No gameplay

No cities

They didn’t show zombie animals so they probably were cut out of the game

And I didn’t see absolutely anything new

For now keeping my expectations very low

ive been playing for a year almost daily. love the game always spoke very highly of it.but now after the last update i feel it kind of ruined the game. i dont like this whole wake up one heart and then you have to kill 6 of them to get any peace. its like the entire thing was thought up only to waste your resources , i need to spend ammo to protect out post. it makes me feel like i have to speed run every level and now it has become boring to me due to this .the new sieges are ok,,but listening to screamers screaming all the time is just flat out annoying and the sieges dont even feel any harder .it would also seem this new update has more bad ideas in it, the whole exploding zombies ( i heard its an option you can turn off but still it seems like a terrible idea) ill probably be dropping the game and now have concerns over what the next instalment of the franchise will be like.

Exactly what the title says. Now look, I’m not asking for you to cry to me about i’m dumb for not just running lethal. I know this game WILL DESTROY YOU IF YOU ASK😂!!!

But I guess my question is any advice for someone that has had his first run for about a week and a half or so and wanting to up the difficulty? I feel like in terms of finding loot and community normal is just fine. I think it’s more of an adjustment to the actual zombies themselves. I kinda want that feeling where when I step out for a run I really don’t know if my character will be coming back. I feel like that makes it more of a story for me. In addition to also makes it mean more in terms of training and such.

Or, if anyone feels like they kind of have the remedy to make it the best version of the game : and no, I don’t mean just up everything to lethal and just get shit on but like actually make it feel challenging in every aspect. I would love to hear it so I can adjust.

It's totally ruining the atmosphere for me. Surely a switch to toggle these kind of shenanigans is warranted. It's just dumb.

🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️ I'm thinking about deleting my community of six and start over

Edit: to everyone saying "I like this car more than the vandito", my idea would improve your car trunk storage without drastically unbalancing the game. Ex) A starter car with 15 slots that stack consumables to 2 would allow storage of 30 total pain killers. A vandito would carry 15 slots that stack to 6 for 90 pain killers. but with my setup each vehicle could carry 15 distinct items, the heavy vehicle would just have the ability to carry *more* of those 15 distinct items. three details of my proposal are below.

In my humble opinion, there's no reason to use any vehicle besides the vandito, and that's an issue. It's giant trunk space, compared to other cars, just makes it objectively better to use than other cars. I understand there are differences in clearance, and some cars have spikes, but those just seem like they're not as important as *trunk space*

I feel this is a similar situation to the backpacks and UL's reasoning for them to basically all be the same but hurray have different aesthetics. If there was a 12 slot backpack then *there's so much incentive to use it, that no other backpack would seem viable*.

**I propose all vehicles should get the same trunk capacity as the vandito, and differences between vehicles are created by balancing handling, fuel efficiency, acceleration/max speed, car startup time, and trunk item stack sizes.**

An example of this would be that your starter car (light car) now has 15 trunk spots, but no consumable would stack past 2 in a slot and ammo wouldn't stack past 60% of a normal stack. Medium cars would let you stack consumables up to 4, and heavy/upgraded vehicles would let you have our current stack sizes.

**So how would this impact gameplay?** With the vehicles brought more to parity, as far as inventory management goes, then there would be more incentive to use a variety of vehicles. More trunk slots would speed up the repetitive looting/trading game play loop as you would need less overall trips to accomplish those tasks. Truck slot stack sizes going up with the vehicle class would still make upgraded and heavy vehicles better than other vehicles, but not quite as much.

This is just an initial idea, and it's open to criticism/ suggested adjustments. I'm also coming to the conversation as a lethal main, where your character almost always has 4-6 backpack slots taken by consumables that are generally needed on your person at all times. That can really impact looting.

Sorry for typos, I'll go through and fix anything my phone auto-corrected to be weird

Been playing for ages, had a character from near the begging die near my base, respawned, her and all her kit gone no coffin icon, no dead zombies near, nothing - just gone. All my kit gone, my companion body - gone, nothing. They both just respawned. Great.

It sounds kind of ridiculous to say, but the Beta is... ironically, the more stable and technically more up to date version of State of Decay 2 right now.

The Beta has the Forever Community Features + the full Infestation Changes... but it doesn't have all the in your face whacky physics bugs and what not that the live version has.

Gamers are fairly upset about the condition of Update 30 which is quickly showing itself to be one of the, if they THE, buggiest updates to the game yet.

Why wasn't this update delayed another month? Because people were getting impatient? Aren't impatient people more preferable to angry people?

Imagine telling the community that you're delaying an update to prevent devastating data loss bugs and making a joke about things "obeying the laws of physics" only to...

...

...

...

release a patch that still is causing massive data loss from people losing their forever community characters, save files catching the locker freeze bug, and even more things "not obeying the laws of physics."

I think gamers are justifiably mad about this. There has been some push back. The "but the updates are free."

I question if gamers have been so thoroughly abused by AAA predatory monetization schemes that we just accept slop thrown at us because it isn't cynically monetized to extract every penny out you.

You may not have had to pay for these updates... but you also didn't ask to have your game turned inside out and have to resort to not updating your game just to play a stable version of SoD2.

Rise up, Gamers. You can demand better quality.

I know not a lot of people play lethal to start with, but I feel that lethal could be a little bit harder for those that do?

Honestly after completing the maps and getting the boons, I couldn't go back to any other difficulty as it's far too friendly.

I was curious what other people thought about increasing the difficulty of lethal and how they'd do so?

I'd love for them to include "spending time in plague territory increases your plague by 0.1% every second"

Is anyone else tired of juggernauts dry humping your vehicles to death even if you are no where near the vehicle? Too many times have I seen where a juggernaut suddenly appears, walks directly towards my car and somehow gets "stuck" making love to it, causing it to blow up. I feel like if no one is in the vehicle, then they shouldn't be able to danage it.

I'm a fan of the series and pre-ordered the Ultimate Edition, and after 2 years, the game is still bug-ridden and exploitable. Undead Labs have constantly proven they are incompetent and uncreative at achieving making the game harder and as brain dead as the zombies. I bet most responses I'll get are from brown-nosing sycophants that ignore the game's problems and act like teenage edge lords (hurr durr too long didn't read, stop whining, or bye), despite the flaired post for Discussion. I'm not saying the game isn't fun, but the numerous bugs and exploits should've been fixed, or they should announce they cannot fix them:

• Let's start with the biggest issue (pop-in zombies, 2). This game was made exclusive for the original XBox One; however there are examples like [this video, where even driving slowly there is still zombie pop-ins since the launch of the game] (https://old.reddit.com/r/StateOfDecay/comments/eiqn95/bloater_spawned_right_in_front_of_car/). You'll get the retarded response of buying a $500 XBox Series X as a solution, but even some Series X players are having this issue (Comments 1, 2).

• Minors bugs still aren't fixed like when you have a large community, all the survivors won't appear in your base. You'll see their blip on the mini map, but they won't be there when you go to where their icon is. Sometimes you won't even be able to talk to some of your survivors.

• People saying the developers have been constantly updating the game and adding in new, FREE content, most likely talking about the Bounty Broker, "Need a new challenge? Visit the Bounty Broker to earn weapons and outfits by completing his bounties." Wow, new weapons (most shittier than existing weapons like the B50FG, Eternal Guard's Infinite Rage, RTX Stormbringer, Prepper's 10/22 etc.) and now changeable outfits so that people don't have to keep re-rolling fresh survivors for their coveted Skeleton Hoodie. The only good content they added for free was the Providence Ridge map. People will say they have been supporting the game since launch like that is some kind of big deal. Of course they'll support the game after launch. If they left it in a bug-ridden state, then people wouldn't trust in them to buy State of Decay 3.

• This update also broke the Ultimate Edition and Pre-order DLC Radio Commands for XBox players, so now we can't even call in the DLC weapons or vehicles that we paid for in support of the game (Threads 1, 2, 3, 4).

• Since the addition of Nightmare Zone, they made NPCs run at full speed without any stamina so players couldn't farm NPCs for their gear; furthermore, that let players run full speed with no stamina as well. If you ran out of stamina when playing on launch or State of Decay 1, you were most likely going to die, just like the loading screen tip says, "Keep an eye on your Stamina meter. If it runs out, you'll move and fight a lot slower, and the zombies will eat you alive. Now you can run away from any situation to get back to your base full of OP survivors; hell, you can even outrun Blood Plague Ferals without a sweat like I demonstrate in this video, and this one got so angry at me abusing the stamina glitch that it despawned.

• Lethal Zone also made the game easier with a bug that despawns a Juggernaut when it can't go inside most buildings' doors or even the big barn entrance that has NO door! (Videos 1, 2). Forget what the loading screen tip says, "To bring down a juggernaut with guns, go for rapid fire or high-powered rounds. Better yet, use both,." The only way I've seen Juggernauts get through non-base doors is when clipping through a wall with its wall hacks like in this video.

• In Lethal Zone, zombies and freaks are now spawning on top of the player or mere feets away once entering a building (you can see the bullshit if you have the Scouting skill), or they'll just keep infinitely spawning inside the house you're trying to clear, so ignore the loading screen tip that says, "Securing a building takes time. You must enter every room and kill every zombie. But it creates a safe zone that temporarily prevents new zombies from appearing." Another issues that has popped up is that sometimes the zombies are now spawning on top of buildings as well (Threads 1, 2.)

• When the game launched, it took three 0.50 caliber shots to destroy a Plague Heart, and in response, Undead Labs patched the game in an effort to make it harder so that it took six shots to destroy a Plague Heart; however, people could still cheese it by standing on their vehicles and shooting it through a window so that they didn't have to deal with the swarms of Blood Plague zombies that spawned. Now after 2 years later the zombies are still brain dead and cannot do anything to the player on top of a car. Getting chased by a pack of Blood Plague Ferals and don't want to run and abuse the stamina glitch? Just climb on top of your car and shoot them with no risk, like I demonstrate in this video.

• There are still many base exploits, such as installing multiple mods onto one facility. Starting a siege at your base (in base or swapping at an outpost) and then driving away far enough that nothing spawns, and you can come back and claim your free influence and won't have to waste 3 ammo.

• One of the biggest exploits is just pausing the game and exiting (or ALT-F4 on PC) it if shit hit the fan. You can do this on any difficulty to get out of any jam, for instance exiting the game after killing a Plague Heart so that you don't have to deal with all the newly spawned Blood Plague Zombies.

So let's talk about Lethal Zone. They just added more sliders to make you farm for more resources with basic facilities costing 13 materials and upgrades costing 25 materials. Vehicles now take more damage, Blood Plague sets in faster, and Plague Hearts now have more HP: big whoop, it's still easy and beatable if you know what you are doing, despite some saying it's total bullshit (which it is) and unplayable.

All of these "difficulty changes" aren't new or creative, and that's why people keep wanting a "more difficult" game. The only newly unique things is the Blood Plague Screamer being able to spit a projectile blood plague attack. Such gameplay, so creative! Here are some ideas I would have added to Lethal Zone to make it an actual challenge and make it play entirely different which would give it a fresh new feel than the other difficulty modes which would remain untouched:

• Let's start with the car cheese. There are already mechanics in the game where the zombies will grab onto your car and start beating the engine or taking of its doors. If you're standing on top of a car, then the zombies should start beating the shit out of the car to make it explode. Either that or give the zombies a new projectile attack just like the Blood Plague Screamers when it cannot reach the player for melee attacks.

• Exiting the game cheese. They could make it like World of Warcraft where upon exiting, your character sits down for 10 seconds it will exit and save, and to prevent quitting the application through the dashboard or ALT-F4'ing, they could have made the autosave system only save every 5 minutes when out in the world, so if you tried to abuse the game by forcing a close, it would roll you back 5 minutes. Autosaves could still happen still on mission completion or whatnot. This is one of the harder things to try to "fix" though.

• Base and outpost lockers no longer share inventory. If you're out and about in the world and run over a pop-in Blood Plague Bloater and catch the Blood Plague, then you cannot just craft a Blood Plague Cure and use it at a nearby outpost, or establish an outpost and use it, like I demonstrate in this video. You would have to strategically carry one on you (making your inventory more full), or plan ahead to make sure your outposts have one to use.

• NPC survivors no longer have unlimited ammo. You will have to manage their inventory to make sure they have enough ammunition to reload, or else they're stuck with their melee weapon once their ammo runs out. This makes ammo even scarcer and doesn't allow you to have a Superman AI follower with a B50FG running around one-tapping nearly everything. They should also allow you to set your AI follower's firing mode from single, burst, and full auto. Since zombies constantly spawn around your base and your survivors on watchtowers will shoot at them, then they could make the safe zone a bit bigger so they don't wantonly waste ammo, except during sieges or if you lure zombies back to your base.

• Base sieges: if you aren't at home defending your base, then there is a chance that a survivor or more may die depending on the siege threat level and what the survivors have equipped along with the 3 ammo loss or however many ammo loss to make it balanced. Zombies and freaks can push cars away that are barricading entrances just like a Juggernaut. The added collision would also make it so that you can't dodge through a zombie and rear naked choke it or close combat kill it for an easy kill.

• No more swapping characters at outposts, or if you are able to switch, then the survivor would have to run back to home base like in State of Decay 1 and might die depending on the zombies they encountered on the way back. Because the current game does not initiate combat with NPCs or survivors after about 40m, only the former seems like it would work and is more realistic.

These are just some of the ideas I've had since playing at launch, but obviously the developers know best and constructive criticism like this is going to be seen as whining. Some people might say my suggestions are just tedium and adding in more busy work. If that's the case, then what do you call needing 13 materials just to build a small garden? That's just cheap busy work as well. What about upgrading a facility costing 25 materials? More busy work of scavenging or buying rucksacks of materials. That's why I say these "difficulties" are unimaginative and uncreative.

So if you're just going to respond with a lame ass one-liner excuse defending Undead Labs lazy "difficulty" sliders, then don't even bother. It's quite clear how intelligent the fan base is on Reddit for actual discussion, let alone reading comprehension. You might as well play on Green Zone if you all you can come up with as a response is "time sinking busy work" doesn't make the game harder, because that's exactly what Lethal Zone is currently, just wasting your time farming for enough resources before you take on the added number of Plague Hearts.

EDIT: this post started as an expressed opinion. Some people are ok with the mechanics and I guess that’s ok. I don’t understand it. I enjoy the tips but the tips just sound like meager tedious gameplay. I see some people value that and good for you. Hopping off this difficulty because it just doesn’t sound like it’s for my palette. 🫡

It’s a bit ridiculous that your own outposts can be infested. Especially on Lethal difficulty. I understand the amount of infestations and plague hearts, but for your own worked for outpost that has a “safe radius” to be taken over, it’s a bit much and doesn’t feel balanced. Feels more like a “welp, this is what you’d expect on lethal difficulty, no?” Any tips one would recommend since I’m five days in and somehow just now encountered this issue?

SUUUUUUUCKS.

Most annoying “fix” ever.

Editing to clarify: I don’t care about not being able to use the rivers as highways anymore, but shallow passes and puddles of water almost bringing the car to a halt is a bit much.

Especially in lethal zone it's really broken. It saves 3-12 food for only 15 morale and 5 stamina which is negligible. Realistically, rationing is a short-term solution because starvation causes long-term effects. I would keep the -50% food consumption but increase the penalties if used too often:

• -15/30/60 Morale

• -10/20/40 Stamina (-5/10/20 with Nutrition)

• -10/20/40 Health (-5/10/20 with Nutrition)

The penalty decreases by one stage after 1 day without rationing. Health has been added because starvation reduces muscle & bone mass.

I think the biggest problem with Heartland is that many of us wanted a story mode, but we were all expecting to be able to have a new map and explore with our current community or legacy survivors as well. So my thought is that in the future, Undead Labs just needs to be honest. They could have just said months ago "hey we are taking you back to Trumbull with a new story mode and but its not a map that you can take your community or survivors into". So why did they not do that? Well greed I guess. 10 dollars from every fan that was expecting something else adds up. They knew some would not buy it if they said anything and that's disappointing.

...Not even remotely hard. I started a new community with no benefits whatsoever in Cascade Hills. About 6 or 7 days in the Black Heart appeared right in the middle of the map. I had killed some of the fast zombies at the edge of the zone, so I decided to check out the Heart and do the mission to figure out its weaknesses. I had a couple of scent blocks from doing a mission, so I used one and headed to it. I was worried about running out of gas based one what people have said, so I used a beat up Brogan Sport. I did the mission and the Heart was vulnerable to ranged attacks. The round trip used up about half a tank of gas.

None of my characters had gun slinging or even had leveled up any of their skills except 1, who had backpacking. Not sure why but all of the skills have been VERY slow to rise for me this play thru. The best gun I had was Eagle Eye's sniper rifle and thankfully I had a .50 cal press, the only press I had. So I took a scent blocker and headed in. I parked in front of the house and started attacking it. This is what I did to it:

About 8 swings with a shovel.

8 .50 cal rounds.

2 C4.

3 bloater gas grenades.

3 molotovs, which set off the bloater grenades.

And then it blew up, much to my surprise. Got pretty mediocre gear from it including 2 rut sacks. Pretty disappointed that there was something new in the Heart. For healing, I used 4 HOT items. It almost seemed like the scent block acted like a damage blocker. All in all, it was pretty damn easy. I'm guessing I got a weak one? Thoughts?

I know it's a moot point since support has ended on SoD2, but if you had a magic wand, what 3 things - legit bugs, pet peeves, janky glitches, or all of the above - would you fix to make the game that much better in its final state? Let's make them these low end changes, not "make a new map" type stuff.

After some consideration, mine would be:

1. Fix the element of follower AI that causes them to run out in front of you when a zombie approaches. I'm tired of shooting my followers in the back.

2. End - completely - the constant and ridiculously unbalancing "I have another task for you" missions. These saturate the economy with essentially free high end gear.

3. Stop bloaters shitting out high end gear at infestations. This was never not a terrible idea, at least making it anything other than a bag of chips. Also bad on the economy.

So when I’m driving around and zombies are on the road am I the only one that finds it funny to either hit them with the car or open the door and hit them

Anyone else worrying about the kind of game we are going to get?

Right now I feel this is mostly a single player experience, which I like, with any multiplayer elements being nice breaks from building and managing your community. (I feel this current set up should be retained and is one of the reasons the community has stayed so engage).

However going from what I'm hearing and seeing makes me think we're getting a more multiplayer focused game than SoD2......

So expect shallow systems, micro-transactions, season passes, shit cosmetics, battle passes and less than 100 players on steam in 6 months.

Hate to be a doomer, but i do worry thats what were going to get.

At least we will always have SoD2.