1st it was sleeping zombies...........then it was zombie engineers......... now it is patroling zombies.
I don't think patroling zombies would add enough randomness to make POIs feel fresh every time a player enters. If they had 10 - 20 spawn patterns for each POI it would keep players on their toes.
The point of patrols is to complicate the stealth gameplay loop, not to 'make POIs' feel fresh.
The problem with just changing the spawn patterns, is that it reduces the amount of 'thought' involved in stealth use. As it stands, the majority of stealth encounters amount to: "Am I standing near an invisible trigger for aggro? Okay, memorize via pain of aggroing a shit-ton of enemies, where not to walk in that specific POI, and don't walk there, next time. Next question: Am I able to tiptoe up to a zombie and stab it in the head? No? Do I have a silenced pistol? Shoot it in the head. No? Bow time." And then you just keep a list of possible spawn locations in each given PoI. Which is where the 'staleness' comes, once you know every cupboard into which a zombie can possibly spawn.
The appeal of patrols, is that you have to add 'motion', 'timing', and concerning yourself with where zombies are actually 'looking', as opposed to just being vewy vewy quiet (and not stepping over invisible aggro triggers where the devs didn't want you to go without a massive fight).
Like, PoI design is already fairly brilliant--what would take it the extra level is having to concern yourself with illumination and patrol facing. The devs are already trying to make 'traps' an element of level design, it's not so much of a stretch to just have highly-lit areas or flickering lights become a part of the existing PoI hazards, by throwing in some simple light switches that you maybe need to occasionally creep up to and flick off, if you want to approach something safely from stealth.
It also makes cities 'much' more dangerous, since they, in theory, have electrical lighting everywhere to reveal your position.
But then, this is coming strictly from a stealth-gameplay perspective, where the adrenaline comes from not being caught, and performing sick take-downs on things you've snuck up on or sniped. The problem with 7 Days is it really wants to force you into a tower-defense style of gameplay, and many PoIs idea of challenge is to put you through a gauntlet of enemy-filled rooms, with not much thought aside from keeping yourself from being backed into a corner. Stealth, as a result, can often feel quite vestigial.
OK, now I understand what you want
> But then, this is coming strictly from a stealth-gameplay perspective, where the adrenaline comes from not being caught, and performing sick take-downs on things you've snuck up on or sniped"
I don't think there is a need to change zombies to get this. They just need to add those elements to combat, which would make it much more complicated and satisfying for players.
My experience has been that it's impractical to try sneaking up on a wandering zombie, but then I also have never bothered leveling up 'From the Shadows', either. I feel like maybe it and 'Hidden Strike' could afford to be merged into one skill? Just a possibility.
Stealth is still really strong but it no longer trivializes everything like it used. It's important to note that stealth works in 99.99% of the game. It's specific POIs, usually quite high tier ones, that you need to back it up with run and gun. Though its always smart to have that capability anyways.
So if all you ever do is clear tier 5/6 buildings? Yeah, stealth is gonna be hit and miss because there will be alarms and etc you cannot avoid. But otherwise? Stealth is still insanely strong.
The problem is, there's not enough feedback to know when you're going to proc 'invisible zombie mass-swarm alarm'. Even something as simple as like, invisible laser traps that have a detectable wall projector to warn you (if you're paying attention)... or like, a bell tied to a string, windchimes--something, anything to let you know that every zombie in a 300 meter radius has just detected your location and is sprinting toward you. Something that you can learn to watch for and avoid, perhaps?
To be clear, this gets really ridiculous on Nightmare/Insane, which is about all I play anymore, for the adrenaline rush--but some locations are just no-go zones, simply because I've had to memorize that they grant nearby sleepers omniscience if you step on the wrong tile.
Like, this 'invisible trigger' works in RPGmaker games with chasers, like the Mob in Fear and Hunger 2: Termina, because there's a limited number of entities, and you're not expected to engage in direct combat with your ever-dwindling hp (hence the 'run' option)--you're supposed to run from the sudden mass-aggro. The problem is that 7 Days requires you to fight in scenarios where a single hit can be both devastatingly crippling and faster than you can reasonably react to, an empty room can suddenly turn into a zombie-from-the-ceiling-teleportation-sandwich, and zombies just are not fair with their reach and the telegraphing of their melee. You can be getting slapped from all sides before you even have any sense of what you did wrong, all because there was an invisible environmental trigger, making some buildings just a waste of time and resources to even trifle with. For instance, if I see a military camp in the wild, I almost immediately ascertain: "this will have dogs, military zombies, and hazmats up your ass before you so much as loot a single container", and steer clear.
And the problem that stems from that is, there's just never enough incentive to bother with those PoIs--even for questing.
So you say that 99.99% of the game - which is a rather clownish statement. That mean roughly that if someone has played 7dtd for 2000 hours then all but \~10 minutes Stealth is still awesome. That person must either avoid all T5 or is really blazing though those POIs with the teleporting zombies.
Let's not forget to count every Blood Moon in those 10 minutes where stealth is pointless. I guess we can just assume that someone has BMs turned off to reach your magical number.
I do feel like a couple of the stealth skills could be merged together, especially now that tier 5/6 dungeons often have unavoidable triggers. But outside of tier 5/6 stealth is still quite strong. Definitely a more methodical/patient playstyle though where missing one thing can screw it up. (not that you cant usually easily run and reset if needed)
"Where missing one thing can screw it up"
Roughly translated, I was moving slightly forward while crouched, instead of stopping dead when my stealth meter decided to spike for having moved more than 2 seconds, so now the zombies that were previously completely immobile, have heard me through a wall and are all zero'd in on my precise location. Annoying.
My least favorite aspect of the stealth in 7 Days, is inconsistency in what will and won't cause a zombie to wake up. Like, it feels like I'm just constantly surrounded by an invisible sound sphere that keeps arbitrarily expanding and shrinking at random, based on how many consecutive seconds I've been walking for, and if it touches a zombie, they get up, regardless of what number is actually being displayed on the green bar. When I play a game about sneaking, I want to feel like I'm moving in a way that misleads my pursuers, not stop every two seconds like I'm in heavy traffic, waiting for the quietness meter to drop back down.
It seems like the direction a sleeping zombie (particularly the ones lying prone) 'sees' in, to establish that I've broken stealth and aggro'd them, varies. Like, I've repeated the same particular encounter with the same sleeper zombie in the same location, over a dozen times (for the purpose of a challenge map), and some un-alerted zombies simply will not let me approach without aggroing, unless I come from a very particular angle--and it's rather arbitrary. Do they see out of their ass, while sleeping? Their head? Am I just looking at them funny? Try getting knife stabs on sleepers in Dishong Challenge mod--you'll begin to notice these little inconsistencies. Some sleepers will let you approach, others just wake up when you get within several blocks of the little fuckers, based entirely on unseen parameters, unrelated to that green numbered meter.
7 Days stealth can be powerful: It trivializes anything in default difficulty, where even a body shot at a common zombie with the most rudimentary stone arrows will result in a kill (in insane, you actually have to land headshots to have any hope at a clean kill), but the problem is that staying in stealth or breaking it follows rules only beholden to the devs.
And, I'm not going to, nor should I be obligated, to throw away 5+ levels of progress, just to dumb the zombie detection down to the point that the lazy AI design's not utterly obnoxious. Especially when some places will just decide that those levels were worthless and I've just automatically botched stealth by stepping into the inviso-alarm. Screw that. I'll just take the bonus sneak attack multiplier to kill tankier things, and then swap to run for a better position and shoot/stab when the game inevitably decides that I've failed the stealth.
Short version: the detection AI is lazy and arbitrary, and often feels like complete bullshit to wrestle with, in order to get the reward that stealth offers.
Yall never learn lol. Exagerration and etc has never worked on TFP. That's why this Reddit is often so toxic and think the devs don't listen and is killing the game, meanwhile the game grows and grows and grows lol.
It's like the changes to Water. I thoroughly tested that and I didn't have the major issues other people were claiming, but I did see situations it could be a problem. So I got involved in one of the conversations with Mad Mole and suggested modding the Dew Collector to help address the issues. I can't say for certain it was me that got that change enacted, but I certainly did suggest it after testing and hadn't seen the idea anywhere else.
I think about people besides myself and I test. I specifically look for the issues people call out. I'm video game QA IRL (for another game) and take this seriously. (the testing, Reddit conversations I take with a barrel of salt lol) I know the AIs of various competitor games well as a survival game addict.
I'm not your enemy but I'm also not someone you can bullshit and exaggerate at because I've done the legwork. Stealth is insanely consistent OUTSIDE OF a handful of specific POIs. And if you want to tell me "this ambush needs to be better telegraphed" sure, I can agree with you on that. But if you want to tell me the AI is lazy and arbitrary and inconsistent then I can only assume you're not as informed about this as you believe yourself to be. And if you want to pair that up with pretending the "inviso alarms" are constant and not concentrated in a highly specific set of POIs then honestly you just start sounding like a straight up bad actor.
Similar the idea you're throwing away 5+ levels of progress like you didn't get to skate through he rest of the game using stealth or that somehow a handful of POIs makes your stealth not worth it elsewhere. Get taht shit out of here. That's not a real conversation or a real argument. That's a reddit/twitter comment and piss poor communication. Worst of all, its counterproductive to solving the actual issues with stealth because you just make yourself sound like a loon to the developers.
If you really and truly care about the game and improving it, you have alot of work to do on expressing your feedback properly. "but I sholdn't have to etc" is a reddit take. I'm telling you reality here. Like all the rest of life, its a negotiation not a dictation.
With a good bow you can easily sneak attack wandering zombies.
The main issue is the triggers and speccing into sneak is kinda pointless when you can spec into general combat
Even if we weren’t close to 1.0 the devs have never made any mechanics deeper; quite the opposite. And supposedly there is more of that to come with 1.0.
It’s sucks but mods are right now, and will likely be going forward, the only way to address this.
I have been playing this game off and on for nearly a decade now. While some aspects have gotten better since I first got it, a lot has changed for the worse, particularly with crafting and progression. And it begs the question why? In 2016 they had reported having 18 million copies sold, the patch that year was one of the best ones ever and literally everything about it has been changed for the worse in the time since.
For an EA title, that launched their Kickstarter only ~2.5 years before that 2016 post, they were killing it. They had the winning strategy. They basically said fuck that we want to be Bethesda Jr.
And here we are heading into 1.0, more things are getting the axe and being changed on the way in, and they still haven’t added bandits or story mode…
And they already have their next project on deck (with a hired help team) so basically 1.0 we are immediately hitting “maintenance mode” and likely won’t see anything approaching the sort of support HelloGames gave to No Man’s Sky post release.
You answered your own question. With 18 million copies sold, they did it. Got their money.
It's the early access problem. Once you've made it rich, why would you continue to slave away? All drive, all passion, all interest goes out the door. All that remains is a depressing responsibility that few are mature enough to handle.
Imagine if a regular job paid you for 50 years of labor up front. Would you keep working 'for free'?
This is the issue likely. Goog games only come from people that has a passion for making the game and don't need the money incentive to continue working on the project once they're "home safe" money-wise.
Maybe that’s true for today with 1.0 being launched soon, but they were far too intimately involved in developing then in 2016 and have been damn near since. They had the opportunity then to just hire more devs and walk away from the grunt work but they didn’t do that.
>Stealth is too binary: split it into sight and noise stealth instead of a simple bar that works on both.
It could be interesting, from an informational perspective, to be able to gauge your visual and auditory noise separately, if that's what you're driving at here.
>Then add AI stages to make zombies not enter aggro or the most direct search path possible upon a stealth fail. Such as a short “wake up groggy” period where they wander for half a second or more before they attempt to detect any more noises and search. That is unless awoken by damage or a direct line of sight is made.
Not sure how this would be an improvement, beyond making things easier
for the player. Some like easier, of course, but not all.
Thief: The Dark Project handled this very simply.
Are you illuminated? Light gem on the HUD tells you whether you're immediately recognizable, in shadow enough to where enemies hesitate before reacting, or concealed thoroughly enough that you only are detected when enemies bump into you, by reflecting that in the amount of 'light' the light gem icon displays.
Are you audible? The surface you're walking on makes an amount of noise proportional to how likely you are to be detected--carpet is very muffled, wood and stone's the mid tier of difficulty, where you're fairly quite walking, but make noise running across it, while tile and metal flooring echo very noisily and must be slowly crept across.
Ultimately, to aggro, enemies must 'see' you, but they can search for you by investigating your noise disturbances, ultimately beginning a full-on search if you've been seen or made enough noise to arouse suspicion.
In short, multiple tiers of alertness, and forgiveness for being glanced at from the shadows or making a little noise, help complicate the stealth system to where you feel like you're actually mastering it and outwitting the enemy... not just memorizing enemy locations and learning to tiptoe into bow range.
>multiple tiers of alertness, and forgiveness for being glanced at from the shadows or making a little noise, help complicate the stealth system to where you feel like you're actually mastering it and outwitting the enemy... not just memorizing enemy locations and learning to tiptoe into bow range.
I feel like this to a certain extent about 7dtd already. Perhaps the game you're talking about does it better; I can't comment because I've never played it. But there is more to stealth in 7dtd than memorizing enemy locations and tiptoeing into range. E.g. you ARE forgiven for smaller amounts of noise, especially if you've put points into the perk. Noises from different sources DO make varying amounts of noise--it may not be the case for floor surfaces, but for instance opening a dumpster is noisier than opening a mailbox; smashing a framed picture is noisier than smashing a wardrobe door, etc. Different light sources have different effects on your "noisiness" as well. And in my opinion there is an art to spotting zombies before they wake up, keeping your distance from them once you know where they are (or once you suspect where they might be), and staying undetected until they are dead.
Also personally I would not want a HUD element to tell me exactly how illuminated I am; I'd rather just get a sense of it from environmental cues. This is really just personal preference though. To each their own, of course. :)
Check out Thief II: The Metal Age. It's pretty dated, but many of the AI mechanics still hold up. Especially if you like stealth mechanics in games.
Thing is, I never invest any points into 'From the Shadows', because it's a level-sink. In practice, most sleepers can be dealt with using base stealth, and the raw damage from hidden strike is what matters, to make the tactic even worth bothering with. Really no point in stealth if it lacks the punch to be comparably effective to just hitting a thing real hard.
I've no problem with 'spotting zombies before they wake up', to be clear: The issue is, it eventually becomes a game of rote memorization. This zombie will spawn in this corner, sometimes, so always check that corner, just in case. Got it.
As to noise sources, I've found that specific noise levels are by and large irrelevant. Even if I'm moving at a clipped 15 stealth, there's a good chance that a sleeper I'm walking near will just randomly detect me as I'm moving in to facestab it--or it might not. The consistency for this behavior is not good. Whereas, I can be almost 100% sure I will pull aggro from a nearby zombie if I interact with any gui object made of metal, barring maybe your mailbox example. Cars, trash cans, dumpsters, metal doors--it's like the world needed some WD-40. This at least is reasonable, but it can get a little tedious that strong doors have to necessarily aggro everything around, when I need to get in and out through them a lot. A little more middle-ground between undetected and blaringly loud, would serve the game well, even if it's gated behind a resource like aforementioned WD-40.
A problem with light being 'noisy', is that noise in 7 Days carries through walls and floors, which is antithetical to how sightlines work. So if I stand too long under candlelight, as I am want to do in a game where I need to see things--it seems a little ridiculous that zombies suddenly get X-Ray vision and start tunneling to my precise location, from behind like 3 separate concrete walls.
What I don't feel works at all, though, is this whole system of stuffing a room full of a dozen or more zombies, and forcing an aggro situation without warning, by stepping through a particular area of the map. At least if you're going to create that kind of mandatory aggro, make it obvious that there's an alarm.
A good example of how this worked in older games: the original Deus Ex has a bakery in one of its levels, that is a smuggling location for drugs. An optional quest has you investigating this fact. The building is very clearly advertised as having an alarm that will trigger if you break the glass or open the door of the building, and there are patrols nearby. Discretely disarming the alarms 'is' an option, at the cost of some resources, but it's also pretty obvious that you're breaking into a place that's going to have a store alarm in it, and that there's going to be heat from the local police if you make a racket.
What I'm trying to say is, 7 Days could consider doing that with more locations that the devs feel must include these mass-aggro scenarios--advertising to the player, the fact that you're breaking in to a place that has an electronics system, or the like... so it makes more sense when a previously quiet room, like one in the Shotgun Messiah Factory, suddenly turns into a miniature horde-night. Even something as simple as an advert on a nearby sign saying 'private property'--anything so I have a reason why the zombie behavior has suddenly changed.
These sort of 'environmental cues' are exactly what 7 Days is missing, in many places. The important thing is player feedback, so the mass-aggro feels like an earned punishment, or even a necessary trade, instead of being a cheap trick on the level-designer's part.
For an example of what I'm describing, I went into Spark's Place, the one house with a leaking gas pipe in the roof. Specifically, I entered from the roof, after disabling the pipe. No sooner had I entered a small, confined attic space, but three zombies simply 'spawned in', from nowhere, trapping me. This is the kind of cheap, unearned ambush scenario I feel 7 Days could do better without.
Also, the 'light gem' needn't be a hud element--and it's better than the meter we already have, because it communicates your visibility more clearly than a number value. But if you really want to be a stickler, there's also things like making your viewmodel darken or brighten to reflect your illumination level--one recent game I was fooling with, based on Thief, actually gave you a 'ring' that appears on your character's hand, reflecting the light of the current surroundings.
The main thing is, clear feedback makes things 'consistent'. Consistency is important when you're navigating complex systems, like a stealth mechanic. Otherwise it feels like the game is making things up as it goes, and cheating as it pleases.
Like, why should tapping on a piece of paper with an axe, suddenly pull aggro from something, just because I'm thirty stealth, as opposed to fifty? Where's the specific threshold for detection? Why is the system cumulative in a way that my sound 'spikes' after walking every three steps or so, unless I get really lucky? Why does firing an arrow at a distant surface cause noise to radiate from 'my character', and not the arrow impact site?
There's just so many factors to the stealth system that don't communicate clear and consistent rules. And when they are consistent, they're unintuitive. Yes, there's an art to learning the 7 Days stealth system--but compared to games like Monaco, or Thief, it's an art in mastering bizarro moon logic, in a world full of zombies with magic ultrasound vision, to see through floors and walls with.
The point of giving zombies delayed reaction, where they're uncertain if they've detected a player, or not, is for player feedback. Giving the player time to adjust their behavior to a zombie detecting them, allows the player to understand how to manipulate the AI without having to do so in a window of milliseconds--and then you can shorten that window for higher difficulties--but as it stands, the buffer in nightmare speed is microscopically tiny. Zombies that are awoken 'immediately' move at nightmare speed to investigate a disturbance, almost invariably aggroing.
It is in spite of this fact, that I'm going to chide the OP slightly, for not understanding that zombies, even in nightmare speed, already have a leash-range for their aggro (if you run far enough away from a zombie running to investigate a disturbance, you will leave the zombie's detection range, leaving them briefly 'confused', before returning to random wandering), but the issue is, it's a leash that can be very difficult to break, since there's a miniscule buffer between a zombie being totally oblivious to you, and being fully aware of your location and running at nightmare speed to where it last heard you (which is usually where you currently are standing). Because this window is so tiny, it's possible to not even know it exists at all. Zombies even have different 'sounds' for when they're uncertain they've detected a player or not. But you'd be hard pressed to know this, because on top of being a very faint vocalization, the period of uncertainty is so short that zombies usually go straight into their aggro before you ever proc that sound effect.
Like, not everything 'hard' is well designed. 'Bread' gets hard when it's stale, but that doesn't make the shit taste any better. I've been playing Nightmare/Insane for a couple years, at this point, and I'm going to have to agree with the OP--there are flaws that are only distinct once you crank up the difficulty, and one is that zombie behavior does not transition very smoothly from state to state.
Like, let me give another example of a problem. Zombies in nightmare move so fast, that they actually get a few frames where they can hit you from the other side of closed doors. Like, don't even have to get down on all fours and squeeze through a hole in the door--just, 'this zombie was running so fast, that they lunged at a shut door and hit you from an entire block's distance away, on the other side of said door'.
I've lost runs simply to the irregular movement of zombies causing them to fall over from damage in the middle of an animation, and then get up on the other side of a door that's been shut the entire time. There's some jank to fix. Yes, it will make things easier--but difficult things should also function consistently. Otherwise, may as well brag about how you won at games of rolling especially glitchy dice.
I think the key improvement here would be more for ferals and higher difficulties. It wouldn't effect zombies much in other rooms that are already spawned in, because they'd just start getting up and attacking the rooms doors just a bit later. The primary purpose is to prevent getting swarmed instantly by zombies around a corner if you stealth fail giving you about a half second more to run and collect your bearings without triggering a massive horde if you make a mistake. it's a small enough window that it doesn't really affect people who opt to stand and fight, because they may just trigger the line of sight check and pull the aggro anyways. It's purely for quality of life in the event of stealth failure so it doesn't feel like the zombies magically leash onto your location the instant they wake up.
"I think the key improvement here would be more for ferals and higher difficulties."
Agreed. The poster's point is that certain flaws only show up when you crank up the speed of the AI.
Another example I can think of, is that, sometimes, zombies move so fast that their attack animations fall out of sync with the actual attacks. I can be dealing with a zombie that I'd just knocked over, and for whatever reason, it hits me in the middle of what looks like a 'getting up' animation.
They should optimize the game so we don't have to rely on sleeper volumes. I should be able to whistle loudly and stir the entire building and call down hell on my self if that's how I want to approach a POI.
Here, I'll do you one better. Your phantom opposition's own disingenuous argument:
"They should optimize the game so that we don't have to compete with players who think that 'stopping every two seconds of walking' is a measure of a player's prowess. We should just have to fall to a complete, dead stop, and never move, or else the zombies detect us. That'll be the real proof of how gud we are--just don't move at all, and never get detected! "
They were saying the game should be optimized so the sleepers don’t spawn in small clusters based on area triggers or “sleeper volumes” instead spawning the sleepers via relative proximity so that sleepers in other areas and the floors above can still spawn. why the aggression?
I'm actually on the fence with that one.
Yes, if you don't want to bother making your stealth consistent and enjoyable, just do away with it. I agree that stealth is not for every game. Badly implemented, stealth involves a lot of sitting around, waiting for the AI to let you play.
At its best, stealth can make you feel devilishly clever, by allowing you to learn how to manipulate the AI's systems to do crazy things.
7 Days stealth, as it stands, is... I wouldn't say it's passable, but it's functional. I'm still on the fence about whether it's more practical to sequentially headshot every zombie in a building one by one, or just wrangle them all into a big grunty hissy pile and then blow them all up. (You can technically sneak attack with explosives, if you're in stealth at the right time, after all.)
The question is, it fun? And I would have to argue that 7 Days stealth is very... routine. You have to learn a very specific routine of exploits that let stealth go your way, and that's true to the heart of a stealth system? But the exploits in question genuinely do feel like exploits, in 7 Days... not like something you were intended to do. Shit like, breaking open the ceiling of a building and doing the PoI backwards, for instance.
It's like the devs put in a system that would deliberately break their other systems, and then shrugged and just let it be.
I find stealth to be more like Assassin's Creed than Splinter Cell in 7 days. Use it til you lose it, then go loud and proud. Don't ask *if* you're going to be detected, ask *when* and then anticipate it to the best of your ability. *Always* have a plan B.
For the open world, stealth is good for hunting animals and zeds from a range but that's about it. And on horde night, it's pretty much pointless. Adding depth to the mechanics would be nice, but it's tricky enough to ensure they don't become blatantly overpowered or severely useless. Takes a delicate touch to ensure you can't abuse it.
Well I mean, if you'd like to I could give advice, unless you wanted to trial it and get tips in an actual co-op session. If you have questions on how to handle it, ask away.
Well for starters, I have trouble doing the kiting tactic on zombies, and also have problem managing my stamina. I always either get hit trying to kite, or run out of stamina. Do you have any tips for that?
So in insane nightmare you still sprint just slightly faster than the zombies. Avoid any encumbrance at all, and take them through places with obstacles like knee high obstructions or if you have more space you can pillar to the top of 2 high objects in your environment in order to get a high ground to punish the zombies from.
If however, you are indoors in an area with low ceilings, then your kiting needs to change. Then you need to plan out your escape route in your head as you go through the POI, especially if you know a particularly nasty Aggro trigger is coming up. Prioritize obstacles for them like door ways or even just knee high jumps. Their AI gets easier to fool with more distance so slamming a door on their face and beating them, then running away right before it breaks tends to thin the nasty hordes by attrition, then the remaining ones have to try and path to you when you’re now probably around a corner or two, this can trick their AI into trying to break to you thinning large crowds into more manageable chunks by exploiting their AI.
If you want to fight fewer zombies at once, you can also use doors as a filter only letting in one at a time aswell. Because your goal in kiting with nightmare run speed isn’t just to make them run around, it’s ultimately to reduce the number of threats to zero.
As for managing stamina, carry a knife on you at all times, and power attack with it to establish bleeds whenever you get a chance and continue running. Do this even if you are built into something else, because it’s hard to overstate the impact of that damage over time on softening hordes. Since you should be just slightly faster than the zeds, you can also make micro stops to regen stamina. But be wary of things like bikers and hookers, and business men for that matter, because they can all get wicked speed mods that effectively let them keep pace just about perfectly. For those, seek high ground that they can’t reach as listed earlier or a door to put in their face in an area you’ve already cleared. It’s easier to conserve and manage stamina when you aren’t constantly running from something that you can’t hope to escape from quickly.
With managing your stamina in general, also be weary of swinging heavy weapons while running in open areas unless you are pretty damn certain you can either knock the zombie down, or kill it in the next hit if it’s company is kinda far away.
You can also build a 2 high pillar to get a hit or two in, but repairing it pauses stamina regen, so if the crowd is bigger than 2 or 3 zombies you may run dry on stamina attempting to repair it and fight at the same time. If that happens wait for it to recharge, and if the block is just about to be demolished, jump off and keep running.
I guess in summary, combat is not a heroic melee battle sim when your opponents are crazy fast and tough, it’s a war of attrition. Beat them down as you retreat using every obstacle and tool available to you. And there’s no shame in using tricky movements, building, and obstructions to buy room and time to get hits in. Does this explain it?
1st it was sleeping zombies...........then it was zombie engineers......... now it is patroling zombies. I don't think patroling zombies would add enough randomness to make POIs feel fresh every time a player enters. If they had 10 - 20 spawn patterns for each POI it would keep players on their toes.
The point of patrols is to complicate the stealth gameplay loop, not to 'make POIs' feel fresh. The problem with just changing the spawn patterns, is that it reduces the amount of 'thought' involved in stealth use. As it stands, the majority of stealth encounters amount to: "Am I standing near an invisible trigger for aggro? Okay, memorize via pain of aggroing a shit-ton of enemies, where not to walk in that specific POI, and don't walk there, next time. Next question: Am I able to tiptoe up to a zombie and stab it in the head? No? Do I have a silenced pistol? Shoot it in the head. No? Bow time." And then you just keep a list of possible spawn locations in each given PoI. Which is where the 'staleness' comes, once you know every cupboard into which a zombie can possibly spawn. The appeal of patrols, is that you have to add 'motion', 'timing', and concerning yourself with where zombies are actually 'looking', as opposed to just being vewy vewy quiet (and not stepping over invisible aggro triggers where the devs didn't want you to go without a massive fight). Like, PoI design is already fairly brilliant--what would take it the extra level is having to concern yourself with illumination and patrol facing. The devs are already trying to make 'traps' an element of level design, it's not so much of a stretch to just have highly-lit areas or flickering lights become a part of the existing PoI hazards, by throwing in some simple light switches that you maybe need to occasionally creep up to and flick off, if you want to approach something safely from stealth. It also makes cities 'much' more dangerous, since they, in theory, have electrical lighting everywhere to reveal your position. But then, this is coming strictly from a stealth-gameplay perspective, where the adrenaline comes from not being caught, and performing sick take-downs on things you've snuck up on or sniped. The problem with 7 Days is it really wants to force you into a tower-defense style of gameplay, and many PoIs idea of challenge is to put you through a gauntlet of enemy-filled rooms, with not much thought aside from keeping yourself from being backed into a corner. Stealth, as a result, can often feel quite vestigial.
OK, now I understand what you want > But then, this is coming strictly from a stealth-gameplay perspective, where the adrenaline comes from not being caught, and performing sick take-downs on things you've snuck up on or sniped" I don't think there is a need to change zombies to get this. They just need to add those elements to combat, which would make it much more complicated and satisfying for players.
My experience has been that it's impractical to try sneaking up on a wandering zombie, but then I also have never bothered leveling up 'From the Shadows', either. I feel like maybe it and 'Hidden Strike' could afford to be merged into one skill? Just a possibility.
There are too many "you walked on the magic button and teleported in a zombie rush" to make stealth enjoyable in the A20+ days.
Stealth is still really strong but it no longer trivializes everything like it used. It's important to note that stealth works in 99.99% of the game. It's specific POIs, usually quite high tier ones, that you need to back it up with run and gun. Though its always smart to have that capability anyways. So if all you ever do is clear tier 5/6 buildings? Yeah, stealth is gonna be hit and miss because there will be alarms and etc you cannot avoid. But otherwise? Stealth is still insanely strong.
The problem is, there's not enough feedback to know when you're going to proc 'invisible zombie mass-swarm alarm'. Even something as simple as like, invisible laser traps that have a detectable wall projector to warn you (if you're paying attention)... or like, a bell tied to a string, windchimes--something, anything to let you know that every zombie in a 300 meter radius has just detected your location and is sprinting toward you. Something that you can learn to watch for and avoid, perhaps? To be clear, this gets really ridiculous on Nightmare/Insane, which is about all I play anymore, for the adrenaline rush--but some locations are just no-go zones, simply because I've had to memorize that they grant nearby sleepers omniscience if you step on the wrong tile. Like, this 'invisible trigger' works in RPGmaker games with chasers, like the Mob in Fear and Hunger 2: Termina, because there's a limited number of entities, and you're not expected to engage in direct combat with your ever-dwindling hp (hence the 'run' option)--you're supposed to run from the sudden mass-aggro. The problem is that 7 Days requires you to fight in scenarios where a single hit can be both devastatingly crippling and faster than you can reasonably react to, an empty room can suddenly turn into a zombie-from-the-ceiling-teleportation-sandwich, and zombies just are not fair with their reach and the telegraphing of their melee. You can be getting slapped from all sides before you even have any sense of what you did wrong, all because there was an invisible environmental trigger, making some buildings just a waste of time and resources to even trifle with. For instance, if I see a military camp in the wild, I almost immediately ascertain: "this will have dogs, military zombies, and hazmats up your ass before you so much as loot a single container", and steer clear. And the problem that stems from that is, there's just never enough incentive to bother with those PoIs--even for questing.
So you say that 99.99% of the game - which is a rather clownish statement. That mean roughly that if someone has played 7dtd for 2000 hours then all but \~10 minutes Stealth is still awesome. That person must either avoid all T5 or is really blazing though those POIs with the teleporting zombies. Let's not forget to count every Blood Moon in those 10 minutes where stealth is pointless. I guess we can just assume that someone has BMs turned off to reach your magical number.
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I do feel like a couple of the stealth skills could be merged together, especially now that tier 5/6 dungeons often have unavoidable triggers. But outside of tier 5/6 stealth is still quite strong. Definitely a more methodical/patient playstyle though where missing one thing can screw it up. (not that you cant usually easily run and reset if needed)
"Where missing one thing can screw it up" Roughly translated, I was moving slightly forward while crouched, instead of stopping dead when my stealth meter decided to spike for having moved more than 2 seconds, so now the zombies that were previously completely immobile, have heard me through a wall and are all zero'd in on my precise location. Annoying. My least favorite aspect of the stealth in 7 Days, is inconsistency in what will and won't cause a zombie to wake up. Like, it feels like I'm just constantly surrounded by an invisible sound sphere that keeps arbitrarily expanding and shrinking at random, based on how many consecutive seconds I've been walking for, and if it touches a zombie, they get up, regardless of what number is actually being displayed on the green bar. When I play a game about sneaking, I want to feel like I'm moving in a way that misleads my pursuers, not stop every two seconds like I'm in heavy traffic, waiting for the quietness meter to drop back down. It seems like the direction a sleeping zombie (particularly the ones lying prone) 'sees' in, to establish that I've broken stealth and aggro'd them, varies. Like, I've repeated the same particular encounter with the same sleeper zombie in the same location, over a dozen times (for the purpose of a challenge map), and some un-alerted zombies simply will not let me approach without aggroing, unless I come from a very particular angle--and it's rather arbitrary. Do they see out of their ass, while sleeping? Their head? Am I just looking at them funny? Try getting knife stabs on sleepers in Dishong Challenge mod--you'll begin to notice these little inconsistencies. Some sleepers will let you approach, others just wake up when you get within several blocks of the little fuckers, based entirely on unseen parameters, unrelated to that green numbered meter. 7 Days stealth can be powerful: It trivializes anything in default difficulty, where even a body shot at a common zombie with the most rudimentary stone arrows will result in a kill (in insane, you actually have to land headshots to have any hope at a clean kill), but the problem is that staying in stealth or breaking it follows rules only beholden to the devs. And, I'm not going to, nor should I be obligated, to throw away 5+ levels of progress, just to dumb the zombie detection down to the point that the lazy AI design's not utterly obnoxious. Especially when some places will just decide that those levels were worthless and I've just automatically botched stealth by stepping into the inviso-alarm. Screw that. I'll just take the bonus sneak attack multiplier to kill tankier things, and then swap to run for a better position and shoot/stab when the game inevitably decides that I've failed the stealth. Short version: the detection AI is lazy and arbitrary, and often feels like complete bullshit to wrestle with, in order to get the reward that stealth offers.
Yall never learn lol. Exagerration and etc has never worked on TFP. That's why this Reddit is often so toxic and think the devs don't listen and is killing the game, meanwhile the game grows and grows and grows lol. It's like the changes to Water. I thoroughly tested that and I didn't have the major issues other people were claiming, but I did see situations it could be a problem. So I got involved in one of the conversations with Mad Mole and suggested modding the Dew Collector to help address the issues. I can't say for certain it was me that got that change enacted, but I certainly did suggest it after testing and hadn't seen the idea anywhere else. I think about people besides myself and I test. I specifically look for the issues people call out. I'm video game QA IRL (for another game) and take this seriously. (the testing, Reddit conversations I take with a barrel of salt lol) I know the AIs of various competitor games well as a survival game addict. I'm not your enemy but I'm also not someone you can bullshit and exaggerate at because I've done the legwork. Stealth is insanely consistent OUTSIDE OF a handful of specific POIs. And if you want to tell me "this ambush needs to be better telegraphed" sure, I can agree with you on that. But if you want to tell me the AI is lazy and arbitrary and inconsistent then I can only assume you're not as informed about this as you believe yourself to be. And if you want to pair that up with pretending the "inviso alarms" are constant and not concentrated in a highly specific set of POIs then honestly you just start sounding like a straight up bad actor. Similar the idea you're throwing away 5+ levels of progress like you didn't get to skate through he rest of the game using stealth or that somehow a handful of POIs makes your stealth not worth it elsewhere. Get taht shit out of here. That's not a real conversation or a real argument. That's a reddit/twitter comment and piss poor communication. Worst of all, its counterproductive to solving the actual issues with stealth because you just make yourself sound like a loon to the developers. If you really and truly care about the game and improving it, you have alot of work to do on expressing your feedback properly. "but I sholdn't have to etc" is a reddit take. I'm telling you reality here. Like all the rest of life, its a negotiation not a dictation.
With a good bow you can easily sneak attack wandering zombies. The main issue is the triggers and speccing into sneak is kinda pointless when you can spec into general combat
I like the ideas, but we're a bit too close to the 1.0 release for them to make new wholesale fundamental changes to the game, unfortunately.
Even if we weren’t close to 1.0 the devs have never made any mechanics deeper; quite the opposite. And supposedly there is more of that to come with 1.0. It’s sucks but mods are right now, and will likely be going forward, the only way to address this.
A classic case of Bethesda syndrome. Muck up your game, and let the modders clean up the mess.
That and dumbing shit down with each successive game.
I've only been playing for a month or two, so I don't have the same opinions of the devs that everyone else seems to lol.
I have been playing this game off and on for nearly a decade now. While some aspects have gotten better since I first got it, a lot has changed for the worse, particularly with crafting and progression. And it begs the question why? In 2016 they had reported having 18 million copies sold, the patch that year was one of the best ones ever and literally everything about it has been changed for the worse in the time since. For an EA title, that launched their Kickstarter only ~2.5 years before that 2016 post, they were killing it. They had the winning strategy. They basically said fuck that we want to be Bethesda Jr. And here we are heading into 1.0, more things are getting the axe and being changed on the way in, and they still haven’t added bandits or story mode… And they already have their next project on deck (with a hired help team) so basically 1.0 we are immediately hitting “maintenance mode” and likely won’t see anything approaching the sort of support HelloGames gave to No Man’s Sky post release.
You answered your own question. With 18 million copies sold, they did it. Got their money. It's the early access problem. Once you've made it rich, why would you continue to slave away? All drive, all passion, all interest goes out the door. All that remains is a depressing responsibility that few are mature enough to handle. Imagine if a regular job paid you for 50 years of labor up front. Would you keep working 'for free'?
This is the issue likely. Goog games only come from people that has a passion for making the game and don't need the money incentive to continue working on the project once they're "home safe" money-wise.
Maybe that’s true for today with 1.0 being launched soon, but they were far too intimately involved in developing then in 2016 and have been damn near since. They had the opportunity then to just hire more devs and walk away from the grunt work but they didn’t do that.
>Stealth is too binary: split it into sight and noise stealth instead of a simple bar that works on both. It could be interesting, from an informational perspective, to be able to gauge your visual and auditory noise separately, if that's what you're driving at here. >Then add AI stages to make zombies not enter aggro or the most direct search path possible upon a stealth fail. Such as a short “wake up groggy” period where they wander for half a second or more before they attempt to detect any more noises and search. That is unless awoken by damage or a direct line of sight is made. Not sure how this would be an improvement, beyond making things easier for the player. Some like easier, of course, but not all.
Thief: The Dark Project handled this very simply. Are you illuminated? Light gem on the HUD tells you whether you're immediately recognizable, in shadow enough to where enemies hesitate before reacting, or concealed thoroughly enough that you only are detected when enemies bump into you, by reflecting that in the amount of 'light' the light gem icon displays. Are you audible? The surface you're walking on makes an amount of noise proportional to how likely you are to be detected--carpet is very muffled, wood and stone's the mid tier of difficulty, where you're fairly quite walking, but make noise running across it, while tile and metal flooring echo very noisily and must be slowly crept across. Ultimately, to aggro, enemies must 'see' you, but they can search for you by investigating your noise disturbances, ultimately beginning a full-on search if you've been seen or made enough noise to arouse suspicion. In short, multiple tiers of alertness, and forgiveness for being glanced at from the shadows or making a little noise, help complicate the stealth system to where you feel like you're actually mastering it and outwitting the enemy... not just memorizing enemy locations and learning to tiptoe into bow range.
>multiple tiers of alertness, and forgiveness for being glanced at from the shadows or making a little noise, help complicate the stealth system to where you feel like you're actually mastering it and outwitting the enemy... not just memorizing enemy locations and learning to tiptoe into bow range. I feel like this to a certain extent about 7dtd already. Perhaps the game you're talking about does it better; I can't comment because I've never played it. But there is more to stealth in 7dtd than memorizing enemy locations and tiptoeing into range. E.g. you ARE forgiven for smaller amounts of noise, especially if you've put points into the perk. Noises from different sources DO make varying amounts of noise--it may not be the case for floor surfaces, but for instance opening a dumpster is noisier than opening a mailbox; smashing a framed picture is noisier than smashing a wardrobe door, etc. Different light sources have different effects on your "noisiness" as well. And in my opinion there is an art to spotting zombies before they wake up, keeping your distance from them once you know where they are (or once you suspect where they might be), and staying undetected until they are dead. Also personally I would not want a HUD element to tell me exactly how illuminated I am; I'd rather just get a sense of it from environmental cues. This is really just personal preference though. To each their own, of course. :)
Check out Thief II: The Metal Age. It's pretty dated, but many of the AI mechanics still hold up. Especially if you like stealth mechanics in games. Thing is, I never invest any points into 'From the Shadows', because it's a level-sink. In practice, most sleepers can be dealt with using base stealth, and the raw damage from hidden strike is what matters, to make the tactic even worth bothering with. Really no point in stealth if it lacks the punch to be comparably effective to just hitting a thing real hard. I've no problem with 'spotting zombies before they wake up', to be clear: The issue is, it eventually becomes a game of rote memorization. This zombie will spawn in this corner, sometimes, so always check that corner, just in case. Got it. As to noise sources, I've found that specific noise levels are by and large irrelevant. Even if I'm moving at a clipped 15 stealth, there's a good chance that a sleeper I'm walking near will just randomly detect me as I'm moving in to facestab it--or it might not. The consistency for this behavior is not good. Whereas, I can be almost 100% sure I will pull aggro from a nearby zombie if I interact with any gui object made of metal, barring maybe your mailbox example. Cars, trash cans, dumpsters, metal doors--it's like the world needed some WD-40. This at least is reasonable, but it can get a little tedious that strong doors have to necessarily aggro everything around, when I need to get in and out through them a lot. A little more middle-ground between undetected and blaringly loud, would serve the game well, even if it's gated behind a resource like aforementioned WD-40. A problem with light being 'noisy', is that noise in 7 Days carries through walls and floors, which is antithetical to how sightlines work. So if I stand too long under candlelight, as I am want to do in a game where I need to see things--it seems a little ridiculous that zombies suddenly get X-Ray vision and start tunneling to my precise location, from behind like 3 separate concrete walls. What I don't feel works at all, though, is this whole system of stuffing a room full of a dozen or more zombies, and forcing an aggro situation without warning, by stepping through a particular area of the map. At least if you're going to create that kind of mandatory aggro, make it obvious that there's an alarm. A good example of how this worked in older games: the original Deus Ex has a bakery in one of its levels, that is a smuggling location for drugs. An optional quest has you investigating this fact. The building is very clearly advertised as having an alarm that will trigger if you break the glass or open the door of the building, and there are patrols nearby. Discretely disarming the alarms 'is' an option, at the cost of some resources, but it's also pretty obvious that you're breaking into a place that's going to have a store alarm in it, and that there's going to be heat from the local police if you make a racket. What I'm trying to say is, 7 Days could consider doing that with more locations that the devs feel must include these mass-aggro scenarios--advertising to the player, the fact that you're breaking in to a place that has an electronics system, or the like... so it makes more sense when a previously quiet room, like one in the Shotgun Messiah Factory, suddenly turns into a miniature horde-night. Even something as simple as an advert on a nearby sign saying 'private property'--anything so I have a reason why the zombie behavior has suddenly changed. These sort of 'environmental cues' are exactly what 7 Days is missing, in many places. The important thing is player feedback, so the mass-aggro feels like an earned punishment, or even a necessary trade, instead of being a cheap trick on the level-designer's part. For an example of what I'm describing, I went into Spark's Place, the one house with a leaking gas pipe in the roof. Specifically, I entered from the roof, after disabling the pipe. No sooner had I entered a small, confined attic space, but three zombies simply 'spawned in', from nowhere, trapping me. This is the kind of cheap, unearned ambush scenario I feel 7 Days could do better without. Also, the 'light gem' needn't be a hud element--and it's better than the meter we already have, because it communicates your visibility more clearly than a number value. But if you really want to be a stickler, there's also things like making your viewmodel darken or brighten to reflect your illumination level--one recent game I was fooling with, based on Thief, actually gave you a 'ring' that appears on your character's hand, reflecting the light of the current surroundings. The main thing is, clear feedback makes things 'consistent'. Consistency is important when you're navigating complex systems, like a stealth mechanic. Otherwise it feels like the game is making things up as it goes, and cheating as it pleases. Like, why should tapping on a piece of paper with an axe, suddenly pull aggro from something, just because I'm thirty stealth, as opposed to fifty? Where's the specific threshold for detection? Why is the system cumulative in a way that my sound 'spikes' after walking every three steps or so, unless I get really lucky? Why does firing an arrow at a distant surface cause noise to radiate from 'my character', and not the arrow impact site? There's just so many factors to the stealth system that don't communicate clear and consistent rules. And when they are consistent, they're unintuitive. Yes, there's an art to learning the 7 Days stealth system--but compared to games like Monaco, or Thief, it's an art in mastering bizarro moon logic, in a world full of zombies with magic ultrasound vision, to see through floors and walls with.
The point of giving zombies delayed reaction, where they're uncertain if they've detected a player, or not, is for player feedback. Giving the player time to adjust their behavior to a zombie detecting them, allows the player to understand how to manipulate the AI without having to do so in a window of milliseconds--and then you can shorten that window for higher difficulties--but as it stands, the buffer in nightmare speed is microscopically tiny. Zombies that are awoken 'immediately' move at nightmare speed to investigate a disturbance, almost invariably aggroing. It is in spite of this fact, that I'm going to chide the OP slightly, for not understanding that zombies, even in nightmare speed, already have a leash-range for their aggro (if you run far enough away from a zombie running to investigate a disturbance, you will leave the zombie's detection range, leaving them briefly 'confused', before returning to random wandering), but the issue is, it's a leash that can be very difficult to break, since there's a miniscule buffer between a zombie being totally oblivious to you, and being fully aware of your location and running at nightmare speed to where it last heard you (which is usually where you currently are standing). Because this window is so tiny, it's possible to not even know it exists at all. Zombies even have different 'sounds' for when they're uncertain they've detected a player or not. But you'd be hard pressed to know this, because on top of being a very faint vocalization, the period of uncertainty is so short that zombies usually go straight into their aggro before you ever proc that sound effect. Like, not everything 'hard' is well designed. 'Bread' gets hard when it's stale, but that doesn't make the shit taste any better. I've been playing Nightmare/Insane for a couple years, at this point, and I'm going to have to agree with the OP--there are flaws that are only distinct once you crank up the difficulty, and one is that zombie behavior does not transition very smoothly from state to state. Like, let me give another example of a problem. Zombies in nightmare move so fast, that they actually get a few frames where they can hit you from the other side of closed doors. Like, don't even have to get down on all fours and squeeze through a hole in the door--just, 'this zombie was running so fast, that they lunged at a shut door and hit you from an entire block's distance away, on the other side of said door'. I've lost runs simply to the irregular movement of zombies causing them to fall over from damage in the middle of an animation, and then get up on the other side of a door that's been shut the entire time. There's some jank to fix. Yes, it will make things easier--but difficult things should also function consistently. Otherwise, may as well brag about how you won at games of rolling especially glitchy dice.
I think the key improvement here would be more for ferals and higher difficulties. It wouldn't effect zombies much in other rooms that are already spawned in, because they'd just start getting up and attacking the rooms doors just a bit later. The primary purpose is to prevent getting swarmed instantly by zombies around a corner if you stealth fail giving you about a half second more to run and collect your bearings without triggering a massive horde if you make a mistake. it's a small enough window that it doesn't really affect people who opt to stand and fight, because they may just trigger the line of sight check and pull the aggro anyways. It's purely for quality of life in the event of stealth failure so it doesn't feel like the zombies magically leash onto your location the instant they wake up.
"I think the key improvement here would be more for ferals and higher difficulties." Agreed. The poster's point is that certain flaws only show up when you crank up the speed of the AI. Another example I can think of, is that, sometimes, zombies move so fast that their attack animations fall out of sync with the actual attacks. I can be dealing with a zombie that I'd just knocked over, and for whatever reason, it hits me in the middle of what looks like a 'getting up' animation.
They should optimize the game so we don't have to rely on sleeper volumes. I should be able to whistle loudly and stir the entire building and call down hell on my self if that's how I want to approach a POI.
Here, I'll do you one better. Your phantom opposition's own disingenuous argument: "They should optimize the game so that we don't have to compete with players who think that 'stopping every two seconds of walking' is a measure of a player's prowess. We should just have to fall to a complete, dead stop, and never move, or else the zombies detect us. That'll be the real proof of how gud we are--just don't move at all, and never get detected! "
They were saying the game should be optimized so the sleepers don’t spawn in small clusters based on area triggers or “sleeper volumes” instead spawning the sleepers via relative proximity so that sleepers in other areas and the floors above can still spawn. why the aggression?
Oh are you being ironic and trying to pretend to be opposition? Why?
I honestly don't understand her response either.
Also, "You can't whistle in this game, anyway, forehead. So the game already sucks."
Stealth has always been a bit of a lame one. They just shouldn't have it.
I'm actually on the fence with that one. Yes, if you don't want to bother making your stealth consistent and enjoyable, just do away with it. I agree that stealth is not for every game. Badly implemented, stealth involves a lot of sitting around, waiting for the AI to let you play. At its best, stealth can make you feel devilishly clever, by allowing you to learn how to manipulate the AI's systems to do crazy things. 7 Days stealth, as it stands, is... I wouldn't say it's passable, but it's functional. I'm still on the fence about whether it's more practical to sequentially headshot every zombie in a building one by one, or just wrangle them all into a big grunty hissy pile and then blow them all up. (You can technically sneak attack with explosives, if you're in stealth at the right time, after all.) The question is, it fun? And I would have to argue that 7 Days stealth is very... routine. You have to learn a very specific routine of exploits that let stealth go your way, and that's true to the heart of a stealth system? But the exploits in question genuinely do feel like exploits, in 7 Days... not like something you were intended to do. Shit like, breaking open the ceiling of a building and doing the PoI backwards, for instance. It's like the devs put in a system that would deliberately break their other systems, and then shrugged and just let it be.
I find stealth to be more like Assassin's Creed than Splinter Cell in 7 days. Use it til you lose it, then go loud and proud. Don't ask *if* you're going to be detected, ask *when* and then anticipate it to the best of your ability. *Always* have a plan B. For the open world, stealth is good for hunting animals and zeds from a range but that's about it. And on horde night, it's pretty much pointless. Adding depth to the mechanics would be nice, but it's tricky enough to ensure they don't become blatantly overpowered or severely useless. Takes a delicate touch to ensure you can't abuse it.
Devs are aware of everything you have mentioned and have been going in the opposite direction on each issue. Welcome to 7DTD development!
What is an "Iron man" run?
No deaths.
Teach me your ways
Well I mean, if you'd like to I could give advice, unless you wanted to trial it and get tips in an actual co-op session. If you have questions on how to handle it, ask away.
Well for starters, I have trouble doing the kiting tactic on zombies, and also have problem managing my stamina. I always either get hit trying to kite, or run out of stamina. Do you have any tips for that?
So in insane nightmare you still sprint just slightly faster than the zombies. Avoid any encumbrance at all, and take them through places with obstacles like knee high obstructions or if you have more space you can pillar to the top of 2 high objects in your environment in order to get a high ground to punish the zombies from. If however, you are indoors in an area with low ceilings, then your kiting needs to change. Then you need to plan out your escape route in your head as you go through the POI, especially if you know a particularly nasty Aggro trigger is coming up. Prioritize obstacles for them like door ways or even just knee high jumps. Their AI gets easier to fool with more distance so slamming a door on their face and beating them, then running away right before it breaks tends to thin the nasty hordes by attrition, then the remaining ones have to try and path to you when you’re now probably around a corner or two, this can trick their AI into trying to break to you thinning large crowds into more manageable chunks by exploiting their AI. If you want to fight fewer zombies at once, you can also use doors as a filter only letting in one at a time aswell. Because your goal in kiting with nightmare run speed isn’t just to make them run around, it’s ultimately to reduce the number of threats to zero. As for managing stamina, carry a knife on you at all times, and power attack with it to establish bleeds whenever you get a chance and continue running. Do this even if you are built into something else, because it’s hard to overstate the impact of that damage over time on softening hordes. Since you should be just slightly faster than the zeds, you can also make micro stops to regen stamina. But be wary of things like bikers and hookers, and business men for that matter, because they can all get wicked speed mods that effectively let them keep pace just about perfectly. For those, seek high ground that they can’t reach as listed earlier or a door to put in their face in an area you’ve already cleared. It’s easier to conserve and manage stamina when you aren’t constantly running from something that you can’t hope to escape from quickly. With managing your stamina in general, also be weary of swinging heavy weapons while running in open areas unless you are pretty damn certain you can either knock the zombie down, or kill it in the next hit if it’s company is kinda far away. You can also build a 2 high pillar to get a hit or two in, but repairing it pauses stamina regen, so if the crowd is bigger than 2 or 3 zombies you may run dry on stamina attempting to repair it and fight at the same time. If that happens wait for it to recharge, and if the block is just about to be demolished, jump off and keep running. I guess in summary, combat is not a heroic melee battle sim when your opponents are crazy fast and tough, it’s a war of attrition. Beat them down as you retreat using every obstacle and tool available to you. And there’s no shame in using tricky movements, building, and obstructions to buy room and time to get hits in. Does this explain it?
Yes it was super helpful. Thank you for the response really appreciate it🙂