On Sat, 26 Aug 2023 22:13:27 -0600, PW
<
iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:
On Sun, 27 Aug 2023 01:58:38 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
I played more. Its management stuff annoy me. I just want to play its >>action parts! :(
Oh rats Ant! I don't like the sound of that!
I wonder if the second game is better or worse than the original in
that regard.
The 'management' in the former was, I felt, fairly limited but not too obtrusive, and it felt true to the setting. It's all done in first
person; for those worried, it's nothing like a management sim or
anything. But to survive, you need to collect resources (varying from
food to medicine, to lumber, and more) that will let you build up your
base and keep your people alive.
The driving mechanic of the game is how long it takes to heal from
injuries. Although there are 'instant heal' med-packs, they rarely fix
you up to 100%, and to completely heal you need to rest up in your
base. But while that character is resting, you still need to go out
and find more resources. Fortunately, you can switch between
characters, so while one character is healing, you can take another
out into the wastelands. Having a large stable of characters thus
becomes a necessity, since you will always have some in the infirmary.
But having a lot of survivors means you need to build up the base,
which requires more resources. It's a never-ending cycle.
Which is, ultimately, leads to some of the game's problems. Firstly,
because you can switch to any character, there's no main protagonist,
which means there's no driving narrative. This makes all the
characters - and much of the action - feel very generic; you have no
emotional attachment.
Furthermore, that cycle starts becoming very repetitive very quickly. Personally, I think that the 'management' of the game actually works
really well... except for how pointless it all becomes. Struggling to
find enough ammo or medpacks... that's all very on-point for the
zombie genre, and overall I think the mechanics of it are done pretty
well. But there's a real lack of reward for all your effort, except
the knowledge that tomorrow you'll have to do the same thing again.
Of course, that's on-point for the zombie-genre too. Ultimately, you
never really WIN in zombie apocalypses. The whole genre is about
achieving a teetering survival that can be swept aside with one bad
day. This precariousness is what makes the genre so fascinating, but
if it goes on too long it becomes tedious. Most games resolve this
issue by limiting the length of the adventure. But the narrative in
"State of Decay" is too slow and the gameplay too lacking in variety
to maintain the intensity; after a while, all you see is the endless
grind.
TL;DR: at least with the first game, it's not the management that was
the problem, it was the too languorous pacing.
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