I love this game, the atmosphere is exciting and the variety is interesting.

That said, it's starting to feel like DDR Zombies. I use that comparison very deliberately because DDR works very much the same way this game does in that there is an extremely specific series of moves that must be made in the right order to avoid insta-fail. If you don't send your people here and do this by the second turn then do that by the third turn, you've lost the game, which seems to be the norm from my experience playing it and reading articles giving gameplay advice (which, I might add are generally contradictory).

That's a fine recipe for DDR but when you have a game that is supposed to be at least a little more open, it becomes frustrating. It turns the game into one giant quick time event and I feel seriously hampers the potential of the game's interest.

I would really like to see a scaled difficulty so that people who are looking for a more hardcore experience can have what they want and people who want something more relaxed can also find enjoyment with the game.

Hey Socinus,

We are tweaking the difficulty a bit in the next patch, in addition to adding a new game mode which will be easier than the two currently available.

Each mode will also have its hardness clearly marked, along with a bit of info about that mode (survivor counts, time limits, etc.).

Excellent! great news. Always nice to see the devs improving and upgrading their games. Looking forward to this next patch

Excellent :) I greatly look forward to the next patch.

Alright, so I've spent the last two hours playing the game with the latest patch and...I don't see much of anything different. You are still basically slaughtered regardless of the path you take and the choices you make.

Just to experiment, I went on the lowest difficulty with the most maxed out custom character I could create and it made almost no difference. Try to hunker down? Slaughtered by the horde that materialized outside the building. Try to stay mobile? Slaughtered inexplicably by a building with two zombies in it. Even mix of the two? You're still lunch.

There is a lack of any discernible effective strategy. There doesn't seem to be any reliable way to protect yourself from the zombies as making the same choice several times often has several different outcomes. This means the entire game turns into guesswork and luck which removes the element of mastery that comes from difficult games; it's impossible to get better at a game where there is no skill involved only luck. On top of that, zombies sometimes seem to materialize out of nowhere.

After playing this a total of six hours and never having a game last more than half an hour, the game needs a little more tweaking. Starting a new game every five to ten minutes gets old very fast.

I would suggest some kind of system that works the way Dont Starve does; where the player (on certain modes) can adjust aspects of the game's difficulty (number of zombies, average zombie health, rarity of ammunition, etc) for a particular game.

I agree with what was said above. The game (still) has the impossible, the insane and the absurd levels of difficulty. I'm still waiting for the update with the normal setting.

I think the incredible difficulty comes from the randomness of the game. Basically the game is too random so there is no guarantee that sending your custom, maxed out, navy seal to breach against 2 zombies will succeed. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't, sometimes he will turn out to be a meth head and become completely worthless in the beginning of the game. (It happened to me).

I think they need to tone down the randomness factor and allow for real cause and effect. If a game is too random then it doesn't reward the player for doing the "right" thing because essentially there is no "right" thing because it can fail one moment and succeed the next.

I really tried to get into this game, but I literally couldn't get past the first day without getting incredibly frustrated or dying. Carefully planned out, cautious decisions I made meant nothing most of the time, and that doesn't make for a good game.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the feedback. I will say the game's difficulty has been reduced quite a bit in the last few patches (though Deadline remains quite challenging).

A pack of five maxed out, custom survivors should *never* have a problem dealing with two zombies! While the game does have its random elements, it's most definitely possible to manage these and come out victorious -- we have players that can regularly defeat both Road Kill and Deadline, in fact, we've had some people say the game is too easy!

I can assure you the only place zombies appear from are the edges of the map. What a lot of new players forget to factor in when breaching a location is the zombies they bring with them as they travel through town, and the zombies surrounding the location attracted by the noise of a fight. You might easily deal with the zombies inside, but you'll die from those that come in afterwards. This can make it feel like zombies are appearing from nowhere, when in actual fact they were chasing you all along.

As the game progresses, and zombie numbers escalate, you should try to create distractions in other buildings to make sure the only zombies you fight are those at your destination. You can also patrol around a location, making sure to set your survivors to "attack" instead of "report", just before you leave, to thin out the numbers in your immediate vicinity.

We find that many cases of players feeling the game is too difficult or random is when survivor relationships are left to degenerate. Relationships are probably the most important aspect of the game -- you could have a team of crack commandos armed to the teeth, but if they're not getting along, then they will succumb very easily in combat.

When you start a new game, the very first thing you should do is start a rumour on the least-liked survivor. This will greatly boost your chances of survival. You should almost never assign two survivors to the same task if they have a bad relationship or prejudice.

If you want to go the custom survivor path, just make sure the age, gender, ancestry, wealth and education values are all the same and your survivors will get along much better than a regular group.

Modifying items is also very important. I'd recommend modifying tools for engineering, and then using those tools to further modify weapons for assault (if you plan on breaching) or close combat (patrolling and defending locations).

Finally, be sure to check out our FAQ, which includes additional tips on playing:
http://forums.screwflystudios.com/index.php/topic,320.0.html

Scapegoat politics is childish and dangerous, it even brings to the worst result for the group:
When the least-like is left dead by the group, the group has to choose another scapegoat...
All but one: "I'm not the scapegoat, so all is good for me"

At least it should be like this ingame...

You mean that the group, for longer surviving, has to decide who will die next, instead of trying to keep surviving all together but letting the decision to zombies?

Yeah, I can confirm that using max out characters makes the game a lot more easy.

I'd really like to know what they're doing because I have yet to play a game where I wasn't summarily slaughtered. You'd think by now that just by dumb luck I'd be successful. That's I think where part of the problem because if I cant see the zombies then it's just as good as materializing from nowhere. Yes you can keep a lookout for zombies and the little X's show up to mark positions but they seem to be very specific locations and don't give you a good idea of how things are shifting.

I realize that it's very realistic but it does make it frustrating when a massive blob of zombies blindsides you. I have made use of distractions (fires, noise, etc) but it doesn't seems to actually do that much. I've done this and while it does make the game easier, it still feels impossibly difficult.

I think the deal-breaker is the Russian Roulette nature of a lot of the game. One decision can absolutely torpedo you and there's no way to know when you've reached a point like that and there's no real way to recover once you've made a decision with no information. If you're making a choice blind with absolutely no information to help inform your decision process, having one or several outcomes be absolutely crippling is frustrating.


As a PS, I realize this sounds a lot like complaining and like I'm trying to rip on the game. It's absolutely not the case, I think the game is tons of fun and I'm incredibly happy to see developers as involved with the community as you are. I want to do what I can to give feedback as a player and I deeply appreciate that you are even interacting with the community, let alone listening to suggestions.

Interesting ideas.

One things that bugs me is that whenever there's an "event", such as the family looking for their daughter or something, the following are kind of annoying (at least for me):

- There doesn't appear to be a way to be able to tell exactly at which location this event occurred. Which is really annoying since for some reason I happen to get these events as soon as I decide to send a couple of people out exploring another house, so I never figure out which place the event is taking place at.

- Coupled with that, the diary entries showing what happened BEFORE the event are not displayed until AFTER the event. For example, it would be kind of handy to know that most of my group sustained serious injuries prior to entering a location BEFORE I get the event showing up at that location.

So typically I'd get some of my group into a location - breach it. Breach seems to succeed, but before I find out what happened and who was injured, I get an event. I'm not told where the event is, but it's almost always at the place I just breached. So now with no info from the breach, I make a decision. Then someone dies. Then reading the diary, it turns out that during the breach my team were all seriously injured.

I'm starting to think I must be missing some very basic UI element or something, because no one else seems to have an issue with this. If that's the case, can someone please let me know! Otherwise, this should be fixed IMO...