games

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.