Morning, everyone!
This got bigger than I thought while I was typing it - tl;dr at the bottom.
I’m putting this together as a relatively new player. I first played Generation Zero during the free weekend, and have since clocked ~100 hrs on the game. I’m at 100% completion for quests and collectibles, have a full inventory of fully decked out equipment to suit my tastes, and hit level 31 on my second character to spec myself just the way I wanted to. I offer this to provide some background on who I am, and my level of experience with the game - I don’t know what the game looked like two months ago, but I’ve become very familiar with the current game state, and want to provide feedback on such.
The first, and potentially biggest issue I have with the game’s current state, is its sense of conveyance. Generation Zero is supposed to be an experience in discovering how things work, and this is amazing - I clearly remember the transition from new baby player, plinking at things with a .32 and running, screaming, to hide in a shed, to an experienced guerrilla fighter capable of taking down any of the threats the game throws at me. This transition happened because of the experimentation that the game encourages you to go through - hints in flavor text, changes in machine behavior, visual prompts (blue sparks vs. orange sparks vs. no sparks on enemy hits, seekers calling enemies over, etc).
However, this conveyance has several significant gaps that I think should be, at least, reviewed. In order to make my case, I’ll examine the difference between 762 AP and FMJ rounds. I use these because, one, they’re a mainline piece of my loadout, and two, they’re one of the fairly universal ammo pairings - 762, 556, 9mm pistol and smg, and .50 cal all have the same two ammo types available for use, so understanding the differences between the two is something that impacts a wide variety of weapon types, and the strategies that couple with them.
The in game description of these ammo types makes a relatively vague reference to the idea of component damage (FMJ) and armor damage (AP). There are two problems with this description, to me. The first isn’t actually a fault of the description - it’s a fault of the actual use of these rounds in combat. While the FMJ does do better component damage than the AP, the difference is actually relatively small, in practical application. FMJ rounds will destroy a component faster than an AP round, but components, in general, have relatively little health. If we look at, for example, the armor plating on the leg of a FNIX tank, and the joint segment behind said plating, we get some numbers we can work with - specifically, that the armor plating takes ~6 AP rounds from a 5* AK to remove, or ~8 FMJ rounds. Subsequently, the component behind the armor (the leg joint) takes ~20 FMJ rounds, or ~22 AP rounds to destroy. If the health pools for components were larger, this would be more obvious and more impactful - as it is, however, the difference from a ‘damage done’ perspective isn’t easy for a casual player to notice.
The second problem, however, comes from the game’s penetration and ballistics mechanics. Rounds penetrate things, and different rounds penetrate to different degrees. I refer to the material of a robot that isn’t armor / component / weapon by the name of ‘chassis’ material, and chassis is the real deciding factor in which ammo type to use. Using the same leg component, the FMJ rounds are the winner at actually damaging components - however, the 762 FMJ rounds suffer from substantially less penetration than their AP counterparts. The practical result of this is that, with AP rounds, I can reliably hit component weakspots from locations other than where said weakspots are exposed. This is incredibly evident against that same joint weakpoint - rounds can actually penetrate the armor plating and damage the joint before the armor’s even been removed. In addition, utilizing AP rounds, I can shoot the same weakpoint from, for example, the side of the leg, vice the front - this is a huge tactical advantage, as I can literally use the tank’s own leg to avoid its gun and rocket attacks.
The penetration discussion, to me, is very similar to the discussion of bullet ballistics. Bullets experience drop, in this game, along with travel time to reach their target. This is really cool, and I actually enjoy it - it makes sniping feel more satisfying, and adds another layer of ‘things I have to consider before I engage a threat’. The problem, however, is the same problem with the discussion of penetration on rounds - nothing in the game tells you that such is going on. More importantly, the starter weapons for most players - shotguns and pistols - aren’t effective at ranges to observe bullet drop, and don’t fire tracer rounds for you to observe the behavior. I was ~15 hrs into the game, missing shots with my .243, before I finally figured out that the reason that I was missing my shots was due to bullet travel time and bullet drop - and this happened because I could see the rounds traveling and hitting dirt, somewhere other than where I was aiming.
Again, my issue with this isn’t the fact that these systems exist - it’s the fact that the player isn’t clued in to their existence. In-game lore tells the player that machines have weak points, and that aiming for them takes them down faster. It’s not pervasive, but it’s there, if the player finds the right quest note. This, however, is something that the players will readily witness themselves, right out of the gate - ‘when I shot that weird dog thing in the back, it exploded. oh look, the corpses have weird tank things on them. shoot them in the tank thing to win!’. Ballistics behaviors only really start to show themselves once the player has the opportunity to snipe at things, and if those signs are missed, there’s nothing to nudge a new player in the right direction.
Weapon attachments suffer from similar problems. Early into the game, it’s easy to get a silencer for a hunting rifle or a pistol - but these are low quality. Once a player finds a better silencer, they can compare them, say ‘oh, this one has a bigger noise reduction bar - I guess that means it’s… better at making things not notice me?’. Until then, however, silencers are a mystery - a thing that the player puts on and prays works. This issue in particular is compounded by the way certain robots behave; I’ve noticed that they seem to be able to calculate where a shot was fired from, regardless of how silent said shot was, with faster triangulation coming with more shots fired. I’ve used this fact to pull hunter squads with my pistol - plink him from some ridiculous distance and step into a shed, to deal with the hunters as suits me. For a new player, however, this is miserable - ‘No matter how careful I am, how sneaky I am, as soon as I start shooting, they know where I am!’. Nothing warns the player about these mechanics - they just exist, for the player to discover the nuance of themselves.
This discovery process isn’t a bad thing - on the contrary, it’s something that I absolutely adored about the game. The problem, here, is that many new players are being turned off and away by things not behaving as advertised, even if it’s a case of ‘there’s another mechanic going on here, and you just can’t see it’. To make matters worse, the newest player is the one that needs the most ‘starter tips’ on where to begin their investigation into how the game world works - and they’re also the ones in the worst position to investigate. I took the time to experiment with different ammo types and the penetration issue after I was already level 25+, and had my 5* AK to run the tests on, because at that point who cares if I dump a few mags of ammo trying to figure out how the game works? Who cares if I burn some adrenaline 'cause I’m more focused on testing than on not getting shot? Newer players don’t have that - they haven’t gotten the time to loot and hoard the way older players have, and don’t want to waste precious resources on risky, ‘maybe this will work, or maybe it’ll be a waste of what little ammo I have’ propositions.
My suggested solution, for this, would be a rework and expansion of the ‘tutorial’ tab, along with a potential addition of a ‘bestiary’ tab. Flesh out the articles on basic game mechanics to at least allude to the existence of how bullets work, how ammo types work, the fact that material penetration exists, etc… Add in a system for the player to passively accumulate a reference guide for how to combat different machines - once a player has shot X many runner gas tanks, add in an entry to say ‘oh, these guys have this gas tank, and shooting it makes it explode’. This way, even if the player discovers these things by accident, they’ll at least get an answer to ‘why did this guy die in 2 shots and this other same version of that guy took a full mag to drop?’. I think this is a decent way to add in an extra immersion layer while also keeping true to the ‘go figure it out!’. The blueprint collectables are a good example of this kind of thinking - but there’s also nothing to indicate, to the player, what the benefit of having them is. It’s entirely possible to play the game up to level 31 and never pick up the perk that lets you benefit from having bothered to collect all of those schematics, which feels silly to me - someone put a lot of time and effort into making that amazing cutout graphic mode, so seeing it go unused is a terrible waste.
One other point I’d like to make, for the sake of new player retention, is the idea of a re-spec system. Perks are, currently, widely unbalanced for the utility or damage that they provide versus their location in the skill tree. This is actually less of an issue than it seems, because (from what I can tell) the location and placement is based on balancing the game for multiplayer, vice singleplayer. That said, one of the aspects of starting a new game is experimentation, and the perk tree is a big example of this. However, currently, if a new player decides that they don’t like how their character is specced and want to try something else, the route forward is… to start over at level 1. If a player is already frustrated and trying to find a new way to approach situations, they’re also not likely to be enthused about the idea of starting their spec over from scratch, just because a given perk didn’t behave the way they thought it would, or turned out to be less useful than it seemed.
That huge wall of text out of the way, I want to take a moment and address game balance - specifically, the power creep involved with the exp 50 cal. I understand that everyone loves this gun - I do to, and I think that it’s an amazingly fun weapon to use. That being said, I also think that it’s terrible for the long-term health of the game.
One of the core tenets of gameplay in Generation Zero is approaching your fights smart, rather than hard. The player spends their time learning the weaknesses and strategies of each enemy type and flavor, and benefits from learning how to exploit those weaknesses. The exp 50 cal allows the player to completely ignore those weaknesses, in favor of ‘shoot it here, regardless of position’. What’s worse is that it helps trivialize the robots that’re supposed to be a substantial threat - specifically, the tanks. I don’t think anyone will argue me about harvesters being loot pinatas once the runner compliment is gone, but tanks are supposed to be beastly, the king of the area that they’re in. With the exp 50 cal, I can pop the fuel tank… by shooting them in the face. Worse, I actually benefit from doing this - because I can damage all of the armor plating and drive components (and, if I’m really good, the gas dispensers or concussion attack speakers) all at the same time.
Other players have noted that the exp 50 cal is overtuned, because it’s easy to quickly eliminate tougher enemies. My point is that this isn’t the problem - the problem is the penetration that it gives you, because it allows you to ignore game mechanics like positioning, robot orientation, etc, and just put massive holes in things from wherever you happen to be standing. Grenades, EMPs, and the exp shotty are all useful because they get robots to flinch, or stand still for prolonged periods of time, opening up the opportunity to safely target weakpoints. The exp 50 cal says ‘naw, I’ll just drill holes in it until it dies’. If this is the direction the devs want to go with for weaponry, then that’s also cool - but the enemies need an adjustment to ramp up as well, or what was supposed to be a cat and mouse situation turns into a tom and jerry cartoon. Also, the other weapons should receive similar levels of love - either in the form of ridiculous damage potential (meh), or more utility (!). The exp shotty is fun, to me, because it introduces a new kind of role, especially in team play - I can take that shotty out and perma-stun any given robot of my choice, as long as I’m careful, while my teammates do the work of actually putting it down. I think adding newer, more unique approaches to what weapons can do would be a good way to still provide cool, top-end loot, without immediately invalidating other weapon choices.
tl;dr - I just want this game to succeed, and I feel like some transparency would hugely help the playerbase. Players that’re having fun are players that keep playing, and refer the game to their friends. Adding in better explanations of game mechanics, and making sure that weapons stay interesting and varied, is what I see as the best approach to this.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the text vomit.
