Generation Zero

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah thanks Binn, the guns did help, and no problem, I wasn't too happy with the pistol and shotgun. As it was, I headed to the logging area from the first church I was in after I met you then to the farm. And then the game put up a notice about losing connection to the steam servers and abruptly shut down. Or crashed, whatever. So I reload, and I'm back at the church but it has saved my inventory and progress, just not my position, so I guess that's how it works. I made my way through the logging area again, this time taking more care with the dogs there. First time I just runned and gunned it and that is not the best way, I've found, to handle these guys. Get in some cover, a building is best, and take them on one or two at a time, getting a swarm of five or six is a bad idea, they will flank and "clever girl" you. If you get that reference. Two shots each with the sniper you gave me on their power pack thing on their backs and those are finished. Get to loot the entire place a second time, so that's a plus. Head on to the farm and look around and there don't appear to be any of the enemies respawned yet, not sure if it's on a timer or a distance away setting, but I didn't get to check around much as I walked up to a building and the game crashed outright this time. A dialog pops up about sending in the info so the cause can be looked at and that was it. I didn't have time to play much more anyway, so I guess I'll start back at the church again next time and see if a third time will be the charm.

[BinnZ]

Ah damn, too bad you had these nasty crashes D_B! I saw you pop up yesterday, and right when I wanted to ask if we should meet up I noticed you had gone already

Anyway, I have to say I am really happy with this game. It has the same sort of looting experience as DayZ, something I really liked. You find cooler and cooler weapons, all with its unique bullet types and attachments (some attachments are multi-use like scopes and scope-adds, but most are bound to a type)
And you will find dilapidated, worn, good and probably also pristine guns and items. I am not sure about the pristine but I saw a screenshot from a guy who had purple items in his inventory. Haven't come across those. I focus on getting blues now; good.

And the landscape, it's so beautiful. And instead of louzy zombies you get clever robots of different types. And the game is really HUGE!! I've spent 10 hours of hard w0#k now and have only disclosed a little part of the map.... te be continued, food is ready

[BinnZ]

Ah yeah, where was I... Yeah, the world. It is HUGE!!!! You start at a small group of islands to the south of the main Island (the whole game is set on an Archipelago so it's all islands in from of the mainland Sweden).
I just checked; 23 hours played and basically I've only made my way through those tiny little starter islands. And still they are quite big. Once you enter the main island, it's an enormous chunk of land with peninsula's all around, there's really so much to explore. It has definitely the same size as DayZ has. But the graphics are so much better...

I haven't fully fathomed how the enemy spawning works. I know that there's always a pack of enemies at points of interest, and along some lines (maybe roads?) in the game there's patrols. At points of interest sometimes the packs respawn, however they will be fewer, and I have also come across places I had fought enemies before where it seemed as if the robots had sort of revived themselves, and they were flying / walking in bad condition so I could easily take them out.
Once you proceed farther in the game, you will encounter bigger, more challenging enemies. There's 6 types, and each type seems to have different appearances. Move advanced appearances have heavier armour and shoot better. But their behaviour is the same. So far I found dog-robots called Runners, spider robots called Ticks, soldier robots called Hunters, drone robots which are called seekers (they call in reinforcements when they discover you) and I stumbled upon a Tank a few times now. A tank is a giant two legged robot with incredible armour and shooting power. I managed to take out two, by hiding in the church tower, but since then I try to avoid them.
They all have their own type of behaviour and I really like the dog type. They are agile and clever. They try to approach you from various angles if they can, and come close enough to charge on you. They all have their own type of weapon; the simple ones have a simple handgun using .32 rounds. More advanced ones have 9mm or buckshots.

If you don't plan your approach you will be dead in no time. They attack quick and clever and you don't get time to second-think sometimes. However you can always choose to escape. Normally you can outrun them and they will loose track of you in the end. The game is kind of milt on you though. If you collect enough med kits it's easy to heal yourself in between, although you have to switch to your med kits slot. When you die (get unconscious) you can revive yourself with an adrenaline shot. They are quite common. I had over 40 at a certain point, which is plenty for multiple combat errors and you can still make it out alive.
It's much cooler though to set up a trap and lure those bastards to an explosive. I found a landmine once, but normally I'd use a canister and shoot it when they're close, like D_B showed in the video.

And now something something important: There is a way to save your scavenged weapons, ammo and other interesting stuff. I already mentioned you can get a bigger inventory but it will still not be enough. You will find multiple guns on your way; a variety of handguns, rifles and shotguns. You can't carry all of them especially if you also want the different ammo types for them; hollow point, full metal jacket, armour piercing... So you'll be looking for a safe place to dump some of your stash for other occasions. Well, there isn't. However I read about a solution and it works very well!!!!

You have 4 characters, and someone (I forgot who it was, otherwise I would've given credits here) found out that you can switch between characters without the world being reloaded. So, the stuff you drop on the floor will still be there to pick up with your second character. And he will have an inventory as well!!! You can have up to 4 characters which all share the same progress in the world, so you can use them as stash-vaults

Look at how beautiful the world is:
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Last but not least I want to say something about the many many complaints in the reviews about repetitive areas like houses and sheds and stuff. I don't agree with that. Sure they repeat the same type of houses over the areas, it's not like GTA in that perspective. But I am actually glad they did. Imagine entering a completely different house every time you search for loot. Wouldn't that be a bit over the top and mind boggling? I'm just looking for that tool box, backpack or ammo crate and it's way easier to find those if the houses are somewhat familiar with each other. Anyway, I think there's more than enough variety. There's a lot of bunkers in the game. When you enter a bunker, it reminds me in a way of Wolvenstein. Lots of walkways, rooms and stairs, sometimes hard to keep track of where you are. And all these areas contain good loot.
Houses don't always fit perfectly in their environment. Sometimes one corner is a little sort of floating, and sometimes plants stick through the walls. But that's not a big issue. The world is a lot more stable as DayZ used to be, and more beautiful too. I think there's a lot of mens-w0#k gone into designing this world. It really looks natural and you don't see repetitive patterns.

[Art Blade]

cool story, and I am glad that you guys are having fun together

[BinnZ]

I keep playing, exploring like crazy. Trying to find 'special' weapons and weapon attachments. They are yellow, 5 stars, and the best you can find. I don't know what's the difference though, except for the scope you really notice the difference; you have a clean sight without cracks, scratches or stains. And I think I noticed the damage bar was higher too, for the weapon itself.
I found out that the tank I took down the first time, in the church tower, wasn't a tank. It was a harvester. They look a bit like the tanks, but have 4 legs and are a tad smaller. They don't have that excessive firepower and aren't really attacking easily, but they are tough. If you kill  and loot them, you have high chance to find a special weapon. It happened twice to me, but twice the same hunting rifle
I like the way the story unfolds. Bit by bit you pick up the pieces of what seems to have happened. There's several paths that need to get sorted. Like "why are there Russians on a radio frequency and why are they jammed?" and "Why did the military friendly fire at a Swedish jet? And why all the evacs seem to go wrong?
So far, apart from dead soldiers, I've only come across one dead person. He's story related. The rest of the story related persons are all gone. There isn't a single soul alive, except for team mates of course. There's no friendly fire. I've been playing with several guys now who randomly joined, and never got shot.
There's plenty of stuff to go after. You just find fragments of a story while you explore, fight and loot and it's bloody entertaining

[Art Blade]

sounds like you finally found the right game, Binn

[LowPolyOWG]

Hmm, so basically FO76, but in a SP experince, with co-op. Which many people really wanted Bugthesda to do. Instead, they chose to make a massive screwup Looking at the webpage, this game has a roadmap planned ahead. Also, lots of bugfixes incoming.

[BinnZ]

Yes you are right OWGKID, the next week they will launch a fix that patches over 200 known issues. I myself have one that needs being fixed; a mission that won't accomplish. The game keeps telling me I have to clear the area of machines (on the spot of a little side mission) while there's only one runner / dog spawning when I come there and I kill him all the time. It's a known bug.
And there's much more to come as it seems. If you take a look at the map, you see large areas / islands that are not filled or inaccessible for now.
But I must say I there's a lot to do already. The enemies really act natural. Funny to say that of a bunch of robots. But their behaviour is clever and smooth. If you get attacked by a pack of runners (robot dogs) it is as if a pack wolves is attacking you. They approach carefully, surround you and when they see the opportunity they charge on you. In between shooting at you whenever they can of course. Their body parts and armour are quite complicated and behaving very well. The animation of a dog running is almost like a real dog, with its metal components. Some areas are vulnerable to gun fire, like their heads and a tank on their back. The higher ranked dogs wear armour that protect these parts better than the first types you encounter.
When you're in a fire fight with a bunch of these enemies it is very immersive. I begin to stay alive longer while fighting bigger groups. That is because of experience and a combination of better weaponry and higher skill.

The game is so good I stayed up playing until 5 am (!) yesterday which I seldom do. I just forget the time and keep searching for better equipment and cool places. It is awesome

[LowPolyOWG]

Crazy Kinda like our GTA Online sessions last year. I have returned to the survival genre through Minecraft again. Helped a friend setting up a server and some mods. I originally bought MC back in 2014, but I never played it a lot on PC. Being a console gamer in a transitional phase to PC, I was not used to keyboard and mouse controls. Had the X360 version for a long time. Not sure if I want to dedicate my time to another survival game yet, I am busy with Minecraft/Destiny 2.

[BinnZ]

Yeah that's okay man. I'd love to say to all of you; "YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS FREAKING GAME IT'S AWESOME!!!" but of course I know we all have our titles we stick to and we all have a slightly different taste of course. And the concept may grow old quickly... it's not for nothing that so many people said; "there's only 6 types of enemies and the missions get repetitive..."
Well for me, it's the perfect match of a couple of things I like in games; looting, wandering beautiful landscapes, total freedom and heavy shoot-outs with challenging AI. Add coop gameplay with friends to that and I'm more than happy. 

[fragger]

It's a great-looking game world judging by those screenshots, BinnZ

I'm glad you're having so much fun with it. Sounds like me when I first got hooked on FO4 - hours go by like minutes and I'd find myself in the wee small hours without realizing it.

I still can't tear myself away from FO4 yet, but I might give this game a go sometime in the future. I'll see

[Art Blade]

indeed, "you never know," as the saying goes.

This game does look fantastic and reminds me of my early days in DayZ which was great as we played online together as a bunch of friends among which were Binn, me, Abletile, Stiku and more, it was overwhelming and intense. But after some time of horror and stress, I felt uncomfortable. I got completely freaked out by unknown players who kept killing me and others, losing all my valuable loot.. and those players would proceed to cheating which led to my final experience. Only Stiku and I were on the whole server, and as Binn described it, the game maps are huge, it was practically impossible to bump into someone at night without light. And yet that was what happened. I got killed moments after someone joined the server and Stiku barely got away with his virtual life, he got wounded before leaving the server. I still remember those details despite the comparatively long time since then because it really freaked me out and made me mad on top. I haven't recovered from that and any "survival" games are a no-go for me since then (they were before DayZ, too, but I was persuaded to join anyway..) and I won't try that stuff anymore.

However, I'm interested in how you guys fare and love reading about your adventures and details of the game.

[nex]

I'm not one for science fiction movies or games, I sometimes read some of the posts but generally I skip them.   

As fragger said, I'm glad you guys are having fun with it like I'm having with my game   

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah Binn and I met up for a little while over the weekend to try things out. After a few glitches and crashes getting joined up, it ran pretty smooth. Since he's so far ahead of me, we used my save and he could show me some things I might have missed and in one case, did miss. One part of the mission requires you to listen to a message on a radio in a police car, which I didn't see. I looted the car but didn't know that the radio was something you could interact with. We had some fun taking out a few packs of the dog robots, which is much easier with two people, I would imagine with three or four, it would get simple, unless the more players you have the more enemies spawn.

There is no friendly fire, so if a player joins they couldn't kill you, and all loot is player specific, so they can't even steal loot from you. So online play is well managed, though I didn't want a distraction while we were playing and getting to know the way things worked and had to kick a player who joined us and then figure out how to make the game invite only. I kind of felt bad as the person was probably just looking for a team to play on and in the future now that I know how it works, would probably let others in the game, but on the first real try I didn't want things to get complicated. Funny though, I played several hours on my own with no one joining and not 10 minutes after Binn joins my game, someone else shows up. He must attract them lol.

I do think it's a fun game, and I can say the scenery is amazing as are the weather effects, the thunderstorms that blow through make you feel wet and cold and just want to hang out in a house near a fire or something. Nights last a long time, Not sure what the day-night cycle is but I know I played at least an hour and it was night the whole time. When the sun does finally come up, you're relieved it's daytime again. I will also say I can see where people are coming from, as far as the sameness of the buildings, and the layout of the interior rooms. But it does make for an easier time looting, though I did see one house that had three bathrooms, two next to each other downstairs and one upstairs. I think the rooms are picked out of a set of rooms and placed inside the houses where they fit and it just happened to pick three bathrooms for that house. I've only raided one of the smaller bomb shelters and that was fun as well, though more than one enemy in there would have been nice. But since it becomes a safe house spawn point, having enemies in there would have been problematic.

Once the update drops and hopefully some of the glitches get taken care of, it will hopefully crash a bit less for me. It doesn't crash often, just enough to be annoying, and ti is still early access.

[BinnZ]

Yeah it was fun to meet up, and after a few crashes quite joyful indeed. It would be nice once we are both ranked up a bit more and we can fight the big groups of enemies. Don't worry about little amounts of enemies D_B, once you leave the island you are on now, there will be plenty, and quite challenging. You'll need the loot you found

When you start the game, it is nice to know a little about the skill trees. There's 4 of them, and each one has two branches with sets of upgrades. The last upgrade at the bottom is called a specialization. It can be toggled on or off, so you have 4 specializations you can choose from. I think that is something that might be useful to know more about once you team up with 2 or 3 others against bigger and more challenging enemies farther up in the world.
But when you start there's a few things important: There's two stages of a skill that gives you 50% and 100% extra XP. Nice to have those asap, since you need to rank up in order to unlock more skill points. Each rank is a skill point and each skill point can be turned into a skill of your liking. You will unlock the skill below the one you purchased. Once it's unlocked you can purchase it. Etc.
So there's a skill for XP, and the next thing you'd want is a skill to get a bigger inventory. Also one with two stages, each unlocking an additional row of slots in your inventory. Then there's a skill for looting related to ammo pickups; when you have that skill, you will get 50% (and with second stage 100%) extra ammo from each loot box you find and enemy you kill and loot. For some reason the extra amount of ammo you find even after getting the first skill is amazing. I'd say it's at least 3 times the amount of ammo you used to find before, and ammo is scarce. Until you have that skill, that is. Then you start tossing rounds away to empty space for other stuff in your backpack

There's probably a lot more to tell about how to rank up and spend your points on skills, but I think those are of primary importance. You can also upgrade your total health, your running speed, all sorts of shooting advantages etc. etc. I think the game has a total of 40 skills to purchase, so plenty to find out about

I found out a way to get the best weaponry in the game. Each type of weapon has a dilapidated version (grey), a worn one (green), a good one (blue), an exceptional one (purple) and a special one (yellow). The last one is the best. The weapon looks shiny new and does a little more damage. It might be a placebo effect but I feel like they handle a lot better too. Anyway, you want the special ones. I found 4 of them already, and all by killing Scavengers. Those are big robot on 4 feet. They are easily mistaken for a tank (happened to me the first time) because of their size and massive armour. It takes a LOT of damage to bring them down. Once you kill it, you can loot it. However, there's usually a poisonous cloud around it, or a super hot area. So you have to loot it quickly, or you'll die trying. Quite often they contain a special weapon. I downed 12 Scavengers so far and found 4 special weapons. Never found those weapons elsewhere on the map. I have two special hunting rifles of the same type. One is currently in use and the other is stashed away, waiting for D_B to rank up a bit more and reach the area where he'll find the right ammo for it
I suspect that the Scavenger will give you the special weapon that is being held in your primary slot, since it was the case in most of my experiences. So you seem to be able to influence what special weapon you may be awarded with! Gonna test a bit more and see if that really works

Unless this game being a really nice gaming world, sometimes you find funny flaws in the game. I once passed an area with elevated grass, floating in the ski, and here I found a hole in the map:
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When I looted the airport yesterday, I found myself in a snowstorm. It didn't stay though. I've seen other footage where everything is white, so maybe it does snow at times. We'll see
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