Now you see, Xezr, I’m not sure the devs have a clear vision for the game. Each area is done by someone different (that was in a stream - no doubt Aesyle will know which and where), and I’m not convinced that there is an overview. They seem to be oiling the squeakiest hinge all the time. Bosses, Super-Bosses, crafting, base-building and hordes have all gone in, but not one of those things fits the original concept.
Now, the houses thing seems to be to create a concept picture, rather than a live-in space, and then the action is to tear around a Tank and five Hunters in a field screaming.
But that’s not the game they set out to make. Nor is it the game I wanted to buy. And anyway, they already have a game like that with dinosaurs in it.
I suppose I should specify; I don’t mind the houses that are actually barricaded inside. That makes sense. If you can’t make it to the top floor because someone put furniture in the way, sure.
But the ones that are just boarded up with a plank of wood or have a box placed in the way of the door so it’s inaccessible, that’s a bit strange.
Though I think we might need a separate thread about just the houses now.
The game was going to move away from the spooky, abandoned setting at some point.
But, let’s focus on the now. What I would like to see would be more options for basebuilding in other areas. I don’t know if it’s possible but inside the city would actually be cool.
The original game had a perfectly balanced world design and a mystery to investigate. The premise was that you’d returned to an empty country, deserted houses and robots everywhere. What happened?
Just walk for 5 minutes in the new world and you’ll find craters, blood, corpses & barricades etc. Look a bit harder and there are Russian troops and resistance camps.
You’ve got to wonder exactly how long the player had been gone for and how far away? Have they woken up from a coma!? because there’s no way this ‘just happened’.
The world as it is no longer fits the original narrative or game design. Tbh. I’d wager none of this was ever part of the ‘original vision’ and is a result of devs throwing ideas at a wall to see what sticks.
This game has had more retcons & continuity changes than Star Wars at this point.
Sorry to say, but I personlly think Aesyle is right here… His point makes a lot of sense.
Putting a resistance “base” in one place just begs for a concentrated attack.
The whole point of putting up a proper “resistance” is to have it scattered, to wage a Guerilla type of warfare on an enemy like Fnix and the whole machine invasion.
Boarding up and burning down everything left, right and center just feels completely contradictive.
If anything; More and more houses that are boarded up, should be opened up instead.
More places to hide and fight from. More places to find loot or to hide stashes of loot.
Boarding up simply does not make any sense.
Unless we get to have a tool like a crowbar and unlock all these places again.
As someone said before; A wheelbarrow or a small plank in front of a door, would that stop anyone in real life? Not me.
And on a sidenote, it does not make sense again, if you think our characters can haul about 100Kg of schtuff looted from everywhere around, but can not swim?
So they are also too weak to move a wheelbarrow or pry open a door held close with a thin wooden plank?
I just hope this trend will end here.
GZ at this point in time is not the game I originally bought anymore, nor want it to be or to evolve further from it’s origin.
New stuff is good, but not this. Not Basebuilding and a ravaged boarded up burned down gameworld.
Burned down or (heavily) damaged, I can agree upon… But the boarding up. No.
Hey guys, I brought the question about the closed houses to the developer design team & showed them your feedback. Below is basically what they told me, so I can post for all to see.
There are basically two main reasons why the houses were boarded up;
Performance - This is the big one and having a lot of propped houses does affect the performance. Especially with XB1 and PS4 they need to be mindful of how performance-heavy the game is, so it still runs okay on the base versions of the consoles as not everyone has access to a high end gaming PC or Pro versions of the consoles.
World Design + Narrative - One of the bigger feedback points they got after launch was that the world would sometimes feel empty and that many locations were samey/similar. Therefore they wanted to maximize the amount of custom propped houses to add some more life, narrative and variation to locations.
Depending on the narrative for some locations, they would often board up some of the houses to allow more focus to be put on the custom propped/narrative houses and they usually are a bit more visually interesting with some lamps and light sources to attract players, while the boarded up ones are still serving as objects you can hide behind when in combat, and narratively showing that people in the world have packed their bags and left their homes.
As they are a small team with limited resources, they gradually add to the world (new world scenes, region revamps, propping, etc) when able, in a scope to try and keep what’s realistic and achievable for a team of their size, while at the same time balancing between that and performance.
Finally, I’ve been told that they do very much acknowledge and value the feedback given here and will take it into account moving forward.
Answer is pretty simple. In game development, and graphics wise how the game is able to run on different systems.
Game area has to obey certain polygon budget. Mostly i would bet this is because of console machines. They have limited processing capability.
PC side it can wary greatly.
So boarding up or making houses destroyed, they free up this polygon budget. To add other details to surrounding areas.
Well, rendering the animation of live smoke or fire in destroyed houses is far more taxing to CPU/GPU than loading in still images (e.g house furniture).
Here, i’m unsure if destroyed house with all the live smoke and fire is really less taxing to the system than open house with furniture in it (no constant animations).
So I get that devs made a “basic shape” of the world at launch and by “gradually add to the world” they actually finishing the product, but story and time(line) ain’t staying still and world is constanly changes, which creates the flusterclank that is “compromise between intented world and current story world”.
I agree with Aesyle that animations on props (burning and sparking) are more taxing than just re-propped houses. Like, I even get better FPS with IR mode, than Normal mode with all that rendering.
IMO I’d like to see more destruction by “hit damage” (chunks ripped off by machine gun or holes and concaves by explosive forces), than still burning houses.
I do understand where game go. I just don’t like where it goes and devs, IMO again, going overboard with this much destruction (keywords much destruction).
If it were to happen - I’d wholly agree to retcon some revamps if it benefits both performance and story.
I hear everyone here and I get maybe the game isn’t as pretty on the whole map as it once was, however if the story is evolving and moving forward it cannot stay the same as the initial launch. I suspected performance for base consoles was the issue with empty areas and boarded up housing, I do want to see the story progress and hopefully more exciting additions coming, the world was always going to be scared from the growing conflict and growing combatants, right now it doesn’t feel ruined for me just showing the signs of conflict on a whole, just my opinion and base building is something new to mess around with, let’s just see what the year brings!
Happy hunting all
Hmhm… I thought about that more an more often, especially when you turn around in some spots/locations and see the “world” graphics change and vanish in front of your eyes…
I didn’t want to be the first one to speak this out but for me it’s time to split the worlds of consoles and PC, no ?
Because sometimes it is embarassing to see these artificial graphic limitations due to console versions capable of running on the lowest thinkable specs.
People from different platforms are not able to play together anyway so why tie the game to the lowest specs for all ?
I guess most of the PC players do have a decent set of hardware in their machines where CPUs or graphics cards sometimes cost more than a console… + TV set…
I really don’t want to offend any group of players on the different platforms but is it really so hard to set different graphics settings and values for the different platforms ?
I don’t know as I now play on PS5, and the game is so much better in every way than when I used to play on PS4, I don’t know I guess time will tell but I suppose that the numbers for base consoles players are very high on this game still !
Well, that would be something one buddy can tell another one , but for a company to tell that for their customers would mean end of the company due to the revenue loss.
I know the reason why PC and console versions have been kept same. Though, i also think that devs have discussed about splitting the two and develop two builds; one for PC and another for console. As of why the split hasn’t been done - that i can’t tell.
Following is me speculating;
What would be the pros and cons if devs would split the game?
Pros:
Game is fine tuned to the platform, increasing the overall stability and lessening load on the hardware.
E.g PC players would get 800m render distance while console players would get 200m render distance.
More full of a game.
E.g there would be more fancy animations and many houses wouldn’t be boarded up, since PC version wouldn’t be limited by the console hardware cap. Same would be on consoles, since when consoles wouldn’t need to live up for the PC performance and can have lesser render distance (to reduce overall hardware load), more fancier world can be included for the console version as well.
Fine tuned controls for each platform.
Here, devs could add more functions for separate keys of PCs and for consoles, optimize the controls for controllers.
Cons:
Different time when updates are released.
Usually, it’s far easier to make and publish the PC update than console update. Since for the latter, there is cap at the hardware limitations and it takes time to optimize the game for older hardware (consoles).
Different states of the game between PC and console.
Result when updates are released at different times. (Which is already partially in effect.)
Splitting up the already small dev team, resulting in PC department and console department.
Unless that is already in effect.
I dread to think what will be left after the next revamp. Has the game really reached the point where any enhancement means fewer accessible buildings. I guess new map areas are also unlikely for similar reasons.
But a ruined house is more complicated than a simple one. Anyway, Himfjall had both, and opened up the stores. I’d rather have the houses to fight from than lots of set-piece scenes with unnecessary soldiers and tanks.
All my Semla is disappearing - empty plates is what I see in every kitchen. Some miserable bugger is running around ahead of me and eating all the Semla. I’d rather have the buildings than the detail, which is irrelevant. Once you’ve seen the battle scene, well, you’ve seen it. But a house is a joy to fight from forever…
So somehow I don’t know what to do with the story. When I got into the story at the end of 2019, it was still mysterious and sometimes creepy. You could take refuge in houses, which made sense from the history, because the residents fled headlong. The fact that some houses and places like Asö were completely destroyed during the last update was not so great, but OK. Somehow fit into the story. But now, we are one year further in history, the resistance has increased. The survivors have gathered. OK. but no longer fits with the beginning. As a reminder, you come from a boat trip, land in Yttervik and everyone is gone. But you don’t travel a year to get from Yttervik to the forest region or to the farmland. Somehow inconclusive. Maybe it should have been better to create a Generation Zero Part 2. To give a better ending to the story from a year ago. Then you would still have the possibility to switch back and forth between the two worlds. The base building is quite nice, but for me the game lives from wandering around. But if you only hike through completely destroyed landscapes, it is no longer fun. Somehow the devs should find their way back to their story and not implement what is screamed the loudest. If you continue like this, I believe that this is going in the completely wrong direction
, but for a company to tell that for their customers would mean end of the company due to the revenue loss.