Sabin_Stargem: How does it compare with Dead State?
I found that game very disappointing. monkeydelarge: Why? I am thinking about buying the game.
Various stuff. The gameplay itself was a bit dull for me, but technical issues abound that aggravated me.
For example, there is an area in the game where using the stairwell is problematic, since your party can spawn in a way where you can't ascend or descend. Fortunately, saving and reloading in those locations would allow you to continue moving. That shouldn't be necessary in the first place, and increases the amount of loading that you have to wait for.
Another bug is that places which have lower and upper sections can really confuse the camera - it can start constantly switching between layers, or become focused on the wrong one. That makes it harder to navigate, and is irritating during battle.
You can't send parties out to explore and scavenge. That is all on you, the player - and there is only so many useful functions that you can put your excess survivors towards. They pretty much end up eating a ton of resources, without much gain. Heck, extra survivors are a liability due to the morale system: Happy and content survivors apply a malus to global morale, and unhappy survivors are apt to run off. Even if you got tons of global morale, individual characters become unhappy anyways.
An number of GUI elements are not implemented well, which makes it more annoying to play. A bunch of little things that add up: You can't see how much weight capacity characters in the field can carry, without going to their character sheet. The leader commands are hidden behind a button, so you can't see their current status. There are no tool-tips for status effects, leader commands, ect. You can't easily find and speak to survivors in the shelter, and so on.
There is the biggest killer for me: There are many, many items to scavenge - so I have two choices: Ignore them for the sake of my patience, or go mad from making several trips to pick up everything. Wearing armor doesn't help here either, since I have to leave it behind or drop it in a container in order to free up weight capacity for moving stuff. Being able to send minions to do the busywork would have been very helpful for me.
There isn't much music to the game, and the graphics do not impress. Worse, turn times in places with a lot of NPCs can take an age to be completed - the times that I have pitted NPC humans vs zombies could end up taking 3 or 5 hours on a pretty powerful rig. On the plus side, it gave me an opportunity to listen to a couple of audio dramas to pass the time.
To say the least, Dead State left me bitter and angry.