KickStarter Dead State: Reanimated

[Ninjerk]

rpg games

 

[Lhynn]

Dead state only real problem is writing. Falls flat and fails to keep you interested. And this from the dude that gave us bloodlines? what the fuck.

 

[cherry blossom]

Recolor the zombies and make them ever more powerful? Is that supposed to be sarcasm?

One of the most fundamental tropes of the genre -that you can't kill all the zombies and you can't run from them forever- is magnificently wasted; zombies don't roam (locally and globally), don't respawn, are even dumber and less perceptive than the archetypal classic zombies and the entire game had only a few places where zombies could become a serious headache unless you played like an idiot. However, the real challenges that the game throws at you aren't built around zombies at all. Human encounters are an increasingly bigger threat than all the zombies. The level of risk you take with humans escalate pretty well. If you haven't put together a decent team (ie. good combat skills) with decent gear by the time you meet some of the larger or edgier groups out there, you're fucked. And there are times when the game puts you in extraordinarily tight spots. So, the comical levels of hostility aside, the game does very good with one of the other fundamental tropes of the genre: the biggest threat is other people. Sadly, the difficulty curve flatlines after you reach a point. Nevertheless, I found that there is a happy balance to keeping your people uninjured and healthy through encounters and working around the clock.

And one other good thing is that shelter-drama is prone to happen even if you do your absolute best and keep it a paradise back there because regardless of what you do or do not, some of the characters can do stupid things on their own when left to their own devices. The way the game throws these issues at you is rather hamfisted, though.

 

[Telengard]

Recolor the zombies and make them ever more powerful? Is that supposed to be sarcasm?

No. While recolors are weak rpg design, it is what poor people do when they make a game and can only afford a few art assets. And while weak design, it illustrates that they at least know how rpgs function. They know that to do what the Mitsodas have done leads to a massive grind of Asian mmorpg scale, and without the social aspects to keep you glued to doing it. A few (mostly copy-pasted) boss monsters cannot patch over that fact.

Now, a Telltale style 'game' can have static zombie enemies all it wants, because the main characters are also static in power, plus there's no real combat anyways since zombies remain more of a storybook metaphor. But rpgs are a different breed. Rpgs actually have to function at something other than the story level. And endless grinding of the same low-tier monster for 50 hours is something we (are supposed to) frown upon. Yes, even when those endless, mindless hordes of low-tier creatures are there for story reasons. And if it were any other monster but a zombie, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, because absolutely everyone would be pissing all over the design. Just imagine the same exact game as Dead State, but with giant rats instead of zombies, or stirges, or skellingtons. After all, we piss all over the recolorer indies, and those actually have proper rpg progression game design. But instead, Dead State isn't supposed to be pissed on when they pull the same indie move, but worse? Come on!

Basically, if you're going to design a game where the vast bulk of the enemies are a single weak, mindless, melee monster, then the rpg genre is not for you. That's not how rpgs work. But especially not if you're going to give the PCs stealth and ranged weaponry, and thus make them tactically superior in every way, shape, and form to your mindless, melee mook.

 

[Zombra]

Abandoning the RPG checklist power curve would have been way way better than escalating zombie stats. "Over here, these zombies are all level 10, you have to have tier 3 weapons to go there." Ugh.

 

[Invictus]

I dont know guys but the design of the scenario is spot on to a zombie apocalypse; the begining is the hardest part for looting and scavenging but after that zombies are manage able with good gear and stats. The real enemies then become other scavenging groups which are looking for the same resources you do for survival.
The game then adds the balancing challenge of your group of survivors
Adding super zombies or whatever would have been a cool addition to make their threat more viable on the long term but it certainly fits the walking dead theme
The game is not perfect as everybody knows but it is entertaining and fun while it lasts, too bad we probably wont see anything like it again

 

[Sizzle]

Dead state only real problem is writing. Falls flat and fails to keep you interested. And this from the dude that gave us bloodlines? what the fuck.

The biggest problem I had with the game was the slow combat. It's NOT fun waiting for all 50+ zombies in an area to pass through their turn.

As for the writing - it was ok. Like someone already said, the game has dozens of NPCs, all of them more or less distinct in personality. So while I wasn't blown away by the writing, I appreciated the effort to include both standard zombie movie archetype characters, as well as more normal folks.

A shame, because while the game has lots of nice little details (for example, each area, even the generic suburbs, are custom made, so they all stand out from one another), its ambition in scope is what ultimately does it in - should have been way shorter. Each time I try to play it I lose the will to finish it about half-way through.

 

[Lhynn]

As for the writing - it was ok. Like someone already said, the game has dozens of NPCs, all of them more or less distinct in personality. So while I wasn't blown away by the writing, I appreciated the effort to include both standard zombie movie archetype characters, as well as more normal folks.

"ok" is not good enough. The whole fucking point of the stupid game is its characters and its setting. Its easy to remember secondary unnamed characters in bloodlines but in dead state the only assholes that i sort of remember are lyric suite and the autistic zombie slayer, if i remember any other is because they were irritatingly bad.
It shoulda been better, even at the expense of something else.

 

[Sizzle]

Bloodlines was also greatly elevated by the voice acting and facial animation, both of which weren't an option here.

Now, while I agree that there should have been fewer NPCs, I did like quite a few of them (mostly the realistically self-serving/psycho ones, a rarity in games).
But, like in almost every other Dead State aspect, I caught myself not giving a fuck about the backstory or character of a freshly recruited NPC when I already had more than 20 (probably even 30) of them in the shelter (many of them doing nothing), and an established raiding party that rarely changed.

 

[makiavelli747]

The only real problem with combat is that zombies bite does not infect you. They did it in hardcore patch but things like that should be in basic game.
I believe they thought pussy-players won't pull it off.

 

[Telengard]

Abandoning the RPG checklist power curve would have been way way better than escalating zombie stats. "Over here, these zombies are all level 10, you have to have tier 3 weapons to go there." Ugh.

Definitively better. Better even in ways people might not even see until they were in game. Better not just in appearance, but in the sense that the design choices would actually support and reinforce the gameplay and story.

There is no reason for these design choices to have been brought together to make an rpg. It's square peg, round hole stuff. (Which is not to say that post-apocalyptic fiction can't be rpg'd. It's just apocalyptic futures that have only one low-tier monster in them that aren't rpg, instead of, for instance, the rpg goodness of a plethora of irradiated monsters for you to progress against. Or something.)

 

[valcik]

Hint for all non-native English speakers: passwords for data items are stored in scripts.aod file, starting at $1C3598

 

[lightbane]

One thing that no-one mentioned so far is that even ignoring all of the flaws about using zombies as a main enemy in a turn-based rpg, the game has a FATAL flaw that makes said creatures even more defenseless and boring to fight: for some stupid reason, zombie attacks cannot attack in diagonal tiles, only cardinal ones, so whenever a bunch of zombies want to swarm a character, they'll surround him in a perfect, fully synchronized formation that covers every side before they start their attack.
Put an obstacle to prevent them from doing that and the AI will waste their turn moving around. Meanwhile, two-handed attacks and dogs can attack diagonally, which means that a pack of angry dogs will be always way more dangerous than any number of zombies.


Also, in spite of the game's fluff mentioning that the Zombie Virus cannot infect infants and elder people, you do encounter plenty of "young bodies" and "old bodies" as a type of possible zombie, so they couldn't even get their own lore right.

 

[Zombra]

You're suggesting that:

* Dogs and humans are equally well-suited for pack hunting;

* Large weapons should have about the same tactical range as biting someone;

* "Young" zombies are meant to represent undead infants.

I think there may be a reason these keenly perceptive points haven't been brought up before.

 

[lightbane]

* Dogs and humans are equally well-suited for pack hunting;

* Large weapons should have about the same tactical range as biting someone;

You got me on the young zombies one (although they had smallish bodies IIRC). But no, I meant that zombies should have been able to attack diagonally, there's no need to change their animations, attack ranges or anything like that. That would have allowed them to truly attack in swarms and be really dangerous, as they're supposed to do. Incidentally, they are also unable of being able to walk through fire for some reason, in spite of lacking a sense of self-preservation (but that may be an issue from the game engine, since a tile on fire is a literal barrier for anyone, even if you have armor with 100% resistance to fire).

 

[cherry blossom]

Zombies cannot attack diagonally for the same reason humans cannot attack diagonally with small melee weapons either. It is a design choice. Not an elegant one, though, as human characters also had to jump through hoops to get into a cardinal attack position at times, wasting precious APs and it also lessens the zombie threat of swarming. They could introduce conditional exceptions into how diagonal attacks were handled but chose not to for want of simplicity.

I wasn't too bothered by it and accepted to roll with it early in the game. But it is indeed a thematic flaw.

 

[tuluse]

Story-wise, an apocalyptic fiction tale needs intimacy. You can't have a huge cast of characters, because that's not apocalyptic. A small group of characters (mostly normal-moron in caliber) who struggle to survive in an ever-tightening nightmare scenario - that's what the form of this fiction is. This kind of story needs a very small cast, with few extras anywhere, so that the group faces a reality that there is no help coming. All so that the viewer feels how alone and isolated this group really are. It needs that; what it doesn't need is a weird when-wilderness-creatures-attack scenario, where you trip over people every minute. That isolation is the bit that is the horror part of zombie-apocalyptic horror. The horror is not the zombies, but the isolation, and the fact that the survivors are morons who will receive no help. Lose the isolation, and you lose the horror.

There would be another way to go. Which is make the theme the cheapness of life in hard conditions. Make the player decide who lives and dies all the time and constantly cycle in fresh blood. However, this game isn't deadly enough for that (and you're clearly meant to build up a community).

Likewise, you need the sense of loss from the lead character. That is, for anyone not getting their apocalypse rocks off just being in a zombie apocalypse story, the lead is the one who expresses to the viewer why this apocalyptic vision that you're gazing upon isn't a perfectly normal situation for this imaginary world. His loss is what illustrates just how painful and broken this world is. His loss is the story.

Thus, for Dead State, the lead character needs to have been someone from the community. Such as, a police lieutenant. Possible scenario - The chief dies in the initial zombie attack. So, back at headquarters, while everyone still is shaken and doesn't know what's going on, the senior lieutenant takes charge and introduces you to the game. Then gets bit, and you have to shoot him. And so you, lowly lieutenant though you might be, end up in charge of headquarters and eventually the community, because you are the authority that's left. That's the kind of story that lays out for the viewer just what this apocalypse has cost everyone, and just what it's going to take to survive in this harsh new reality. And that kind of harsh, personal story is what makes apocalyptic fiction work.

I'll only note the PC doesn't need to be the lead with this. It would be interesting if the PC wasn't making decisions and instead had to choose which leader he wanted to support who was making decisions and then deal with the consequences. Also, you'd get to see that character's story and perspective more. This would make writing work better I think as the player doesn't have 30 years of memories of the town built up to care about.

 

[lightbane]

Zombies cannot attack diagonally for the same reason humans cannot attack diagonally with small melee weapons either. It is a design choice. Not an elegant one, though, as human characters also had to jump through hoops to get into a cardinal attack position at times, wasting precious APs and it also lessens the zombie threat of swarming.

But that's the thing: swarming IS the main strategy of zombies in fiction. Remove that and then they become an annoying speed-bump. It would have been fine if their ability to attack diagonally was an unique thing that only they can do (besides dogs and two-handed weapons, as mentioned before).

Another issue is that in spite of the AI's improvements, enemies clearly prefer to target your party no matter what. That, or military personnel and gangs have superhuman discipline in order to ignore 2/3 zombies chewing their faces, just so that they can keep shooting your guys.

 

[cherry blossom]

That's what I said.

I didn't experience that second part. Human enemies seemed to prioritise targets based on proximity and numbers. If zombies were on their ass, they let me off the hook until they got rid off the zombs.

 

[Gunnar]

Zombies seem to have a flat percentage chance to knock you down on a hit, it happened to me all the time even when I was fully decked out in Apocalypse armour and riot gear. Then they all get together and feast on your face. That is the real danger of being swarmed by them.

 

[Mark Richard]

Another issue is that in spite of the AI's improvements, enemies clearly prefer to target your party no matter what. That, or military personnel and gangs have superhuman discipline in order to ignore 2/3 zombies chewing their faces, just so that they can keep shooting your guys.

I never got that, but then one of my favourite tactics was to pull back and manage the two groups (zombies and human enemies) as they battled for supremacy, picking someone off here or there to keep the sides even. The player is aware of the noise their weapons generate and can choose to hold fire at key moments, whereas AI-controlled humans don’t seem to care.

I was able to accept Dead State’s clunky ruleset and have fun within it, but don’t blame anyone who can’t. The game is rougher than your mum after a Twilight marathon.

 

[Roguey]

DoubleBear's new game for those who don't keep up with their forums or visual novels: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-high-a-new-visual-novel-by-doublebear.110450

 

[Severian Silk]

How come every character, male or female, looks like a butch lesbian?

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

shitty devs, shitty game, glad it flopped hard af

 

[Roguey]

shitty devs, shitty game, glad it flopped hard af

It did pretty respectable after sales. Most indies can only dream of 100,000+ sales.