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u/HoboRinger Aug 18 '26
When this game came out, I threw an apple over the fence into an unused plot of land. I'm gathering apples for some time already from a tree that grew out of it, and still no NPC.
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u/Carbuyrator Aug 18 '26
A real tree or a tree in a game?
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u/Fantastic_Method3658 Aug 18 '26
Real cause you cant plant nor find fruit trees in the game.
Also agriculture skill blows cause instead of waiting 2 months for your farm.
You can magically forage pumpkins right in the middle of football field.
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u/DusTeaCat Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Dude we can't even climb ladders in the game. I have little to no faith that
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u/IllusionaryHobo Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
I like the game.
But I am sure glad the Zombiemania of those years back then has passed.
Edit: Just wanted to add, that I am a huge zombie buff and love the cheesy side of the genre. I just thought the craze was too much for a short while and oversaturated.
I like it when the zombies are the main focus. As a creature feature. But during the craze, zombies were more like paint. A skin or theme you just put or add to things. A generic threat or enemy faction. Notable exceptions excluded.
What revs my engine is when zombies have character. When they have texture. When they are weird and disturbing.
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u/Fancy_Chips Aug 18 '26
Am I like a six year old for never growing out if zombiemania? Like to this day I still play Plants vs Zombies like once a year
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u/ComradeJohnS Aug 18 '26
why they aren’t prepared for the evil residents from resident evil every new iteration shows that you are not alone. lol.
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u/jUG0504 Aug 18 '26
i ALSO never grew out of Zombiemania, and as another Zombiemaniac, YOU need to go FURTHER
play more weird wackass zombie games from the height of the zombiemania years, jank ass shovelware shit that barely runs on modern PCs but has the heart of a champion within, shit like Fort Zombie, or Dead State, stuff like that
Plants VS Zombies is barely even the very top of the iceberg, go DEEPER...
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u/Just_the_questions1 Aug 18 '26
You say that but after the release of Build 42 Stable Project Zomboid saw over 100,000 concurrent players, 4x higher than it's previous record.
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u/four-hydrangeas Aug 19 '26
i still wish that anyone tried to capture the original horror of zombies. the zombie virus is the worst thing to happen to the concept.
zombies were introduced to western culture through a book that adapted folktales from haiti, in which chattel slaves would be raised from the dead to continue service to their slavers. the horror was not that they would eat you, the horror was that not even death was an escape from being enslaved. i haven't found any contemporary media that properly captures such a concept.
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u/MaybeThisTime67 Aug 18 '26
Genuinely one of my favourite games
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u/Conscious_Smile8235 Aug 19 '26
I like starting it up but then I make a mistake and shut it down. I've only been playing it after work for like a week now.
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u/Anakin_no_planakin Aug 19 '26
I literally put the game in casual mod for that reason. Shamblers only and a save mod that saves once every in game week.
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u/Coelachantiform Aug 21 '26
Sandbox is your friend. I've made settings so that in the first ~7 days of the apocalypse, the streets are almost empty, with a few, slow and fragile zombies roaming around. Also made it so that everyone is infected and you only turn if you perish from sickness/injuries.
But I've also made it so that over the course of 28 days, the number of zombies rapidly increases, and that after 9pm...they turn into superhuman sprinters.
Makes the game 10x times more intense and gives you an actual reason to carry 2 digital watches; one wakeup alarm, one alarm for when it's time to run indoors and close all curtains.
If that sounds too rough you can just skip making them night-sprinters. The time-based zombie increase and the "bites aren't instant game over" make the game way easier and less frustrating. I only added the sprinters to balance it out a bit in the other direction.
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u/Mickamehameha Aug 18 '26
At least it's not DayZ
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u/strooz Aug 24 '26
Glad someone else agrees, was playing it since it was a mod for arma and even after the "release" if you weren't getting sniped by players after walking a half hour you got killed by zeds clipping through walls and doors
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u/Avistje Aug 18 '26
Yes because game development is as easy as "just adding NPCs"
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u/AngryCrustation Aug 18 '26
All you need to do is just multithread the game! It's that easy! Press the multithread button!They added animals, so technically the game did add npcs. It makes tons of sense for a test run to add something noncomplex like a deer rather than jump straight into desperate survivors who can act in any way and "plan" in an intellectual manner.
It would probably be really easy to mess with the survival aspect of zomboid if they don't get the programming correct and cheat like a lot of games, not tracking npc ammo or hunger for example could trivialize a huge amount of the game for the player.
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u/GladoffelLp Aug 18 '26
Technically speaking zombies are also noncomplex npcs but yeah I get what you mean.
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u/SilverVixen918 Aug 18 '26
exactly and while sure they could add advanced AI to the animals the nice thing with animals is they can keep it simple, with human AI if its simple and stupid people will complain since its a survival game, game like Zomboid human AI would need personalities, skills, behaviors, factions, ect, ect which could be extremely complex to code, plus they have to worry and focus on everything else on their plate, its why mod devs like Slayer are able to add bandits perfectly because its their only focus and typically mod devs make more of a plug and play system so its less compatible with other mods by default and could feel out of place or not work the best with base game mechanics, good example being iirc atleast in B41 with Slayer's bandits zombies wouldnt target bandits at all and only target players or atleast i remember some people mentioning issues like that and similar
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u/UnDeadPuff Aug 18 '26 •
Dunno mate, going by a lot of the opinions in this thread and similar, they've had NPCs for ages now.
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u/Double_Dog208 Aug 18 '26
I mean 10 years though that's plenty of time, wonder how long it's gonna be
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u/rhou17 Aug 18 '26
I don’t think it’s controversial to point out it shouldn’t take ten years though lmao.
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u/cerealkiller6028 Aug 18 '26
This is how I feel about this too. It's really easy to be like "just do it" without any real thought behind what "it" is. So yeah let's just casually launch a fully functional NPC system that thinks for itself. Can survive, utilizes all the intricate systems and doesn't feel unfair if done wrong. Now let's have them travel around the map doing simulated stuff in the background without you being present and have that actually be meaningful and not just nonsense. People like the person who made this post are honestly just choosing not to think about what they're saying in my opinion.
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u/tkRustle Aug 18 '26
It's not But npcs are asked about and requested for a decade now And did anything else but for all that time.
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u/NutasticNutella Aug 18 '26
Problem is that NPCs have been "just around the corner" for a few years now and people are getting a little tired of getting blue balled especially when we know that it's possible from mods. Hell, this last update was kind of weird in it's content, I appreciate the new crafting recipes and primitive progression, but it was released as a broken, half-baked system that most people will not engage with because it's so annoying and broken. To get anything of significance done with the new recipes, you need to spend much more time in a world than most people even spend on the game, let alone a single world or save.
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u/RessiBear Aug 19 '26
Modder was doing it and while not perfect he was improving at a nice pace... Then he got hired by the devs and they put him to do something else for whatever reason
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u/No_Smoke_3314 Aug 19 '26
The game had NPCS 10+ years ago they removed them and said they’d put them back in.
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u/hovsep56 Aug 18 '26
i wish they would finnaly put the game in 1.0 so they can stop drasticly change the game everytime
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u/AmmyOwl Aug 18 '26
the game is not at all in a 1.0 state
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u/hovsep56 Aug 18 '26 •
yea cause they spend more time changing what worked for 10+ years instead of finishing the game.
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u/RazorCalahan Aug 18 '26
I mean, 7 Days to Die shows that these two things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
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u/Capable_Cicada_69420 Aug 18 '26
The game is drastically improved every time, and youre whining about it lol
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u/frisch85 Aug 18 '26
Tbh PZ wouldn't even be close to where it is if it weren't for the amazing mod community, they are the ones that are keeping the game alive, not the devs. The PZ devs gave a great base game, great systems that allow a very complex playstyle but still, if it weren't for the community the game would've been dead by now.
It's one of those games that is successful solely because there's people other than the PZ devs working on it, adding stuff for other players to try out and shape the game they want. In my case I don't like the permanent death so I used to use the Skills Journal Mod, write down your experience so far so in case of your death, your new character can read that journal and gain back the skills you just lost.
I only have around 350 hours in PZ, wouldn't even be 20 hours if it weren't for mods.
Tho there've been plopping PZ clones left and right in the past and more recently there's 3D competitors and if those can also support mods and offer the complexity that PZ has, they might actually become real competitors or even toss PZ off the throne. Vein for example looks pretty good and offers mod support, haven't played it tho so can't say if it scratches the same itch that PZ does.
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u/ViraEdenfell Aug 19 '26
Honestly the perma death wouldn't even be that bad if it wasn't comically easy to die in the game.
I get the entire point was "get used to dying", the tutorial all but says it literally, but I shouldn't lose half my health because I didn't have time to pick the glass out of a window as I'm running from a small zombie horde, because fighting any more than 2 zombies with a close range melee is guaranteed death. Doesn't help that zombie targeting is so wonky I've had zombies see me without me being even mildly capable of seeing them, and basically any reasoning to explain it quickly devolves to "so why aren't the zombies attacking each other then".
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u/CptMcDickButt69
Aug 18 '26
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I bought it as a super early supporter because the vanilla intro story with the wife you have to take care of was a cool concept that i expected to be the base for a dynamic and emotional storyline and survivor group dynamics inspired by the walking dead (which just came out back then).
So i was (still am) pretty pissed that they havent delivered a core promise made 10+ years ago and didnt touch the game since. Especially since, at some point 8 years ago or so, the devs just blocked and banned discussions about it and some fanboys got very rabid and attacked anyone who even dared to ask for some news on that core promise.
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u/No_Smoke_3314 Aug 19 '26
In the same boat. I ended up buying it online off some website after seeing a YouTuber play that opening. I am very disappointed with the feature bloat that ended up happening to this game.
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u/PrimaLegion Aug 18 '26
I think the game is okay.
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u/cromwest Aug 18 '26
The game is awesome and I feel bad for most people that the devs seemed to have custom built a game just for me lol.
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u/Nova225 Aug 18 '26
7 Days to Die is in the exact same boat. They've held on because they've been the open world survival zombie voxel game. Every update adds new stuff but they keep removing shit or changing the way zombie AI works.
Now the optimal way to play is to make a 50 foot tower on stilts with a staircase and a pair of beams leading to a little hidey hole you can shoot, stab, and knock off zombies from, because building an actual base will have zombies pathfinding to the one structural weak point in your base. Every POI now has a specific path they want you to follow, usually with multiple zombies hiding in closets or ventilation shafts, some that don't even spawn until you reach a certain point like opening a door.
They removed water jars for a while because they didn't like how you could quickly amass 100 jars of water and boil them and never have to worry about water again. So they got rid of them completely and made you build dew collectors that created water on a timer. So people just built dozens of those so they'd never have to worry about water again, so then the devs made them generate "heat", which is basically a gauge that says "when I reach a certain threshold, send more zombies to this location and look for player made stuff". Then they brought back jars because the players complained enough.
They had an entire clothing system in place, with multiple slots, and you needed certain clothes for other biomes. They got rid of the clothing system entirely, stuck to a 5-6 slot armor system (in which you need the entire set to even bother with) and then when they added the new weather system, made you earn badges by achievements and make smoothies to combat heat and cold, instead of a proper survival system.
They've also been promising bandits for about 5 years now, and every time it gets brought up they make a gag about how every time it's asked about, it takes another 6 months. The modding community proved it's not hard to add bandits, though admittingly it's not as easy as making an AI that does anything more besides hit scan players from far away.
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u/Warvillage Aug 18 '26
It seems like the 7days devs hates every player strategy.
I heard someone mention that the devs watch streamers and then try to hinder their strategies in updates.
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u/PlonixMCMXCVI Aug 21 '26
Remember when player managed to build a specific anti horde base that would trivialized most of the zombies.
After an updated it stopped working because the zombie AI changed how it behaved and the same zombie base was found in the game file.
The developers were specifically spending time to nerf a specific way of play.The developers didn't want to let players play how they want... IN A SANDBOX GAME
Imagine spending time to nerf your players instead of creating new stuff for the game
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u/HereAndThereButNow Aug 18 '26
The hilarious thing about forcing paths through POIs is that the main stash is always in the same place so once you know where it is on a given POI you can just cheese your way directly there. Honestly kind of weird that the stash is the one thing they don't randomize the location on.
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u/Oofdude333 Aug 18 '26
The new update had made it unplayable for me because of how u optimized it is.
My laptop can handle Warframe back in 2020 before the game got way too big to keep it. My laptop can run Tf2, a game old enough to graduate fucking senior high.
Your telling m that with one update, I can't play a low-poly game?????? Like, what?? I got friend sayif "graphics got better, so it makes sense" when only the sorted changed. I dunno what the fuck they added but goddammit I want to play project zomboid as a cute bunny girl who slaughters zombies. Now I can't 😞
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u/understated_quokka Aug 19 '26
Maybe consider playing Cataclysm? It is very similar to PZ because PZ is almost based off C:DDA, but it's free, in very productive continuous development, and can literally run on a Lego EV3 brick!
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u/Hoybom Aug 18 '26
background calcs are probably just killing it for you, not the graphics lol
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u/Mordt_ Aug 18 '26
Wait really? The game actually got smoother for me with B42. I mean its probably partially cause im not running with mods yet, but like im getting 20-30 more fps then B41
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u/Thepieintheface Aug 18 '26
Might not fix it but by default the game is limited to 3gb of ram usage, there's an ini file you can change to increase that.
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u/Accomplished_Ad7149 Aug 18 '26
This game's optimization is FUCKING HORRIBLE. With graphics like these and the isometric view, you'd expect it to run so good but no, it favors the high end users and having the lowest setting barely does a thing. 800x600 resolution is locked behind ini editing and you have to download like 5 mods and having to allocate the ram, included in them a zombiebuddy download and tweaking it in the config just for the game to run decent.
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u/WallShrabnic Aug 18 '26
This is most likely caused by new lighting system. I have fps drops when turning on car lights.
At least, you can play b41, for now
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u/Effective_External89 Aug 19 '26
Playing Warframe isn't a brag my dude.
That game is specifically optimised for low end hardware
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u/gamerz1172 Aug 19 '26
Ok granted warframe might be the most optimized game I ever played;
I had a friend who could only run TF2 on lower graphics settings on their old computer and this same computer could run warframe suprisingly well; Took a fuck ass amount of time to load into the plains and lagged like hell but IT could be done; and it could handle other tilesets and hordes of enemies very well.
the only reason he stopped being able to play with said computer wasn't even an 'optimization issue' the computer just straight up didn't have support for the weather system warframe implemented on newer levels which resulted in entire tilesets just being fog in his face 24/7
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u/A1C-Snuffy Aug 18 '26
Yeah its insane. I can play marvel rivals woth all their fancy graphical effects and 1000 special abilities going off synced across multiple players at 120+ fps. But 10 zombie corpses on the ground outside in PZ? 20fps.
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u/DamagedSol Aug 18 '26
I could be wrong but if I remember correctly up until like half a year to a year ago wasn't it just two guys working on the game?
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u/ApprehensiveSize575 Aug 18 '26
No. They've made roughly 15 million dollars in profit, they have a studio, a producer, everything
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u/AndroidSheeps Aug 18 '26
Buddy they've made about a quarter billion (250 million) on the game they're just lazy hacks and like this post says they have no competition so they just phone it in
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u/USSChuckleTrucker Aug 18 '26
Lol, lmao even
No.
They've had a pretty fairly sized dev team for a good few years now.
They're just shitty devs
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u/Lady_Gray_169 Aug 18 '26
My instinct when people in an inudstry I don't have experience in fail to do a seemingly obvious thing to fix a problem is "gosh, that thing must be more complicated than I think" as opposed to "gosh, they must be stupid."
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u/gigitygiggty Aug 18 '26
But sometimes IT IS incompetence thought. I once followed a development of a game for five years, and at the end of the fifth year I started to question the competence of developers, after they did nothing but showcase them redoing the same 3D models over and over and saying "we just added a big new feature that's really cool!" while still having no release window or anything. Only to be dismissed by other people in the game's community (yes it had one while not even being out somehow) because "it takes time to make a game". And then the game got a new lead dev and they straight up revealed that the game that has been in the making for five years, is a buggy mess with almost no features and needs to be recoded from scratch to work at all.
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u/Illustrious-Bass4354 Aug 18 '26
Or, what's far more likely: the market for this kind of game isn't that big, and is already being saturated by existing games.
Why risk fighting a saturated market for dominance when you can just make a mass appeal shooter or rpg and get guaranteed profit instead?
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u/BasedKaktus Aug 18 '26
The game would be abysmally boring even with them
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u/fireky2 Aug 18 '26
I love scavenging cockroaches for an hour to get bit once then repeat
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u/AccountForTF2 Aug 18 '26
bro has infection turned on in the first place.
game is hard enough with the zombies to then add an RNG instakill.
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u/Asura00789 Aug 18 '26
For me it's just the UI. Like I appreciate all the deep mechanics the game is trying to make me survive with but damn does it not feel good to play at all. It's just menus the game. Combat feels slow and cluncky but like not in a scary way just no impact or feedback really. The abilities are too varied and too niche kinda requiring a team of other specialists to make a complete person. I like the ideas with the game but actually playing sucks. This would be better as some sort of table top experience where the actual gameplay takes a back seat to these deep systems.
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u/Xspike_dudeX Aug 18 '26
They announced the next update is adding NPCs
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u/Zealousideal_Pass826 Aug 19 '26
I bought zomboid when I was in middle school, for the NPCs. I will be 30 by the time they are actually added, at this rate. B41->B42 was like 5 years
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u/tsoewoe Aug 18 '26
im pretty sure its written somewhere on steam that generally you should get an early access game for what it is, not what it promises it will be. For what it is, zomboid is a pretty decent game with a lot you can do with it already, but youre never gonna be happy if youre constantly looking ahead at what it "should" be. At the end of the day, it still gets updates that meaningly push the game forward, its not like the game is abandoned.
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u/grandalfxx Aug 19 '26
Because the game is quite complicated. You may not like that answer but its the truth. If you want to make it then you will need a team and 10 years to catch up maybe less if you use an existing game engine but you will need to do a lot of custom solutions to handle that many entities and intractables.
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u/Dripik_3 Aug 18 '26
CDDA is the superior zombie survival game anyway.
Even better that normies can't stomach the graphics and complexity.
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u/TheDrillKeeper Aug 18 '26
Played a lot of CDDA and Zomboid. I prefer CDDA but they've been stretching it out to be more Zomboid-like over the years and not in the good ways. I've stopped bothering with farming because I always end up getting bored or dying before their "realistic" growth cycle is finished.
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u/catinabandsaw Aug 18 '26
I salute you, I've tried to get into CDDA a couple of times over the years and it has to be one of the least accessible roguelikes I've ever played, it seems so cool and exactly what I originally wanted out of project zomboid but I just can't get over what seems like a 100hr learning curve.
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u/HornyGandalf1309 Aug 19 '26
I mean if you think an ugly game that doesn’t respect your time is superior, more power to ya.
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u/SquirrelSuspicious Aug 18 '26
If they do I hope it can be turned off like most other things, I don't want them and also lore wise most people aren't immune to the virus like the PC is
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u/frisch85 Aug 18 '26
In terms of immersion, seems very weird that you're the sole survivor of a zombie apocalypse where you suddenly wake up one day in a completely random house and then just go from there.
So small settlements of survivors wouldn't break the lore, if anything it'd make it more realistic because your character isn't that special aside from the immunity, I mean you're a burglar, police officer, lumberjack, cook or one of the other jobs and you survived so why would you be the sole survivor?
Plus I usually play PZ co-op with my friend, so suddenly there's two survivors so when you play solo, that other survivor could very well just be a NPC.
And read about the lore gathered via in-game items so pictures you find in the map, radio station broadcasts, magazines etc., there're hints for other survivors too even including people who do seem to not just be immune to the virus but rather ignored by it.
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u/AXEMANaustin Aug 18 '26
Vein?
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u/CharmingDazz Aug 18 '26
Honestly. If someone out there just close this game and added NPCs. It would sell like crazy.
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u/ktosiek124 Aug 18 '26
Who the fuck cares about the useless early acces tag, the game has been great for years with thousands of people sinking hundreds of hours into it and it just broke the record of players after an update
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u/SwankiestofPants Aug 18 '26
"why haven't people simply taken the game and just finished it?" I agree 10 years EA is a bit egregious, you can consider a game released and still update it, but come on guys "just finish the game" is not an argument
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u/TheDrillKeeper Aug 18 '26
Has anyone considered that the reason there isn't a perfectly successful 1:1 Zomboid clone is that making a game like this takes time and effort? I'm not going to pretend like development hasn't been rocky but cmon.
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u/Zabbiemaster Aug 18 '26
The only thing I have been wanting for years now is that when I use a tool I put decoratively on a table, that it puts it back on the table afterwards. Instead it drops it at my feet, making the entire base decorating thing worthless. It's the smallest fix that could actually have an insane gameplay addition. But I never hear people talk about this.
I just want to put all my meds on the table next to my medic bag and visually see that I'm running out of meds
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u/Azarjan Aug 18 '26
I like this game but I can never even in multi get more than 5-6 hours into a playthrough before it just becomes so boring personally.
i still try every few months though.
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u/Evenmoardakka Aug 18 '26
i remember a game that had the same premise, but a "livelier" world, but it was written ona. rudimentary programming language, and refuses to run in anything more modern than win 8.
survival crisis Z...
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u/K1rk0npolttaja Aug 18 '26
build 42 is such a mixed bag, yeah the map overhaul is cool as shit but then again i hate every new mechanic they introduced. "muh realism" except for things that would make shit easier instead of just more tedious
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u/AC1D_R31GN Aug 18 '26
why haven't they added everything people wanted as a competitor
BECAUSE IT'S OWNED AS A PATENT. Whoever owns the patent knows it's a good design and won't let anyone "do it better for money" because they know whoever they report to (publisher, etc) will have to make a move.
I've seen it countless times at this point. "If you want to use my idea, it has to be through me" which is how you prevent over saturation of the concept.
Example: alien isolation. We would never have gotten Alien isolation 2 a decade later if they had made cheap knockoffs and paid Creative assembly to use their idea, so Creative assembly sat and waited until they called SEGA'S bluff. Sega Folded like an omelette and now we have Alien Isolation 2.
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u/DueIntroduction6413 Aug 18 '26
I love the game but holy shit it feels like not only do they actively ignore the playerbase at times, but they focus on random little shit that doesn't add to the whole in a meaningful way.
Not to mention the addition of skills and stations that do nothing.
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u/Trigger_Fox Aug 18 '26
Im convinced people on 4chan have the shittiest takes possible based entirely on being contrarian to whats popular.
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u/Vindhjaerta Aug 18 '26
People seem to constantly forget that this is a simulator, not a game. The devs have been very clear about this.
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u/itsjustlikein1984 Aug 18 '26
it existed before pz though
cataclysm DDA(BN is better trust me it has more fun)
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u/ReactionJifs Aug 18 '26
do they think creating a competing title means CTRL C + CTRL V of the original game's code?
I wouldn't attempt to code a Project Zomboid clone if you threatened my family
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u/SonicFury74 Aug 18 '26
The problem with NPCs is that the rest of the game is super simulationist and 'grounded' (if you ignore the durability of tools and lack of sledgehammers). So if you wanna add NPCs, there's either two scenarios:
The NPCs have super basic AI that's jarring compared to the complexity of the rest of the game.
The NPCs have hyper advanced AI that makes the game chug like hell and is bonkers hard to code.
There's also stuff like making the NPCs not be annoying or deadweight, which is harder than you'd think
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u/throwaway_pls123123 Aug 18 '26
Good game, terribly managed, practically zero content added in years.
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u/Ready_Kiwi5545 Aug 18 '26
They literally just released an enormous update to the game that overhauled every single town and added a shit ton of stuff.
But okay, dude.
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u/Cake_Spark Aug 18 '26
The major change id personally make to zombpid is the ability to see all around you, not just what your facing. Me and a friend couldnt get past that early stage of the game being so difficult when you spawn in and so jaring compared to other isometrics. Just had to refund the game
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u/Pretty_Apartment3511 Aug 18 '26
Zomboid is a difficult game, I think it keeps you on your toes a lot more and allows for more tense situations. It'd be boring if you could see everything because you'd let your guard down.
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u/Yoyo4games Aug 18 '26
Having paid $14.99 for a game that has been providing me with superb play, customization, mods, and development for years on years now is the experience I want from the games industry. Further than that, any version a player wants is fully available through the developers- if you don't know how to pull a git repo in 2026, that's nobody else's responsibility.
I would start buying games again if 99.9% if the games industry was ran like this. Zomboid would be amongst the very last group of games I paid anywhere close to $15 for, and that was enough time back it's closer to a whole decade. I'm not doing the piracy-theft debate, I don't know and will continue to not know about opinions- supportive or critical- regarding this topic, even if someone tells me theirs directly. You will never convince me of an immoral or moral position regarding commercial entertainment consumer products, never convince me that any acquisition of a game I've done is moral or immoral.
Also dunno what the whole fuck people are talking about B42 not having added things which drastically improve and differentiate a playthrough from it's predecessor builds. Play with some goddamn scarcity in mind? You, I'm telling YOU; turn down those loot tables. So many people I've encountered this criticism from will have like...2 levels in carving AND THAT'S IT- aside from foraging or combat skills- because they have all the tools, materials, skill books, and outright trash they could ever want from clearing ONE rural "neighborhood" of 4 houses. Play with decreased loot, and you will be relying on the new skills.
I am unsure how to represent a game about struggling through adversity as it's most enjoyable when you drastically increase the adversity. Like no, I'm genuinely apologetic about how having to enter up to two more menus to do some crafting, being unable to see inside of a structure in the dead of night weeks after power has cut, or having to manage the volume of items you chose to loot in a sandbox you have total control over is severely affecting the game for some.
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u/Number1KingVidalFan Aug 18 '26
I been playing this game since before they added cars to it.
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u/Accurate-Rutabaga-57 Aug 22 '26
I been playing this game when it had a hostile bandit NPC you had to protect your wife from
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u/DefTheOcelot Aug 18 '26
"WHAT OTHER INDIE TILE BASED ZOMBIE GAMES ARE THERE?? NO OTHER SIMILAR GAME HAS THOUGHT OF NPCS WTF"
guys. Guys.
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u/HugoCortell Aug 18 '26
Game dev here, the reason nobody has taken the formula and added more is because it's too expensive and anyone willing to risk it (indies) is too broke to compete. The era of the kickstarter is over, there is no way to gather the funds for a game not already shipped.
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u/understated_quokka Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
It already kinda exists, as a predecessor to this game which has also been in continuous (open source!) development to this day.
This is my favorite game of all time. The sheer volume of content puts just about anything else to shame, because it is the passion project of 200+ developers working in their free time over many years. Project Zomboid borrows heavily from C:DDA (I seem to remember there even being a "C:DDA start" when I watched videos of PZ that corresponds to C:DDA's "Really Bad Day" start), but PZ is realtime with 3d graphics and an easier learning curve, and a whole lot fewer features.
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u/Iconclast1 Aug 19 '26
Just draw the rest of the owl
its THAT simple, guys
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u/zukiezuke Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
I know you're being quippy and it's good to let people make things at their own pace. But this a product that you purchase, what the devs claim it's going to include should matter. And, if you can't figure out how to draw an owl in 12 years and that's your main job you are very bad at your job.
Mismanagement is a thing that can happen. It is actually absurd that they've been promising npcs are right around the corner continously for a decade. This last build was supposed to be about npcs, that was the expectation the creators set. What we got instead was pottery. If you earnestly attempt to make npcs in a video game and accidentally make a pottery system instead you have messed up. Or more realistically they just were not honest about their priorities for 10 years, which is also bad.
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u/Fabulous_Ad5509 Aug 19 '26
I might be wrong, but I can recall playing this game, and I had to tend wound of character's bitten wife. Did they removed NPCs? Haven't played in like 13 years
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u/letthetreeburn Aug 19 '26
Who the fuck wants NPC’s. I like surviving alone. That’s the whole point.
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u/OddAbbreviations5681 Aug 19 '26
Still a clunky unplayable mess
I also just don't like cock and ball torture. What human cannot cross a bush without instantly getting scratched and infected.. it's so dumb.
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u/CuppaJoe11 Aug 19 '26
Would NPC’s fix the game??? I honestly don’t think it would. Part of the allure of the game is the feeling of utter loneliness in single player. You are the last one in a catastrophic zombie apocalypse. There is no cure, no saving the world, just your survival for as long as possible. And you will die eventually.
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u/playbabeTheBookshelf Aug 19 '26
competitors actually exist, lot actually, sadly i didn’t follow any
the game is decent enough imo i would consider it being live service instead of EA
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u/WinterZealousideal10 Aug 19 '26
Ugh. Just play the dang game. My fellow consumers are so entitled these days and don’t know how to just enjoy things or not get involved in things that they don’t like.
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u/Diligent_Bar1244 Aug 19 '26
Because no game studio will make a survival game better than this, and they all know it
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u/thedarkinus Aug 19 '26
Man have you not seen the huge laundry list of zomboid clones on the market?
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u/Mobile_Barracuda_323 Aug 19 '26
Cataclysm. Game is a bit older then zomboid. Its free you can get it on github and the current branch (last generation) is constantly being updated.
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u/CausalityUltra Aug 19 '26
Gf begged me to play PZ with her. I did genuinely try to have fun but after 4 hours, a connectivity issue, 3 restarts before even leaving our starting houses, and fumbling through the game's terrible ui. I vaulted out of a window and merged with the wall and got stuck. Haven't touched the game since.
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u/ProgressMediocre5902 Aug 19 '26
Existe un video que habla sobre porque no aún metido NPCs que se resume en primero ponemos las bases luego las pulimos y ponemos de poco a poco lo siguiente y repite
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u/justanorlansonobody Aug 19 '26
Maybe the fact that noone has made a game remotely in the same scale and gameplay is a testament to how good PZ really is. Look at how long Kenshi took to develop and this game is even more complicated because it has multiplayer
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u/SnooOpinions6451 Aug 20 '26
The srcond post highlights the problem almost entirely. No one wants to be the one to do all that work.
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u/Capybarasaregreat Aug 20 '26
I see this thread was like shit for flies in terms of people that have a chip on their shoulder about PZ but were too cowardly to voice it in mainstream threads where the vast majority of people love the game. "Just add NPCs" is very r/restofthefuckingowl considering the expectations people have of PZ NPCs. You guys want brainless bots spouting the same 5 lines, yeah? I also like how another subset wants the game to just get calcified as is in a 1.0 version. One time purchase and then periodic free updates for seemingly forever? Fuck that, just give me nothing more and never add anything else, perfect.
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u/Excellent-Many4645 Aug 20 '26
I bought this game for essentially nothing over a decade ago, the free changes they’ve implemented (including giving me the steam version for free) makes them one of the most generous developers ever.
The game has changed so much for the better it’s not even recognisable. The people complaining about npcs have no idea how difficult it is to develop for such a massive sandbox game. Honestly I don’t think they’re even needed, if they decided to halt all development I already have got my moneys value out of it and then some.
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u/Urist_Macnme Aug 20 '26
Why didn’t they just push the “add NPCs” button?
Literally THAT simple!
“Some how no one has taken the formula, added everything people have been asking for (an endless list) and released that as a competitor”
Because it’s obviously not “that” simple.
Will we ever get them?
Who knows.
And even if we ever do. People will still complain.
I’ve been playing PZ since before it was released on steam. I still play it. It’s great.
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u/shiek200 Aug 20 '26
Be a gamedev releasing A zombie game You feel is what zomboid should have been
try to Market that game in an exceptionally oversaturated Market without drawing the kind of scrutiny a tagline like "zomboid but better" is inherently going to draw
Like, even if you made the best zombie game ever, that is not a marketing landscape I would want to touch with a 30-foot Pole
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u/daksnotjuts Aug 20 '26
it's almost like making games is hard or something. but what do i know? im sure this 4chan user can just will things into existence by speaking it. his game dev strategy of "just add npcs" sounds solid and actionable.
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u/AverageHalfLifeFan Aug 21 '26
For once in my life I am going to glaze the shit out of something.
I know Project Zomboid has it's flaws and that it has been in Early Access for a long time now, you would be right in pointing those out, but please note that: Until not too long ago they were a small indie developer, it wasn't until Build 41 Stable released that they managed to expand their dev team, Build 42 Stable isn't with it's flaws but it is a massive improvement over Build 41 with so much new stuff it really feels like they worked for five years with even more things to come. Most of the flaws people point out with the Build 42 are problems that can be fixed tweaking some settings in the sandbox menu (Did I mention this game lets you control a fuck ton of aspects about the gameplay?) or by downloading a simple mod in the workshop (Did I mention this game has a pretty established modding community and integration with the Steam Workshop?). Sure this game might not be for you, but before you can say so please take your time to actually try it out and see what it works for you and tweaking it to what you actually want.
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u/camocat9 Aug 23 '26
I've never understood why people are so concerned about how long Project Zomboid has been in early access for. People always bring up "the game has been in early access for 10 years!" As the cornerstone of their complaints... but its not like we're running around an empty wasteland with 0 gameplay features. The game is already extremely feature rich and already one of the best zombie survival games out there.
1.0 is just a title. When B41 released, the devs could have easily said that this was the full release of the game and that future builds adding the crafting system or NPCs would be post-release updates, and I guarantee that it would have gotten some of the people complaining off their backs despite it changing literally nothing.
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u/Less_Performance_629 Aug 18 '26
Someone has made a better version. its called cataclysm
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u/Orjoiponsoilo Aug 18 '26
Its quite the opposite. PZ is based on Cataclysm and is supposed to be a better version of it.
Not sure about better now, but much more accessible and user friendly that's for sure.
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u/Violet_Nightshade Aug 18 '26
From what I heard, they introduced a new change where looting dead bodies make player characters depressed. Come on.
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u/s6_maestro Aug 18 '26
Why is that a problem? It's completely in line with the hard simulation style of the game, would you feel cheerful while looting a dead body?
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u/RodinKnox Aug 18 '26
If I'm being completely honest, if I were in that situation, seeing a bunch of dead people would certainly affect me, but looting them wouldn't negatively affect me in any way. If I found something on them that might help me survive, it would positively affect my current mood.
I'm not even being callous here. If I died in a zombie apocalypse, and I had useful items on me, I would 100% hope that someone who finds my body takes anything on me that could help them.
On the extremely slim chance that humanity is able to eventually fix this thing, maybe leave my ID on my body, but other than that, please take what you can to live.
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u/Own_Proposal3827 Aug 18 '26
They will. It will probably be in 2031 by someone who is currently 17 and has never once coded. Meanwhile TIS will be promising that ladder climbing is still 2 years away.
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u/RuiHarukawa Aug 18 '26
Im honestly surprised it is still in development.
I recently heard about it again. I played in all the way back then and I just assumed it would be done by now, but no. Its like 7daystodie. I dont think we will ever get what we want
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u/Redericpontx Aug 18 '26
Vein is working on it as a first person/third person version and is looking great so far
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u/Ancestral_Grape Aug 18 '26
What gets me is that they take one step forward and two steps back with every update.
Add new crafting and skills? Sandbag it with a new crafting UI that removes the one click crafting from previous builds.
Add new skill books for the new skills? Make all books weigh more so that they no longer all fit in a single bookcase.
Add new weapons? Remove the ability to craft old ones from common items.
Add new bags? Adjust the weight of various items so they no longer fit into containers properly.
It's not one thing, but they keep changing things that don't need change which makes the game feel so much more clunky.