Zombasite - zombie apocalypse action RPG from Soldak

[LESS T_T]

https://www.soldak.com/Zombasite/Overview.html




https://af.gog.com/en/game/zombasite?as=1649904300

Spoiler

Features:

• Survive the zombie apocalypse in a fantasy world
• Experience uniquely created worlds for every game, with different areas, monsters, items, and quests
• Explore a dynamic, evolving, living world
• Lead a clan of followers who have their own personalities and skills
• Navigate relationships with rival clans using diplomacy, trade, war, and raids
• Adventure with your friends with co-op multiplayer
• Your choices truly impact the game!

 

[Markman]

RNG is a wonderful thing.

First game started, in first 2 hoods I discovered 2 clans and got 116 quests on bulletin board. Solved 2 quests, had peace with 1 clan, second clan told me to gtfo their hood.
Minutes later second clan faggots declared war on me, invaded me with 3 lv8 dudes while my crew was level 3-4. Got raped, game ended sub 30 min.

Second game got 15 quests to solve, still didnt meet anyone, solved a few quests, found like 10 NPCs that I sent to my hood.
Still playing.

You need food to feed the clan, some NPCs bring some with em and I found some randomly. Nowhere to buy food.
Also nowhere to buy/sell items. There are places in the town where it seems that there should be someone there like armorer/merchant but nigga aint home.
This also gimped my dude cause money dropped is rare and to upgrade skills you need moolah besides skill points but got nowhere to sell shit I've collected.
Dont know if this is intentional or a beta bug.
I'll play more tomorrow so maybe I'll feel more enlightened then. Besides a silly name it feels like another solid Soldak game.

 

[WhiteGuts]

where da hood at

 

[Hobo Elf]

Nice. I've been waiting for this! Will get it when I come home and post impressions.

 

[Renevent]

I've enjoyed a few Soldak games...they're kinda rough even for an indie game but they always have some really neat features. That being said, their last game (the spaceship arpg) didn't resonate with me and I didn't play it much at all. This looks pretty cool though, kinda like a mix between Din's Curse and Depths of Peril which is alright by me. I'll probably pick it up somewhere down the road, however, I have too many games to play at the moment.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Played it for about 1.5 hours so far and here are my impressions so far:

Character classes are pretty much the exact same as in Din's Curse. No changes in the trees and spells from what I've seen. I don't even know if they've been rebalanced either since there were a LOT of balance issues that I had with the game. Kinda bummed about this to be honest.

The only new skills are the traits:

Gone are the helpful passives that give nice stat bonuses every X amount of levels and now we have.. these. Yeah, invest 50 points into a stat that increases your mana and mana regen only to unlock a skill that removes your mana and uses your health instead for spells. Other examples are passives that give +25% more damage when fighting against 4 or more enemies, but 3 and less will grant you a -25% malus (very bad against boss monsters), or a passive that grants you a percentage based bonus to all your stats but greatly increases your hunger. They are very Risk / Reward oriented traits and maybe someone can have fun with them, but personally the Bonuses didn't really seem that impressive to justify the Maluses. Drox Operative had a similar-ish skill system where you could unlock new cool bonuses every time you invested 50 points into a particular stat, but they were always useful with no strings attached. I wish they'd gone with that again.

Moving on to the game itself, my first 1.5 hour experience was spent scraping for cash to invest my skill points into a new skill. After an hour I was finally able to get enough to buy one new spell, but I still have another 5 levels worth of skill points that I just can't spend becuase I can't afford it. I haven't found any vendors to sell my loot for cash and the other factions simply do not buy anything from me even if I have high standings with them. I tried trading 4 greens and 1 yellow for 10 copper to a Faction I had an Alliance with and they wouldn't accept it. This is super frustrating to me as I'm running around with 10 skill points but no money to invest them into any of the skills I want to. Something else that bothered me is that Monsters keep raiding your town and now you don't own an item that makes a teleport gate anymore so you have to find a teleport node to get back to your town and kill the raiding monsters, otherwise you'll be harrassed by the sound effect that plays when you are being raided, and there doesn't seem to be an option to remove this particular sound effect. It's very grating. You do have NPCs defending your town, and you can find monsters to guard your gates, but it seems to take a very long time for your NPCs to deal with the threat.

All in all it feels more like Depths of Peril + Din's Curses classes. I was expecting some new interesting mechanics, maybe new cool classes, and I got none of that. Big thumbs down from me for now. Drox Operative was far more innovative, this is just a blatant rehash. You're probably better off playing Din's Curse for now as the game doesn't have anything new to offer. But if you didn't play Depths of Peril then this game might be interesting. Will play more and updated my opinions as I get further.

Edit: Judging by the steam forums there are some people who share my opinions that the game doesn't offer anything new.

 

[Renevent]

Good update, thanks! The video does seem to rehash a ton from their previous games down to the graphics/sounds effects.

 

[Markman]

Ye, UI and gfx got a bit of update but it is mostly Dins Curse+DoP combined.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Finally caught the Zombasite. I thought it'd lead to something interesting, but all it did was lead to death. Stage 1 I got some maluses to my faction relations because people didn't want to deal with a guy turning into a zombie, stage 2 you get a DoT and die. After you respawn you lose the Zombasite virus and carry on as usual. Whoa! It's nothing! I guess it'll be a lot more important to deal with if you play hardcore, but now it's just a complete non-issue debuff and not a very interesting one at that either.
I tried partying up with my Clan members, but they kept going insane and then attacking me, forcing me to end them. I don't know what causes my NPCs to get more Insanity and I don't know what to do to reduce it (if that's even possible). I thought maybe sending them back to our Village for a holiday will reduce their Insanity, but apparently not. So for now I'm just keeping all my NPCs permanently in my Village. More hassle than they are worth.

 

[Markman]

I had that too. But I thought they turned insane cause of fear in dungeons. Had one also pick a fight with another NPC in the clan area for no reason whatsoever, just cause he felt acting like a dick.
Still the amount of merchants I've met = 0. Have like 12 skill points left, had some luck and found some secret areas with gold chests but its still pityful. I'd say about 10 silver pieces in total so far.
But I found the solution to the food problem, once every hour I can send a hunting party from clan info page and when they get back from the 10 minute trip they get back with some food.

 

[Hobo Elf]

At least it's confirmed that the next patch will probably remove the money requirement for Skills. I feel relieved!

 

[Metro]

Looks like a near carbon copy of their other arpgs with a slight twist.

 

[Hobo Elf]

And the twist sucks ass in this game, unfortunately. It's too bad that Shadow cannot accept that truth from an objective standpoint because he's apparently a huge fag for Zombies. He thinks the new Zombasite mechanics are interesting and fresh when all they are, are the same old monsters with a new zombie-like texture and maybe slightly better stats. You wont notice who is a zombie and who isn't when you are out in the wilderness slaughtering everything anyway.

 

[Metro]

These guys just refuse to innovate. Even Drox was a letdown although this, as you say, seems as lazy as a reskin with a few mechanics shuffled around.

 

[Lhynn]

Ah, this is too bad. wasnt even aware he was going for a zombie action rpg, tho i feel its a bad idea, we have too many of those already.

He should have gone with a super hero theme, would have fit his hybrid character building mechanics much better. It would have also given it some sort of personality, instead of just another zombie crapfest.

 

[LESS T_T]

Now it's out of Early Access: http://store.steampowered.com/app/408960/

 

[Metro]

Is there any reason to bother with this over Depths of Peril?

 

[getter77]

If you wanted a mix of that and Din's Curse with even more complexity heaped on in layers---this will do that, but the chaos factor is pretty high unless you do lots of fiddling. Hard to say how this will do for Soldak...

 

[Metro]

Bleh, I meant Din's Curse. Keep getting their games confused since they're almost all identical.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Zombasite is a far better game than Din's Curse now. When it initially came out in Early Access it was just Din's Curse with overland maps and clans. My early reaction to this game wasn't very impressive, but Soldak really worked hard and I like where the game is at now with release. Right off the bat I'd say the most important change was rebalancing the scaling of all the skills in the game. None of them improve in a linear fashion anymore, everything has an exponential growth, which is wonderful. It helps a lot since monsters used to (and still do in the older games) power up at a exponential curve while the PC had a linear growth which left off many characters and character builds in the dust at some point.
A new class was added, the Death Knight, and it's all kinds of amazing.
Soldak also revamped the skill system even further by adding synergy so that enhancing skills will give you some kind of bonus that will benefit your other abilities as well. As a quick example, each point in Fiery Blast (1st tier fire spell) gives you an additional +1% Spell Damage and +3% Fire Damage. That way you never feel like you're losing out by investing in some other skill.
Gear now has new stats like +magic damage% which helps make spell casters useful at higher levels. Melee used to be the top dog but it's possible to play as a caster or summoner now without sucking mountains of dick because there's gear that gives you more damage for your spells, or enhance various aspects of your pets (damage, armor, resistance, movement speed etc.). Perhaps my favorite new stat is +X% chance of Extra Projectiles. At 50% there's a 1/2 chance that any projectile you fire (bow or spell) will shoot two projectiles at the same time, without any added mana cost. More than 100% and you'll always shoot 2 projectiles with the chance to shoot and extra 3rd projectiles and it keeps going up the higher you get the stat. My Firery Blast Wizard does obscene damage as I've stacked this stat quite high.
The biggest gimmick of the game is the titular Zombasite virus that is slowly creeping through the land turning everything into zombies. It's pretty cool, but if you're not into it then you can turn it off and play the game normally without having to worry about it.

 

[Makabb]

Zombasite is a far better game than Din's Curse now

Was about to buy dins curse but i found this thread, gotta try this now.

 

[LESS T_T]

Soldak will work on two projects at the same time. One is an expansion for Zombasite and the other sounds like a generational RPG: http://www.soldak.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37179

For the first time ever, I think we are going to work on 2 projects at once. It's not like we are going to have 2 teams or anything. I just think these 2 projects will overlap enough that we can do both at the same time fairly efficiently.

While Zombasite isn't doing as well as I would like (hopefully launching on GOG will change that some), I think it deserves an expansion. So that's one of the 2 projects we will be working on. I'm not positive what the focus of this expansion will be, but some possibilities are more classes, lots more quests, more monsters, etc. The nice side benefit of working on an expansion is that it allows me to actively work on Zombasite, so that will mean fixes, balancing, and probably even some new features here and there will sneak into the base game. If you all have things you would like to see in an expansion, please speak up!

The other project is going to be a separate game that is focused around the ideas of hardcore characters with random skills and traits, the next generation of character is evolved from his/her parents, and each world has a random setup and win conditions. The general idea is each individual character life will be fairly quick, but some amount of the character's power growth will pass on to the next generation. Also which characters you evolve from will greatly control what mix of skills the new character has. Ever want a character that could stealth, use healing spells, and shoot arrows? You should be able to do that, but it will take some time improving and evolving from the right characters. I know this is relatively vague still, but if you have any ideas or games that you would like me to look at, again please speak up!

None of this is set in stone and it is possible that I drop one or both of the projects or go in a different direction, but this is what I'm planning at the moment.

So what are your thoughts?

 

[agris]

Hobo Elf

So you're saying between Din's Curse, Depth of Peril and Zombasite; you would pick Zombasite? Looking for some guidance here as I've never played a Soldak game.

 

[nomask7]

Soldak games aren't the same game but with different story like, say, Geneforge. There are enough differences affecting gameplay and general feel of the games that it doesn't make sense to try to identify any "objectively best game" from the lot. It also means that everyone will have their own favorites. Your best bet is to try the demos.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Hobo Elf

So you're saying between Din's Curse, Depth of Peril and Zombasite; you would pick Zombasite? Looking for some guidance here as I've never played a Soldak game.

I'd pick Zombasite if I was going to pick one of the fantasy based ARPGs by Soldak. They are all iterative games that build on the previous one. Since Zombasite is the latest one it's the most expansive one with the most polish and content. As nomask7 said, they all have demos, so you can try them out and compare the amount of changes that Zombasite has gotten compared with the earlier titles.