flashburn

Right, so after I pull up the scavenger window with the Y button, the "call in" button is also Y, I push that, and the window closes and nothing happens.

Deftones

yes it does. you'll hear lily on the radio say someone is on the way. someone from camp will come in and collect the items and return them. you don't ever have to do anything other than that. it's completely autonomous.

nickdawgy

The more I play this, the more I am liking it. I don't think the driving is bad at all. The performance cars are a bit hard to control, I will give you that.

It's all still kind of confusing to me. I basically try and put out a call to scavenge and it's always "we don't have the people for that" or whatever. How do I get more people? I found survivors and stuff but they never came back with me.

I also had one person (Maya) die. She was checking the back door of a place while defending it and a horde popped up. It wasn't pretty.

How do you rest? Just change people? Who can you control? So far I only controlled the main guy (Marcus?) and Maya. Where do the other survivors go at night at the church? How do you get more materials to upgrade stuff?

Deftones

You need to recruit people. Basically look for side quests and do those. You'll usually find a person or two you can drag back with you. I've got 11 or 12 in my camp now. I'm actually the point where I have too many people draining the resources. Once you get those people, you can easily not have to worry about not having enough people.

You rest by changing people. You can't control everyone. I've got 5 people I can control, but I'm still using the dude from the beginning and the 1st girl you run into. I've build them up with some good skills.

The survivors are sleeping in the back room or outside doing tasks. You get materials by sending out scavenging parties in the menu when you hit up on D pad. You can send people out to find ammo/food/medicine/fuel/materials. Materials are good because they help you upgrade your shit. I've got a workbench now, an additional barracks and an upgraded sentry tower.

Deftones

Also, some of the missions are timed, so if you get something that doesn't look like a main mission, do those first. I've missed a few of the timed ones. I don't know if they come back or not, but those help you build your influence and often give you bonuses.

flashburn

It's working now. It must of been bugged when I was playing it before, because it was definitely not working then.

nickdawgy

Except if they get attacked, you may have to help them.

A few complaints I have....

Is there no fast travel? The main church is very far from the main town in the game and it sucks having to drive all the way back there. I guess they are trying to make it seem as real as possible, but it still sucks.

What are potential home sites? New areas to live? How do you get them occupied?

Too many times I searched an entire house or warehouse, and haven't cleared it. Where are they storing this shit? The walls?

Sometimes the AI is retarded. Getting in the way of the car while I am trying to run down zombies, getting lost, blocking my way, etc.

I still love the game and hope it lasts for awhile. This is what all zombie games should have been like.

Deftones

I just moved my "home" to another part of the map. Word of advice. If more than half your missions start being across the map, it's time to move. You can't effectively scavenge stuff because your guys take forever to run back and forth. I just moved into some warehouse. It's awesome. In the church, you could really only build 2 things. In this warehouse, I can build everything I want (workbench, garden, library, etc.) All these things help you by building up your stats.

nickdawgy

I found the

So are people always getting sad and bringing morale down? I had three people at once, then another guy got sad again. I ended up taking him out on a "feel better" mission and let some zombies eat him.

I started over before that, and I think I've had two main characters die, and the pastor guy.

Deftones

Yeah, I've got that place, too. Awesome set up.

Yes, people get sad all the time. Just run them out to do a quick pep talk mission and you won't lose influence.

Deftones

The one thing that absolutely annoys the fuck out of me is when your influence takes a huge drop after not playing a while. I was up over 700 influence last night. I was finding crazy amounts of weapons. When I logged on this morning, my influence was 150. I understand the need for it to go down, otherwise you would be crazy strong. But that much of a drop is ridiculous.

Nausicaa

I really want to play this, any word on the PC release?

Barth

So I'm confused. Your stats change just by not playing for a while? Like if I fire up the game today and then not play it for a week it won't be where I left off, stats wise? Yikes.

Deftones

Not your individual stats per se. You have a thing called influence. You get this by doing tasks, helping people out, etc. This goes down if you don't play a while, apparently. Influence is important because it allows you special skills, especially later. Some of these things are like calling in a SWAT team, calling in a mortar strike, calling in a sniper, and setting up an outpost. These are only a fraction of the special skills you can use your influence for. Basically, the more goodwill you dole out to others, the more things you get in return.

Plus, your other "stats" (food/ammo/materials/medicine/gas) also go down daily based on a consumption number. Your menu tells what your daily use is. You can lower these by building certain things (garden for food, med tents for medicine, etc.).



They just released stats that this sold 250k the first 2 days. Awesome. I'd love to see these guys build a full game based on this system. It is a really, really good game. I'm impressed as hell with it.

Barth

Thanks for the info. I was just wondering because I was going to play some this weekend and then won't be able to again for several days.

Deftones

It's pretty easy to build it back up. Any item you return to your storage gives you influence, as well as doing tasks. Guns are big influence items, so if you see one, pick it up to return. this is also what makes the outposts valuable. you can put them all around, and have access to your storage, so it helps to dump/pick up if needed and not near your base.

nickdawgy

I'd love to see a full game as well. Enjoying the hell out of this and sad that it's not for PS3 because it'd sell more and I'd recommend it to my friends that are PS3 fanboys.

I think a patch is coming next week that will address some of the issues that happen when you're offline.

flashburn

The giant influence drop really seems like a bug to me. It just drops way too much in between playing. It doesn't even make sense that it drops while you aren't playing since time is paused, it's not like stuff is happening without you playing or something.

Deftones

Some dude said he lost 1000 influence in 30 minutes after he turned off his system and then came back to play.

I am on, what I'm pretty sure is, the last mission. I think i've put in about 20 hours into this. I don't really have any more missions other than those infestation things. So far, I'd say this is a damn good value for $20. There are some minor quibbles (driving is pretty floaty, some of the controls aren't very tight either when you combat), but it brought a ton of new stuff to the table. Well worth the purchase, if you are on the fence, IMHO.

BTW, if you want to see something kind of cool in the game:

Deftones

beat it today. the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but overall this is a very good game for a great price. i think i got about 20 hours of gameplay (could've been more as there were things i didn't do).

msdmoney

Just heard about this on the Gamers with Jobs podcast, sounds definitely like something I would enjoy. I hadn't even heard of the game before, other than seeing the thread title and skipping over it previously. It sounds like Dead Rising, but with the concepts and ideas of Dead Rising fully realized (mainly survival and exploration) without as much of the artificial game elements like timers, etc. Price also sounds good. I think I will wait for the PC version, I would rather have it on steam than xbla (maybe they will also improve the technical flaws reviews mention), but I am pretty sold on the idea already.

edstein

A tip I heard on Major Nelson's podcast is to drive backwards with vehicles. Then they don't take any damage.

Deftones

not true about not taking damage backward, but it does seem to mitigate the damage somewhat.

flashburn

Yeah driving backwards definitely helps. I try to dodge a zombie horde and just back into them instead, you'll take way less damage.

nickdawgy

I always seem to flip my cars over at the worst times anyway, so worrying about how much damage I'm doing to them is irrelevant.