Hello everyone! It's been a mostly successful launch, I think! ːsteamhappyː I do have a lot of new feedback and bug reports to process and I'm going to be doing that over the following weeks.
First on my list is the difficulty, which a number of people have complained about. I kind of knew this would be the case as I got a number of similar comments during the beta, and had spent some time trying to make it easier in subtle ways (yep, it actually used to be even
more difficult lol).
If you're wondering why make it so difficult, well it serves a purpose which is to try and encourage you to tackle things in more varied ways than just going in and hitting or shooting everything. Such as using stealth, hiding in buildings, digging traps, throwing meat as a distraction, and making use of the NPCs in the world. I find that once people are familiar with the mechanics, they don't generally find it too hard at all. I probably need to be messaging some of that stuff better though.
I think the biggest problem is that because there's no story mode as yet, there isn't a nice tutorial to introduce you gently to the game systems and you're kind of thrown in at the deep end in Sandbox mode. Story mode is going to take a long time to make, though, so to address the issue in the short term I'm adding difficulty modes!
When you start a game you'll now be presented with this dialog:
Your options are "
Normal" and "
Slightly Easier". The only difference currently is that in Slightly Easier mode, half the zombies will be spawned with leg injuries which means they limp and don't move fast. If you're a beginner let me know if you think that helps or if it's still too hard.
I also added an option to set where you want your saves to go, as some people have been having mysterious problems with access violation errors when using the normal place.
Here's the full changelist:
- Added slightly easier difficulty setting
- Make it possible to change the directory the game saves to by putting 'savedir c:\\foo' or suchlike in your launch parameters