i'm waiting
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
67 points (98.6% liked)
games
20709 readers
439 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
-
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Imma hit STALKER franchise (haven't played S2) and Project Zomboid (with great pain because it's an indie game but I have to)
STALKER: The worldbuilding of GSC is not great to be honest. A place like the Zone in real life would be an insane mess of world powers and ridiculously big and powerful corporations butchering each other to control it. To think that a place that can naturally warp reality, spawn science-shattering artefacts and control the minds of people like it's nothing is not object of contest between AT LEAST NATO and Russia is insane to me. In the game the Zone is known to relatively few people and the Ukrainian state is able to more or less "keep it under control". Everyone inside appears to be ukrainian or russian but most are freelancer weirdos who go there to be rich or hide from authorities. There is little to no foreign interference. It makes little sense that such place would go unnoticed by the world's biggest powers. In the real world a place like this would have their weak "loner", "bandit", "duty" and "freedom" factions, among others (including the mutants) be swept aside by the sheer power of entire militaries called to intervene and control the place, all of this would have immense geopolitical rammifications. It is implied in the game that outside forces know about the Zone and are interested in it's riches, but these outside forces do not intervene other than sending Mercs to do their shit and maybe finance the Monolith, but in general they leave that place alone and do not try to directly control it which is not very realistic imo. Yet despite all this I love the Zone as it is in STALKER, it's just me being insufferable, that's all.
Project Zomboid: Best zombie survival game that ever existed but it has an awful development cycle. They released one update in two years and frankly it sucks, it's broken and it added uninteresting stuff like animals and pointless crafting. Devs refuse to listen to players (who have been asking for NPCs since day ONE AND THAT WAS OVER A DECADE AGO) .Also the devs have left a lot of stuff just incomplete for years and years, from bugs to half-baked gameplay features. And tbh the game lacks a purpose and general depth, like one you get to your first month there is NOTHING ELSE to do other than finding your own way to just die or you'll just get bored and drop the game. The game is easy when you figure out the basics and surviving becomes trivial unless you push it to the absolute limit.
Eh, B42 has a lot of underlying changes. Yeah it's got busted features but it's only laying the groundwork for proper NPCs. There's a lot of engine changes under the hood which is why we have basements now, and the map can be expanded more later in ways it couldn't before. And it's always going to be a sandbox game where you set your own goals or go roleplay with others. Agree that the crafting is nonsense though. Fix cars so the models reflect if the hood is up before you add blacksmithing maybe
I don't know, I feel like PZ is a lost cause and I feel this way because the development cycle of this game has been plagued by extremely long development times, weird development choices and general lack of direction for a lot of time (from an outside point of view at least). And this deeply saddens me because I fucking love PZ, I've been playing this game since I downloaded a pirated version a little over a decade ago when it was just Muldraugh and West Point.
My biggest frustration concerning this game hovers pretty much around NPCs and TIS' denial to work on them for many many years, pushing them further down the line to be added after animals and crafting and only God know really when that'll actually happen, if at all. To me without NPCs the game feels empty and sometimes pointless after X amount of time, because you get all the shit that you're supposed to do with fellow NPCs but there are no actual NPCs around. Like the base of the entire system will be added at the end instead of being their number one thing. I think they should have added basic but functional NPCs way back that would get upgraded with each big update, that way everything would make a lot more sense and would feel organic. Like for example to me there's little incentive to engage in animal farming because I have to take care of that by myself, while I have other tasks like loot runs, securing the perimeter, cooking, organizing my loot and so on. Same goes with crafting, I can't engage in all of that because there's nobody to help me with it and because in the end there's no use for all the time and resources you've sunk into these systems, like why get 300 pieces of butter from your cows when you don't have to share it with your community or trade them? You're fully alone after all.
There are NPC mods which are buggy but also at the same time easily demonstrate how good this game becomes when there are other people running around in your world. If it wasn't for the performance issues and barebones functionality they would be perfect. It's no coincidence that the "Week One" mod got super popular despite the jankyness, because it seems to me that modders delivered what TIS couldn't. And that opens up another front, mods. They're all good, I love them, they bring so much life to the game it becomes essential to play with them (without mods PZ is really barebones). But I feel like TIS is going through the Bethesda way, just let the community fix things as if they are unpaid workers. You mentioned cars, yep, B39 was released in like 2017 or something and all vanilla cars still to this day have no animations, yet modders have figured them out and pretty much the standard these days for any vehicle mod is that they're animated. Nobody can really convince me that they couldn't spend the time to animate all 12 of their vehicles (don't know the exact number, but it ain't alot anyways).
This game could learn a lot from Rimworld, where you can just freely build your colony and play indefinitely to see what happens, since the game is a story-generator above everything else. In PZ you play to see what happens and nothing happens, perhaps four months in you get bit and you're done for (and goodbye to all your grind) or you abandon your world because there's nothing to do. I really don't know what kind of game they envisioned way back when they started to get things working, but I'm 100% sure they have changed ideas more than once.