ZOMBIE FEEDBACK

[apophis775]

Post any feedback about the zombies here.

[Rain7x]

IMO Zombies should be immune to tasers

[Jaketeaking]

Good, apart from a few minor annoyances,
cant unbuckle
If marines strip your corpse, theres nothing you can do, i died many times to glass and schrapnel on the floor
sometimes, youll go into white-screen crit, and wont die, unless marines happen to walk by and kill you.

Overall though, good, feels fresh

[rev_benji]

Really enjoyable and a refreshing change of pace. Shooting humanoids is more satisfying for some reason. I look forward to seeing it further developed and run regularly.

[Martzin]

It was excellent, a new scenario and change of pace from the standard ayy round, increased RP which always is a factor to me. i enjoyed this special event alot more than usual alien rounds, 10/10

[Draegonlore]

I'm gonna salt. Getting admin infected is not cool. It basically made my survival invalid even though I never got bit by a zombie.

But otherwise, I had a lot of fun and did a lot of RP. Including panic killing a guy who was down and out but uninfected. I fucking freaked and beat his head off with my shotgun while his friend screamed at me to stop. It was brutal and amazing. I just wish the CMP let me kill myself rather than walking up mid stride and unloading point blank into my head, after I told him I thought I was infected somehow and tried to kill myself.

[Garrison]

Its a shame I late joined, I wonder if everyone started the game expecting it to be just a normal round, that probably really would of messed with a lot of people.

[TehSpoderman]

it was guuuuuud

[Casgair]

Condensing what I observed and others have mentioned already:

Zombies could use:

• Taser immunity
• Possibly no pain slowdown/paincrit
• Ability to resist restraints
• No need for shoes (both in terms of speed and tripping over glass shards)
• Potentially some natural armor as getting stripped seemed pretty common

For the marines.. I'm not sure, from dchat it sounded like there were some people who were potentially immune/found a cure but ended up dying before they could do anything, so it's hard to gauge what would have helped on their end.

[Winter]

It was very fun, though it was kind of awkward watching zombies get tazed and fall over on glass.

[Fritigern]

I made a post last year (viewtopic.php?f=64&t=9129) suggesting a 'Thing' themed map that was in the same vein of story and gameplay that we saw tonight, and it saw moderate interest. I'd still like to see it replace our sub-par winter map but that's a topic for another time. And, obviously, shapeshifters and zombies are separate beasts but a lot of the gameplay mechanics I brought up there were implemented here and I am glad to see some of those conceptual theories working out as I expected them to.

Specifically there was a great deal of paranoia and mistrust amongst the crew, with people forming small alliances amongst themselves. Bonds were both made and shattered as marines turned on their infected comrades. Great drama all around, really.

The major win, I feel, was how fresh everything felt. There was a LOT of role playing going on and it was all meaningful. It certainly elevated things above the movie-quote spewing tripe a regular CM round is filled with, as there is simply too little time to absorb and react to most things when trying not to get killed by xenos. Zombies, though? More sporadic, tense, and filled with a great deal more dread.

I think a lot of the flaws of this test are obvious and don't need me reiterating them, so instead I am going to throw out some design ideas that will hopefully bring this whole zombie concept home to roost. These ideas will require new code to work, perhaps a great deal, but I think the effort we put into it will result in something special.

So, to kick things off, we need to remove the ability for the medihud to pick up the infection. It's too damn easy to hand them out like candy and they really spoil the tension. Secondly, I think we should randomize blood types for every player in the game instead of letting players pick their blood type. What the hell does this have to do with zombies you ask? I'll get there, I promise. This change won't have a major impact on regular CM play and it's not exactly taking anything meaningful away from them, but at the same time it gives us an easy backdoor to building up my proposed (it's coming soon) system without a massive time investment by our coders. With that change done, we can now go forward with a VERY meta-proof round of CM, or at least as close as we can get it. That means we run a duplicate LV map with the same mission brief and story hook, but instead there will be ZOMBIES waiting instead of ALIENS! Shocking, I know. But this is no mere palette swap where we have zombies scurrying around like runners and spitting vomit like boilers, oh no.

Once marines make landfall they will be introduced to an airborne disease that will infect a certain % of the marine force, based solely on their BLOOD TYPE, regardless of their proximity to zombies and their blood. This means a SIZEABLE chunk of the marine fighting force is going to be introduced to the zombie plague no matter HOW robust they are, guaranteeing a progression of the STORY. To further fight meta knowledge we could even randomize the specific blood type that will be vulnerable at the start of the round but that's up to the coders to tackle and isn't necessary for things to play out.

So, marines land, colony is fucked, and they're likely swarmed by 20-30 zombies waiting for them. But these zombies are TOUGH. They aren't fast and tough like shitty little ancient runners, they're human speed but INCREDIBLY resilient! I am talking Predator levels of bullet sponge, but with a weakness to fire (the only thing that can put them into a 'pain' state where they slow down), and of course their limbs can still be blown off after a big chunk of damage is done to them. They revive VERY FAST after being 'killed,' and their true death only comes once their heads have been COMPLETELY removed, and doing so RELIABLY requires doing it by hand (but doing so at point blank usually leads to blood splatter and heeeey that's a way to transmit disease, don'tchaknow?).

By this point in the round there are likely a LOT of marines showing symptoms of infection, either from the battle with the undead or their exposure to the infected air of the planet. Now what do we want to happen at this point? We want EVERYONE back on the Almayer of course! But why would that happen, wouldn't command force everyone to stay on the planet in case they're infected? Of course! But you know what? THERE IS A CURE BACK ON THE SHIP! And the corporate liason has it for just such an occasion!

In his possession is a jug of zombie-b-gone that, when added to the cryo tanks can CURE a person before the dead sets in! Now you got pilots, squad leaders and a fuckton of infected marines all clamoring to get back to the ship. And what is a ship full of after landing on the planet? INFECTED AIR! Cue the second wave of the genetic lottery where everyone unfortunate enough to be born with B- blood is doomed to turn into a cannibal.

Now you've got a round stacked against the marines that comes as a complete surprise when it gets played and happy fun times are likely to follow!

[YungCuz]

-snip-

I do like the idea of this but one thing i could suggest is make so the blood type that is affected is random rather than randomizing everyone's blood type probablywillleadtosomeridiculousshnanigensbutwhatever.

[Fritigern]

I do like the idea of this but one thing i could suggest is make so the blood type that is affected is random rather than randomizing everyone's blood type probablywillleadtosomeridiculousshnanigensbutwhatever.

I thought of this, but then I realized that most people don't actually change their blood types when they create their characters and there could be a much larger % of infected players than intended. A quasi randomized system avoids that situation.

[YungCuz]

That would work but that would mean it'd be unavoidable to most and kinda unfair. I think so atleast.

[Aracino]

O- is suppose to be a rare bloodtype, but when I'm medic its 90% of the blood types in my patients. I'd like blood to be randomized too, so people don't get the most robust blood...And that whole infection for the blood type could be neat.

[Garrison]

O- is suppose to be a rare bloodtype, but when I'm medic its 90% of the blood types in my patients. I'd like blood to be randomized too, so people don't get the most robust blood...And that whole infection for the blood type could be neat.

Oddly enough I see O+ more then O-. I haven't noticed this as much, but then again I don't often take note of a patients blood type.

[WinterClould]

The zombie round I played (Don't know if you guys ran it a second time after) was AMAZING. I had so much fun walking around by myself as a lone wolf sniper or sometimes with small bands of people. For so long I didn't even see a zombie till the evac operation started.

Being the guy with the scope on his gun, I felt like an actual hero holding the zombies off from attacking other people even when they didn't know I was actually around helping from a distance. I felt like the guy from the manga "I am a Hero" after he gets his sniper rifle and during the climax of the series. Any zombies that got hit by a fire bullet, that was probably me.

The zombies were genuinely scary the whole time. I was worried about everything to do with them. How strong are they? How easy do they come back from the dead? What do they actually need to do to transfer the infection? What clothes should I wear? I was constantly worried. From the very start when Delta was sent to the lab I just had the feeling I was going to get infected with something. After I got shot by Boris on accident while he was trying to kill animals I got worried something might happen to me. Frantically looking for anything to cover myself in to prevent infection, gas mask, bio suit. Everything about genuinely not having any meta info about what was going on made for some crazy good gameplay.

One thing tho, I hate the suggestion that a random blood type should get infected automatically from the air, or really just anything to do with an airborn infection. This is horrible idea to me, people should totally be scared it might be airborne, command should totally freak out that it might be, but it shouldn't actually be. Just randomly getting infected would be lame as hell and I and may other marine only players would probably quit the round which is a waste for both teams. The first people to get infected should be people with xeno prefs enabled so people who only play marine don't get rng fucked and the zombie team doesn't get under staffed because of these zombies going SSD.

On some changes for the Zombies, they should still get damaged from not wearing shoes. Its a trope in zombie movies that people leave glass and whatnot to trip up the zombies and hinder their advance. On the other hand I doubt a tazer has any good reason for working on a zombie. Id also allow them to break out of cuffs after a short struggle. It would be a hella lame way to waste the round as a zombie tied to a chair you could realistically force themselves out of. Striping dead zombies down to their PJ's though is a realistic thing people would actually do to better identify friend and foe once they knew the infection wasn't spread by just touching the bodies.

All in all I cant say enough about how much fun I had and how great this type of round would be to play maybe a few times a week. Like Whiskey Outpost I'd love to play this more often. When the team comes out with rounds like these I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

[TheMaskedMan2]

What a great round, I had no idea what to expect, and that was great. A few things that come to mind.

1. Zombies may need a bit of a natural regen, I suspect they weren't given it to encourage the players to charge, die, and come back at full HP, but I found myself being stuck in crit almost dead as a Zombie for quite a long ass time as I slowly bled out.

2. Health-huds somewhat ruined the surprise to be honest, I would prefer if the only way to tell people are infected is by the actual symptoms.

3. More of a suggestion really here, but as CO I was getting so many conflicting reports, and I had no idea what to expect, I had marines reporting seeing "Zombies", and then some were mentioning "Creatures", and then another marine brought up that they started to "Glow" after a while, so I had no idea what to expect and it was fantastic, the mystery, I had started to believe that the zombie infection would keep progressing and they'd start getting claws and spew goo everywhere and craziness. Especially after someone turned, I killed them, and they came back at super speed, I kept thinking everytime I killed one they'd get some creepy fucking new ability as the infection progresses and i'd be dealing with glowing tentacle goo barfing monsters. Might be a better way to encourage zombies to continually die, hm..
Anyways the point about this is the mystery of the infection might have been the best part, and we had no idea what it was capable of, how it spread, or well, anything.

4. Once this is eventually a full mode, I would love if the gamemode was a secret at round start, so marines don't know what they are deploying to deal with. Might be nice to remove some meta.

In conclusion, the RP was fantastic and I hope metagaming and knowing what is coming doesn't ruin this at some point. If this was simply a barebones skeleton of what is to come, I can not wait for the finished product, thank you devs, as this was absolutely fantastic and I can't wait to see what comes next.

[Draegonlore]

Wintercloud, as someone who got "airborne" infected during the test round I can tell you that you're 100% right. It really is lame as hell, and it didn't help that the CMP just blasted my head off as fast as possible without even telling me that I /was/ infected.

[Winter]

I did notice during the round, that cargo was really understocked for mods, points and let an odd number of people in as staff. I'm not sure if that's intended, though.

[Casgair]

I did notice during the round, that cargo was really understocked for mods, points and let an odd number of people in as staff. I'm not sure if that's intended, though.

Couldn't tell you for sure, but my gut feeling with the staff is that it's more indicative of people knowing it's an event round and wanting to "be in on the action" (play as a more active role) than taking a seat on the sidelines more than the system specifically messing with support roles -- if I remember correctly there was just one medical researcher and around 103 standard marines a few minutes after roundstart.

[johners12345]

pretty cool, unsure if you can make em only die to head shots, but it was a fun round

[Karmac]

Randomized blood types would be cool

[WinterClould]

Randomized blood types would be cool

Just as a normal thing in even normal rounds so Medics/Doctors don't all go O- and Standards don't all go AB+ for that sweet sweet blood type power gaming this is something I'd actually just like to always be a thing. Put peoples blood types in their notes if it isn't already so people actually have a way to just know what their own type is after its been random'd.

[Stripetail]

Loved the round, we were so paranoid when we heard contagion that the WO, Researcher, and myself locked ourselves in Research thinking we were likely infected.

I was a bit bummed when we were forced to not use the incinerator, but even without it was fairly fun, until I started seeing ultra fast zombies, that shit was crazy.

11/10, save for that UPP no RP bastard that just riddled me with bullets after I'd survived so much and saved so many. He could have at least said a single word, but nooo, fmp fmp fmp, dead.