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.