but the effect will be subtle, and you will always be able to crit them and headshot them. The bulk of our difficulty work is focused on making the zombies more aggressive and damaging, and making you more vulnerable, not making you feel less effective. It has to stay fun, after all.
DETAILS
How much is this going to be?
At this exact moment, we don’t know. It’s up to our publisher to decide and announce the price. We’ll let you know when that happens, and update this post accordingly.
Will there be achievements associated with difficulty levels too?
Yes. The Achievements are all tied to the Hero Challenges. Since the Hero Challenges all have prerequisite difficulty levels, that means the Achievements do, too.
But none of them require you to play at the highest difficulty levels. That’s for crazy ninja players only. Getting to level six is enough to be able to earn all the Achievements.
When does Breakdown come to Steam?
It depends on how quickly we can get the keyboard and mouse interface up, and how fast we can implement your feedback. After we see how that goes, we can give you a guess. We expect our Steam players to get Breakdown pretty quickly after we move to full release status — Zip built out the PC bits of the DLC already.
Last edited:
Trash
Pointing and laughing.
Going to wait for a GOTY edition in a while for this one. Too flawed a release but too promising to just pass up.
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