trapping would make a lot more sense if, after gaining a few levels, we could make zombie traps like trenches/ walker pits, etc around the base. booby trapping our safe houses would also be a nice addition
maybe make furniture better as a barricade like the only thing that can block a window is a book shelf and you have such a small chance to pick it up by the time you can you have better alternatives
Maybe they could be balanced by having a noise mechanic. Too many zombies and they start making too much noise and draw in even more. Forces you to clear them out before they get too full
Fun fact about foraging: It's harder in multiplayer. The debris tiles that have a higher chance to spawn items like stones and branches are not in multiplayer. For example the only way to reliably gather stones in multiplayer is by checking cracks in roads which hugely limits foraging and makes you level it up much slower.
I feel like people's experiences are being screwed by some weird mods tbh, i find sticks and stones _everywhere_ in the grass on both in sp and mp? and yea 95% of the time i play with 0 mods. There might be some correlation between these things?
Fun Nimble trivia, playing the game normally with a character who has at least one point in it (75% = 400% overall exp) will still take several hundred hours of playing to reach level 10, it's painful
Nah, the devs will just attempt to shush everyone, ignore the problem, blame it on community, or tell everyone they will fix it and do nothing and everyone forgets about ir
The devs are doing what they want not the other way around. Look at the crafting system, it was already a convoluted hateful mess and they're making it 10 times worse with all the stupid work benches and tools. Nobody asked for a sharpness system which is also, like the new crafting system, more micromanagement ending in being just a way to slow the pace down even more.
For real. I’ve called em’ out for years now on this garbage, and only get coping dismissals by people like MrAtomicDuck. I’m just glad to finally get some validation from the community.
The developers have been making money off of this product for over a decade. This is not the first time in 10 years people have talked about the game’s problems. The problems still exist. My mind is blown at how silly your thinking is, and how everything you said sounded nice but meant absolutely nothing, and is verifiably incorrect.
That is something I noticed with a lot of indie games, especially of the survival type like Don't Starve, a lot of skills and mechanics exist with zero depth and only exist as a speed bump for the player but started with the idea that there will be a lot to add in the future but just never got around to it.
yeah DST is definitely getting a lot more love from KLEI compared to indie stone. Even Don't Starve got all those DLCs.. quite frankly it's a lot of content that sometimes feel a bit hard to keep up with.. and KLEI even has Oxygen Not Included which is still getting a ton of content all the time together with a DLC as well.... I don't know if the team sizes and their resources are comparable, but if they were, then KLEI is definitely exposing the laziness of Indie Stone@@windflier1684
Having to install like 20 mods to make the game enjoyable is crazy. After playing modded, I cannot go back. So much is missing from the game that should be there
I love zomboid but the fact that people see the indie stone as infallible or undeserving of criticism is baffling. They made a really really good game, but at the end of the day that game still isn't finished and there's a lot of things they could address that they haven't yet
They can't say it can't be done when independent modders crank things out, which means it's entirely an internal autism thing where it has to be so and so just right to some image they have. Or they simply aren't doing {insert thing} like they say they are.
Someone said in another video that for 42 they should have worked out NPCs first, got that working well to give some mid/late game content for us, and then do the deep dive into crafting/hunting/fishing improvements afterward. This makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of the metallurgy crap won't even really be in the game except in special (medieval?) maps.
>A lot of the metallurgy crap won't even really be in the game except in special (medieval?) maps. In particular wilderness-only maps, which i will admit i'm *definitely* planning on messing with on release, especially with less mod jank involved :V
I agree. Plus build 42 takes like forever to come lmao. Now we have to wait even longer. PZ is only fun at the start of the game. Once I have everything, then there’s nothing left to do lmao.
Electronics could be awesome if you were able to create some simple mechanisms with it. Like maybe send signals if you detect motions, set up a Camera System, remote lock and unlock doors. You could have a Fort with a Command Center that can remote control a lot. Or maybe some nice automation like sprinklers and such. Maybe even go as far and let the player set up stuff like Solar Panels and Batteries or if they also are good at mechanics let them build a Bio Diesel Generator There is so much potential
I kind of agree except for solar panel unless you made it level 10 in 93 civilian solar wasn't super common and super expensive but automation would be great live most garages had remoted operated door why not allow people to dissemble garage door and make automated gates (which is all ready a mod) or like you said bio diesel for long term fuel source
@@Armetar Yep. Even if its military grade loot as it wasnt that common for civilians like 'Spike' wrote earlier. Wouldnt be the worst item to work with 😂
There's 31,000 people playing the game at this very moment. We have a small team can't be an excuse anymore. The game absolutely exploded at the start of the year. Not a single update since a 10k increase in daily players
I’m personally worried about B42 because it seems like zomboid is making the same mistakes that worlds adrift made, where they keep growing the scope much further than they can actually follow through
yea but this has always been the scope/vision for the last 13 years. They aren't growing the scope past what they've already been working towards this entire time. I think the time to worry about that was like 10 years ago lol
@@thebagelar3859 It's time to get the game functional and stable, wouldn't you say? Any feature additions are moot if the game handles so poorly we can't properly play it together.
@@MadAtMax.300Blackout The ore deposits is an addition for a custom WILDERNESS ONLY map that they're going to add; They're making sure it is Possible to be able to start from literally nothing and still be able to progress through the crafting system. You won't be finding random ore deposits in or around muldraugh and the rest of the existing map. There will be other methods of getting metal, ie, smelting down scrap metal.
The small team 'we don't have the manpower ' excuse, for over 10 years seems well... Weak. Point of comparison -> kenshi (10 or 11 year dev work if I'm not mistaken) And they got to a point where they decided the project had been completed, even though there where still a lot of possible developments. And moved on to the sequel in which a lot of systems they developed over the years will be developed further and in a more integrated way. Always had my eye on Zomboid but just found more rapidly progressing developments in other projects. Jankiness is not fundamentally a problem, the problem is when no one takes a step back and admits: we set things up in a way that will require to much reworking to fully fix, here is a system that kinda works with/around the jank, and we will address it in the follow up project. Sad to keep seeing the communities around promising games get so fixated on the "supremacy/holiness" of the project they have been following for so long that they can't accept issues or weaknesses being called out. Eh well... I'll keep on looking for something to fill the time till kenshi 2 comes out. (Guys you know you could try going back to Runescape, graphics are not to far off and systems are functional 😂)
Hot take... no game should be in development for 10+ years. Most players/devs would have long moved on from the game and it makes them look incompetent for taking so long 7 Days to Die, another very popular zombie survival game is another that has this issue... if you so much as even mention the development time of these games, you are banned from everything or hit with excuse after excuse The devs for both of these games never communicate with the playerbase and keep adding useless meaningless features to the game instead of fixing known bugs
This is exactly how I feel about 7Days.... I read through the whole post on Steam about what we were going to see with the new upcoming update n I don't recall anything about fishing being reworked into a minigame. If that's true alls I have to say is dont fix something that isn't broken.
PZ right now suffers heavily from the 'get out of town blues' wherein once you secure a car and a full tank of a gas, you can simply drive out of town, into the middle of the map. You'll never starve to death or die of thirst, you'll probably get bored and close the game looooong before then, I firmly believe the game needs more (and interactable) meta events, and more importantly NPC's, both friendly, neutral, and hostile.
Honestly, while i'm not really feeling NPCs for the most part, yeah more Meta Events would be nice. There's like... three, and only one is significant really (chopper) :V
The development time is becoming less and less understandable. The game has sold a lot of copies now, they have a fairly large team, but still haven't pushed out an update for a year. I do really love this game, with hundreds of hours sunk into it but this whole "it will be done when it's done" attitude players have towards the devs is becoming counterproductive now. I bought this game back in 2014/2015 and have been waiting almost a decade for NPCs and other features at this point.
I think it's a weird case of most zomboid players (possibly) being minecraft vets (again, speculation). As Mojang started pumping out updates on a set development schedule, half-assed changes became more and more prevalent (villager trading is super OP, Caves and Cliffs had to be split in 3 updates [Wild Update included] instead of the two they promissed and so on) and people look at it as the "gold standard" of sandbox games. So people, in reaction to those half-assed updates released on a schedule, have a kneejerk reaction and would rather have the complete opposite (it's gonna be out when its out). The issue is that none of those approaches are essentially good (or bad, mind you) and that, at the end of the day, it's what is done that matters. Prioritizing things is also a huge problem and, knowing multiple programmers, it can be difficult at times to prioritize things between what they want (lets call that artistic vision), what they feel is needed for the game's health (usually boring backend stuff that players won't care about unless performances are attrocious) and what players want. While there can be some overlap, there are also issues there. It may be a bit of a fence-sitting take, but if they only addressed the community concerns in terms of balance and performances, I think players would still be upset there are no new guns/locations/etc. I 100% support that those issues need to be addressed and that the "small team" excuse is getting thin however. It's not like a lone dev over their head in a overambitious project where there is promise and people keep up with it because the project shows promise and the dev is really open about development and the lack of resources, it's a fairly large team with some experiences devs (they mentioned some guy from Mojang actually) joining the team that should be able to work things out far easier than (no offense) junior devs.
From a devblog a while ago Then kindly put the game down and go elsewhere until it releases and do everyone including yourself a favour. If you expect a huge expansion dlc sized dev cycle to take six months of dev time from any developer, you'll likely have as miserable time here as we will have you complaining. I get the frustration and anticipation for waiting for something I've been there myself so I empathise. But the idea that a year or even a year and a half is unreasonable for the huge amount of expansive features this update will bring is extremely frustrating. This isn't a few bug fixes, its large systemic changes and additions to the core game, you say you get things take time to code but clearly not if you've looked at what we're adding to the game and find the time it's taken completely unreasonable. Especially factoring in we've already stated numerous times a serious illness and hospital stay within the team early on delayed the remaining part of the update that is yet to be completed, yet even if that hadn't happened I'd be perfectly comfortable and happy with the teams progress given what is being created here and feel the team's done a fantastic job of catching up. We're not gonna crunch the team to nervous breakdown to rush some broken crap out the door, cause then everyone will be mad about that and I'm almost certain you'd be first in line. But not only that we'll also prob start bleeding staff with all the code knowledge as they leave due to the miserable stressful and unhealthy work environment that creates, and good luck getting meaningful quality or sizable updates ever again then, as we have a team unfamiliar with the dark recesses of the code. [5:57 PM] Code that becomes a house of cards no one dares make significant changes or improvements to. It's a story as old as time. At end of the day we take as long as we take to release a good product and maintain a healthy happy team and considering our biggest success came after years of maintaining this dev cycle are not planning to change it because of your complaint. We'll release when its ready, and people will be thanking us for taking our time and releasing a quality update. Then we'll ride that positivity until posts like this start emerging again for b43. We'll suffer it, not gladly, but suffer it nonetheless as its better for the game, the community and our team whether people like yourself at this point in the update dev cycle appreciate it or not. There are other games and if you're unhappy or bored of b41, forget zomboid exists for a while until you hear a news story that the beta or next stable build has released. Zomboid may be early access but its still sold as a complete product bought as is at point of purchase, and priced for what its worth as it stands. We could have already 1.0ed it and moved onto a new game years ago, or 1.0ed it and sold anything we've done since as DLC at $20 a pop. You're being provided substantial bonus free extra content we're not asking for any money for whatsoever, and it'll take as long as it takes. If this is somehow a bad deal for you then I'd suggest you look for a better one elsewhere. I get you paid money and feel entitled to complain, and that is your right. But considering you have the testicular fortitude to throw the same complaint towards pre-steam Dwarf Fortress which was completely free doesn't fill me with confidence you'll see my perspective though. -lemmy101
I don't really see how my comment comes across as entitled in any way. I did stop playing Zomboid a year ago, and I stopped for 4 years after I bought it originally, as you suggest. I'm pointing out an issue with the development cycle, as well as the growing issue of gaslighting people who point out this issue, as you have. I don't feel like I'm owed anything, I'm just slowly losing interest in the game, as are many others presumably.
Hi, im the foraging main in pz from reddit. Just want to say i 100% agree with you that it's insane that half the map is missing foraging zones. Constantly referring to zone maps to see what is viable foraging or not SUCKS. However, i also strongly diagree with your general review of the usefulness of foraging. Having played multiple cdda runs, foraging is amazing. You can find tools like saws, watee bottles and pots, enough food to gain weight, weapons, and more consistently in a run. Given you dont do much else walking from one town to another, foraging is a great addition. Expect similar changes to fishing to be more interactive
As a consistent foraging user, I completely agree with this, prehaps they could’ve made it to the “???” Zones have a basic loot table to them or something? Better than just making the area unviable outright.
As far as my experience has been, you can only get a few types of berries in the winter. During the other months, foraging at high levels (probably about 7+) can net you some crazy foods, from dead animals to entire fruit trees! If you dedicated entire in-game weeks to foraging green areas, you might be able to slowly gain weight. However, the egregious calorie use while walking (don't know why they upped it so much) might make that nearly impossible.@@user-zw6rq9pp7p
3:05 or so: This is not unique to PZ. Heck, Starfield has a ton of wholly irrelevant, there-just-to-be-there skills, and that is an 8-10 year project from a AAA dev. The discord and other PR shenanigans are more of the bad news, for me.
And medicine would absolutely matter more, and probably be fine enough "as is" - if injuries just took longer to heal from, and in a functional multiplayer setup. No treatment of wound should equate to days of poor performance as a person, while good treatment should fix most right up. For this game, at least.
After over a decade of the EA model I think we can all agree: we should only part with our money once devs, no matter how well intentioned, have a complete product. You would not buy 4 wheels in hopes of getting a car one day, nor would you buy a roof hoping to get a house finished at some point. Don't understand why people think it's ok to do the same for games.
It's 20 dollars! And most people payed half of that. Games don't seem to be measured by time played, but they should be at least a bit. 300+ hours for 20 dollars is a steal. I do understand what you're saying though. I just want more!!!!!
So am i allowed to harp on the absurdity of needing to read a magazine to flip a switch on a generator without some jackass trying to convince me generators are complicaed to operate? "Oh man, i see the gas cap but... what do i do with it?!"
Turning on and off or refueling a generator requires no skill book. Only "connecting" a generator to a building requires a skill book. Can you connect a real generator to a house power grid?
Do not ever attempt to connect a genny to a house by yourself. Call an electrician. My step dad is an experienced handyman, but even he called the electricians to set it up. It is dangerous work.
Just got to 12:00. Before I hear your thoughts, I've owned Zomboid since Desura - back in the old Kate & Baldspot days and the house raider. All I've ever wanted from zomboid was the npc system. I was in highschool when I wanted it and I'm now 30 years old and there's rarely ever any updates on it and the hivemind responce for a decade has been "it'll come when it's ready". I've got my money from Zomboid, and it's in my opinion one of the best games of all time and my favourite zombie survival by far. But Christ, just work on the NPCs already. For people like me that have no real interest in multiplayer save dicking about with a few friends, I don't need blacksmithing, crafting overhauls, while the most critical piece of the puzzle is missing. Love the devs, but we've literally invented AI LLMs in the time it's taken them to write a couple of blogposts about Dynamic Crusader kings style AI. Just get on with it!
NPCs are the only thing I want to see added really too. Specifically MP usable NPCs. Then for me the games complete save for any modding the community does. Im worried that once NPCs are released it will only be SP which would just put me in the overall dumps about the whole game lol
I appreciate this video. It's much like Valheim, where the game is reddit wholesome 100 fighting against triple A studios, then just... Stops adding features.
Okay this game kinda flew under my radar but got my interest in the past couple of days after some "I survived 100 days doing XY" videos popped up on my feed. So I checked it out on steam and nearly did a double take drink spit combo when I saw it's been "early access" for 10 years and sells for 20$. Well I guessed it's developed by a single guy out of his garage or something and read up on its history and was completely baffled once again when I discovered there are apparently dozens of people working on the game for years now and it earned an estimated 80 million $! And I found reddit and steam forum posts from 5+ years ago begging for stuff like NPCs and other things the developers seem to have promised but not delivered to this day. And then I discovered the workshop, where actual single guys working for free out of their garage have already implemented all those things and so much more. This game looks like a 20 year old PS2 game but somehow dozens of people working with a budget of 80m $ have not managed to implement basic things like NPCs, a properly working foraging system, additional maps etc. in 10 years and instead only release minor updates like the (for some reason) hotly anticipated crafting overhaul (that as you pointed out has been done via mods years ago) maybe once a year?!? And I've seen the previews of the v42 crafting update, it looks like there's a small handful of new assets for clay ovens and materials and stuff and some menus that are just boxes with some text, what are these people doing all day year after year?!?
If they don't want to take the trouble of assigning to each part of the map the area that corresponds to each place. At least the "???" places should be like a middle ground in everything. It would be just while they finish polishing the map.
@@itsamine4840 And I'm sure they're working on it, probably already finished work on it. But the problem is that they don't release updates regularly, they take a while and then release massive updates.
I agree on a few things but you lost me on the second half. The second half was mostly you complaining because update 42 is not how you play. 42 is indeed aimed at role player. This shouldn't be surprising, most of zomboid content is aimed at role play, like the professions, traits and negative moodles like depression, and panic. I personally like grinding skills and min maxing, I play zomboid like a jrpg, so I understand where you are coming from, but that was never the focus. Where I agree is the fact that so many skills aren't fun to level and don't have much to offer after leveling. Is sad that its been so long and this hasn't change. I'm also scared with some of the reworks too, I get it from playing multiplayer, some of the system aren't really that engaging and it sucks to not be able to fast forward so you got to just suck it up. That is why I understand why they are going around around and changing it. I just really hope they ramp the updates a bit more or properly test and fix the new system like you mentioned. For the looks of it they are jamming a ton of content on update 42 but I wonder if it would have been better to release it every other month instead of a couple of years. I wouldn't compare content from prior to build 41. If the devps are truthful by saying they reworked the whole game, build 40 and 41 are entirely different game so at least in that case I don't think we will be having a whole spaghetti monster of code. and the current zomboid is just 2 years old. Think of it like project zomboid 1 and project zomboid 2. The devps just decided to keep the same name instead of selling a different copy. which I'm happy they did
I feel like this game really hasn't changed much since 2016. I mean, yeah, vehicles are a thing now, the animation overhaul is awesome, but other than those two big things there's really nothing that changed too much. It's sad that even after the game exploded with the B41 MP release, the development pace really hasn't changed at all. I'd say it even slowed down in general. Sure, they're a small team and all but at this point it's just an overused excuse to me. I'm no game developer, I don't know what the developers of PZ do with their time, however when you have one man team developers working on games such as Songs of Syx and putting out major updates every few months, it makes you wonder just HOW do they take so long to update things?
@@Saplingbat I'm not a game developer, no, but that doesn't mean that I don't know anything about developing games. It also doesn't mean I've not tried developing my own games in the past. I know how long it takes and I know how difficult it can be. I've owned this game since around 2013 or 2014, I originally bought it on desura lol. It was quite an obsession for me up until shortly after build 41's MP update dropped. I think, having followed the game's development for around ten years, I'm entitled to criticize the game developers for frankly not changing the game all that much over those said ten years.
i genuinely feel foraging is better, harder but better, i think it would be perfect if lots of very basic things were like 10x more common such as sticks and rocks. i like how it massively expands the possible finds so you can get very rare things renewably and that makes it wortwhile to use which is a major issue i had with the old foraging, how it had a pool of like 10 possible items you could find and nothing else the fishing however i dont know, i hope it turns out as something less productive but faster to do because the meta currently is to sit around all day accumulating fish.
man I feel this, and when I bring it up people say I'm just being negative I've put well over 3k hours in this game over the years, it's wild to think about because it feels like I just started playing this year with how little has changed The multiplayer is still absolutely terrible, the nimble skill is miserable, the combat is janky and everything about this game feels so unfinished People say "oh! it's a small team making this ambitious game!!!" but that's not the problem- Lethal company was made by a single person- smaller scope I know but lemme explain TIS has 0 direction it feels, one day their adhd kicks in and they add a bunch of random stuff into the game and then try to fix it, instead of having a list of things they need to do or add.
This game is already good as it is. Unbalanced like almost every game but at least it seems like they're trying. I used to watch this game in 2014 and these last builds really improved the experience!
Saying the game feels “unfinished” is such a joke. Yeah it meeds work but man, you put 3k hours into it stfu about it being an “unfinished” game lmao. Of course after 3k it gets boring and mew stuff will solve that, but don’t need to be an hypocrite about it
@@scientistmyself 🤦🤦🤦 Not the brightest, are you? Totally missed his point. He's not being hypocritical, he's sharing an opinion that is backed up by reason, logic, and evidence, things you seem to be unfamiliar with. You must be one of those fanatical cult members I've heard about 🤔 Or maybe you just completely missed the point 🤷
I think alot of these complaints are very specific for how this youtuber likes to play, not nessecarily for every player. I don't think every trait needs to be this bottomless pit of potential. Some things are naturally more useful than others. Just like in real life. And I don't think the game is a "buggy mess". Yes there are bugs, but you're extremely exagerating this. And for the multiplayer stuff, well I don't play multiplayer so personally it matters very very little to me. Overall, I feel like you're being a bit of a dramaqueen here.
You proved the point he made at the very start of the video lol. Don’t agree with him so you just shame him and call him names. That in fact make you the one who is being dramatic. Nice try though.
They didn't even bother mapping out all of the foraging areas so you have "nothing to see here" in various places... Metalworking without mods seems to be for 2 things and only 2 things: crates and fences. I think they're adding to this in the next update.
Putting focus on the wrong things... exactly what my issue is with the direction of the game. I really love PZ but after each new Thursdoid I feel more and more disappointed. Other than the basements there's nothing I'm actually looking forward to in B42, maybe the "optimizations" but that's more like wishful thinking. I wouldn't care what they work on next if it weren't for the glacial pace of development. Even the frequency of the news has been cut in half (the Thursdoids). I'm really hoping that this is due to the sudden increase in team size and the initial overhead it creates, but I'm worried that the real reason is focusing on the wrong things and over-designing features. Like the new crafting system. It is getting hella complex which is great if it's fun, but it's really easy to do badly, and whenever it's finally released it may take a year to focus on "fixing" it, causing even more delay for the content we're actually waiting for.
I don't understand how they could make the choice regarding getting xp. If you do something, it should reward you for doing it. It's very simple. How someone sees this and goes. Ah yes, when you do something you might be rewarded for it, which simply results in people just cheesing it or using mods to fix it. I've not even got 100 hours in the game and when I realized how bad the XP system is, the first thing I did was download mods that solved it. If that's how the developer is handling it, I have little to no faith in their design decisions.
from a 3.2k hrs player; I completely agree with you.. A well deserved rant. I was cautiously hopeful that they may be dropping the 42 beta around these days with the Steam winter sale, but now it doesn't even feel like it's gonna be any time soon.. and YES! the excuse that "we're a small indie team" can only go for so long! like you made huge sales already and you must have earned some cash that you can invest back in your business and expand it, and yeah I understand they hired more people some of whom were modders which is great, yet the pace seem to haven't picked up with any notable degree. I've been literally trying to summon my will to get back to playing the game again for some good time now, but it hasn't happened yet.. no incentive to play the game.. The devs need to understand that their good game can be left out in the dust and forgotten if they don't keep polishing it!! many new games and many new distractions to still be hung on this aging game!! and don't get me wrong, I still do love the game and still am hyped for B42, and I'm not trying to hate on the devs... but c'mon already make haste!!! this is getting to be unacceptable to be honest and I'm not happy about that!
Hi, I just started playing this game a couple days ago, been enjoying getting my ass kicked and easily getting overwhelmed lol, but i'm getting a better sense of the game each and every time I play. Your videos have been very helpful so far as well, so thank you! It seems that PZ has a thriving modding community, and I think thats a beautiful thing that many games wish they could have. This makes some of the points you brought up, specifically those in which the devs finally fix something that a mod has already fixed long ago, especially frustrating to hear. With certain issues being much more drastic than others, it's such a waste of time and resources to fix what has already been fixed from the ground up, when they could reach out to the modders and ask them to implement their mod officially into the game. This is an assumption on my part, but I believe most modders go out of their way to make what they want because of how much they like the game. I'm sure most would be thrilled to work directly with the developers, and to have their work recognized (and potentially compensated for) by the devs and the community at large. Since this course of action was not taken, it leads me to wonder if the developers have an issue of pride, and think that THEY need to be the ones who implement everything into the game. Considering the fact that some parts of the community have made it clear what they'd like implemented in the game to improve it, only to be ignored by the devs, it seems that they have a bit of an antagonistic approach to their player base, which is a shame when the players themselves are quite passionate about the game. While it's not the exact same, a similar thing can be seen with how Valve has left Team Fortress 2 fans out to dry, despite their undying love for the game, flaws and all. I hope these issues can be mended, and that a more direct relationship between the game devs and the game players be established to work towards the common goal of making the game enjoyable for the most amount of people possible.
>the fact they admitted the game will never be finished says all you need to know about the developers. Depends on what you *define* as finished, honestly. Do you mean a 1.0 Release? Or it just not having a planned End Point where they cut support? Minecraft "Finished" in 2011, but i'm willing to bet you'd feel it's a half-baked midpoint compared to today in quite a few aspects :V Finished, but not "Finished".
@@higueraft571 you know exactly what i and everyone else means by a "finished game" you are willfully misinterpreting what is being said which says everything i need to know about you. run along now lil bro
@@DevDog98 >ou know exactly what i and everyone else means by a "finished game" So which definition of one are you hoping it is? The "We're never going to add critical features and milk you forever!!!" or "We're gonna keep adding to the game for the forseeable future"? >you are willfully misinterpreting what is being said And you've taken ONE sentence, to back up the idea that they're the Antichrist, i guess. >run along now lil bro So why are you even on a PZ video if you dont like the game or the devs anyways? Or are you kinda just bitching into the void? :V Of course, GEE context on where you pulled that quote from anyways would be nice, but that'd defeat your point...
I'm a world class strength and conditioning coach (and nutritionist) who has trained top ten world ranked athletes in three different sports and the thing that has probably bothered me the most about PZ is the fitness stat. After a couple months of traveling in and out of town, fighting, sprinting, etc you'd be able to do nearly anything required in the situations presented in the game. You could jog one hour per day, say, five days per week and be able to jog across the entire map without getting tired. Yes, there are situations that would make you tired in the game no matter how fit you are, but the fitness stat isn't realistic. In some games, you might make a mechanic unrealistic to make it more fun, but PZ does the opposite with fitness. It's even less fun than in real life haha.
I run a dedicated server, I love project Zomboid nothing else scratches that itch however running a dedicated server the server is never happy and always have to chase down errors. I agree with ya and love watching your videos. Running about 300 mods to make the game enjoyable and quality life items. I could not imagine non modded PZ.
300+ mods, most of them QoL, then one of them updates, suddenly your friends having issues joining due to one of their mods is not sync properly and can't join the server. The amount of times we had to troubleshoot server compatibility was headache inducing.
I couldn't agree more with the incoherent developement direction What's worse is that core game mechanics like combat, skill progression, user interface are TERRIBLE, and the devs have given 0 indication of planning on changing/improving these mechanics. I'm supposed to grind skills from the second the game starts, I have to immediately watch the skill channels, spend irl HOURS watching my character read ingame books to get an xp multiplier (and comabt skills DO NOT have skill books for some reason). All of this just so I can then lose all that progress because I was locked in a stabbing animation and got swarmed or because all I can do is spam shove while backpedaling in the hope that the next zombie in the conga line is one that is at low enough hp to kill thus decreasing the overall number of the horde. 300 hours into the game I learned that to hit a fallen zombie in the head you have to STAND over their head, not aim the swing animation. Ever wondered why baseball bats and crowbars deal so little damage to fallen zombies? Yeah this right here is why. Never explained or hinted to. Every time I bring this up to other players people tell me that "you're not supposed to fight the zombies! it even says so when you select the apocalypse difficulty! you have to use stealth!" STEALTH DOES NOT WORK, it has NEVER worked, you always get spotted once you get in the zombie's cone of vision, it does NOT matter what level your stealth skill is at (for some reason theres also 2 different stealth skills in case things werent obtuse enough already). The other common retort is that "you have use the campfire/cardoor/chainlink fence/composter strat" you're telling me the only way to get anything done is to exploit the ai pathfinding? Meanwhile the devblogs show them working on adding claycrafting, iron ores, forges and chickens... Its very sad because there's no other game that comes to mind that looks as unique and is as athmospheric as zomboid, but the thought of having to grind these skills and use this combat system makes me want to roll up in a fetal position and cry. As it stands the only way to play the game as is is to either install 2 dozen QoL mods that either make infection survivable or let you keep your skills, and/or somehow get a server running with a few friends and essentially play coop with your buddies.
Stop self censoring and just say the truth, you don't have to sugarcoat grievances with the game and devs. Lets face the facts here, the developers are rude and nasty people.
Someone is doing a Bethesda. It sounds like the devs REALLY need to sit down and think about what they are doing, why they are doing It, and talk to the community.
I played the first project zomboid when it first came more than a decade ago. I voiced these concerns on their facebook page and got blocked....they dont care it it like a project car thats never finished.
As far as trapping and farming goes, most people don’t survive long enough to where food runs out unless it’s a weird challenge where you heavily limit what you can loot. From experience I can easily say that if you ration even a little all the canned and non perishable food on the map can easily last over a decade of in game time. Which means outside of novelty or playing on extreme scarcity. The skills are functionally useless as the only thing that actually matters is a calorie count and even then it only matters if you want to keep at an “ideal” weight and not just live with being overweight. There is no consequence for eating nothing but cabbages, which is fine, but having a whole skill dedicated to the individual things like trapping, farming, fishing and foraging is redundant when it could easily be tied together in one skill called survivalist. Even if they expanded on the systems, I still think the skills being individual ones are entirely redundant.
5000+ hours into Zomboid LOVE this game is an understatement -- I get your choices and understand them I just hope the devs listen to the community and understand without us they don't have a game etc.. praying the 42 update at least tries to understand what we love and hate -- then again we can thank the modders for the extra help
I understand where the developers are coming from. A lot of the things about unfinished systems are things that the devs are looking to address with the upcoming updates. Build 42 taking so long is really frustrating but I think a lot of it are those massive under the hood changes that would allow modders to do more in the game.
with you 100% Predz. we all love the game, the hours show this. its positive criticism, ideas for improvement, rather than just blasting the game. if we didn't enjoy playing the game, we would switch off. thank you for the upload.
Hello, I am Dylan the creator of Dylan's tiles, map mods such as Pitstop, Blackwood, Grapeseed and Ekron. i think I have a good insight on how the game operates to respond to your video. I would like to respond to some of your comments. "Anyone who has said anything about this game or devs have been scrutinised" - This is not a PZ problem this is a any game to ever exist problem. People will always blindly do this. "I get that excuse 5 - 6 years ago. They hired a full team now" - They hired a few people mate. Even so, I don't think it's an excuse they are making. They have been very transparent that they like to take their time and be cautious what they put out. "Overhyped harvest moon animals" - Sorry you feel that way mate. It's a massive undertaking to add any mobs in a game with mechanics. They need path finding, functions etc. Per animal could take weeks and weeks of work. When you add a new CharacterBody to a game you have to test every other mechanic in your game that contacts it. There is a long list of all sorts of things you need to account for. It's not as simple as add animal, animal do this, animal go there. It's a lot of work, game dvelopment in general is extremely tedious. I could keep going on and on but I will save you and myself the energy. My point is the developers are working, at their own selected pace. The game has bugs and issues that have existed for years. This is not something they would deny themselves and I garuntee you they are working on it. I have been very critical of the game myself, I love this game... hell I modded it for 2 years+ trying to land a position at their company. The reality is, the game will improve as time goes on. They have plenty of funds to keep going for a long time. I am sure they will adress many bugs and issues. It's not like they have abandoned the game. Game development is incredibly difficult in general and they will be the only ones expert on such topics.
From reading your comment I just maybe got to an conclusion that their biggest mistake was making their own game engine instead of taking already existing one. Most of games built on unity, ue4 etc doesn't interfere with the core systems as much as project zomboid do
Wow that’s so interesting like I mean woah game development is so interesting to wrap your head around I want to learn it someday Y’know this game is super inspiring because i want to learn about mods now and learning how to farm seems cool and my mom knows a lot about it because when she was in India before she moved here, they grew a lot of food to cook and make chai tea and all that. Personally, I think potatoes are awesome. They’re a great meal alone all you have to do is poke it with a fork and press the potato button on the microwave. And, potatoes will search for dirt anywhere in the right environment. They’ll just grow roots in the pantry. Carpentry has also always sounded so interesting. It sounds really expensive though. Dirt is very cool too. And maggots are cool. And you can put worms in dirt which is awesome. I want to be like wall-e. I just want my house to be a bunch of weird stuff like probably one of those metal crates and just boxes of interesting stuff I find randomly on the floor or something or the trash. Tbh I’m probably just going to live in an apartment in some bleak depressing town in Texas and one day I’ll probably be the only person left I know despite my how much I love to socialize when I do. Think I’m only living because it hurts more than anything else can. I’m just staying along here to watch the corpses build up and god I wish they’d reanimate hostile or not. Aye, they could never be dead to me anyways, but maybe I wish they were. Reminds me of that song by motionless in white in that album.. creatures, was it? Eh, thanks for telling us all that cool stuff about game development
Nope it is a PZ problem you are literally not permitted to speak negatively about the game on any site except for 4chan and the occasional CZcams video like this one 💀 Try saying something on their echo chamber forums, discussion on steam, or Reddit. Good luck buddy
Regarding trapping - I have literally never used it in nearly 600hrs game time. There are 2 reasons for this - - food is ABUNDANT even on low loot settings - fishing/farming are just flat out better/easier to do (with standardized settings across all 3 skills) Regarding point 2 - you can set up a farm IN your base. You can make your base RIGHT NEXT to water. These two facts make trapping immediately less convenient than the other two. You can also fish with nothing but a wooden spear (ubiquitous item) and you can farm with just seeds when you find them. Traps which actually catch something also make noise and attract zeds. So that's another strike against traps. I literally don't even know what the crafting recipes for traps are. I don't know what they catch in what biomes. I even downloaded a mod that removes the distance requirement and STILL have never used them. I think there is a very niche set of circumstances that would lead to me actually using trapping. No access to farming/seeds, no access to body of water, insanely rare loot mod for regular food items, and already have materials to do trapping. Maybe then I'd use it. Until then, nah.
Agree with nearly everything and Im usually the type to go in on game devs, but at this point im just glad the game exists and ive gotten to enjoy it for 400+ hours. Development has been slow and the main draw for a few years was "Multiplayer soon TM" and when they did finally release multiplayer it was/and is still kinda hot garbage. But, i paid $15 dollars for this game and have gotten 10x the hours i have gotten out of $70 titles and could easily get another 400 hours out of the game in its current state. The fact that a $15 dollar early access game that is 10+ years old with very slow and often underwhelming updates gets 20,000+ players every day is kinda insane.
I mean pz only had less than 1K players for most of its lifetime, this was their chance and if they don’t act the indie stone is gonna lose the playerbase from the B41 CZcamsr boost as well
Good video bro but be confident in your stance. This is your opinion and don’t backtrack saying “maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t know” people will always have something to say whether it’s positive or negative. Just stand on your beliefs and don’t backtrack too much.
Thanks for everything, i got a few things to say myself... After countless of years of playing this game, i waited a lot, new players dont understand this, they joined the community a year ago, and they defend the devs, i defended the devs when i was new, everything they promised they did it, i waited for vehicles, i got them 2 years after, i waited for animations, i got them 2 years after, and build 41 multiplayer was one of the most anticipated updates so far, i waited and after a while i realized that, this isnt good, you are waiting for 2 years for an update? And after they said now we adding animals i knew i wont even care, im not waiting, once its out i dont think i will even make guides on it, i dont care, i dont need animals theres food everywhere, i didnt play this game for 8 years so i can play Sims 4 with DLC's or minecraft with mods.... The devs after so much praise dont feel the need to do what we want, they know they will get away with anything, they know that if they add the dumbest shit withouit mods it wont matter as we will be happy to recieve any content whatsover, because we are starved of content and updates, they keep stringing us and we keep accepting it and supporting the game and devs, if we keep supporting and praising, we wont get what we want and right now the game is becoming something i dont want, i made my video and i expected bigger hate and was ready to never even upload anymore if th ats what happens, but apparently people are waking up, they are realizing we arent getting what we deserve... The whole game is broken and instead of fixing that, devs give more content that will break even more creating a huge mess it already is, they want more players, but eventually none of these players will praise them, zomboid was known to be a small but strong community, and its becoming the opposite, people are leaving this game and just being like notifiy me if you fix the game im gone, and after some time community will be weak, i've stopped caring aswell. Animals and crafting? Why? I want to play walking dead or 28 days later type of game where im afraid if im gonna survive a few next days with no food, instead im getting the game where i worry what the hell do i do tomorrow or what animal im catching into my farm because im bored, crafting system sounds like a joke honestly, i dont want it, i want them to fix pvp, user inteface, skills, code, zombie spawns, map, combat system, desync, multiplayer can still have some work, i had so many ideas, but the devs dont care about our ideas, i noticed that over time Instead of fixing it, we fix it with mods, couple of years ago i was against mods, i dont know why, i liked vanilla, but after a bunch of mods came out that just made the game better i asked myself what is going on? Are we fixing the game? The devs literally take mods and add them into game, does this mean modders are better at making the game? And im telling you, if they took all these modders and got them into their game development the game would be fixed in a year, some of these modders are so skilled and determined even more than game devs... Now i know that i have to add 30 mods to fix the game and make it good the way it supposed to, im not waiting for the next update, even when it comes out i dont care about animals, i dont need them... Thanks indiestone but i dont like your choices anymore, and i dont praise you no more, you need to learn some accountability, you need to explain your actions and listen to the community, because thats why community supported you, if you want that support, step it up... Thanks for reading this, hope you have a nice day, and thank you Predz, i didnt expect anyone to really listen to me let alone agree and make a video about it mentioning me, hope to play with you and talk more, i still love zomboid, just hope indiestone dont mess it up for us, bye
At least they allow modding, I suppose. Some of my other survival sim games don't and their games are buggy shit fests with low QoL. The only reason I keep coming back to them is that the survival game genre where you play as an animal doesn't have much options for me to choose from.
PZ is a passion project afflicted with feature creep. I've been calling them out since before they lost their hard drives, and even after that chapter they still develop the game at an ineffectual snails pace. They have no idea how the build the core game, nor have any idea with what to do with it. They could have released 1.0 a long time ago. Instead we're at build 0.4X.
Its funny how people who make their money with Project Z are rambling about how incomplete or unfun this game is. Its version 0.41, the game will have many more years of development. No shit that people who play it 24/7 for money wont have any thing to do in the game in a foreseeable time. Its not perfect, but it has a slow dev cycle, always had and people complaining about the endgame havent realised, that they playing an unfinished game. I bought it 2013 and seeing how it went till now i dont expect it to be finished before 5-10 years into the future. I see it as something like Dwarf Fortress. Play other games meanwhile. Let it sit for a year or so. I get why the devs get a bit grumpy when they do the same as ever, but now it has exploded it popularity and everybody thinks he has the final solution for a problem the devs dont even have.
Zomboid "community" is almost turning into Genshin community but with devs supporting them. We are couple of steps towards disaster, and it's nice that we don't have only brainwashed people playing this. Whoever if i was you guys i would be prepared to face the despair that it might turn into.
Maybe a bit of a conspiracy theory but I think the reason why they have such empty skills is because of their community let’s be honest The only reason why project zomboid is such a fantastic game is the modding community so I think why they leave some of these skills empty is because they may want to capitalize on the modding community Granted, I’m not saying that the skillet should still be so empty in the first place. I still think they should be changed or have recipe updates but that’s just a theory
Not only that but ho cares about level 10 electrical? The mindset of grinding something pointless is like getting that 100% of achievements or whatever. Or loot boxes with only "cosmetics". I loved Pizza Tower and S ranked some levels. But really even attempting 100% the game turns into a grind and can ruin the fun. If I'm stuck wasting time on a Steamdeck or whatever in the future and feel to play the game? Sure I'm going to enjoy the challenge not part of finishing the game. Meanwhile I 100% and did stupid amounts of hours in NFS Most Wanted 2005 having beaten it countless amount of times on many consoles, school laptops and gaming computers. Grinding out the perfect rewards and built multiple saves with the best upgrades and tuning of different cars for MY enjoyment. Not some skill needed just to hotwire cars do I care to even consider getting to lvl 10! I love NFS Most Wanted 2005 and it is a flaw game. Yet after years and many consoles and computers it is still so fun and no mods needed. Even keyboard or with a racing wheel it is fun to play the races and the cops. Now all manual driving and trying to avoid cheesing to much when free roaming. Trying to get off and on the throttle like driving it for real and match RPM's etc. Even on keyboard spamming the gearshift into neutral or dropping rapid gears up and down to manage the RPM and lower the car noise in the chase. Actively slowing down when it makes sense to even in races. It makes zero difference for the wins or losses but MY enjoyment making a car game fun even on just a laptop keyboard. It is a wonderful game for what it is! And most of it comes down to gear shifting and the sounds and action in NEED for SPEED. When not able to keep up with the handling of the gearbox and brakes the car slams into something but the engine do not blow up or the car brakes from the impact. But it still is fun to try and play as if it dose and pushed to the point of not being able to keep up. But I know that at my disposal I got so many tricks and cheats up my sleeve yet make sure to avoid braking the fun of the game for ME. Like everyone playing a game should strive for. Sideways and unreal grip at a klick of a button! So much fun! So many games "you reading this" can make more fun by actively avoiding trying to turn into a stealth archer. But Skyrim and Loadfield/Fallout is a bad example of good mechanics and game design. Still just deciding to OR accepting the bullshit and making the best of it is the way to go. And mod. Mocking the game being dumb has some fun in it too. Console and cheats being the last resort! If the game dare to screw me outright then I'm sure going to cheat and say bye bye to some achievement that means nothing! As much as making my life harder to make the game more fun! Even Minecraft is fun to play vanilla when stuck on a controller let alone a phone screen! The challenge of combat is massive when not having a mouse and keyboard to play the game with. But that is just serious time wasting when Minecraft is out on the table as a option. Or car seat whatever. It is bad, real bad time waste when modern Minecraft is played. But really hotwire cars should take lvl 3 or something. The hole XP and skill system can be reworked since it has flaws. Like even in 2023 you can not really ask some ape on the internet how to hotwire a car and not have the basic skills to something with that information. Let alone gain the knowledge of how every car brand and security system works and is wired. The game is set in 1993? Sure it is easier to hotwire a car but like dam. Even with a video tutorial you are not ending up finding a perfect video explaining it for your use case. How in the world in 1993 would you figure out how to hotwire by taking apart digital arm watches? Or TV's! NO! It takes far more then lvl 1. It takes trail and error on each set of car type most likely. The more valuable the car the harder it should be to hotwire. A car full of tools like a work van should be difficult to steal vs a dam granny wagon. But even I can not bother with the awful system and things in the game right now and so grind watches for the XP needed to hotwire and being done with it. Since getting to even LVL 3 electrical is just not fun right now. And stamina or fitness skills grind is pointless as I toughen up the zombies for m enjoyment etc etc. I can not care to buff myself! If the system worked better I might have tried to gain skills and made it even more challenging. But it is basically just roleplaying that makes me truly bother with the grind of fitness and such. LVL 8 is a fantasy number in PZ. It is ridicules to even talk about LVL 10 skills outside of carpentry.
For me as a casual player, the main issue is that everything past the first few hours of gameplay is a grind. It's okay that you have to invest some time to gain skills and build things etc. But a big part of the game is "locked" behind hours and hours of grinding which the average player is not willing to invest.
Some foraging areas are also poorly allocated. There's an area that's great for hunting rabbits east of the Rosewood mechanics shop. It's classified as a "deep forest" when in reality it's just plains with very few trees just a couple of steps outside of town.
Ive heard this same argument in so many communities. Rust. Escape from Tarkov. What it all comes down to is playing a single gamr too much. I just started PZ to take a break from EFT until wipe. Tbh, i didn't notice 99% of what you were talking about. Why? Because I play PZ, Rust and EFT pretty evenly. When EFT gets annoying, i switch to another game. I think a lot of people would be much happier with games if they did this. And maybe I just don't understand the complaints, but an active dev team that shares updates, even if they take awhile, is pretty rare. Look at most EA, Blizzard, Valve games. Random updates, years apart with zero communication. My point is at least TIS cares and is trying. Game Dev is a very difficult job. You work hard on something then thousands of players tell you how much it sucks, or is unneeded, even though you thought it was a great idea. So even if your complaints are valid, which it seems they are, take some solice in the fact that the Dev team of your game cares enough to keep you in the loop and will keep trying to please the community. Also wanted to comment on Endgame. The NPC addition wont fix your endgame problem. At all. It'll just strech your play throughs out a few more hours. In Sandbox games, they only go as far as your own creativity and self motivation. Which is why I have always love your content Predz. You set goals and go out and try to complete them. All these players thinking one update will make the game fun for them are going to be very disappointed when NPCs are added and they still aren't having fun. Sandbox games are what YOU as the player make it. If you want a well scripted story and quests and all that, go play a single player story game. But maybe this reconfirms your complaints about skills and making sure the basic building blocks of the game need to be solid. I'll just keep getting mods to fix any issues until they are eventually fixed. And dont worry about "spaghetti code". EFT had the same problem. They are rewriting the whole game in the new unity engine and there seems to be tools that make that easier. Hopefully TIS has the same tools when this gets addressed eventually. Keep up the great content and as a community, keep the complaints civil and make sure we are all giving constructive criticism that can be fixed. After playing hundreds of games, some with great dev teams and some with shit dev teams, PZ should know that TIS at least cares a lot about their game and want to do right by the community and make the game fun. If the community goes down the road of "they are just doing this for money and they don't care" is when the relationship sours and the game will slowly die out.
I have pretty much since i heard of the game and got to play it for the first time when all it consisted of was a few city blocks, a factory with a ton of boxes in the middle, and stylizex pixel set, been absolutely enamoured with Zomboid. Even minor updates and small things released have warmes my heart entirely and to me Zomboud has been the epitome of apprecoation of little things and details. That being said, ive always been incredibly leniant and laid back about their dev time and while i never claimed any personal disappointment or frustration with the devs ive always understood other peoples. Today after seeing a recent wave of people mentioning the issues with development time (among other issues) I think i had my first like realization of an issue. Im not mad with the team, and while i acknowledge mid and late game lacks a desired amount of depth, I think Im just afraid Ill never get to see zomboid at its full potential Kinda sobering. Its odd, I love this game to death and its potential, aesthetic, and total captivation it has over me.. but I guess if i never got to see it through itd feel.. pointless
i got project zomboid a few years ago and loved it for a good year and a half. Until i stopped dying and realised how limited and surface level the game truly is, all i see in project zomboid is an unfinished game with huge wasted potential and its sad.
There’s so many things they could fix or overhaul with the game, but instead they want to work on a hundred different things at once and not give us anything new to play with. Like come on Indie Stone, “Toss me a frickin bone here!”. Something! Anything! Fix stupid bugs like driving cars through doors or zombies biting you through your car door. Overhaul the shitty Occupations so I don’t feel the need to pick Fire Officer or Police Officer or Burglar or Lumberjack every single playthrough because the majority of occupations are just objectively, and even subjectively, dog water. Overhaul the shitty skills. Change the way you get xp. Fix stealth! Why is stealth just… nonexistent in this game? Especially since there are stealth traits and stealth mechanics. I could go on and on and on. It’s just sad because I love PZ and the game has so much potential, but it’s just stagnated.
The way i level electrical is disassembling extractor hoods, large modern ovens (the pizza ones), and the fryers in restaraunts. With skillbooks, if you clear the restaurants in your starting town you can get to lvl 4. Still a worthless skill beyond gen repair.
I still find it useful for moving stoves at level three but beyond that there’s not much beyond that. Yes you can replace electrical switch’s on lamps with battery powered ones at level five but it’s not as useful as you think.
Despite having played this game a lot, I'm thinking of leaving it to until when I retire, at least 35 years from now. At that time the game's gonna be SICK, I just have to autopilot this period of life until the time comes, it's just as what this game is about: survival.
I'm not really part of any major PZ community, so I can't really speak about the toxicity surrounding criticizing PZ and it's Devs, but you raise some valid points. I want to believe in the honest desire of Indie Devs (generally speaking) to put out the game of their dreams. But more and more, especially with these survival style games, it just begins to feel like the devs either stop caring because, typical early access BS of "We've got your money, peace out" or, which I think is the less egregious crime, they just... burn themselves out; Lose the drive and inspiration to make the game they'd dreamt of in the beginning, a result of setting their expectations for themselves too high, biting off more than they can chew, so to speak... pun not intended. These days I can't help but feel that the conversation surrounding Zomboid and a lot of these survival indie games has thawed out a bit, when we're waiting two years, four years, *ten* years... (Looking at you Fun Pimps) for substantial updates or heaven forbid, a finished product... our patience begins to wane and we can no longer accept empty promises as assurance that change (for the better) is coming. I personally still love Zomboid, and pray that Indie Stone isn't taking the "Leave it in Early Access indefinitely/as long as we can" approach that some indie survival devs have taken... (See the above mentioned company) even though like many of us, my patience is beginning to wane. EDIT (As I watched further): When you were mentioning about the RNG exp gains, something I was semi-aware of but not aware of to the extent you brought up... I gotta ask, what is with devs adding arbitrary grinding to their games? A certain amount of grind is to be expected, gives you stuff to achieve... but... days to grind certain levels? C'mon...
like so many things it's 50/50 with reasonable and not reasonable an attempt at a "realistic" apocalypse SURVIVAL game and someone is gonna complain that once they become self sufficient it's boring.... ya survival is either boring or terrifying and if you seek out the interesting/terrifying you are likely to die ya rng for exp doesn't really make sense and i wish i could drop 10lbs in a week >.> seek to break the game and you'll find a way then they just have to spend the time chasing fixes, then they have to fix the breaks that the fix broke ans so on i only recently got to day 42-43 so most of these thing are way beyond me i've always wondered why mods/moders seem to often drastically out do the teams that do it for a living
@@nerfherder4284Having to disassemble hundreds of pieces of furniture to figure put how to put a series of planks in an upright position is not immersion
I disagree on foraging and fishing, foraging is now something I do moving between areas when on foot in town, or in nearby forests when moving between A and B in small towns. Fishing might be something interesting, doubly so if it removes depletion. However, for other skills, I absolutely agree. Trapping needs to be fleshed out alongside electrical. Putting the two together should yield access to explosives, and advanced traps to have around your base. Tailoring is also something I've found to be lackluster, even if not lacking in utility. Tailoring should allow us to create patchwork leather gambesons, and perhaps with animals, animal hides being tanned either worked into tailoring or trapping to allow for the creation of hardened leather armor with tailoring. These older types of armor were actually quite effective, and if metal working takes a hand in this, you could weld together links of chain to make chain armor to put over them. It'd be heavy, but incredibly effective and durable against an undead menace. However, regarding servers, I'd like to see a simulated option put into effect. If the apocalypse has just started, then it gives the current job options. Five years, and burger flipper and unemployed, or just minimum wage jobs, might fall under survivor. Basic, run of the mill, some bonuses to foraging, trapping, light footed, etc. 10 years and the only jobs left unaffected would be soldier, police, doctor, medic, the high skill or ongoingly useful jobs even in the end times. After 15, the soldier and police job are replaced by guard, infantry, cavalry, with each having assorted skill bonuses. Medic is replaced by herbalist as basic first aid supplies dwindle and the reliance on herbs for day to day healing increases. Finally, at 20 years even doctors would be replaced with something like "surgeon" as a general name for someone who has advanced knowledge on how to compound medicine AND perform advanced procedures such as amputations. Likewise, the highest technology to be maintained should be a generally medieval level when communities come together, and more tribal or nomadic for lone survivors. Then, this idea could be implemented with great effect and also give the option for long form small group servers to progress, or rather, regress, into the level of sustainable technologies as survival goes on. It's not a bad idea, not one bit, and it'll work for the right servers. Just not for yours, which isn't a bad thing. It just means that it won't work for your server, given that it won't even be needed for your server in the first place since you'll always be wiping to day 1 of the fall of humanity anyways. However, the combat needs a rework, yes. Holy shit, it needs a rework before NPCs.
I bet the biggest issue the devs have is the engine upon which their game is built. This is still a mostly 2D game, with 3D elements tied in, that renders every 2D tile every frame, etc, etc... Implementing anything new in the game is probably 1000% more time-consuming because of its uniqueness. If the devs rebuilt the game from scratch in something like Unreal Engine 5, they'd be able to do a lot more, much quicker. But this will never happen because they are obviously too deep now to change things so drastically.
I actually do level electrical to 3, so I can install plumbed washing machines and porch lights to my player built log cabin by the river. But yeah purely fluff, in vanilla electrical and metalworking is basically worthless. The only reason I could imagine even grinding metalwork is to build metal containers for even more loot space. Foraging is neat. I usually play a park ranger with stacked bonuses and I feel like I find a lot. It could 100% benefit from more variety, and the blank foraging spots are ridiculous. There should at least be a placeholder foraging table in those places if they’re not gonna fix it.
I would love to see the crafting system from cataclysm dark days ahead in zomboid. That was one of the main things that kept me playing cdda for months.
As a new player im having a blast just trying to get through the first couple weeks, there are quirks with the game but it's an overall fun experience. I think the problem with this game and most other games is that people justvplay them too much. You said you've been playing this game every day for 5 or 6 years ammassing thousands of hours. Imagine going back to the days before social media and the internet and playing Donkey Kong 64 for thousands of hours, it's going to get boring. Games now a days provide more replayability but just seems like people expect too much, any game is going to get dull eventually.
Admittedly, they DO have a point as far as "lack of endgame" goes, since once you've got a nice home, are self-sustaining, and so on, you dont have TOO much to do... You could grind skills, but that'd take ages, and what then? Maybe clear out all the zombies? Even larger huge loot pile maybe?
On the subject of NPC's: They've put themselves into a really difficult position by promising this huge amazing NPC system that now huge chunks of the community are putting all their faith into it. A lot of people point to the broad idea of "NPC's" as being the thing that will save the game. There's so much hype around the concept that now if they release something that isn't almost perfect it's going to be massive let-down. A huge issue with NPCs as a concept is that if they are implemented badly they make the game physically worse any time they are around. I've played PZ since it was on Desura, including old builds with the really janky NPCs. And I'll tell you, those NPCs sucked. The meta then was to just "delete" them any time you met one because they were such a liability to have around. Luring zombies to your location, randomly attacking you (intentionally or otherwise), they were just a hassle to deal with and didn't add anything to the experience. Its clear they don't want a repeat of that with the new NPCs so are trying to implement a huge NPC update that's mostly complete all in one go rather than a trickle of small additions that have them broken for ages before finally becoming playable. BUT this leads to the NPC system ballooning out into this infinite entity that will never come out because it'll never be good enough and any time they add any other system to the game they also have to update the NPC's to match that new system. (How will NPCs interact with the car system we added? How will they interact with animals? etc.) So what's the solution? Well, my idea would be to break the idea of NPC's down into smaller, but still complete packages. Maybe the first people you interact with aren't even physically in the game world. Imagine getting a radio call on a random walkie talkie you found: "Hey is anyone there? I'm hurt and need help. Bring bandages and painkillers to [location] and I'll give you something". The location in question would either be an inaccessible building or a drop box or something so you never actually meet the "person" but it still creates neat little activities that can emerge in the world. This takes vastly less time to implement but is still a valuable addition. Keep building on it with small incremental updates and eventually you'd have a full NPC system, without needing to spend years with nothing to show for it until you were "done". This comment is already too long so I'll stop here. Glad you made this video, glad people are talking about this stuff in a rational way.
I only play single player, so I don't have nearly as many frustrations with the game as Predz - and I only have 350 hours in game, so I have barely dipped my toe into PZ compared to a lot of you I'm sure - but even I recognise there's a lot of work needed and all the talk from devs being of "cool new crafting recipes" in B42 worries me. Adding more bells and whistles to keep people busy, when there are fundamental game play issues that have needed a rework for years suggests to me their focus is not where it needs to be. Game stability (especially in multiplayer from all I've heard), a more meaningful character creation system, purposeful skill progression system, dynamic zombie behaviour system and randomly generated mid and late game "quests" and events to give continued purpose to playing past the first month are all on my wish list. 5:25 I know this entire video is highlighting issues with the game that the devs should fix, but in the meantime, ForagingZ mod does solve the missing forage zone issue. Trapping should level to booby traps - once you know how to trap small animals, trapping zeds is the logical progression. Ankle snares, pit traps, guillotine wire across doorways etc. 7:51 Standardized Sprinting XP and Standardized Nimble XP are absolute must have mods IMO I didn't realise other skills were random so I'll be adding the standardized reloading and aiming and fitness mods as well now.
I'm glad this is being discussed finally (in general as a community) because I do love this game, but frankly I've stopped play PZ until they fix the game. Without the modding community, their would be far less traction with this game since it's vanilla platform has so many deep seeded issues that are masked until you play for many hours to uncover their hollow, "brickwall" aspects. Again, I understand this piece of digital art is quite a feat to accomplish, making it something that it's wanting to be but there is no obligation to stand by due this being a transactional experience. I haven't given up on the game but I am waiting for it to mature to what it thinks it is.
In a nutshell - TIS are more focused on building new systems which take years to develop than fixing/implementing the ones that they already created, and leave it up to unpaid volunteers (modders) to update their core game features. Example, the vanilla lighting system has no impact on the zombies ability to see players. A recent mod created a system which makes it work. And that's great right? The community made the game better - but WTF have the developers actually been doing all these years? And how many of these mods will be broken by whatever they push out?
Also, it puts the work on to the community to bug fix and work out what combination of updates (mods) will work together - so again, WTF are TIS actually doing for the game?
Even better. I started playing PZ completely Vanilla and constantly felt like... this is it? Why can't I open a can with a knife? Why can't I rip up underwear? Why does a metal shelf (with 3 racks on it) only hold 50 items, thats the same as the floor but its should hold more than that. Then when you finally get into mods, you find out about stuff that you suddenly realize isn't vanilla and now you can't go back
personally... i just dotn care lol... i like the game for what it is, i knew what i was buying i dont need any more updates or anything, if they dropped the game right now, i would be fine i bought the game knowing what it is and im happy with it
i don’t understand, when you’re building a super massive game, why people decide “hurr durr i’m gonna add another game variable to tune for no reason” like this is where I think factorio is very good, it says, “here’s a list of game variables, if you want more go mod and figure it out,” and it’s not that long a list like, why add “chance to get exp,” a whole new column of numbers (that you have to keep track of and reevaluate!), for no fucking reason
Feature creep. It's very common in game development. People want to make their games bigger and grander which is understandable. The issue is when, as you said it, a game has so many variables and skills to keep track of not only in a vacuum but how it interacts with the world and other skills and mechanics. So many good games got killed with bloated features and I bet in 10 years or possibly less from now more and more people are going to go back to the arcade basics.
@@bigblue344 but what feature creep makes you immediately *start* a feature with too many numbers? or are you telling me they added this rng check for hurr durr absolutely no reason?
@@pallingtontheshrike6374 If we are talking strictly about XP gains and the RNG tied to it, yeah, I don't got an answer for you as it takes long enough as it is to grind out skills unless they just wanted to grind it out more.
@@bigblue344 it’s just boggling to me that they’d add a whole extra column of numbers to a game that implicitly will involve a shitton of numbers, like, do you not realize you wanna start conserving space *now?*
The amount of times I have died due to a bug/glitch in project zomboid is outrageous. Like you I just don't get how these aren't being addressed more aggressively in a perma-death game. I could care less about NPCs when the core of the game - which is zombies - are super janky with barriers and stairs
7:51 I ALWAYS play with the 'Standardized Experience' mod, it removes the RNG from xp gains with skills such as nimble, sneaking, sprinting, reloading, etc., it's such a great mod!
I as you wish they would work faster we have all been so patient because of the love we have for the game. But please just do better guys. I honestly feel like this will end like dayz did for me a game I loved and put tons of time into and then they start selling add-ons to an unfinished game.
Honestly, my sign that the PZ devs are too headstrong and possibly incompetent is that they refuse to add a save system. I barely play the game because losing many hours of progress isn't thrilling, it fucking pisses me off. Also doesn't help that because the game forces away people like me, there seems to be an echo chamber about the subject. When people ask about saving, the thread is guaranteed to be full of responses saying that saving is dumb, as well as offering alternatives to saving that make the game incredibly easy without actually solving the core problem that not having saves creates.
I made a post on Reddit talking about how we need smaller, more frequent updates that fix some of the issues plaguing the game and giving it occasional labors of love, rather than spending years at a time collecting dust. I was downvoted to oblivion and some folks wanted even longer times between updates, meaning bigger updates instead. GUYS, I'M 25. The game came out when I was 12. I want to see this game hit 1.0 before I'm 40, please.
I absolutely LOVE this game. I currently have 1,910.9 hours as a SP. I've only been playing for a couple of years. I didn't realize they had a Discord server or that the community can be toxic. That depresses me, a little, because I've been talking them up to anyone who will listen to me ramble lol. I LOVE that they seem to appreciate modders. I now wish they would listen more to the players as a whole. I have been a little worried about the changes that are coming. The crafting system, especially, with the newest Thursdoid update, seems like it can add a layer of tedium I'd much rather avoid. I also worry about conflicts with the mods I currently love and can't imagine playing without... and I hope the modders are able to update them into the new build. I started playing after foraging was changed and I like it the way it is now (not knowing any different lol). I'm not sure how I'll feel about the fishing minigame. As for glitches, I hope they fix zed attack wall clipping and walls being treated as fences (I've only found that, thus far, at the Prepper store in Loisville.) Multiplayer sounds like a nightmare! Oh! As for electrical, I usually level to 3 so I can move stoves and for mods. It's not a priority though because I (now) always play as a Burglar and with a mod I can make my own stoves 😁
I love the fact any and all criticisms gets swept under the rug by the excuse ''but muh small team'' and ''muh you aren't a game developer, no opinions for you''
That's interesting. Let me talk about electrical, and why electrical is a heritage of something the game no longer craves to be. First time I heard about PZ was back in 2012, very long ago, and what it was supposed to be, and tried at least, was a 3D version of Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, evidently there were some changes fundamental to moving from the turn based system to the real time system, but that was the idea, the core concept, and CDDA have had, for a good long while, a clear end game with mutations and cybernetics/bionics/robots, you grind your skills, electronics included, to be able to install/craft mutagen and bionics, so in that game a skill such as electronics is vital, the game simply cannot function anymore without it, unless you intend to change a core concept of the game, but for PZ that's not the case. You see, PZ does not have any sci-fi aspect to it besides the zombies, electricity is only ever used for convenience, cars, freezers, TVs, it's not, by a long shot, vital, nor a core part of the game, so the electrical skill that was, certainly, imported from CDDA, where it's vital, ends up completely useless since now you can start as burglar and don't even need electrical 1. This problem also plagues metalworking and foraging, both almost useless skills as they are right now, and cooking, somewhat better but still largely useless. They are a heritage of ancient times, devs don't want to take them out because it feels wrong, but there is no way to make them useful without dipping into sci-fi or making them actually meta defining broken in some regard.
I feel like the community of modders have already emulated build 42 in a way where when we get the official build 42, Its not going to be as exciting. They keep hyping it up and its going to be the downfall of the current Update Path they have planned. Its bad enough that the modders have had to fix the game due to the lack of updates.
As someone who has played MP(specifically on your servers. I'm even in the event you showed in the later half of the vid) it was just not fun playing with multiple people because of performance issues. The amount of times i had to reset my character because i got bit by a teleporting zed(have more then 1-2 players fighting in the same area causes this) was to high. That plus if there where dozens of players like in the events on your server all i could really do was play loot goblin since trying to attack a zombie, get near them or even target them would cause the game to just start turning into a slide show. Now to be fair i am in Europe and i think the server is in the US, But i also have played on Australian server with other games and i had less of these problems. I cant say much about the dev time itself since while i owned the game for a while i did not really start playing until beginning this year. But from what i hear i think its time for the devs to pin down what they want to do with the game. Set up a time frame and finish that so they have a solid ground to actually start adding on more fancy stuff later on(examples Rimworld, Factorio,Terraria).
A lot of these complaints are neatly addressed by saying "it's an unfinished game." Criticisms about the skills in particular. Hate to sound like a jerk but that's what you're in for when you buy in to play an unfinished game. A lot of this stuff is the sort of thing that serves as an early framework early in the development of most games only actually finalized in the final few months of development. That's why so many of the skills are barren, why foraging isn't implemented everywhere. Or take the grievances about the patches. Four updates in a week is normal. So is going weeks without one. Sometimes testers will be playing a new version of a game every single day for weeks at a time. Other times they'll go weeks or even months without changes. I hate to sound like a dismissive jerk by saying that it's mostly normal stuff and you signed up for this by buying an early access game but, well, you did. Most of this is fairly routine. I get that you feel frustrated but ultimately you're the one investing so much time into something openly touted as unfinished. And also, what happens when they make a decision to cut something from the game because they feel it's not adding anything meaningful- something completely normal in development of most games? The players freak out. The electrician skill is something that would end up being cut from most RPGs. Most RPGs, before the end of game development, do end up cutting one or multiple skills that the devs created an entire framework for earlier. Ultima, Fallout, Diablo, Balder's Gate, even action RPGs like Deux Ex, Mass Effect, Alpha Protocol, System Shock. Totally normal in game development but if it happened here do you think the response would be gracious? You're in this video upset that they replaced a bad, unfinished foraging system with a better one because the new one was unfinished - when the game itself is unfinished. They're sticking pretty well to game dev fundamentals. The reason most early access games fail is because they don't and pursue instant gratification for the playerbase instead of doing what is best for the long-term health of the game.
the animal AI is a big step in my opinion, think of the mods that will come out when that code drops, Im talking STALKER SHIT and like FALLOUT and some other popular game stuffs with cool creatures
glad you are bringing up these points. i only just started playing single player split screen with my son less than a year ago and have ran into alot of issues with the gameplay that they ignore to make things more complicated by doing what moders already have done witch confuses the heck out of me 🤪 like foraging. with forage off you see plants, logs, sticks, twigs, berry bushes, etc already on the ground but you cant interact with it and its so anoying. or how janky the attacking is how you can shoot a highlited zombie but miss and hit a zombie 3-4-5 rows behind the green highlited zombie your aiming at. or like how you can stand on a zombie and stomp its head but miss. or well alot of how attacking is jank but moders have soled most it now they wanna just make it so moders have to fix more and its kinda sad....and i dont want another minigame for fishing i want less lag they need to fix the sorting and sprites and zone spawning and lighting -weather and omg i hate the dang trees that well they grow way to fast and flip cars like crazy 😵
>with forage off you see plants, logs, sticks, twigs, berry bushes, etc already on the ground but you cant interact with it and its so anoying. Honestly, Foraging is INCREDIBLY nice... Actually kind of a huge upgrade from the old system, with all the shit you can find there, though i do wish the basic resources (sticks and rocks) were more common, especially if you're gonna make tools and weapons out of them Also note while said tiles arent 100% i believe, they pretty typically have that specific resource on them, so rocks are more prone to giving stone, logs/sticks wood, etc
trapping would make a lot more sense if, after gaining a few levels, we could make zombie traps like trenches/ walker pits, etc around the base. booby trapping our safe houses would also be a nice addition
that's a good idea
it's time to cook zombies
maybe make furniture better as a barricade like the only thing that can block a window is a book shelf and you have such a small chance to pick it up by the time you can you have better alternatives
thank you@@sqike001ton
Maybe they could be balanced by having a noise mechanic. Too many zombies and they start making too much noise and draw in even more. Forces you to clear them out before they get too full
Fun fact about foraging: It's harder in multiplayer.
The debris tiles that have a higher chance to spawn items like stones and branches are not in multiplayer. For example the only way to reliably gather stones in multiplayer is by checking cracks in roads which hugely limits foraging and makes you level it up much slower.
Stop teaching me new things....
I've seen this issue. Perhaps it's done to reduce lag in s early multiplayer version
The goat!
Keep enlightening us Zomboid scientist man, I love your work
I feel like people's experiences are being screwed by some weird mods tbh, i find sticks and stones _everywhere_ in the grass on both in sp and mp? and yea 95% of the time i play with 0 mods. There might be some correlation between these things?
Fun Nimble trivia, playing the game normally with a character who has at least one point in it (75% = 400% overall exp) will still take several hundred hours of playing to reach level 10, it's painful
Yeah I always do 1000x XP gain in my server settings. I love how easily the characters get injured and die, but I hate grinding stats
I'm glad that more and more people are talking about the game's problems. In my opinion, this is the only way to push developers to do something.
Nah, the devs will just attempt to shush everyone, ignore the problem, blame it on community, or tell everyone they will fix it and do nothing and everyone forgets about ir
@@wodekw6862this just isnt true though. The zomboid devs have listened to us A LOT hell look at build 45’s current stuff its basically stuff fans want
The devs are doing what they want not the other way around. Look at the crafting system, it was already a convoluted hateful mess and they're making it 10 times worse with all the stupid work benches and tools. Nobody asked for a sharpness system which is also, like the new crafting system, more micromanagement ending in being just a way to slow the pace down even more.
For real. I’ve called em’ out for years now on this garbage, and only get coping dismissals by people like MrAtomicDuck.
I’m just glad to finally get some validation from the community.
The developers have been making money off of this product for over a decade.
This is not the first time in 10 years people have talked about the game’s problems.
The problems still exist.
My mind is blown at how silly your thinking is, and how everything you said sounded nice but meant absolutely nothing, and is verifiably incorrect.
That is something I noticed with a lot of indie games, especially of the survival type like Don't Starve, a lot of skills and mechanics exist with zero depth and only exist as a speed bump for the player but started with the idea that there will be a lot to add in the future but just never got around to it.
At least DST is still getting constant updates, meanwhile PZ has MULTIPLE times in the history that get no update for years.
yeah DST is definitely getting a lot more love from KLEI compared to indie stone. Even Don't Starve got all those DLCs.. quite frankly it's a lot of content that sometimes feel a bit hard to keep up with.. and KLEI even has Oxygen Not Included which is still getting a ton of content all the time together with a DLC as well.... I don't know if the team sizes and their resources are comparable, but if they were, then KLEI is definitely exposing the laziness of Indie Stone@@windflier1684
@@windflier1684 DST still gets updates??
@@ender_3807 Yes, I think there was a pretty big update 2-3 days ago.
@@ender_3807 It literally just drop a major update 2 days after my comment, so yeah...
Having to install like 20 mods to make the game enjoyable is crazy. After playing modded, I cannot go back. So much is missing from the game that should be there
what are your goto mods? ive mostly played vanilla and enjoyed it but i just started playing w mods and i can see the appeal
@@scooterking136i wanna know this too i dont even play the game yet but i think i’ll need good mods to like it
I love zomboid but the fact that people see the indie stone as infallible or undeserving of criticism is baffling. They made a really really good game, but at the end of the day that game still isn't finished and there's a lot of things they could address that they haven't yet
They can't say it can't be done when independent modders crank things out, which means it's entirely an internal autism thing where it has to be so and so just right to some image they have. Or they simply aren't doing {insert thing} like they say they are.
Someone said in another video that for 42 they should have worked out NPCs first, got that working well to give some mid/late game content for us, and then do the deep dive into crafting/hunting/fishing improvements afterward. This makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of the metallurgy crap won't even really be in the game except in special (medieval?) maps.
>A lot of the metallurgy crap won't even really be in the game except in special (medieval?) maps.
In particular wilderness-only maps, which i will admit i'm *definitely* planning on messing with on release, especially with less mod jank involved :V
I agree. Plus build 42 takes like forever to come lmao. Now we have to wait even longer. PZ is only fun at the start of the game. Once I have everything, then there’s nothing left to do lmao.
Electronics could be awesome if you were able to create some simple mechanisms with it. Like maybe send signals if you detect motions, set up a Camera System, remote lock and unlock doors. You could have a Fort with a Command Center that can remote control a lot. Or maybe some nice automation like sprinklers and such. Maybe even go as far and let the player set up stuff like Solar Panels and Batteries or if they also are good at mechanics let them build a Bio Diesel Generator
There is so much potential
Gute Ideen, vor allem der Biogenerator. Frohes Stolzjahr
I kind of agree except for solar panel unless you made it level 10 in 93 civilian solar wasn't super common and super expensive but automation would be great live most garages had remoted operated door why not allow people to dissemble garage door and make automated gates (which is all ready a mod) or like you said bio diesel for long term fuel source
@@sqike001ton I thought more of salvaging existing panels. Would work in the setting
@@sqike001ton maybe we would be able to find solar panels in the world and then you would need electrical skill leveled to set up them in your base
@@Armetar Yep. Even if its military grade loot as it wasnt that common for civilians like 'Spike' wrote earlier. Wouldnt be the worst item to work with 😂
There's 31,000 people playing the game at this very moment. We have a small team can't be an excuse anymore. The game absolutely exploded at the start of the year. Not a single update since a 10k increase in daily players
I’m personally worried about B42 because it seems like zomboid is making the same mistakes that worlds adrift made, where they keep growing the scope much further than they can actually follow through
yea but this has always been the scope/vision for the last 13 years. They aren't growing the scope past what they've already been working towards this entire time. I think the time to worry about that was like 10 years ago lol
The ore deposits is DUMB and completely out of left field nowhere
They're only for "forest only" mode.@@MadAtMax.300Blackout
@@thebagelar3859 It's time to get the game functional and stable, wouldn't you say? Any feature additions are moot if the game handles so poorly we can't properly play it together.
@@MadAtMax.300Blackout The ore deposits is an addition for a custom WILDERNESS ONLY map that they're going to add; They're making sure it is Possible to be able to start from literally nothing and still be able to progress through the crafting system. You won't be finding random ore deposits in or around muldraugh and the rest of the existing map. There will be other methods of getting metal, ie, smelting down scrap metal.
The small team 'we don't have the manpower ' excuse, for over 10 years seems well... Weak.
Point of comparison -> kenshi (10 or 11 year dev work if I'm not mistaken)
And they got to a point where they decided the project had been completed, even though there where still a lot of possible developments. And moved on to the sequel in which a lot of systems they developed over the years will be developed further and in a more integrated way.
Always had my eye on Zomboid but just found more rapidly progressing developments in other projects.
Jankiness is not fundamentally a problem, the problem is when no one takes a step back and admits: we set things up in a way that will require to much reworking to fully fix, here is a system that kinda works with/around the jank, and we will address it in the follow up project.
Sad to keep seeing the communities around promising games get so fixated on the "supremacy/holiness" of the project they have been following for so long that they can't accept issues or weaknesses being called out. Eh well... I'll keep on looking for something to fill the time till kenshi 2 comes out. (Guys you know you could try going back to Runescape, graphics are not to far off and systems are functional 😂)
Hot take... no game should be in development for 10+ years. Most players/devs would have long moved on from the game and it makes them look incompetent for taking so long
7 Days to Die, another very popular zombie survival game is another that has this issue... if you so much as even mention the development time of these games, you are banned from everything or hit with excuse after excuse
The devs for both of these games never communicate with the playerbase and keep adding useless meaningless features to the game instead of fixing known bugs
This is exactly how I feel about 7Days....
I read through the whole post on Steam about what we were going to see with the new upcoming update n I don't recall anything about fishing being reworked into a minigame. If that's true alls I have to say is dont fix something that isn't broken.
They showed it off in a later Thursdoid.
PZ right now suffers heavily from the 'get out of town blues' wherein once you secure a car and a full tank of a gas, you can simply drive out of town, into the middle of the map.
You'll never starve to death or die of thirst, you'll probably get bored and close the game looooong before then, I firmly believe the game needs more (and interactable) meta events, and more importantly NPC's, both friendly, neutral, and hostile.
Honestly, while i'm not really feeling NPCs for the most part, yeah more Meta Events would be nice.
There's like... three, and only one is significant really (chopper) :V
The development time is becoming less and less understandable. The game has sold a lot of copies now, they have a fairly large team, but still haven't pushed out an update for a year.
I do really love this game, with hundreds of hours sunk into it but this whole "it will be done when it's done" attitude players have towards the devs is becoming counterproductive now. I bought this game back in 2014/2015 and have been waiting almost a decade for NPCs and other features at this point.
I think it's a weird case of most zomboid players (possibly) being minecraft vets (again, speculation). As Mojang started pumping out updates on a set development schedule, half-assed changes became more and more prevalent (villager trading is super OP, Caves and Cliffs had to be split in 3 updates [Wild Update included] instead of the two they promissed and so on) and people look at it as the "gold standard" of sandbox games. So people, in reaction to those half-assed updates released on a schedule, have a kneejerk reaction and would rather have the complete opposite (it's gonna be out when its out). The issue is that none of those approaches are essentially good (or bad, mind you) and that, at the end of the day, it's what is done that matters.
Prioritizing things is also a huge problem and, knowing multiple programmers, it can be difficult at times to prioritize things between what they want (lets call that artistic vision), what they feel is needed for the game's health (usually boring backend stuff that players won't care about unless performances are attrocious) and what players want. While there can be some overlap, there are also issues there. It may be a bit of a fence-sitting take, but if they only addressed the community concerns in terms of balance and performances, I think players would still be upset there are no new guns/locations/etc.
I 100% support that those issues need to be addressed and that the "small team" excuse is getting thin however. It's not like a lone dev over their head in a overambitious project where there is promise and people keep up with it because the project shows promise and the dev is really open about development and the lack of resources, it's a fairly large team with some experiences devs (they mentioned some guy from Mojang actually) joining the team that should be able to work things out far easier than (no offense) junior devs.
I wonder if they had a mess of code and are having to redo portions of the game to allow for basements, larger buildings, and stable npcs.
From a devblog a while ago
Then kindly put the game down and go elsewhere until it releases and do everyone including yourself a favour. If you expect a huge expansion dlc sized dev cycle to take six months of dev time from any developer, you'll likely have as miserable time here as we will have you complaining.
I get the frustration and anticipation for waiting for something I've been there myself so I empathise. But the idea that a year or even a year and a half is unreasonable for the huge amount of expansive features this update will bring is extremely frustrating. This isn't a few bug fixes, its large systemic changes and additions to the core game, you say you get things take time to code but clearly not if you've looked at what we're adding to the game and find the time it's taken completely unreasonable. Especially factoring in we've already stated numerous times a serious illness and hospital stay within the team early on delayed the remaining part of the update that is yet to be completed, yet even if that hadn't happened I'd be perfectly comfortable and happy with the teams progress given what is being created here and feel the team's done a fantastic job of catching up.
We're not gonna crunch the team to nervous breakdown to rush some broken crap out the door, cause then everyone will be mad about that and I'm almost certain you'd be first in line. But not only that we'll also prob start bleeding staff with all the code knowledge as they leave due to the miserable stressful and unhealthy work environment that creates, and good luck getting meaningful quality or sizable updates ever again then, as we have a team unfamiliar with the dark recesses of the code.
[5:57 PM]
Code that becomes a house of cards no one dares make significant changes or improvements to. It's a story as old as time.
At end of the day we take as long as we take to release a good product and maintain a healthy happy team and considering our biggest success came after years of maintaining this dev cycle are not planning to change it because of your complaint. We'll release when its ready, and people will be thanking us for taking our time and releasing a quality update. Then we'll ride that positivity until posts like this start emerging again for b43. We'll suffer it, not gladly, but suffer it nonetheless as its better for the game, the community and our team whether people like yourself at this point in the update dev cycle appreciate it or not.
There are other games and if you're unhappy or bored of b41, forget zomboid exists for a while until you hear a news story that the beta or next stable build has released.
Zomboid may be early access but its still sold as a complete product bought as is at point of purchase, and priced for what its worth as it stands. We could have already 1.0ed it and moved onto a new game years ago, or 1.0ed it and sold anything we've done since as DLC at $20 a pop. You're being provided substantial bonus free extra content we're not asking for any money for whatsoever, and it'll take as long as it takes. If this is somehow a bad deal for you then I'd suggest you look for a better one elsewhere.
I get you paid money and feel entitled to complain, and that is your right. But considering you have the testicular fortitude to throw the same complaint towards pre-steam Dwarf Fortress which was completely free doesn't fill me with confidence you'll see my perspective though.
-lemmy101
I don't really see how my comment comes across as entitled in any way. I did stop playing Zomboid a year ago, and I stopped for 4 years after I bought it originally, as you suggest.
I'm pointing out an issue with the development cycle, as well as the growing issue of gaslighting people who point out this issue, as you have.
I don't feel like I'm owed anything, I'm just slowly losing interest in the game, as are many others presumably.
Same bro... same.
Hi, im the foraging main in pz from reddit. Just want to say i 100% agree with you that it's insane that half the map is missing foraging zones. Constantly referring to zone maps to see what is viable foraging or not SUCKS. However, i also strongly diagree with your general review of the usefulness of foraging. Having played multiple cdda runs, foraging is amazing. You can find tools like saws, watee bottles and pots, enough food to gain weight, weapons, and more consistently in a run. Given you dont do much else walking from one town to another, foraging is a great addition.
Expect similar changes to fishing to be more interactive
As a consistent foraging user, I completely agree with this, prehaps they could’ve made it to the “???” Zones have a basic loot table to them or something? Better than just making the area unviable outright.
As far as my experience has been, you can only get a few types of berries in the winter. During the other months, foraging at high levels (probably about 7+) can net you some crazy foods, from dead animals to entire fruit trees! If you dedicated entire in-game weeks to foraging green areas, you might be able to slowly gain weight. However, the egregious calorie use while walking (don't know why they upped it so much) might make that nearly impossible.@@user-zw6rq9pp7p
Big agree, I'm a hardcore foraging fan, especially since the system was overhauled (it was incredibly boring before).
Agreed. Foraging = good
you can find weapons consistently?
3:05 or so: This is not unique to PZ. Heck, Starfield has a ton of wholly irrelevant, there-just-to-be-there skills, and that is an 8-10 year project from a AAA dev. The discord and other PR shenanigans are more of the bad news, for me.
And medicine would absolutely matter more, and probably be fine enough "as is" - if injuries just took longer to heal from, and in a functional multiplayer setup. No treatment of wound should equate to days of poor performance as a person, while good treatment should fix most right up. For this game, at least.
After over a decade of the EA model I think we can all agree: we should only part with our money once devs, no matter how well intentioned, have a complete product. You would not buy 4 wheels in hopes of getting a car one day, nor would you buy a roof hoping to get a house finished at some point. Don't understand why people think it's ok to do the same for games.
I think project zomboid is full game at this point and anything they add is extra nice.
@@rerun3283 Honestly yeah, i'd treat it as more of a Full Game.
It's not exactly in-depth and extensive though, when it comes to lategame
It's 20 dollars! And most people payed half of that. Games don't seem to be measured by time played, but they should be at least a bit. 300+ hours for 20 dollars is a steal. I do understand what you're saying though. I just want more!!!!!
@@snakeneedscheeks >300+ hours for 20 dollars is a steal.
Definitely a bit more than that, here :V
I already have more than 100hrs, and I have had the game for a bit more than a month now
So am i allowed to harp on the absurdity of needing to read a magazine to flip a switch on a generator without some jackass trying to convince me generators are complicaed to operate? "Oh man, i see the gas cap but... what do i do with it?!"
Turning on and off or refueling a generator requires no skill book. Only "connecting" a generator to a building requires a skill book. Can you connect a real generator to a house power grid?
@@lockeseven7 don't portable generators have instructions printed directly on them
Did they have those instructions in the 1970's?
I think the skillbook makes sense for generators. But some of the other ones don't make much sense.
Do not ever attempt to connect a genny to a house by yourself. Call an electrician. My step dad is an experienced handyman, but even he called the electricians to set it up. It is dangerous work.
Just got to 12:00. Before I hear your thoughts, I've owned Zomboid since Desura - back in the old Kate & Baldspot days and the house raider.
All I've ever wanted from zomboid was the npc system. I was in highschool when I wanted it and I'm now 30 years old and there's rarely ever any updates on it and the hivemind responce for a decade has been "it'll come when it's ready".
I've got my money from Zomboid, and it's in my opinion one of the best games of all time and my favourite zombie survival by far. But Christ, just work on the NPCs already.
For people like me that have no real interest in multiplayer save dicking about with a few friends, I don't need blacksmithing, crafting overhauls, while the most critical piece of the puzzle is missing.
Love the devs, but we've literally invented AI LLMs in the time it's taken them to write a couple of blogposts about Dynamic Crusader kings style AI. Just get on with it!
NPCs are the only thing I want to see added really too. Specifically MP usable NPCs. Then for me the games complete save for any modding the community does.
Im worried that once NPCs are released it will only be SP which would just put me in the overall dumps about the whole game lol
I appreciate this video. It's much like Valheim, where the game is reddit wholesome 100 fighting against triple A studios, then just... Stops adding features.
Okay this game kinda flew under my radar but got my interest in the past couple of days after some "I survived 100 days doing XY" videos popped up on my feed. So I checked it out on steam and nearly did a double take drink spit combo when I saw it's been "early access" for 10 years and sells for 20$.
Well I guessed it's developed by a single guy out of his garage or something and read up on its history and was completely baffled once again when I discovered there are apparently dozens of people working on the game for years now and it earned an estimated 80 million $! And I found reddit and steam forum posts from 5+ years ago begging for stuff like NPCs and other things the developers seem to have promised but not delivered to this day. And then I discovered the workshop, where actual single guys working for free out of their garage have already implemented all those things and so much more.
This game looks like a 20 year old PS2 game but somehow dozens of people working with a budget of 80m $ have not managed to implement basic things like NPCs, a properly working foraging system, additional maps etc. in 10 years and instead only release minor updates like the (for some reason) hotly anticipated crafting overhaul (that as you pointed out has been done via mods years ago) maybe once a year?!?
And I've seen the previews of the v42 crafting update, it looks like there's a small handful of new assets for clay ovens and materials and stuff and some menus that are just boxes with some text, what are these people doing all day year after year?!?
If they don't want to take the trouble of assigning to each part of the map the area that corresponds to each place. At least the "???" places should be like a middle ground in everything. It would be just while they finish polishing the map.
Completely agree, at least make the unimplemented zones give loot so that living in areas around these zones are viable
It's coming. There's a million and one features that need work and only so much can be done at once. Be patient.
@@poafpoaf9837 They had two YEARS to do that. With a full team.
@@itsamine4840 And I'm sure they're working on it, probably already finished work on it. But the problem is that they don't release updates regularly, they take a while and then release massive updates.
I agree on a few things but you lost me on the second half. The second half was mostly you complaining because update 42 is not how you play. 42 is indeed aimed at role player. This shouldn't be surprising, most of zomboid content is aimed at role play, like the professions, traits and negative moodles like depression, and panic. I personally like grinding skills and min maxing, I play zomboid like a jrpg, so I understand where you are coming from, but that was never the focus.
Where I agree is the fact that so many skills aren't fun to level and don't have much to offer after leveling. Is sad that its been so long and this hasn't change. I'm also scared with some of the reworks too, I get it from playing multiplayer, some of the system aren't really that engaging and it sucks to not be able to fast forward so you got to just suck it up. That is why I understand why they are going around around and changing it. I just really hope they ramp the updates a bit more or properly test and fix the new system like you mentioned.
For the looks of it they are jamming a ton of content on update 42 but I wonder if it would have been better to release it every other month instead of a couple of years. I wouldn't compare content from prior to build 41. If the devps are truthful by saying they reworked the whole game, build 40 and 41 are entirely different game so at least in that case I don't think we will be having a whole spaghetti monster of code. and the current zomboid is just 2 years old. Think of it like project zomboid 1 and project zomboid 2. The devps just decided to keep the same name instead of selling a different copy. which I'm happy they did
I feel like this game really hasn't changed much since 2016. I mean, yeah, vehicles are a thing now, the animation overhaul is awesome, but other than those two big things there's really nothing that changed too much.
It's sad that even after the game exploded with the B41 MP release, the development pace really hasn't changed at all. I'd say it even slowed down in general. Sure, they're a small team and all but at this point it's just an overused excuse to me. I'm no game developer, I don't know what the developers of PZ do with their time, however when you have one man team developers working on games such as Songs of Syx and putting out major updates every few months, it makes you wonder just HOW do they take so long to update things?
"I'm no game developer, but let me tell you my thoughts on what it's like to develop games"
@@Saplingbat I'm not a game developer, no, but that doesn't mean that I don't know anything about developing games. It also doesn't mean I've not tried developing my own games in the past. I know how long it takes and I know how difficult it can be.
I've owned this game since around 2013 or 2014, I originally bought it on desura lol. It was quite an obsession for me up until shortly after build 41's MP update dropped. I think, having followed the game's development for around ten years, I'm entitled to criticize the game developers for frankly not changing the game all that much over those said ten years.
@@Teoras Especially when modders seem to be able to make workable content with no budget.
@@spbakerchezbakethis exactly! it's confusing
@@Saplingbat You don't have to be a chef to understand that someone took a poop in your bowl of soup
i genuinely feel foraging is better, harder but better, i think it would be perfect if lots of very basic things were like 10x more common such as sticks and rocks.
i like how it massively expands the possible finds so you can get very rare things renewably and that makes it wortwhile to use which is a major issue i had with the old foraging, how it had a pool of like 10 possible items you could find and nothing else
the fishing however i dont know, i hope it turns out as something less productive but faster to do because the meta currently is to sit around all day accumulating fish.
Speaking of sticks, they need more uses too. Like comeon, why can't we use them to make maple smoked trout?
man I feel this, and when I bring it up people say I'm just being negative
I've put well over 3k hours in this game over the years, it's wild to think about because it feels like I just started playing this year with how little has changed
The multiplayer is still absolutely terrible, the nimble skill is miserable, the combat is janky and everything about this game feels so unfinished
People say "oh! it's a small team making this ambitious game!!!" but that's not the problem- Lethal company was made by a single person- smaller scope I know but lemme explain
TIS has 0 direction it feels, one day their adhd kicks in and they add a bunch of random stuff into the game and then try to fix it, instead of having a list of things they need to do or add.
Yesss, the multiplayer is sooo bad, its unplayable via steam friends
This game is already good as it is. Unbalanced like almost every game but at least it seems like they're trying. I used to watch this game in 2014 and these last builds really improved the experience!
Saying the game feels “unfinished” is such a joke. Yeah it meeds work but man, you put 3k hours into it stfu about it being an “unfinished” game lmao. Of course after 3k it gets boring and mew stuff will solve that, but don’t need to be an hypocrite about it
@@scientistmyself 🤦🤦🤦
Not the brightest, are you?
Totally missed his point. He's not being hypocritical, he's sharing an opinion that is backed up by reason, logic, and evidence, things you seem to be unfamiliar with.
You must be one of those fanatical cult members I've heard about 🤔
Or maybe you just completely missed the point 🤷
@@scientistmyself 3k hours with 450 mods and a couple i made for myself that fixed zombie spawns
bro don’t be so condescending
I think alot of these complaints are very specific for how this youtuber likes to play, not nessecarily for every player. I don't think every trait needs to be this bottomless pit of potential. Some things are naturally more useful than others. Just like in real life. And I don't think the game is a "buggy mess". Yes there are bugs, but you're extremely exagerating this. And for the multiplayer stuff, well I don't play multiplayer so personally it matters very very little to me. Overall, I feel like you're being a bit of a dramaqueen here.
You proved the point he made at the very start of the video lol. Don’t agree with him so you just shame him and call him names. That in fact make you the one who is being dramatic. Nice try though.
They didn't even bother mapping out all of the foraging areas so you have "nothing to see here" in various places...
Metalworking without mods seems to be for 2 things and only 2 things: crates and fences. I think they're adding to this in the next update.
Putting focus on the wrong things... exactly what my issue is with the direction of the game. I really love PZ but after each new Thursdoid I feel more and more disappointed. Other than the basements there's nothing I'm actually looking forward to in B42, maybe the "optimizations" but that's more like wishful thinking.
I wouldn't care what they work on next if it weren't for the glacial pace of development. Even the frequency of the news has been cut in half (the Thursdoids). I'm really hoping that this is due to the sudden increase in team size and the initial overhead it creates, but I'm worried that the real reason is focusing on the wrong things and over-designing features. Like the new crafting system. It is getting hella complex which is great if it's fun, but it's really easy to do badly, and whenever it's finally released it may take a year to focus on "fixing" it, causing even more delay for the content we're actually waiting for.
I don't understand how they could make the choice regarding getting xp. If you do something, it should reward you for doing it. It's very simple.
How someone sees this and goes. Ah yes, when you do something you might be rewarded for it, which simply results in people just cheesing it or using mods to fix it.
I've not even got 100 hours in the game and when I realized how bad the XP system is, the first thing I did was download mods that solved it.
If that's how the developer is handling it, I have little to no faith in their design decisions.
If I lose my 1 yr character to stun lock from 6 survivors gunning me down I’m going to go into my files and get that survivor back and turn off npcs
from a 3.2k hrs player; I completely agree with you.. A well deserved rant. I was cautiously hopeful that they may be dropping the 42 beta around these days with the Steam winter sale, but now it doesn't even feel like it's gonna be any time soon.. and YES! the excuse that "we're a small indie team" can only go for so long! like you made huge sales already and you must have earned some cash that you can invest back in your business and expand it, and yeah I understand they hired more people some of whom were modders which is great, yet the pace seem to haven't picked up with any notable degree. I've been literally trying to summon my will to get back to playing the game again for some good time now, but it hasn't happened yet.. no incentive to play the game.. The devs need to understand that their good game can be left out in the dust and forgotten if they don't keep polishing it!! many new games and many new distractions to still be hung on this aging game!! and don't get me wrong, I still do love the game and still am hyped for B42, and I'm not trying to hate on the devs... but c'mon already make haste!!! this is getting to be unacceptable to be honest and I'm not happy about that!
Hi, I just started playing this game a couple days ago, been enjoying getting my ass kicked and easily getting overwhelmed lol, but i'm getting a better sense of the game each and every time I play. Your videos have been very helpful so far as well, so thank you!
It seems that PZ has a thriving modding community, and I think thats a beautiful thing that many games wish they could have. This makes some of the points you brought up, specifically those in which the devs finally fix something that a mod has already fixed long ago, especially frustrating to hear. With certain issues being much more drastic than others, it's such a waste of time and resources to fix what has already been fixed from the ground up, when they could reach out to the modders and ask them to implement their mod officially into the game.
This is an assumption on my part, but I believe most modders go out of their way to make what they want because of how much they like the game. I'm sure most would be thrilled to work directly with the developers, and to have their work recognized (and potentially compensated for) by the devs and the community at large. Since this course of action was not taken, it leads me to wonder if the developers have an issue of pride, and think that THEY need to be the ones who implement everything into the game.
Considering the fact that some parts of the community have made it clear what they'd like implemented in the game to improve it, only to be ignored by the devs, it seems that they have a bit of an antagonistic approach to their player base, which is a shame when the players themselves are quite passionate about the game. While it's not the exact same, a similar thing can be seen with how Valve has left Team Fortress 2 fans out to dry, despite their undying love for the game, flaws and all.
I hope these issues can be mended, and that a more direct relationship between the game devs and the game players be established to work towards the common goal of making the game enjoyable for the most amount of people possible.
the fact they admitted the game will never be finished says all you need to know about the developers. it being a good game doesnt excuse this
>the fact they admitted the game will never be finished says all you need to know about the developers.
Depends on what you *define* as finished, honestly.
Do you mean a 1.0 Release? Or it just not having a planned End Point where they cut support?
Minecraft "Finished" in 2011, but i'm willing to bet you'd feel it's a half-baked midpoint compared to today in quite a few aspects :V
Finished, but not "Finished".
@@higueraft571 go argue semantics with someone else
@@DevDog98 says all we need to know about you then :V
@@higueraft571 you know exactly what i and everyone else means by a "finished game" you are willfully misinterpreting what is being said which says everything i need to know about you. run along now lil bro
@@DevDog98 >ou know exactly what i and everyone else means by a "finished game"
So which definition of one are you hoping it is?
The "We're never going to add critical features and milk you forever!!!" or "We're gonna keep adding to the game for the forseeable future"?
>you are willfully misinterpreting what is being said
And you've taken ONE sentence, to back up the idea that they're the Antichrist, i guess.
>run along now lil bro
So why are you even on a PZ video if you dont like the game or the devs anyways? Or are you kinda just bitching into the void? :V
Of course, GEE context on where you pulled that quote from anyways would be nice, but that'd defeat your point...
I'm a world class strength and conditioning coach (and nutritionist) who has trained top ten world ranked athletes in three different sports and the thing that has probably bothered me the most about PZ is the fitness stat. After a couple months of traveling in and out of town, fighting, sprinting, etc you'd be able to do nearly anything required in the situations presented in the game. You could jog one hour per day, say, five days per week and be able to jog across the entire map without getting tired. Yes, there are situations that would make you tired in the game no matter how fit you are, but the fitness stat isn't realistic. In some games, you might make a mechanic unrealistic to make it more fun, but PZ does the opposite with fitness. It's even less fun than in real life haha.
I run a dedicated server, I love project Zomboid nothing else scratches that itch however running a dedicated server the server is never happy and always have to chase down errors. I agree with ya and love watching your videos. Running about 300 mods to make the game enjoyable and quality life items. I could not imagine non modded PZ.
300+ mods, most of them QoL, then one of them updates, suddenly your friends having issues joining due to one of their mods is not sync properly and can't join the server. The amount of times we had to troubleshoot server compatibility was headache inducing.
I couldn't agree more with the incoherent developement direction
What's worse is that core game mechanics like combat, skill progression, user interface are TERRIBLE, and the devs have given 0 indication of planning on changing/improving these mechanics.
I'm supposed to grind skills from the second the game starts, I have to immediately watch the skill channels, spend irl HOURS watching my character read ingame books to get an xp multiplier (and comabt skills DO NOT have skill books for some reason).
All of this just so I can then lose all that progress because I was locked in a stabbing animation and got swarmed or because all I can do is spam shove while backpedaling in the hope that the next zombie in the conga line is one that is at low enough hp to kill thus decreasing the overall number of the horde.
300 hours into the game I learned that to hit a fallen zombie in the head you have to STAND over their head, not aim the swing animation. Ever wondered why baseball bats and crowbars deal so little damage to fallen zombies? Yeah this right here is why. Never explained or hinted to.
Every time I bring this up to other players people tell me that "you're not supposed to fight the zombies! it even says so when you select the apocalypse difficulty! you have to use stealth!" STEALTH DOES NOT WORK, it has NEVER worked, you always get spotted once you get in the zombie's cone of vision, it does NOT matter what level your stealth skill is at (for some reason theres also 2 different stealth skills in case things werent obtuse enough already).
The other common retort is that "you have use the campfire/cardoor/chainlink fence/composter strat" you're telling me the only way to get anything done is to exploit the ai pathfinding?
Meanwhile the devblogs show them working on adding claycrafting, iron ores, forges and chickens...
Its very sad because there's no other game that comes to mind that looks as unique and is as athmospheric as zomboid, but the thought of having to grind these skills and use this combat system makes me want to roll up in a fetal position and cry.
As it stands the only way to play the game as is is to either install 2 dozen QoL mods that either make infection survivable or let you keep your skills, and/or somehow get a server running with a few friends and essentially play coop with your buddies.
Stop self censoring and just say the truth, you don't have to sugarcoat grievances with the game and devs.
Lets face the facts here, the developers are rude and nasty people.
Someone is doing a Bethesda.
It sounds like the devs REALLY need to sit down and think about what they are doing, why they are doing It, and talk to the community.
I played the first project zomboid when it first came more than a decade ago. I voiced these concerns on their facebook page and got blocked....they dont care it it like a project car thats never finished.
Always good seeing fellow Zomboid creators voicing their opinions without fear of retribution. Good video! :)
As far as trapping and farming goes, most people don’t survive long enough to where food runs out unless it’s a weird challenge where you heavily limit what you can loot. From experience I can easily say that if you ration even a little all the canned and non perishable food on the map can easily last over a decade of in game time. Which means outside of novelty or playing on extreme scarcity. The skills are functionally useless as the only thing that actually matters is a calorie count and even then it only matters if you want to keep at an “ideal” weight and not just live with being overweight. There is no consequence for eating nothing but cabbages, which is fine, but having a whole skill dedicated to the individual things like trapping, farming, fishing and foraging is redundant when it could easily be tied together in one skill called survivalist. Even if they expanded on the systems, I still think the skills being individual ones are entirely redundant.
5000+ hours into Zomboid LOVE this game is an understatement -- I get your choices and understand them I just hope the devs listen to the community and understand without us they don't have a game etc.. praying the 42 update at least tries to understand what we love and hate -- then again we can thank the modders for the extra help
I understand where the developers are coming from. A lot of the things about unfinished systems are things that the devs are looking to address with the upcoming updates. Build 42 taking so long is really frustrating but I think a lot of it are those massive under the hood changes that would allow modders to do more in the game.
with you 100% Predz. we all love the game, the hours show this. its positive criticism, ideas for improvement, rather than just blasting the game. if we didn't enjoy playing the game, we would switch off. thank you for the upload.
Hello, I am Dylan the creator of Dylan's tiles, map mods such as Pitstop, Blackwood, Grapeseed and Ekron. i think I have a good insight on how the game operates to respond to your video.
I would like to respond to some of your comments.
"Anyone who has said anything about this game or devs have been scrutinised" - This is not a PZ problem this is a any game to ever exist problem. People will always blindly do this.
"I get that excuse 5 - 6 years ago. They hired a full team now" - They hired a few people mate. Even so, I don't think it's an excuse they are making. They have been very transparent that they like to take their time and be cautious what they put out.
"Overhyped harvest moon animals" - Sorry you feel that way mate. It's a massive undertaking to add any mobs in a game with mechanics. They need path finding, functions etc. Per animal could take weeks and weeks of work. When you add a new CharacterBody to a game you have to test every other mechanic in your game that contacts it. There is a long list of all sorts of things you need to account for. It's not as simple as add animal, animal do this, animal go there. It's a lot of work, game dvelopment in general is extremely tedious.
I could keep going on and on but I will save you and myself the energy. My point is the developers are working, at their own selected pace. The game has bugs and issues that have existed for years. This is not something they would deny themselves and I garuntee you they are working on it. I have been very critical of the game myself, I love this game... hell I modded it for 2 years+ trying to land a position at their company. The reality is, the game will improve as time goes on. They have plenty of funds to keep going for a long time. I am sure they will adress many bugs and issues. It's not like they have abandoned the game. Game development is incredibly difficult in general and they will be the only ones expert on such topics.
From reading your comment I just maybe got to an conclusion that their biggest mistake was making their own game engine instead of taking already existing one. Most of games built on unity, ue4 etc doesn't interfere with the core systems as much as project zomboid do
Wow that’s so interesting like I mean woah game development is so interesting to wrap your head around I want to learn it someday Y’know this game is super inspiring because i want to learn about mods now and learning how to farm seems cool and my mom knows a lot about it because when she was in India before she moved here, they grew a lot of food to cook and make chai tea and all that. Personally, I think potatoes are awesome. They’re a great meal alone all you have to do is poke it with a fork and press the potato button on the microwave. And, potatoes will search for dirt anywhere in the right environment. They’ll just grow roots in the pantry. Carpentry has also always sounded so interesting. It sounds really expensive though. Dirt is very cool too. And maggots are cool. And you can put worms in dirt which is awesome. I want to be like wall-e. I just want my house to be a bunch of weird stuff like probably one of those metal crates and just boxes of interesting stuff I find randomly on the floor or something or the trash.
Tbh I’m probably just going to live in an apartment in some bleak depressing town in Texas and one day I’ll probably be the only person left I know despite my how much I love to socialize when I do. Think I’m only living because it hurts more than anything else can. I’m just staying along here to watch the corpses build up and god I wish they’d reanimate hostile or not. Aye, they could never be dead to me anyways, but maybe I wish they were. Reminds me of that song by motionless in white in that album.. creatures, was it? Eh, thanks for telling us all that cool stuff about game development
Nope it is a PZ problem you are literally not permitted to speak negatively about the game on any site except for 4chan and the occasional CZcams video like this one 💀
Try saying something on their echo chamber forums, discussion on steam, or Reddit. Good luck buddy
@@bingobangobongo425 You are demonising the developers / moderators. They are not this devil you claim them to be.
@@dylanmyers3889 Read what I said again, perhaps you have a confirmation bias from their censorship.
Regarding trapping - I have literally never used it in nearly 600hrs game time. There are 2 reasons for this -
- food is ABUNDANT even on low loot settings
- fishing/farming are just flat out better/easier to do (with standardized settings across all 3 skills)
Regarding point 2 - you can set up a farm IN your base. You can make your base RIGHT NEXT to water. These two facts make trapping immediately less convenient than the other two. You can also fish with nothing but a wooden spear (ubiquitous item) and you can farm with just seeds when you find them. Traps which actually catch something also make noise and attract zeds. So that's another strike against traps.
I literally don't even know what the crafting recipes for traps are. I don't know what they catch in what biomes. I even downloaded a mod that removes the distance requirement and STILL have never used them.
I think there is a very niche set of circumstances that would lead to me actually using trapping. No access to farming/seeds, no access to body of water, insanely rare loot mod for regular food items, and already have materials to do trapping. Maybe then I'd use it. Until then, nah.
Thanks for bringing this up! As a new Zomboid player I’m excited to see where the game goes, and I hope Indie Stone fixes what needs fixin
Agree with nearly everything and Im usually the type to go in on game devs, but at this point im just glad the game exists and ive gotten to enjoy it for 400+ hours. Development has been slow and the main draw for a few years was "Multiplayer soon TM" and when they did finally release multiplayer it was/and is still kinda hot garbage. But, i paid $15 dollars for this game and have gotten 10x the hours i have gotten out of $70 titles and could easily get another 400 hours out of the game in its current state. The fact that a $15 dollar early access game that is 10+ years old with very slow and often underwhelming updates gets 20,000+ players every day is kinda insane.
I mean pz only had less than 1K players for most of its lifetime, this was their chance and if they don’t act the indie stone is gonna lose the playerbase from the B41 CZcamsr boost as well
Personally I think the devs are getting George Lucas levels of up their own asses. Lol
Desync is so bad in zomboid it makes 7dtd look polished.
Honestly my only complaint.
Endgame? Surviving is the game.
Good video bro but be confident in your stance. This is your opinion and don’t backtrack saying “maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t know” people will always have something to say whether it’s positive or negative. Just stand on your beliefs and don’t backtrack too much.
Thanks for everything, i got a few things to say myself...
After countless of years of playing this game, i waited a lot, new players dont understand this, they joined the community a year ago, and they defend the devs, i defended the devs when i was new, everything they promised they did it, i waited for vehicles, i got them 2 years after, i waited for animations, i got them 2 years after, and build 41 multiplayer was one of the most anticipated updates so far, i waited and after a while i realized that, this isnt good, you are waiting for 2 years for an update? And after they said now we adding animals i knew i wont even care, im not waiting, once its out i dont think i will even make guides on it, i dont care, i dont need animals theres food everywhere, i didnt play this game for 8 years so i can play Sims 4 with DLC's or minecraft with mods....
The devs after so much praise dont feel the need to do what we want, they know they will get away with anything, they know that if they add the dumbest shit withouit mods it wont matter as we will be happy to recieve any content whatsover, because we are starved of content and updates, they keep stringing us and we keep accepting it and supporting the game and devs, if we keep supporting and praising, we wont get what we want and right now the game is becoming something i dont want, i made my video and i expected bigger hate and was ready to never even upload anymore if th ats what happens, but apparently people are waking up, they are realizing we arent getting what we deserve...
The whole game is broken and instead of fixing that, devs give more content that will break even more creating a huge mess it already is, they want more players, but eventually none of these players will praise them, zomboid was known to be a small but strong community, and its becoming the opposite, people are leaving this game and just being like notifiy me if you fix the game im gone, and after some time community will be weak, i've stopped caring aswell. Animals and crafting? Why? I want to play walking dead or 28 days later type of game where im afraid if im gonna survive a few next days with no food, instead im getting the game where i worry what the hell do i do tomorrow or what animal im catching into my farm because im bored, crafting system sounds like a joke honestly, i dont want it, i want them to fix pvp, user inteface, skills, code, zombie spawns, map, combat system, desync, multiplayer can still have some work, i had so many ideas, but the devs dont care about our ideas, i noticed that over time
Instead of fixing it, we fix it with mods, couple of years ago i was against mods, i dont know why, i liked vanilla, but after a bunch of mods came out that just made the game better i asked myself what is going on? Are we fixing the game? The devs literally take mods and add them into game, does this mean modders are better at making the game? And im telling you, if they took all these modders and got them into their game development the game would be fixed in a year, some of these modders are so skilled and determined even more than game devs... Now i know that i have to add 30 mods to fix the game and make it good the way it supposed to, im not waiting for the next update, even when it comes out i dont care about animals, i dont need them... Thanks indiestone but i dont like your choices anymore, and i dont praise you no more, you need to learn some accountability, you need to explain your actions and listen to the community, because thats why community supported you, if you want that support, step it up...
Thanks for reading this, hope you have a nice day, and thank you Predz, i didnt expect anyone to really listen to me let alone agree and make a video about it mentioning me, hope to play with you and talk more, i still love zomboid, just hope indiestone dont mess it up for us, bye
It’s unfortunate that the modding community has to carry this game so hard
In my 1000+ hours I’ve only played a single game of vanilla
Rimworld is exactly the same, kind of shit without some really basic QOL mods.
At least they allow modding, I suppose. Some of my other survival sim games don't and their games are buggy shit fests with low QoL. The only reason I keep coming back to them is that the survival game genre where you play as an animal doesn't have much options for me to choose from.
PZ is a passion project afflicted with feature creep. I've been calling them out since before they lost their hard drives, and even after that chapter they still develop the game at an ineffectual snails pace.
They have no idea how the build the core game, nor have any idea with what to do with it. They could have released 1.0 a long time ago. Instead we're at build 0.4X.
Its funny how people who make their money with Project Z are rambling about how incomplete or unfun this game is. Its version 0.41, the game will have many more years of development. No shit that people who play it 24/7 for money wont have any thing to do in the game in a foreseeable time.
Its not perfect, but it has a slow dev cycle, always had and people complaining about the endgame havent realised, that they playing an unfinished game. I bought it 2013 and seeing how it went till now i dont expect it to be finished before 5-10 years into the future. I see it as something like Dwarf Fortress.
Play other games meanwhile. Let it sit for a year or so. I get why the devs get a bit grumpy when they do the same as ever, but now it has exploded it popularity and everybody thinks he has the final solution for a problem the devs dont even have.
Zomboid "community" is almost turning into Genshin community but with devs supporting them.
We are couple of steps towards disaster, and it's nice that we don't have only brainwashed people playing this. Whoever if i was you guys i would be prepared to face the despair that it might turn into.
I've solved most of these problems by running my server like a large tabletop in which I run a custom homebrew DnD campaign, lots of fun
Maybe a bit of a conspiracy theory but I think the reason why they have such empty skills is because of their community let’s be honest The only reason why project zomboid is such a fantastic game is the modding community so I think why they leave some of these skills empty is because they may want to capitalize on the modding community
Granted, I’m not saying that the skillet should still be so empty in the first place. I still think they should be changed or have recipe updates but that’s just a theory
Not only that but ho cares about level 10 electrical? The mindset of grinding something pointless is like getting that 100% of achievements or whatever. Or loot boxes with only "cosmetics". I loved Pizza Tower and S ranked some levels. But really even attempting 100% the game turns into a grind and can ruin the fun. If I'm stuck wasting time on a Steamdeck or whatever in the future and feel to play the game? Sure I'm going to enjoy the challenge not part of finishing the game.
Meanwhile I 100% and did stupid amounts of hours in NFS Most Wanted 2005 having beaten it countless amount of times on many consoles, school laptops and gaming computers. Grinding out the perfect rewards and built multiple saves with the best upgrades and tuning of different cars for MY enjoyment. Not some skill needed just to hotwire cars do I care to even consider getting to lvl 10! I love NFS Most Wanted 2005 and it is a flaw game. Yet after years and many consoles and computers it is still so fun and no mods needed. Even keyboard or with a racing wheel it is fun to play the races and the cops. Now all manual driving and trying to avoid cheesing to much when free roaming.
Trying to get off and on the throttle like driving it for real and match RPM's etc. Even on keyboard spamming the gearshift into neutral or dropping rapid gears up and down to manage the RPM and lower the car noise in the chase. Actively slowing down when it makes sense to even in races. It makes zero difference for the wins or losses but MY enjoyment making a car game fun even on just a laptop keyboard. It is a wonderful game for what it is! And most of it comes down to gear shifting and the sounds and action in NEED for SPEED. When not able to keep up with the handling of the gearbox and brakes the car slams into something but the engine do not blow up or the car brakes from the impact. But it still is fun to try and play as if it dose and pushed to the point of not being able to keep up.
But I know that at my disposal I got so many tricks and cheats up my sleeve yet make sure to avoid braking the fun of the game for ME. Like everyone playing a game should strive for.
Sideways and unreal grip at a klick of a button! So much fun! So many games "you reading this" can make more fun by actively avoiding trying to turn into a stealth archer. But Skyrim and Loadfield/Fallout is a bad example of good mechanics and game design. Still just deciding to OR accepting the bullshit and making the best of it is the way to go. And mod. Mocking the game being dumb has some fun in it too. Console and cheats being the last resort! If the game dare to screw me outright then I'm sure going to cheat and say bye bye to some achievement that means nothing! As much as making my life harder to make the game more fun!
Even Minecraft is fun to play vanilla when stuck on a controller let alone a phone screen! The challenge of combat is massive when not having a mouse and keyboard to play the game with. But that is just serious time wasting when Minecraft is out on the table as a option. Or car seat whatever. It is bad, real bad time waste when modern Minecraft is played.
But really hotwire cars should take lvl 3 or something. The hole XP and skill system can be reworked since it has flaws. Like even in 2023 you can not really ask some ape on the internet how to hotwire a car and not have the basic skills to something with that information. Let alone gain the knowledge of how every car brand and security system works and is wired. The game is set in 1993? Sure it is easier to hotwire a car but like dam. Even with a video tutorial you are not ending up finding a perfect video explaining it for your use case. How in the world in 1993 would you figure out how to hotwire by taking apart digital arm watches? Or TV's! NO! It takes far more then lvl 1. It takes trail and error on each set of car type most likely. The more valuable the car the harder it should be to hotwire. A car full of tools like a work van should be difficult to steal vs a dam granny wagon.
But even I can not bother with the awful system and things in the game right now and so grind watches for the XP needed to hotwire and being done with it. Since getting to even LVL 3 electrical is just not fun right now. And stamina or fitness skills grind is pointless as I toughen up the zombies for m enjoyment etc etc. I can not care to buff myself! If the system worked better I might have tried to gain skills and made it even more challenging. But it is basically just roleplaying that makes me truly bother with the grind of fitness and such. LVL 8 is a fantasy number in PZ. It is ridicules to even talk about LVL 10 skills outside of carpentry.
@penileymajorey7174 double wow lol
@@TheDiner50no one is gonna read your college essay bro
@@hjbskates But you sure read it enough to comment, or do big words hurt your brain, and you just want quick stupid engagement only? :V
@@higueraft571 is this the elder scroll?
For me as a casual player, the main issue is that everything past the first few hours of gameplay is a grind. It's okay that you have to invest some time to gain skills and build things etc. But a big part of the game is "locked" behind hours and hours of grinding which the average player is not willing to invest.
Put your exp gain to 200 percent
and earn all of xp in 3 days,
@@POLSKI_SZPADEL not in all traits some are still hard to level up
Some foraging areas are also poorly allocated. There's an area that's great for hunting rabbits east of the Rosewood mechanics shop. It's classified as a "deep forest" when in reality it's just plains with very few trees just a couple of steps outside of town.
Ive heard this same argument in so many communities. Rust. Escape from Tarkov.
What it all comes down to is playing a single gamr too much. I just started PZ to take a break from EFT until wipe. Tbh, i didn't notice 99% of what you were talking about. Why? Because I play PZ, Rust and EFT pretty evenly. When EFT gets annoying, i switch to another game. I think a lot of people would be much happier with games if they did this.
And maybe I just don't understand the complaints, but an active dev team that shares updates, even if they take awhile, is pretty rare. Look at most EA, Blizzard, Valve games. Random updates, years apart with zero communication. My point is at least TIS cares and is trying. Game Dev is a very difficult job. You work hard on something then thousands of players tell you how much it sucks, or is unneeded, even though you thought it was a great idea. So even if your complaints are valid, which it seems they are, take some solice in the fact that the Dev team of your game cares enough to keep you in the loop and will keep trying to please the community.
Also wanted to comment on Endgame. The NPC addition wont fix your endgame problem. At all. It'll just strech your play throughs out a few more hours. In Sandbox games, they only go as far as your own creativity and self motivation. Which is why I have always love your content Predz. You set goals and go out and try to complete them. All these players thinking one update will make the game fun for them are going to be very disappointed when NPCs are added and they still aren't having fun. Sandbox games are what YOU as the player make it. If you want a well scripted story and quests and all that, go play a single player story game. But maybe this reconfirms your complaints about skills and making sure the basic building blocks of the game need to be solid. I'll just keep getting mods to fix any issues until they are eventually fixed. And dont worry about "spaghetti code". EFT had the same problem. They are rewriting the whole game in the new unity engine and there seems to be tools that make that easier. Hopefully TIS has the same tools when this gets addressed eventually.
Keep up the great content and as a community, keep the complaints civil and make sure we are all giving constructive criticism that can be fixed. After playing hundreds of games, some with great dev teams and some with shit dev teams, PZ should know that TIS at least cares a lot about their game and want to do right by the community and make the game fun. If the community goes down the road of "they are just doing this for money and they don't care" is when the relationship sours and the game will slowly die out.
this
I have pretty much since i heard of the game and got to play it for the first time when all it consisted of was a few city blocks, a factory with a ton of boxes in the middle, and stylizex pixel set, been absolutely enamoured with Zomboid. Even minor updates and small things released have warmes my heart entirely and to me Zomboud has been the epitome of apprecoation of little things and details.
That being said, ive always been incredibly leniant and laid back about their dev time and while i never claimed any personal disappointment or frustration with the devs ive always understood other peoples.
Today after seeing a recent wave of people mentioning the issues with development time (among other issues) I think i had my first like realization of an issue. Im not mad with the team, and while i acknowledge mid and late game lacks a desired amount of depth, I think Im just afraid Ill never get to see zomboid at its full potential
Kinda sobering. Its odd, I love this game to death and its potential, aesthetic, and total captivation it has over me.. but I guess if i never got to see it through itd feel.. pointless
i got project zomboid a few years ago and loved it for a good year and a half. Until i stopped dying and realised how limited and surface level the game truly is, all i see in project zomboid is an unfinished game with huge wasted potential and its sad.
There’s so many things they could fix or overhaul with the game, but instead they want to work on a hundred different things at once and not give us anything new to play with. Like come on Indie Stone, “Toss me a frickin bone here!”. Something! Anything! Fix stupid bugs like driving cars through doors or zombies biting you through your car door. Overhaul the shitty Occupations so I don’t feel the need to pick Fire Officer or Police Officer or Burglar or Lumberjack every single playthrough because the majority of occupations are just objectively, and even subjectively, dog water. Overhaul the shitty skills. Change the way you get xp. Fix stealth! Why is stealth just… nonexistent in this game? Especially since there are stealth traits and stealth mechanics. I could go on and on and on. It’s just sad because I love PZ and the game has so much potential, but it’s just stagnated.
The way i level electrical is disassembling extractor hoods, large modern ovens (the pizza ones), and the fryers in restaraunts. With skillbooks, if you clear the restaurants in your starting town you can get to lvl 4. Still a worthless skill beyond gen repair.
I still find it useful for moving stoves at level three but beyond that there’s not much beyond that. Yes you can replace electrical switch’s on lamps with battery powered ones at level five but it’s not as useful as you think.
I have never taken nimble trait and I fight just fine
You can fight just fine without Nimble, but an extra 20% movement speed while in combat stance is honestly massive in terms of combat capability
Despite having played this game a lot, I'm thinking of leaving it to until when I retire, at least 35 years from now. At that time the game's gonna be SICK, I just have to autopilot this period of life until the time comes, it's just as what this game is about: survival.
Hahahaha yeah I have a list of games like this. For example Space Engineers, in 10-20 years is going to be beyond epic
I'm not really part of any major PZ community, so I can't really speak about the toxicity surrounding criticizing PZ and it's Devs, but you raise some valid points.
I want to believe in the honest desire of Indie Devs (generally speaking) to put out the game of their dreams. But more and more, especially with these survival style games, it just begins to feel like the devs either stop caring because, typical early access BS of "We've got your money, peace out" or, which I think is the less egregious crime, they just... burn themselves out; Lose the drive and inspiration to make the game they'd dreamt of in the beginning, a result of setting their expectations for themselves too high, biting off more than they can chew, so to speak... pun not intended.
These days I can't help but feel that the conversation surrounding Zomboid and a lot of these survival indie games has thawed out a bit, when we're waiting two years, four years, *ten* years... (Looking at you Fun Pimps) for substantial updates or heaven forbid, a finished product... our patience begins to wane and we can no longer accept empty promises as assurance that change (for the better) is coming.
I personally still love Zomboid, and pray that Indie Stone isn't taking the "Leave it in Early Access indefinitely/as long as we can" approach that some indie survival devs have taken... (See the above mentioned company) even though like many of us, my patience is beginning to wane.
EDIT (As I watched further): When you were mentioning about the RNG exp gains, something I was semi-aware of but not aware of to the extent you brought up... I gotta ask, what is with devs adding arbitrary grinding to their games? A certain amount of grind is to be expected, gives you stuff to achieve... but... days to grind certain levels? C'mon...
Its crazy that B42 is still not out. This game is fun and I've spent hundreds of hours in single player, but the development is pathetic, full stop.
Update; 7 months later... its still not out
like so many things it's 50/50 with reasonable and not reasonable
an attempt at a "realistic" apocalypse SURVIVAL game and someone is gonna complain that once they become self sufficient it's boring.... ya survival is either boring or terrifying and if you seek out the interesting/terrifying you are likely to die
ya rng for exp doesn't really make sense and i wish i could drop 10lbs in a week >.>
seek to break the game and you'll find a way then they just have to spend the time chasing fixes, then they have to fix the breaks that the fix broke ans so on
i only recently got to day 42-43 so most of these thing are way beyond me
i've always wondered why mods/moders seem to often drastically out do the teams that do it for a living
The game’s only reason to keep playing long term is to max out a character, also if I wanted to do some RNG bullshit I’d go gamble.
I think people racing to get to a certain point has ruined this game not the devs. It's a sim game, be immersed....
@@nerfherder4284Having to disassemble hundreds of pieces of furniture to figure put how to put a series of planks in an upright position is not immersion
It's a survival sandbox game. If you need an overarching goal given to you, I would recommend looking into other game genres.
i can say i'm one of the people that honestly didn't know nimble was so slow to level and impacted melee combat
I disagree on foraging and fishing, foraging is now something I do moving between areas when on foot in town, or in nearby forests when moving between A and B in small towns. Fishing might be something interesting, doubly so if it removes depletion. However, for other skills, I absolutely agree. Trapping needs to be fleshed out alongside electrical. Putting the two together should yield access to explosives, and advanced traps to have around your base. Tailoring is also something I've found to be lackluster, even if not lacking in utility. Tailoring should allow us to create patchwork leather gambesons, and perhaps with animals, animal hides being tanned either worked into tailoring or trapping to allow for the creation of hardened leather armor with tailoring. These older types of armor were actually quite effective, and if metal working takes a hand in this, you could weld together links of chain to make chain armor to put over them. It'd be heavy, but incredibly effective and durable against an undead menace. However, regarding servers, I'd like to see a simulated option put into effect. If the apocalypse has just started, then it gives the current job options. Five years, and burger flipper and unemployed, or just minimum wage jobs, might fall under survivor. Basic, run of the mill, some bonuses to foraging, trapping, light footed, etc. 10 years and the only jobs left unaffected would be soldier, police, doctor, medic, the high skill or ongoingly useful jobs even in the end times. After 15, the soldier and police job are replaced by guard, infantry, cavalry, with each having assorted skill bonuses. Medic is replaced by herbalist as basic first aid supplies dwindle and the reliance on herbs for day to day healing increases. Finally, at 20 years even doctors would be replaced with something like "surgeon" as a general name for someone who has advanced knowledge on how to compound medicine AND perform advanced procedures such as amputations. Likewise, the highest technology to be maintained should be a generally medieval level when communities come together, and more tribal or nomadic for lone survivors. Then, this idea could be implemented with great effect and also give the option for long form small group servers to progress, or rather, regress, into the level of sustainable technologies as survival goes on.
It's not a bad idea, not one bit, and it'll work for the right servers. Just not for yours, which isn't a bad thing. It just means that it won't work for your server, given that it won't even be needed for your server in the first place since you'll always be wiping to day 1 of the fall of humanity anyways.
However, the combat needs a rework, yes. Holy shit, it needs a rework before NPCs.
I bet the biggest issue the devs have is the engine upon which their game is built. This is still a mostly 2D game, with 3D elements tied in, that renders every 2D tile every frame, etc, etc...
Implementing anything new in the game is probably 1000% more time-consuming because of its uniqueness.
If the devs rebuilt the game from scratch in something like Unreal Engine 5, they'd be able to do a lot more, much quicker.
But this will never happen because they are obviously too deep now to change things so drastically.
I actually do level electrical to 3, so I can install plumbed washing machines and porch lights to my player built log cabin by the river. But yeah purely fluff, in vanilla electrical and metalworking is basically worthless. The only reason I could imagine even grinding metalwork is to build metal containers for even more loot space.
Foraging is neat. I usually play a park ranger with stacked bonuses and I feel like I find a lot. It could 100% benefit from more variety, and the blank foraging spots are ridiculous. There should at least be a placeholder foraging table in those places if they’re not gonna fix it.
I would love to see the crafting system from cataclysm dark days ahead in zomboid.
That was one of the main things that kept me playing cdda for months.
Glad to see another CDDA fan here! PZ is a great game but I keep going back to CDDA because of the sheer depth and detail present.
Cataclysm 👌
As a new player im having a blast just trying to get through the first couple weeks, there are quirks with the game but it's an overall fun experience. I think the problem with this game and most other games is that people justvplay them too much.
You said you've been playing this game every day for 5 or 6 years ammassing thousands of hours. Imagine going back to the days before social media and the internet and playing Donkey Kong 64 for thousands of hours, it's going to get boring. Games now a days provide more replayability but just seems like people expect too much, any game is going to get dull eventually.
Admittedly, they DO have a point as far as "lack of endgame" goes, since once you've got a nice home, are self-sustaining, and so on, you dont have TOO much to do...
You could grind skills, but that'd take ages, and what then? Maybe clear out all the zombies? Even larger huge loot pile maybe?
On the subject of NPC's:
They've put themselves into a really difficult position by promising this huge amazing NPC system that now huge chunks of the community are putting all their faith into it. A lot of people point to the broad idea of "NPC's" as being the thing that will save the game. There's so much hype around the concept that now if they release something that isn't almost perfect it's going to be massive let-down. A huge issue with NPCs as a concept is that if they are implemented badly they make the game physically worse any time they are around. I've played PZ since it was on Desura, including old builds with the really janky NPCs. And I'll tell you, those NPCs sucked. The meta then was to just "delete" them any time you met one because they were such a liability to have around. Luring zombies to your location, randomly attacking you (intentionally or otherwise), they were just a hassle to deal with and didn't add anything to the experience. Its clear they don't want a repeat of that with the new NPCs so are trying to implement a huge NPC update that's mostly complete all in one go rather than a trickle of small additions that have them broken for ages before finally becoming playable.
BUT this leads to the NPC system ballooning out into this infinite entity that will never come out because it'll never be good enough and any time they add any other system to the game they also have to update the NPC's to match that new system. (How will NPCs interact with the car system we added? How will they interact with animals? etc.)
So what's the solution? Well, my idea would be to break the idea of NPC's down into smaller, but still complete packages.
Maybe the first people you interact with aren't even physically in the game world. Imagine getting a radio call on a random walkie talkie you found: "Hey is anyone there? I'm hurt and need help. Bring bandages and painkillers to [location] and I'll give you something". The location in question would either be an inaccessible building or a drop box or something so you never actually meet the "person" but it still creates neat little activities that can emerge in the world. This takes vastly less time to implement but is still a valuable addition. Keep building on it with small incremental updates and eventually you'd have a full NPC system, without needing to spend years with nothing to show for it until you were "done".
This comment is already too long so I'll stop here. Glad you made this video, glad people are talking about this stuff in a rational way.
No they are literally trickle down updating NPCs you are factually incorrect
@@bingobangobongo425 don't really know what that means. Have a nice Christmas though 🎄
Figures @@RenderScape
People who also didn't know about the RNG stuff with skills
👇
I only play single player, so I don't have nearly as many frustrations with the game as Predz - and I only have 350 hours in game, so I have barely dipped my toe into PZ compared to a lot of you I'm sure - but even I recognise there's a lot of work needed and all the talk from devs being of "cool new crafting recipes" in B42 worries me. Adding more bells and whistles to keep people busy, when there are fundamental game play issues that have needed a rework for years suggests to me their focus is not where it needs to be.
Game stability (especially in multiplayer from all I've heard), a more meaningful character creation system, purposeful skill progression system, dynamic zombie behaviour system and randomly generated mid and late game "quests" and events to give continued purpose to playing past the first month are all on my wish list.
5:25 I know this entire video is highlighting issues with the game that the devs should fix, but in the meantime, ForagingZ mod does solve the missing forage zone issue.
Trapping should level to booby traps - once you know how to trap small animals, trapping zeds is the logical progression. Ankle snares, pit traps, guillotine wire across doorways etc.
7:51 Standardized Sprinting XP and Standardized Nimble XP are absolute must have mods IMO I didn't realise other skills were random so I'll be adding the standardized reloading and aiming and fitness mods as well now.
I can feel this video is coming from a place of love,
In my head, I remember the vid where predz talk about how he loves PZ.
I'm glad this is being discussed finally (in general as a community) because I do love this game, but frankly I've stopped play PZ until they fix the game. Without the modding community, their would be far less traction with this game since it's vanilla platform has so many deep seeded issues that are masked until you play for many hours to uncover their hollow, "brickwall" aspects.
Again, I understand this piece of digital art is quite a feat to accomplish, making it something that it's wanting to be but there is no obligation to stand by due this being a transactional experience.
I haven't given up on the game but I am waiting for it to mature to what it thinks it is.
In a nutshell - TIS are more focused on building new systems which take years to develop than fixing/implementing the ones that they already created, and leave it up to unpaid volunteers (modders) to update their core game features.
Example, the vanilla lighting system has no impact on the zombies ability to see players. A recent mod created a system which makes it work.
And that's great right? The community made the game better - but WTF have the developers actually been doing all these years? And how many of these mods will be broken by whatever they push out?
Also, it puts the work on to the community to bug fix and work out what combination of updates (mods) will work together - so again, WTF are TIS actually doing for the game?
Even better. I started playing PZ completely Vanilla and constantly felt like... this is it? Why can't I open a can with a knife? Why can't I rip up underwear? Why does a metal shelf (with 3 racks on it) only hold 50 items, thats the same as the floor but its should hold more than that.
Then when you finally get into mods, you find out about stuff that you suddenly realize isn't vanilla and now you can't go back
personally... i just dotn care lol... i like the game for what it is, i knew what i was buying
i dont need any more updates or anything, if they dropped the game right now, i would be fine i bought the game knowing what it is and im happy with it
i don’t understand, when you’re building a super massive game, why people decide “hurr durr i’m gonna add another game variable to tune for no reason”
like this is where I think factorio is very good, it says, “here’s a list of game variables, if you want more go mod and figure it out,” and it’s not that long a list
like, why add “chance to get exp,” a whole new column of numbers (that you have to keep track of and reevaluate!), for no fucking reason
Feature creep. It's very common in game development. People want to make their games bigger and grander which is understandable. The issue is when, as you said it, a game has so many variables and skills to keep track of not only in a vacuum but how it interacts with the world and other skills and mechanics. So many good games got killed with bloated features and I bet in 10 years or possibly less from now more and more people are going to go back to the arcade basics.
@@bigblue344 but what feature creep makes you immediately *start* a feature with too many numbers?
or are you telling me they added this rng check for hurr durr absolutely no reason?
@@pallingtontheshrike6374 If we are talking strictly about XP gains and the RNG tied to it, yeah, I don't got an answer for you as it takes long enough as it is to grind out skills unless they just wanted to grind it out more.
@@bigblue344 it’s just boggling to me that they’d add a whole extra column of numbers to a game that implicitly will involve a shitton of numbers, like, do you not realize you wanna start conserving space *now?*
The amount of times I have died due to a bug/glitch in project zomboid is outrageous. Like you I just don't get how these aren't being addressed more aggressively in a perma-death game. I could care less about NPCs when the core of the game - which is zombies - are super janky with barriers and stairs
7:51
I ALWAYS play with the 'Standardized Experience' mod, it removes the RNG from xp gains with skills such as nimble, sneaking, sprinting, reloading, etc., it's such a great mod!
I as you wish they would work faster we have all been so patient because of the love we have for the game. But please just do better guys. I honestly feel like this will end like dayz did for me a game I loved and put tons of time into and then they start selling add-ons to an unfinished game.
Honestly, my sign that the PZ devs are too headstrong and possibly incompetent is that they refuse to add a save system. I barely play the game because losing many hours of progress isn't thrilling, it fucking pisses me off. Also doesn't help that because the game forces away people like me, there seems to be an echo chamber about the subject. When people ask about saving, the thread is guaranteed to be full of responses saying that saving is dumb, as well as offering alternatives to saving that make the game incredibly easy without actually solving the core problem that not having saves creates.
I made a post on Reddit talking about how we need smaller, more frequent updates that fix some of the issues plaguing the game and giving it occasional labors of love, rather than spending years at a time collecting dust.
I was downvoted to oblivion and some folks wanted even longer times between updates, meaning bigger updates instead.
GUYS, I'M 25. The game came out when I was 12. I want to see this game hit 1.0 before I'm 40, please.
I absolutely LOVE this game. I currently have 1,910.9 hours as a SP. I've only been playing for a couple of years.
I didn't realize they had a Discord server or that the community can be toxic. That depresses me, a little, because I've been talking them up to anyone who will listen to me ramble lol. I LOVE that they seem to appreciate modders. I now wish they would listen more to the players as a whole.
I have been a little worried about the changes that are coming. The crafting system, especially, with the newest Thursdoid update, seems like it can add a layer of tedium I'd much rather avoid.
I also worry about conflicts with the mods I currently love and can't imagine playing without... and I hope the modders are able to update them into the new build.
I started playing after foraging was changed and I like it the way it is now (not knowing any different lol). I'm not sure how I'll feel about the fishing minigame.
As for glitches, I hope they fix zed attack wall clipping and walls being treated as fences (I've only found that, thus far, at the Prepper store in Loisville.)
Multiplayer sounds like a nightmare!
Oh! As for electrical, I usually level to 3 so I can move stoves and for mods. It's not a priority though because I (now) always play as a Burglar and with a mod I can make my own stoves 😁
I love the fact any and all criticisms gets swept under the rug by the excuse ''but muh small team'' and ''muh you aren't a game developer, no opinions for you''
That's interesting.
Let me talk about electrical, and why electrical is a heritage of something the game no longer craves to be.
First time I heard about PZ was back in 2012, very long ago, and what it was supposed to be, and tried at least, was a 3D version of Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, evidently there were some changes fundamental to moving from the turn based system to the real time system, but that was the idea, the core concept, and CDDA have had, for a good long while, a clear end game with mutations and cybernetics/bionics/robots, you grind your skills, electronics included, to be able to install/craft mutagen and bionics, so in that game a skill such as electronics is vital, the game simply cannot function anymore without it, unless you intend to change a core concept of the game, but for PZ that's not the case.
You see, PZ does not have any sci-fi aspect to it besides the zombies, electricity is only ever used for convenience, cars, freezers, TVs, it's not, by a long shot, vital, nor a core part of the game, so the electrical skill that was, certainly, imported from CDDA, where it's vital, ends up completely useless since now you can start as burglar and don't even need electrical 1.
This problem also plagues metalworking and foraging, both almost useless skills as they are right now, and cooking, somewhat better but still largely useless. They are a heritage of ancient times, devs don't want to take them out because it feels wrong, but there is no way to make them useful without dipping into sci-fi or making them actually meta defining broken in some regard.
I feel like the community of modders have already emulated build 42 in a way where when we get the official build 42, Its not going to be as exciting. They keep hyping it up and its going to be the downfall of the current Update Path they have planned. Its bad enough that the modders have had to fix the game due to the lack of updates.
As someone who has played MP(specifically on your servers. I'm even in the event you showed in the later half of the vid) it was just not fun playing with multiple people because of performance issues. The amount of times i had to reset my character because i got bit by a teleporting zed(have more then 1-2 players fighting in the same area causes this) was to high. That plus if there where dozens of players like in the events on your server all i could really do was play loot goblin since trying to attack a zombie, get near them or even target them would cause the game to just start turning into a slide show. Now to be fair i am in Europe and i think the server is in the US, But i also have played on Australian server with other games and i had less of these problems.
I cant say much about the dev time itself since while i owned the game for a while i did not really start playing until beginning this year. But from what i hear i think its time for the devs to pin down what they want to do with the game. Set up a time frame and finish that so they have a solid ground to actually start adding on more fancy stuff later on(examples Rimworld, Factorio,Terraria).
A lot of these complaints are neatly addressed by saying "it's an unfinished game." Criticisms about the skills in particular. Hate to sound like a jerk but that's what you're in for when you buy in to play an unfinished game. A lot of this stuff is the sort of thing that serves as an early framework early in the development of most games only actually finalized in the final few months of development. That's why so many of the skills are barren, why foraging isn't implemented everywhere. Or take the grievances about the patches. Four updates in a week is normal. So is going weeks without one. Sometimes testers will be playing a new version of a game every single day for weeks at a time. Other times they'll go weeks or even months without changes.
I hate to sound like a dismissive jerk by saying that it's mostly normal stuff and you signed up for this by buying an early access game but, well, you did. Most of this is fairly routine. I get that you feel frustrated but ultimately you're the one investing so much time into something openly touted as unfinished.
And also, what happens when they make a decision to cut something from the game because they feel it's not adding anything meaningful- something completely normal in development of most games? The players freak out. The electrician skill is something that would end up being cut from most RPGs. Most RPGs, before the end of game development, do end up cutting one or multiple skills that the devs created an entire framework for earlier. Ultima, Fallout, Diablo, Balder's Gate, even action RPGs like Deux Ex, Mass Effect, Alpha Protocol, System Shock. Totally normal in game development but if it happened here do you think the response would be gracious? You're in this video upset that they replaced a bad, unfinished foraging system with a better one because the new one was unfinished - when the game itself is unfinished.
They're sticking pretty well to game dev fundamentals. The reason most early access games fail is because they don't and pursue instant gratification for the playerbase instead of doing what is best for the long-term health of the game.
the animal AI is a big step in my opinion, think of the mods that will come out when that code drops, Im talking STALKER SHIT and like FALLOUT and some other popular game stuffs with cool creatures
glad you are bringing up these points. i only just started playing single player split screen with my son less than a year ago and have ran into alot of issues with the gameplay that they ignore to make things more complicated by doing what moders already have done witch confuses the heck out of me 🤪 like foraging. with forage off you see plants, logs, sticks, twigs, berry bushes, etc already on the ground but you cant interact with it and its so anoying. or how janky the attacking is how you can shoot a highlited zombie but miss and hit a zombie 3-4-5 rows behind the green highlited zombie your aiming at. or like how you can stand on a zombie and stomp its head but miss. or well alot of how attacking is jank but moders have soled most it now they wanna just make it so moders have to fix more and its kinda sad....and i dont want another minigame for fishing i want less lag they need to fix the sorting and sprites and zone spawning and lighting -weather and omg i hate the dang trees that well they grow way to fast and flip cars like crazy 😵
>with forage off you see plants, logs, sticks, twigs, berry bushes, etc already on the ground but you cant interact with it and its so anoying.
Honestly, Foraging is INCREDIBLY nice...
Actually kind of a huge upgrade from the old system, with all the shit you can find there, though i do wish the basic resources (sticks and rocks) were more common, especially if you're gonna make tools and weapons out of them
Also note while said tiles arent 100% i believe, they pretty typically have that specific resource on them, so rocks are more prone to giving stone, logs/sticks wood, etc