The more this game progresses, the more I feel like the developers never even intended this to be a single player game.
If you want to play alone you have to remember to switch the setting every time you start, not really a big deal. The number of machines you face are the same whether you are on solo or multiplayer. given that you don’t lose any items or stats on death, the only time it’s a real problem is if you are too far away from a safehouse or radio. But you do use more ammo killing a pack of hunters on your own and without another player or two to help you it will run out pretty fast.
Inventory space is limited so I don’t think it’s feasible to carry one of every type of weapon to be always ready no matter what kind of ammo you find, and there is no place to store spare weapons or ammo so if you loot all the ammo from an area and use it before moving on, you are out of luck for four hours. and not just log off for a few hours and come back later. you have to stay in the game for four hours hoping to find a weapon or ammo you can use. or do what I do and run around taking pictures. you could use another of your characters to hold stuff for you and swap it around, but that feels like using an exploit to get around one of their fixes for another exploit.
if you play with others, the group helps you take down the machines so less ammo could be used per person. also you can each loot the boxes so there is technically more available and you can swap ammo, guns with the group.
that being said, as a mainly solo player I still find it fun to play, a bit frustrating and repetitive but that’s the cost of my anti-social behavior. I don’t think it needs balancing to make it easier for solo play, plenty of games only offer a single player experience so we are lucky that they decided to add a single player option to this multiplayer game.
You’re not wrong about it being intended for coop primarily. In the last live stream, Graham made a comment about the menu option to disallow random people joining and said something to the effect that it’s on by default and resets to allowing randoms joining every time you restart because the intent is to have random people playing in your game.
So yes, the intent is that this isn’t a solo game. And the more they tweak the balance, the more that’s becoming apparent.
No scaling to number of players in a game. That should tell you everything
I think it is the way around, SP is what they began with, and forgot to add more of everything per person joining.
The amount of machines should increase per 33.333%% per player additionally joining.
This means, that you will have twice the opposition when playing with a full team.
Scaling should be done, IMHO, by adding more machines, not by altering their statistics.
But even for single player, the machines are too easy.
Not their toughness, but their aggression should be tweaked.
Sometimes when you run into a machine, it takes them up to even 10 seconds before they seem to realize you are the enemy, and should be killed.
Quite bloody saddening…
And then there’s the insane lack of machines.
The island where you wake up, and the t next ones (base player map) has FAR too much open (unpopulated by droids) space.
This simply destroys the game, IMHO.
Why?
Well, the living population was eradicated by these machines, even military personnel and tanks.
The five machines that inhabit Sweden (hyperbole) could never have done this.
There should be like 2 million (small hyperbole) machines in the playable island.
I had no problems with the difficulty up until the last update (solo player) and quite liked the easy starter island to get to grips with things like paying attention to roads that end in the middle of nowhere and the awful inventory system.
Meeting the single hunter in the bridge was a much greater shock than meeting the packs of almost impossible to deal with ones what are now on the island (as a new solo player.)
From the amount of messages here it looks as if most people are actually solo players (I wonder if their bug report option logs this?)
I think they have buggered up the intro island for single players.
I liked the unique pace of nothing, nothing, blind panic, nothing, paranoia, panic
But now it’s moving towards being yet another FPS
I agree 
First encounter with the seeker and runner by the football field. From a distance spotting the first Hunter on the bridge. Epic.
I agree it is a bit overwhelming on first island for a new player , but the dev’s had good intention’s just like the explosive item’s they tweaked the setting just a little bit too much , im sure they gonna make good progress in june , there’s plenty of quality feedback from us all … Cheers 
Agree 100%. Adding the extra hunters in the starter island don’t have that same emotional effect. It’s tense and scary, and likely moreso for a new player, but can also be frustrating to a new player to have an overwhelming force attack right away that they can’t realistically defend themselves against. It’s hard to explore the starter island and get used to the game mechanics when big homocidal robots are chasing you down and all you can do is run away, likely encountering more machines along the way that will join the chase.
We need to look no further than the latest live stream where an experienced player who knows the tricks of the game was getting his ass handed to him repeatedly and dying over and over due to the hunters. I don’t know about you guys, but that didn’t look like fun to me. And for a new player who knows nothing about GZ, that’s handing them a near insurmountable boss-level obstacle right out of the gate. IMHO, that’s NOT a good way to get new players into the game.
I can see a lot of new players rage quitting over that and refunding the game. Some will continue trying, but I can see a lot of people giving up if they just keep dying over and over and suddenly not have any more ammo, tools to use, places to hide, or loot to get.
IMHO, they should have just added runners, ticks and seekers to the starter island and in groups near the new set pieces along with the ones that already existed in the world prior. Maybe some military runners at the naval base to make that a little more challenging.
This is great and so true 
i would like to see missions or rewards added specific to multiplayer. not sure how it would work but it would give some more incentive for people to keep their game open for other players. the problem with that is a lot of other solo players would complain that we are being punished for playing alone.
That make no sense to me.
People don’t have open games because they don’t want to play co-op or only want to play with people they know.
If players wanted to play co-op with strangers then they leave their game open.
Why try to make people confirm to what other people want them to do?
If you want more co-op then do some match making in the discord server
I’ve had 3 co-op sessions left open accidentally, one session I had two excellent players a newbie and an experienced one and the experienced guy was acting as tutor.
The next two sessions had multiple seagulls who flew in flapping and squawking while crapping over everything, grabbing everything and screwing up missions I had been enjoying myself working through solo.
The other problem is that some people really don’t want random jackasses joining their games. I want to progress and explore at my pace, without some idiot who’s completed the story trying to speed run me through it, or some jerk just using my game as resource farm.
Of the dozen or so times I’ve actually left the session open, I only had people actually join about 3/4 of the time, and of those, only one time was it actually a positive experience (and that was largely because it was someone who had the same exploration with a fine-toothed-comb focused mentality I have), the other times were a mix of:
- People joining for 5-10 minutes, looting everything they could find in a given area in that time, and then promptly leaving.
- People trying to convince me that my exploration focused play-style was ‘wrong’ and speed run me through the story (who promptly got kicked).
- People following me around and taking the last shot to steal every kill they could.
i know people have many good reasons for playing solo.
i hated it when random people would join and try to “help” speed run me through quests faster than i wanted to do them. i like exploring the world and playing at my own pace and don’t want someone off doing my quests and miss out on things.
i don’t mind playing with fiends but wasn’t into the random joiners.
my main point of the post was just that i see it as mainly for multiplayer. it’s playable as a single player but it’s a little bit harder that way and i’m fine with that.
I do feel that the changes to the first island in particular is pushing the game further in that direction
I feel you bro, but there’s a point where I strongly disagree, although it seems most agree with you.
“I don’t think it’s feasible to carry one of every type of weapon to be always ready”
I disagree in that it makes no sense to me to carry more than the 2+1 equiped guns (the +1 being the handgun).
It’s a lot more intersting to find out which combo of 2(+1) weapons covers the widest range of uses. As an example, my character has the pansarvärnsgevär 90 and the12G pump action (+Klaucke 17), and… that’s it ! And I can tell you there’s no foe that can’t be taken down with this set.
If you really want to use the Granatgevär M49 (and who doesn’t like a good old bazooka ?), it’s a game in itself to find out which weapon completes it best ! With the Automatgevär 4, you have another wining duo !
To be honest, seeing players who grab all weapons complain about the lack of space in the inventory is a facepalm situation to me.
EDIT : I play solo only.
thats what i thought i said, you cant really carry them all and sometimes the only ammo you find is for the ones you don’t have. you end up carrying around loads of ammo for guns you don’t have or a bunch of empty guns.
I play games because I don’t like people. I shouldn’t be forced to interact with them when I’m in the middle of trying to avoid them.
Seems you can alter your multiplayer settings after you start, or even before. As for avoiding crappy multiplayer sessions with what you all mentioned, I’d say more people should hang in the discord server where there a many voice channels of up to 4 people and even separated between PC and Console. I love this game single player and haven’t had many bad experiences, but its also a blast when playing with people who are more or less on your level. Just speak up in discord and make your situation known. Not to mention as a host you have the control.
I completely agree. Setting should not default back to anyone being able to join every time you start a game. Should also add a friends can join option. I’d keep it on that instead of invite only.
This right here. I do like playing GZ with my friends - my friends that I can invite to the game if I choose to, or join theirs. When I do play with them, we’re all on a Steam chat together shooting the shit, talking about our random shared interests, etc. It’s actually fun for more reasons than just the game.
But I have zero desire to play with random Internet people that join into my game because I forgot to go and switch that damn setting that SHOULD be saved every time I start a new session.
But Graham made it pretty clear in last week’s (June 5) live stream that this is the default setting because the intent is to force you to play coop. And we know how they react to people “not playing as they intended”. They want to force you into playing the way they want you to play. That just defeats the purpose of having an open world game in the first place.
Although now my loot is bugged (I get nothing even after waiting out the respawn timer), my 2 friends I play with are both having the same issue. They hate the changes to the game and don’t want to play any more. And I can’t blame them. I don’t really have any desire to play any more either. I played solo for 2 hours after the last patch where I finally ran out of ammo, then we tried multiplayer for about 20 minutes and it killed their desire to play.
Other than that, the other day I idled for 5+ hours to see if my loot would respawn (it didn’t), explored the starter island a bit and shut it down since I couldn’t play it due to no loot - the problem they insist doesn’t exist.