f13.net

I thought I'd create this thread in part because the XBox to Infinity and Beyond thread was interesting but very side-tracked, so I'm touching on some of those issues here.

So these two games are coming out. They are similar on some level - survival centric apocalyptic zombie yarns. One is a technical masterpiece, the other is pretty janky. One has incredible emotionality and Oscar-worthy writing, is the Citizen Kane of gaming, etc, the other is merely well-written minus any superlatives.

I am personally much more interested in State of Decay.

It's funny, I read reviews of The Last of Us, most of which are glowing, but they largely put me off to the game both based on what is said and what is left unstated. Hearing "it's an emotional journey and you'll want to cherish and protect your female companion" is supposed to make me excited, but I can't help rolling my eyes instead. Whereas I read State of Decay reviews and things clearly intended as negatives strike me as positives. (Like the jankiness factor - while this is ostensibly a negative it also conveys a prioritization of gameplay, gameplay systems and interesting ideas over technical polish, animation, etc. Sort of how "Eurojank" has become almost a term of endearment)

I guess a large part of this is due to the Boy Who Cried Wolf factor - I probably would really like a game with Oscar-worthy writing and an incredible emotional journey - but I have trouble believing that TLOU delivers that, in part because similar claims were made about games that were mediocre in writing and narrative. I simply don't trust game reviewers to be able to evaluate things like writing quality, especially in hyped AAA games.

More than anything reading about State of Decay makes me imagine a fun game and reading about TLOU just does not. When I imagine playing TLOU I imagine using my detective vision to see enemies because now every third-person game has detective vision (game design fads ahoy!), killing a hundred dudes then watching a cutscene in which author and watcher agree to pretend that the killing has narrative weight, arena battles against enemy waves featuring chest high walls, etc. Whereas when I imagine playing SoD I imagine crazy wacky shit happening like me driving into a bunch of zombies with a car and exploding or something. Something awesome.

The last of us advertises with testimonials from the usual culprits that always give raving reviews. Eurogamer, Official Playstation Magazine, Gamereactor, Edge etc.

That alone makes me very very suspicious. If your ad campaign involves lots of rags infamous for fellating the games industry and you use overwrought phrases like "the citizen kane of gaming" I'll sure as hell wait until after people had a chance to play it and the hype has subsided.

I hate escort missions in all shooters. I'm not sure if that's a big part of Last of Us or not, but protecting a weak companion usually doesn't sound fun to me in a single player game. State of Decay sounds more like Day-Z, which would be more up my alley.

More... fucking... zombies?  :oh_i_see:

Number of 10/10 scores Edge has given out in its entire twenty year publication history: 16.

Cordyceps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis) is nasty for a "cause of zombification" plot hook, though.

The last game I remember having this nearly universal level of acclaim early on from so many sources was... Demon's Souls. Also, I'm changing the title of this thread. I already made a Last of Us thread.

I'm pretty sick of zombies.

I am also, but there's a handful of zombie games that have been in development for so long I don't consider them riding a fad. State of decay is not one of those games.

I like that it's not locked into a specific console and will come out on the PC. That alone will get me to play it.

Been watching state of decay for a bit, but I have also had my eye on The dead linger (http://www.thedeadlinger.com/). For me, state of decay is a no go because its single player, and, well, feels really static. Dead linger is more ambitious, and uses some key points in its design like Romero style like zombies ( and spawn system, that is is quite cool ) and free form building, also a minecraft like hosting solution. While its no looker right now, they are doing an engine switch and are now focusing on the visuals.

State of decay looks great though. Sometimes i wish groups just combined when they are nearly in the same vein. Lack of multiplayer is the killer for me here though.

Well, too bad my Xbox is dead.  Guess my choice is easy.  :awesome_for_real:

There's live gameplay on Giantbomb right now. Full video will be posted at some point.

Yeah, watching that now, its completely screams for multiplayer, and PC version.

Looks like a fun little game. Gonna wait for PC as well, the 360 version looked gnarly.

When's pc version out? Sandbox zombie world with building ability would be mint.  (Without the idiocy of day z)

Someone is going to do a zombie survival game right, and it will be a game they can expand for years making it deeper and more interesting, but after Day-Z I'll wait until one of them shows both depth, maturity and not being a PK playground.

And it will look like Minecraft and be called Neckbeard Snakebite.

State of Decay is Undead Lab's first title, with the next step being the release of a zombie MMO set in the same universe. Jeff Strain (ex-ArenaNet) heads up Undead Labs.

This was 20 bucks for the Xbox. I nabbed it.

There is some jank, but I am liking it so far. I got about 45 minutes into the game and am realizing that I need to restart.

The game gives you many choices, and it's not entirely clear how many of them play out. I managed to gimp myself by using one character the entire time -- now that character is going to need significant downtime before he can be used again. The resource game is rather fun so far. Zombies aren't too bad in small numbers, but a horde will ruin your fucking day. I'm pretty impressed so far.

FTFY

Bought this yesterday after reading this thread (damn you!), so far it's pretty much GTA Zombie edition.

How's the building/defending aspect?

I'm about to outgrow the first base location -- the building aspect has to be balanced with other resource gathering. Resource gathering is sped up when you have more people at your base.

I haven't had to defend yet, but I prioritized ammo early on. My guard tower seems to deal with the majority of the zombies. I'm sure that this will change when we move to a larger base. The bases themselves have missions from time to time -- I lost two of my favorite playable characters on one. Pro tip: it's really damn hard to fight the huge zombies without shit that explodes.

We'll see if the various supplies transfer bases -- I've got a good stockpile going. I just can't really add too many more residents because I'm out of expandable sleeping space.

ETA -- I was up until 3 AM playing this -- it will suck your time with "one more mission."

Sounds like you need a masterwork adamantite bed with a picture of your bed on your bed.

Ok that sounds way fun.

You basically micro manage the buildings and can use them to carry out certain actions depending on their upgrade level. I have only managed to build a basic workshop and I'm in the middle of constructing a garden that I can't complete without some heavy gloves. I did use the kitchen to 'cook a big dinner' for everybody, health and morale boosts all round.

Defending, I requested the outpost clear out some nearby zombies, useful if you are trying to get a car out of the car park. I have yet to defend the base from an all out attack, but it's still early days.

:drill: :drill: :drill:

Too bad I'm Australian, this looks like it'd be fun (I'll be playing on the PC anyway so this is a non-issue, but it's fun to complain)!

Oh wow, this came out of nowhere and seems right up my alley.  I can't seem to find a PC release date, though.  :/

There isn't one yet, right now I think the answer is soooooon. I would guess holidays.

I can wait.  I'm not buying another 360 or attempting to revive the RROD'd corpse of mine for a $20 game.

Perhaps some of the more glaring bugs I saw some people encounter will be worked out before a PC release.

The low graphical fidelity quickly become irrelevant with such interesting gameplay. The presentation is enough to sustain the mood and atmosphere and that's all it needs, with this amount of player agency, which is like a feast set in front of a starving man. I still haven't wrapped my head around all the gameplay systems after a few hours of play which is a good thing (learning=fun right?). Really pleased with this twenty dollar purchase so far. Hard to put down.

But is it the best game since Citizen Kane?

I'm kidding, don't answer that.

Agreed on both counts. I restarted after 4-5 hours play, I ended up in an eternal search for materials or food and lost the main character and a few others. I was unaware of the importance of outposts, not only do they lower the local zombie population around your house they provide resources to your home if built into the correct buildings.

Citizen Kane was garbage. It was way too short, and had more cutscenes than a Kojima title.

This game, and all that Citizen Kane talk, has inspired me to design a game around Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I am not even kidding. I wish I knew people with skills to at least try working on this. Strongly story driven while still being a huge sandbox about surviving The Great Depression as a family of farmers relocating from Oklahoma to California after the tractor and the banks evicted you from your land, with lots of choices to make especially moral ones which would greatly affect the plot and your relationship with the galaxy of characters you would encounter (including the Joad family of course). With a bit of Singleton's Midwinter into it. Lots of room for combat if you choose the Outlaw way, or negotiation, resource management and stealth if you choose the Paragon way (as if things could actually be that easy. Point of the game would be to force you to make choices you wouldn't want to make). I would call it Okies.

If anything, this would be the "Grapes of Wrath" of gaming.  :awesome_for_real:

Betcha could get a cpl of hundred grand on kickstarter. :awesome_for_real:

I've now moved my crew to a new, larger space. Oddly enough, it only has one additional facility. It also has an unfortunately non-upgradeable guard tower.

Nearby is a huge facility, but I need 1 more person in my group to take it over. So now, I'm blowing 100 influence as often as I can to use the radio to troll for new residents. I am really wishing I hadn't lost those two survivors the other day. It's almost enough to make me restart, but it kind of defeats the design of the game to do that.

Something that I learned recently -- do not underestimate the power of outposts. They work best near your home -- they keep the zombies down in the surrounding areas. You can abandon one and establish another, so having them near your home is always possible, even if you move. Definitely use outposts.

http://nygamecritics.com/2011/02/04/john-milius-homefront-is-grapes-of-wrath/

 :awesome_for_real:

Good find Ingmar. Didn't play Homefront but considering it's a first person shooter where you are members of a resistance movement fighting against a near-future North Korean military occupation of the United States, I think my many thousand kickdollars worth idea is safe.

It gets even better if you know John Milius is the guy that the Coen Brothers based the character of Walter on (Big Lebowski).

Sounds like an update of Oregon Trail.

It's better than Oregon Trail. And that's me acknowledging the game is pretty damn good.

If it had multiplayer, it would be even better -- I wouldn't mind playing with other f13 folks just so long as you don't have to spawn at Cherno and run all the way to Castle Awesome.

There's that new "The Division" game that they announced for the next gen consoles. It has multiplayer and is all post-apoc, etc. It's also part of the Tom Clancy franchise, so yeah.

EDIT -- Finished this on Sunday. The story got -- choppy at one point. I must have fucked something up. Losing one of the starting characters may have been the culprit. I also (apparently) let some NPCs die who (based on the achievements) must have had more story. Another group of survivors also seems under-developed.

There doesn't seem to be any way to know which events are "never going to expire" events and which are ones that require immediate attention. That's good from a gameplay perspective -- it makes all of the events seem urgent. I kind of wonder whether a specific NPC would die if you let things go long enough.

I'm playing through a second time to see if I can find the parts that I broke. Also, I'd like a playthrough where none of my playable characters die.

Aren't almost all the NPC's that join you playable if you befriend them? All I really know about the game is that based from the youtube let's plays I found; I will enjoy the game and the people doing the let's plays fit the stereotype of console gamers being absolute morons.

On my third play through, I cut the other two short due to losing Marcus, about to complete it and I haven't lost anyone outside the main story.

Two things I've done that seem to have helped. Not bothered to request scavenger pickups just get everything yourself, most of my searching when I'm in a group doing a mission and always respond to ally in trouble as soon as you see one.

To get a small head-start before you arrive at the church and the game starts flinging missions at you. Load up your backpack with the best gear you can find and search as many locations near the church as you can before tiredness kicks in.

PC version out before the end of the year and supposedly through steam early access.

Meh. By the time it eventually comes out I'll be too busy with other games. Probably grab it some time next year when it gets discounted heavily on a Steam sale. Likely would have been a day one purchase had the PC version hit before the large slate of games coming out in September and after. Wasted opportunity, in my view. For awhile the game had a decent amount of hype that's already largely vanished (at least to me and those I know). Too long of a delay and too little communication.

Source?

Not to be snarky but how does any of that invalidate this as a game? It would just seem to display your own slavery to marketing and temporary news cycles?

we heard anything about multiplayer plans?

"In the works"

here  (http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/07/17/state-of-decay-pc-and-sandbox-mode-teased)

 :thumbs_up:

I didn't mean to say that it somehow invalidated it as a game, merely that I believe the devs missed a fairly big opportunity. The game garnered a fair amount of hype for PC gamers and I, personally, think a part of that was a relatively quiet span of releases; there hadn't been anything new and interesting to occupy our time. By missing that window with a fairly good fall and winter coming up (at least by my standards) of high end games to buy and play.. it will force State of Decay to the side or later on, in my opinion.

I'll still purchase the game as it does look quite interesting.. it just doesn't have enough to warrant buying it on release after my money and time is going to go elsewhere to larger, more anticipated titles.

Basically; still a purchase, just think the developers missed a big window of opportunity in the schedule of PC games to cash in and wasn't impressed with their communication on the port while the hype was high. Latter part may be fairly irrelevant in the long run, but for me.. well, I just find it annoying.

I agree, releasing them closer together would have made more sense. Now they go into the holiday meatgrinder of competition.

early access is up on steam.

It's truly "early" access though, rather than what some of these games are, which is basically done.

Looks like they killed Co-op.

were the graphics this bad in the xbox release?  i picked up an xbox remote last year on sale so that bit doesn't bother me, and so far it looks interesting.  i'm pinning a fair bit of hope on coop/multiplayer at some stage, not sure if that was dumb.

*cough I'm looking at you, project zomboid*

Anyone played the DLC? (Breakdown)

Worth the 7 bucks?  (Original is on sale on steam atm)

I bought it. Don't know yet, but at $7 it's worth the flier.

I have it, and have been playing it. I enjoy it, personally. If you enjoyed the base game but simply wanted the game experience without the story missions getting in the way and the ability to have a never ending game (unless all your characters die) that can get progressively more difficult.. you should enjoy it. The flaws of the base game are still present and there's currently a couple annoying bugs that will hopefully get fixed soon (i.e. one of the missions will bug out the Mood of the person you save, but I haven't really noticed any serious side effects from it.. that could just be me not being observant).

I'm only up to Difficulty Level 4 so far, but things are starting to get harder and I can already see the difference in the number of vehicles and the zombies. I am actually starting to have to sneak around now and then unlike the base game and earlier difficulties where it was just easier to run around and kill anything that got in your way.

Wow, really fun game, this one.  I wish the graphics were a tad better...not because everything has to have wonderful graphics, but more so because I keep getting jumped by zombies I didn't see hiding in the bland backgrounds.  Driving controls are also a bit annoying.  Permadeath of your main characters is a hard pill to swallow, but the game is better for it.  I restarted my first game after several hours because I lost all three of my main starting characters - I was still kinda learning the controls and stuff, so it didn't seem fair.  After my restart I soon lost Marcus again due to inescapable zombie attack.  In this case, it was for more natural reasons that fit into the story (rather than due to poor control from me), so I let it go.  I think the danger of losing any character that you have leveled up even a little is part of what makes the game so good.  I took Sam up to the lake to search for something, and it was a non-stop hellish struggle for survival.  Low on ammo, flimsy melee weapon that broke, no meds.  Ended up having to run all the way back down to the bridge, chased the whole way, and just barely managed to cross over, climb up (and yes, the fuckers climbed up after me, much to my shock) get in my truck and tear ass outta there.  Brilliant.

Way better than the sum of its parts.  There are roughly 40 billion zombie apocalypse games on the horizon, and I bet few of them will be as fun to play as this one is.

Rise!

So there is a new expansion for this game. It has a whole new setting and includes squad mechanics. I am barely into it so far, and it is a bit hard getting used to the new bits. Since you have a squad, there's way more zombies. When they swarm an escort target.....forget it. Hopefully I will suck less as I play more.

Oh yeah, I paid $6.99 on Steam. Not sure about console.

Okay, but is it still fun?  Does it still have the general structure of the original?  I accidentally wiped out a Steam save about 15 to 20 hours into the main campaign, wouldn't mind having a reason to go back to the game.

I played for maybe two hours last night. It is fun. I have work to do this weekend, and I plan to play this during breaks from writing. Once I get deeper into the expansion, I will be more useful  review-wise. It has been worth the seven bucks so far.

It's a lot less forgiving than original game. The daily sieges are brutal and I lose about a survivor or a refugee a day.

Is it a lot of escort stuff, or squad stuff? How are the controls compared to the original game where it was just your one POV at a time wandering about?

A decent amount of escort stuff with the ability to do it in squads. The squad AI is a little shitty at times, causing my squad mates to stand there and do nothing while I'm getting gangbanged by zekes or going only melee while they've got fully functional guns at their disposal.

The storyline has been pretty good so far though, even if I want to punch a certain radio personality in the throat.

Escorting missions have been my least favorite thing about games going back to Syndicate.

There was one in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault where you were escorting a guy through a house and there were ze germans out in the front yard, so I kept trying to snipe at them from the doorway and the damned friendly AI kept shooting me in the back, so I move out of the way and he's all YOOOOLLOOOOOO dead, game over.

Fuck escorting shitty AI. We will never see good AI in games. I don't even think developers care anymore.

I think it should be said that escorting in State of Decay works better than most, generally speaking, probably because the NPCs manage to be pretty good in combat for the most part and don't die super easy.  I never had one die on me in the original campaign that I can recall.  Pathing wasn't terrible either.  I didn't think much about the AI at the time, which probably says something about its quality.  Maybe having a squad dynamic changes that to some extent.

Arise!

I just beat the base game in 45 hours (per steam, definitely inflated because I left it running at times because I needed to do something mid-mission) and it was quite good. Then I was curious and I found out that there are not a ton but some mods on Nexus. (http://www.nexusmods.com/stateofdecay/?) Which obviously is awesome if people can fix up some of the weaker parts of the game. I already see a mod claiming to make driving feel less "arcadey". Yes pls to that.

Overall what I felt like the game was missing most was options akin to X-Com that let you really tweak the difficulties. Snacks and painkillers were just way too overpowered, hordes were probably not big enough (by the end Marcus could solo a horde with one snack easily) and in general zombie bites just weren't a big enough deal. They didn't make you sick, they didn't do that much damage, they didn't take you out of the fight or make you unavailable for missions or seem to mess up morale. Some of that was definitely needed because at some point nothing but big fuckers and ferals put me into survival mode or made me think about using a gun and I let way to many people get bit or swiped because it wasn't worth using a snack to save 5% of my hp.

Hopefully mods and/or the dlc's fix some of that. But to anyone who bought the game this steam sale and hasn't started it yet you might want to check out Nexus for some simple QoL fixes.

The bugs didn't bother me that much but it did get old realizing that zombies just spawned when there needed to be zombies, that probably caused the most damage to my immersion along with the fact that a zombie biting a npc's neck wasn't worth stopping my own fight to deal with.