Possible to disable robot respawns?
That would be cool Idea, but only if player also was unable to respawn. So one word - permadeath.
That is something we don’t discuss here on official GZ forum.
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I think some Far Cry games had some similar feature… You could also reset the state of the game to bring back enemies. I might be wrong.
By the way, I like @Doc.Caliban’s idea!
Destroying the radar beacons usually reduces or prevents them returning.
That’s another thing they don’t explain in the tutorial tab. 
Like Rivals, and Region Level.
I wrote about that in the survey.
Relay beacons will only get rid of the machines that spawn with the beacon, which is typically Prototype Runners. All other enemies arent affected by this but rather the rivals it seems.
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Don’t you think, that players should learn this by playing the game? Imagine you are in a real cataclysme, nobody is going to tell you what rivals are, or what the best tactics are to beat them, etc. The game already gives far more information than they would get if it was real. Then they’d be on their own.
Finding out and learning as the game goes is what makes GZ a great experience to me.
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Please NO, you have weapons and ammo everywhere, before 2020 that was not the case at all.
And many areas are completely deserted, with no enemies.
So PLEASE, do NOT make the game even more empty and easier.
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It’s about having an option to play the game the way you want to. It isn’t as though you would be forced the play the way that I like to play. Some people like it to be more realistic, some people like it to be endless like an arcade game.
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Not at all!
I used to be really heavily into the ARMA 3 mission and modding community. I created a lot of complex missions, and being a realistic combat sim, that never included anything you eliminated coming back for no explainable reason. The story in GZ is similar to that, but the game play is not. It’s like an arcade game. It would be programmatically easy to have the option for the AI to not respawn during a play-through, allowing you a realistic experience of carefully clearing the map.
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Yes, you can reset the outposts in the game so that you can reconquer them as many times as you like. Imagine capturing one, and then the next time the game loads it is inexplicably in enemy hands again, like magic. Or worse, every one you have captured comes back for no reason. That’s what it feels like to play GZ. Forced to do it again and again and again. Some people like that, some people like the game play to match the actual story, which is that there are a finite number of these things around. So an option to play it one way or the other would be nice.
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I don’t think that forcing permadeath is necessary, but it could easily also be an option. That’s the point though. Allow players different game play options when they are programmatically simple to implement. It’s not like these options would cost much of anything in dev or testing time, and you’d sell more copies. I do not own the game because of the infinite respawn… I’m not looking for an arcade-style game. A single checkbox at the start of a new game would fix that.
As for mods and scripts, that is too bad. Some of the most widely played and most profitable games in existence are what they are because of rich, active mod communities.
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This might have something to do with the Avalanche Studios Group wanting to protect their proprietary game engine as much as they can. I’m not discussing whether that’s a good or a bad move though. (Because I think they should do whatever they want to do with their engine.)
If you were to buy and own the game you would realize the modding community is already heavily invested in the game. It is due to the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the forums you don’t see it that much. And there is zero control in public games to prevent mods from being used in them. It is a matter of minutes that a player will join a public game using mods of some sort.
Which what you are asking for, as a condition of buying and playing the game is to have an ending to the game? Not to many games that have endings do players continue to reset and replay the story.
One of the things about the game is while doing missions, when you get close to a mission point, the area is heavily guarded by machines. Machines that once you complete the mission do not respawn. Only in random areas throughout the map do machines respawn over and over and it is all on a timer. For those of us that play the game regularly, the machines do not respawn fast enough, nor are there enough of them.
I have been on maps with other high level players where we run through the map from one end of the other, fast traveling to high contact areas with machines just to level up the regions, it is to spawn reapers. That is what a lot of players do after they have finished the story part of the game. We run out of targets if the reaper does not spawn. It what makes players continue to play the game and invite friends to join them.
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I was commenting on someone’s assertion that it has to do with protecting IP, so those comments are only as relevant as that person’s assertion is accurate. Nothing more. I am well aware of the mods available on nexusmods and other locations.
I think the disconnect between my question and the answers I’m getting is that people think I asked what they think of my request. I did not. I don’t care how other people play the game, and they should not care how anyone else likes to play the game. What difference does it make? People seem to be arguing against an option.
Anyway, I’m just one guy asking a simple question and getting a lot of oddly defensive replies instead of just, “No. There isn’t a way to do that.” I’m not here to defend my request. I’ve been PC gaming since 1989, and have spent a couple decades in the software industry. I am confident that my request is valid and not at all difficult to implement.
To be clear, everyone; I think the game is great! I’ve played a few hours of it at a friend’s place and am only wishing I could get a single player experience where the progress I make does not get undone by endless respawns. I think it would be a nice option… I’m not saying the existing game play should be changed. Thanks for the feedback!
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Indeed you’re saying exactly this.
What you want is a very different game(type).
If you’re looking for a singleplayer game with a story that ends the game, you’re wrong here. This is a cooperative multiplayer game with an optional story by giving you some missions to do. And you’re able to play this multiplayer game alone.
It’s not the main goal of the game to get rid of all machines (at the moment).
But as the story and the development still are in progress, maybe some day there will be a final mission with a similar goal. (imagine mission/target markers for each machine and a counter: “12543 machines left”) 
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Can we please calm a bit. Let’s try not using the second person pronouns for a moment.
This doesn’t need to become a drama.
That being said, I also think that Generation Zero is mostly a sandbox game with some kind of story, but it definitely not a Far Cry game story-wise. (So it shouldn’t be held to such standards in term of storytelling.)
I also think that it would be cool to have some kind of mode like the one @Doc.Caliban suggests, for people like me who spend 20 hours in the first island of the Archipelago Region (Iboholmen Island). Having robots respawn when you are having fun for 20 hours just on Iboholmen is problematic because you can easily get 2 or 3 rivals without even knowing basic systems like crafting.
I don’t think any less about the game because it doesn’t have the feature suggested by @Doc.Caliban, but I think such mode would be fun for me. Also, I don’t think any less of people who don’t care about such mode.
Let’s just remember that this Discourse’s forum is the dedicated communication channel for anything feedback-related (along with Discord), as announced by the developer/publisher. Discourse provides an asynchronous discussion platform waaaay different than Discord, and it also provides a different experience that Steam’s forums.
Why was the base defense added? Why do you have to destroy machines to resupply resources and gain exp and higher-level weapons from rivals? You cannot get everything from the loot boxes and doing missions. You cannot get apparel schematics past level 2 without have machines spawn and then destroy them. You cannot do a base defense without machines re-spawning. Without the machines there is no story and there is no game. You GAIN by destroying machines, increase skills, increase weapons ability and power, and learning more about what happened and that all continues with each update.
Take away all the missions, take away collecting any of the collectables, take away any weapons that are only found on rivals, take away the reaper and there is no game. Ask anyone that still plays the game after they have done all this and completed everything that is left, what do they do to keep playing? No respawns means no rivals, no leveling up regions to spawn the reaper, the WHOLE game is based around destroying the machines. Ask anyone that spent hours running across their map looking for machines to level up their regions and found very few.
These are not negative comments but facts of the game.
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Basically, what you are saying, is that no enemy respawn would affect other core systems even though it might not be obvious for beginners who did not experience everything the game has to offer. Is that right? (Thanks for the explanation, by the way.)
Without spoiling too much, out of curiosity, is there a story explanation as to how the robots could re-appear every 4 hours (is that 4 hours?)?
I recently did a mission which brought me to containers holding Runners and Ticks in “suspended mode” (), so I guess that is the beginning of an explanation: fresh robots are regularly dropped in Sweden.
As you get deeper into the game, the game play itself will take you to places that by just what you see you can add it up and deduct for yourself why the machines seem endless. Even the lure of the reaper was something that for almost a year we didn’t know for sure what was going to happen to it. For a lot of us, the story has yet to end.
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