Hey all! I’ve recently started playing the game with 3 friends. We usually play more action and story driven games, but we’re giving the exploration genre a try with GZ. We’re on the starting island but soon the rest of the map will open up with all its sub regions.
What is the best route to follow to maximize immersion, “story” progression, difficulty, and interesting quests?
There isnt really a good route to follow anymore due to the updates in game, everywhere after Archipelago will be challenging due to machine spawns and their classes. For the story, you can ignore the South Coast egion, the region left of the starting one, but i would recommend heading there possibly afterwards because of weaponary.
Difficulty is completely up to you. For mainly exploring and less combat, adventure would be a great diffixulty for you. For a mix of the two, Skirmish is the best diffixulty for it. For a challenging combat and less exploration then Guerrilla would be the best choice but i wouldnt recommend that until later in game.
Interesting quests dont really exist tbh, its mostly go from Point A to Point B and collect something or kill machines and claim a safehouse.
Forgot to include: Youll also be seeing stuff from recent updates as the map doesnt have a progression type system in place. For example over in South Coast youll see stuff thats actually meant for a DLC, FNIX Rising to be precise. Keep that in mind while exploring as well.
Hi @Crusard 
Oh my, oh my, how confusing the story progression must be for a new player! 
One note first. The best way of immersing yourself into GZ’s world and atmosphere, is to play alone. But that’s up to you. 
The currently released story content takes place from november 14’th 1989, and up to late march 1990. However, the game will never tell a new player which missions fit in the chronological order, unless you do a little research up front.
The first region (Archipelago) is straight forward. All missions here belong in the “vanilla” storyline. But, when you cross over to the next region (Farmlands), right on the border you’ll find a hangar with a jet fighter and a resistance base built around it. There is a note on a destroyed car leading to a new set of missions. These are tagged in your menu with a special logo, a triangle shape with a dot in the middle. Ignore this mission, as it starts the storyline of the second DLC, FNIX Rising, which takes place in the South Coast region, after the main storyline.
From here, you can pretty much do any of the regions in your chosen order, but keep in mind that it gets harder the further north you go.
In the eastern Forest region you’ll find an abandoned truck with a radio, telling you to cross over to the island of Himfjäll. This mission is tagged with another special logo, the image of a bear. Ignore this mission too, as it starts the storyline of the first DLC, Alpine Unrest.
Also in the Forest region, you’ll find a note in a small town, leading you to a FNIX base on top of the hill “Tylöveden”. This content is also intended to do after you’ve completed both story DLC’s.
Lately there’s been added a third faction into the game. I won’t spoil who they are in case you don’t know. There is a short side-storyline explaining this faction’s presence as well, and I honestly don’t know when I should recommend you do these. There is a lot of confusion around this faction, even for veteran players.
The most confusing aspect of GZ as a whole, is that the set pieces for later missions are put in place right from the start, creating a cluster of time paradoxes across the map.
Anyway, you must first and foremost follow the “vanilla” storyline by seeking out the command bunkers in each region, and completing the missions they provide. When at last you’re done with the main storyline, you should have explored most of the map.
You may just be more confused right now, but I’ll try listing the correct order:
1- Do the vanilla storyline. Basically every mission in your meny without any special logo tags.
Side note 1- At this point it should be OK to pick up the collectibles explaining the third faction while exploring Marshlands region, as we don’t have a clear date for when this takes place.
Side note 2- Avoid picking up the “message in a bottle” collectibles while you explore the Forest region, as these tie more directly into the later story.
Side note 3- Many in-world set pieces won’t make sense to you until much later in the game. Try being curious as to what they are, instead of getting frustrated by it. 
2- Do the “Alpine Unrest” DLC.
3- Do the “FNIX Rising” DLC.
4- Do the Resistance missions in the Forest region, leading to the FNIX base on Tylöveden. Now you should also collect the “messages in a bottle” in that region.
5- Do the missions explaining the third faction in the Marshlands. These are found in a barn on the northern edge of the Farmlands region.
This is just my quick take on it. Let’s ask an expert… @Gysbert do you agree with this? 
I don’t agree with you about doing it alone. I think a journey is best done with some good friends.
Like others said, no real good route to take with how the game is now.
I´m so glad I started playing before all updates, now with all DLCs (if you have them) and all other stuff that been updated I think it would be very confusing. Except for maybe the story line for the faction introduced in the marshland.
With that said, follow the guide by @NJR87, I think that will make most sense.
Yes, I agree , and even though playing with friends can be extra fun for some, I am a strong advocate for playing alone, not least because multiplayer has a history of messing up missions and other progression. But that is of course everybody own choice.
The path you layed out is a good one to follow.
It’s really unfortunate and strange that they decided to put all that DLC stuff in the Archipelago and South Coast. Don’t know why they would put such late-game story stuff right in the beginning areas.
Screws up the story for people like me who only started playing after all those changes were made.
Well, of course it’s an open world online coop and you should be free to do what you want when you want and with who you want (independent from his/her progress)
But as there is an ongoing storyline behind everything I agree that it in some parts should be seperated. The initial missions of the dlcs could be unlocked by finishing the main storyline.
The landscape and the structures on the other hand would still have to be the same for all players. Everything else would need too great changes in matchmaking etc…
All in all this game seems to be quite sandboxy in its progression. It was very strange to see the scenery laid out in different timelines: the first island seemed to be abandoned just barely hours ago, with meals still served on the table and all lights on. Cars fully functional. Then I came accross some intense battlefields with destroyed tanks and bots, and further on I met developed bases from different factions and apparently well planned anti-robot fortifications.
I could see all the content is “mixed up” and would be easier to understand for someone who’s been playing for a while. This also happens in many live service games like destiny, where you can barely understand what’s going on when you start.
We’ve already started playing Guerrilla and it seems like a proper challenge 
Also I’ve gone ahead and done some solo exploration and south coast looks very similar to the starting location geographically, so not a lot new there besides all these strange uninteractable bases and powerful enemies.
Actually after travelling a bit south and encountering loads of FNIX outposts and rivals the difficulty seems to have spiked a lot. I’ve also travelled north for a daily objective, and the russian bots seem so much easier to kill (and they even help you many times) so it seems like an easier area overall as well.
I’ll watch out for these questlines and try to complete the rest first, as you suggest.
Thank you all for your answers!
Playing with friends have never fucked up anything in this game for me. But when random people join that can do that. But we are a group that stay together and work well together.
And for best route I always taken South coast first but that was before DLC. Now I go to the right and the town when I start a new game.
Well that’s good, there is always the exception to the rule. 
I always felt that by keeping away from multiplayer, I kept my game clean of problems that seem to originate from multiplayer. Resulting in a game that never does anything really game breaking for me. No frame drops, no crashes, no stats going haywire.
I have never started a new game (yet). I did however, replay the two missions of the assault base update, by loading a manual game-save from before, to get more information that I missed during first playthrough, but otherwise I am still moving forward in the game.
Here’s an update of my experience playing the game.
We’ve stopped playing the game as a group, as we found the game lacking in some aspects. I’ve had some fun though, and decided to play for a while longer on my own. These are some notes I took in the last couple of days, from a progressing new player’s point of view. Please note that I’m just pointing out the things I did not like, and there are many things unique to this game that make it stand out in the genre. However, the negatives, and lack of development of the good features, have encouraged me to write about the most notable ones in hopes that the game takes a big turn into what it potentially could be.
Enemies:
Runners. Only balanced and fun enemy to fight against. Much more fun when in large numbers, though usually never enough to beat a player.
FNIX hunters are the toughest enemy in the game. Railgun can follow and hit through buildings and cover with a huge AoE blast. Also their red laser is sometimes invisible, making the attack 100% unavoidable. Not fun. Also their machinegun attack can 3-shot you. When there’s 3-4 or more of them and there are no buildings from which to glitch them out of, I have many times died from a single machinegun salvo (full hp).
Harvesters. They’re plain useless. Give them a gun or whatever.
Tanks are the most annoying bullet sponges in the game. No challenge, just a time dump. I usually destroy all their components and am forced to just keep shooting it’s non-component parts. It’s just lame to keep shooting, and shooting. Rewards are crap as well, just partially recover some ammo if I’m lucky, or get like 300 .32s.
Also, for FNIX or military Tanks (can’t remember) the missile animation looks like a mini rocket with a tiny explosion sprite, but the area of effect is massive. Damage is also not instantaneous.
Immersion/story
The story never seemed to make much sense. All the people apparently just went poof without much explanation, and many of the audios and logs don’t fit very well with what’s happening in the game world. “we’re under attack by un unknown entity!”, “some kind of robots!”, etc.
Nothing really interesting seems to ever happen, and I’ve stopped reading the lore and texts after a while because they made no difference either.
Also of note, all objects in the game world seem… out of place. There’s food in most plates of the game, like EVERYBODY was just having dinner all over the island when the robots came. All lights seem to be on. Cars have infinite battery life. Everything looks so lively for a ghost island.
Gameplay
Attachments are weird. For some strange motive, guns have LESS RECOIL and MORE FULL AUTO ACCURACY the more you ZOOM IN with a scope. I don’t think it works like this in real life lol.
Silencers are useless. You just don’t one shoot things except dogs, maybe, and for those you don’t care much about raising the alarm.
Consumables: Who ever thought having like 5 different kinds of medkits would be a fun thing? Heal boxes you drop on the ground heal as much as a simple kit but have a retardedly slow cooldown, and you need to interact with them, and they’re in a fixed spot. Useless. Simple kits are nice at first because they’re easy to craft. Standard and advanced work about the same. Just make TWO medkit types so you don’t have so much inventory spam (we only get EIGHT slots)
There HAS TO BE hotkeys for certain consumable types, such as medkits, field radios or flares, so you don’t have to put them in the extremely limited 8-slot wheel. You end up not using many of the game’s items because of the lack of this and the need to prioritize the most useful ones and the guns.
Miscelaneous notes:
Progression
Inventory progression is slow. Exceedingly slow. Also all quest rewards and collectables were always insta-drop trash.
Moving on from “tutorial” island, I started to come accross FNIX units all over the place. Best gun I had was the green G3 with a scope. All the loot I found was green crap or worse. Even rockets didn’t seem to do much damage to enemies, altough the stun was kinda nice.
I remember my first tank rival in the starting island. It took me around 1500 bullets from different weapons to kill it. I was just throwing it my red cans in the end because I’d ran out in my safehouse (I also just kept respawning, which is not fun). Rewards were like 300x smg ammo and some steel.
Regarding loot and rewards, there were two great things that happened in the game:
1) I travelled North, where the russian bots spawn. Loot was just so much better there. Things with not only much higher quality, but QUANTITY as well. There seem to be chests and gun cases EVERYWHERE. One would think that higher loot zones are more difficult, BUT since soviet machines were always fighting the swedish ones, it was like having friends to rely on all the time. Also soviet machines are much easier in comparison to swedish ones. All in all North was SO much less difficult and MORE rewarding. South Coast was all ultra hard machine spawn, and not even ammo resupply for loot.
Being anywhere else besides the North seems worthless. Maybe look for schematics, but those aren’t much of a big deal anyway.
2) A cheater joined my game (full stats and all experimental guns). I kicked him 3 times but he kept explaining he wanted to help me (he killed many tanks in my starter base defense mission) and gave me an experimental gun to choose from. I said no thank you, but as he insisted, he gave me the experimental 50 cal (PVG90 I think?). I assigned it to a slot, and that made the game less boring: It took less time to ammo-dump tanks, and I could take down hunters hitting their soft spots quicker now. The game began to feel (slightly) less like a pointless grind. Thank you mysterious cheater.
After a while I decided to try medium base defense and it was destroyed. No way in hell I’m grinding all those points back, and this is when I decided to quit the game. I’m level 24 and it seems like there’s not a lot more to do anyway.
Overall
I’ll keep it short: Development of new features and bug fixes seems to be slow. Way too slow. And I’ve seen and played many games that were abandoned in their development before. I don’t see a great future for GZ, even though it has a great potential to be something deep and interesting if development takes a huge shift.
Also thanks for the glitchy bikes, they’re hilarious.