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[State of Decay 2] Coming soon: "Forever" Communities?
tastydonuts
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Didn't see a thread for this yet, and I wanted to talk about SoD 2... so here we are.
What is State of Decay 2?
State of Decay 2 is the latest installment in the State of Decay series, a game that focuses on surviving the zombie apocalypse one awkward heart-to-heart with an upset/angry/afraid community member at a time. Then, when you run out of supplies or people, pack up a select few of your survivors abandon the others to their fates! Or all your good/favorite survivors get killed and then you start all over. Permadeath!
The game is available on Xbox One and PC, and if you bought the fancy copy you can play it now instead of it's official release date, Tuesday, May 22, 2018. If you have Xbox Game Pass, the game is available to you w/o purchase, at it's normal release date. The game is also an Xbox Play Anywhere title, meaning you can play it on your Xbox One or PC (and share saves).
A major feature that has been added this go round is co-op (up to four?)! However the game does not support cross-play, such that you can play with a friend on PC with your console or vice versa. There is no direct PVP contact between players, however you could probably kill or be killed by player induced environmental hazards. You can restrict how people join your games too. An additional player or two will *not* turn zombies into damaging soaking sponges.
For a more detailed description of State of Decay 2 gameplay, see this spoiler:
The meat of State of Decay 2's gameplay is very similar to the original game. The first run of the game will always be the tutorial wherein you choose from several sets of characters with narrative hooks like family members, partners, or friends. Once you go through the tutorial map, you can choose which map you want to start on (haven't done the other two yet so I can't speak to how hard/easy they are yet). Then you set up your base, gather resources, grow your community until it gets large enough to move to another place, repeat. Along the way, there are narrative events (quests) that each community member has. Enclaves pop up from time to time with their own quest lines and irritations (they can be naggy). Ignoring enclaves can make them go hostile to toward you.
New to this game is the plague heart mechanic, in which 9-10 nests are seeded randomly throughout the map. Plague hearts are the source of Plague zombies, who are faster, blood covered zombies that carry the blood plague, an additional mechanic added to the game. Get hit enough and you build up infection, fill the bar and the character has the plague and must be cured or turn. Destroying plague hearts and zombies drops an item that can be used to craft the cure to the infection. With an appropriately leveled infirmary, resting a character who hasn't gone full blown infection will allow them to recover. Some survivors can provide a buff that increases your communities' resistance to this "damage" when they become heroes. Survivors also have a trait that can apply to them individually. As you progress in the game over time, upgrades and plague hearts killed, the map grows more difficult. You cannot place mines and 100% zombie free buffer zone around your base via outposts this go round. You win by either moving your community to another map (same as the Breakdown DLC), or completing the Legacy of your leader. I believe you have to clear all plague hearts from a map before you can establish a Legacy though. (NOTE: Be careful with the quests for your leader because there may be an issue with completing all their quests before making them a leader). Which we'll talk about next.
New to State of Decay is the leader system. Completing quests and generally doing things with a survivor earns XP and standing for your characters. After they gain enough XP they will become a hero. There are four types of heroes in the game: Sheriff, Builder, Warlord and Trader. These provide perks to the player and their legacy. Once a survivor becomes a hero they can become the leader of your community, at which point they can progress to a legacy. Heroes offer benefits to the community, and are random. Completing a legacy finishes the campaign for that community, at which point you have to start a new one. You can use old characters to start a new community. Depending on the type of hero that triggered the legacy you can select up to two Legacy boons for your new community:
You would have to beat the game four times to be able to choose from all four, obv. I do not know if a legacy character dying in a later community would remove access to a boon, however that character would be gone for good regardless.
Once you pick your new starting group, you pick one of three maps and go from there. And that's the loop.
New to this game is the plague heart mechanic, in which 9-10 nests are seeded randomly throughout the map. Plague hearts are the source of Plague zombies, who are faster, blood covered zombies that carry the blood plague, an additional mechanic added to the game. Get hit enough and you build up infection, fill the bar and the character has the plague and must be cured or turn. Destroying plague hearts and zombies drops an item that can be used to craft the cure to the infection. With an appropriately leveled infirmary, resting a character who hasn't gone full blown infection will allow them to recover. Some survivors can provide a buff that increases your communities' resistance to this "damage" when they become heroes. Survivors also have a trait that can apply to them individually. As you progress in the game over time, upgrades and plague hearts killed, the map grows more difficult. You cannot place mines and 100% zombie free buffer zone around your base via outposts this go round. You win by either moving your community to another map (same as the Breakdown DLC), or completing the Legacy of your leader. I believe you have to clear all plague hearts from a map before you can establish a Legacy though. (NOTE: Be careful with the quests for your leader because there may be an issue with completing all their quests before making them a leader). Which we'll talk about next.
New to State of Decay is the leader system. Completing quests and generally doing things with a survivor earns XP and standing for your characters. After they gain enough XP they will become a hero. There are four types of heroes in the game: Sheriff, Builder, Warlord and Trader. These provide perks to the player and their legacy. Once a survivor becomes a hero they can become the leader of your community, at which point they can progress to a legacy. Heroes offer benefits to the community, and are random. Completing a legacy finishes the campaign for that community, at which point you have to start a new one. You can use old characters to start a new community. Depending on the type of hero that triggered the legacy you can select up to two Legacy boons for your new community:
- Sheriff: You will randomly receive items once a day to your locker.
- Builder: Your community will receive power and water for all structures.
- Warlord: You get a ton of weapons and ammo when starting a new community.
- Trader: You get 4000 influence at the start and a trader will visit you.
You would have to beat the game four times to be able to choose from all four, obv. I do not know if a legacy character dying in a later community would remove access to a boon, however that character would be gone for good regardless.
Once you pick your new starting group, you pick one of three maps and go from there. And that's the loop.
So, another zombie apocalypse game you said?
Yes! But State of Decay uses a community mechanic that works surprisingly well. While I will expound on the details of the game loop after release and as I get more info, it's a sequel that lies soundly in "improve upon what you did without reinventing the wheel" territory. One such improvement: this game features three slots for communities. Progression while you're not playing does not return in the sequel.
The game takes place after the events of the first game and its DLC packs, Lifeline in particular. You start your community building adventure off with your buddy/relative/partner archetype and it goes from there. Appearances of your characters are randomized, as are the names afaik. Show us what you got!
Note 1: As with all games that are online, you *cannot* truly pause the game if you are set to accept online sessions. When you press start, the game will let you know this too. Pulling up the mini-map and inventories won't pause the game.
How does the co-op work in this game?
Giving it its own section because I've read in a few places people expecting one thing and then getting something entirely different and complaining after they bought it. The Co-Op in State of Decay 2 is not shared-world Co-op. If you've played a game like Monster Hunter World where you fire off an SOS and a player comes in and kills the monster with you and maybe sticks around or leaves your session, that's about it. Other examples would be Far Cry 5 or the Fable games. Each player gets their own loot feeds. You gain influence, not standing, as you do things with the host in a Co-op setting. You can trade loot via dropping and picking up. If your character dies in Co-op, they die just the same as if they were in your own world.
In short, at its core, State of Decay 2 is still a single player game. This is by design. If you are expecting to start a base with your friend(s) and share a community using the same group of people, you will not get this from State of Decay 2.
Lastly, this is a spoiler related to being infected:
There are two kinds of cure item, the single use cure and a tradeable brick of cures. If you have the latter, you must break it down into single cures to be able to use it. You cannot use the cures prematurely, and if you just have infection accumulated you cannot use the item. In that case you must rest the character with at infirmary 2, which means going back to your world and playing as a different character.
How do you climb down ladders?
Walk up to them and then press A with the movement stick neutral. Yes, I am both deeply committed to that joke and telling you that a thing that will save your life/HP. They forgot to improve on ladders.
So then, go forth survivors! Pop some zombies with car doors either now or see you on the 22nd! Until then, here are some official trailers to conflict with the tone of this post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGpAb2bL6KY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh7WKTMPF_w“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
tastydonuts on
+2
Posts
Moving items to storage
Crafted quest items
Skill books
Outposts
Survivor Quests
Juggernauts
Vehicles
Spoilery hints:
Plague Heart Combat
Legacy Communities/New Game+:
If you start a new game+ and you do not like the map, you can change the map you're on by building a level 2 command center and then doing the move command from it. This does not increase the intrinsic difficulty of the maps themselves beyond the normal difficulty scaling via time, community size, plague hearts remaining (and their timers), infestations (and their timers), and base size. I can't find the dev stream where they touch on this though...
Too Many Infestations!
Yes, it's back! :pop:
Pixie posted the workaround for the situation where you have too many infestations on the map but they're not visible to you:
If you have anything helpful to add just lmk.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The new mechanics have all been pretty cool. Community stuff is expanded (love the new facility mods) picking a pair of survivors at the start is also pretty cool and combined with the early game town selection should lead to more replayability.
Bravely Default / 3DS Friend Code = 3394-3571-1609
Light/dark is definitely noticeable in this game. The difference between an opened and closed door even during the day is fairly significant.
pleasepaypreacher.net
In order to do this, when you are looking in your trunk, you highlight the rucksack and then press RT. I'll add this to the tips.
I fell off the fucking water tower because I was trying to go down the ladder and stutter stepped off the edge, but wound up in some animation....and didn't take damage which should have killed me. My wife wanted to know why I screamed out "Nooooo!".
I don't have enough people or influence to move into the really big spot on the maps I've been on, i'm being fussy about taking on losers.
I'm at a party of six, but it doesn't feel like I actually need to grow it? I haven't set a leader yet either, as my party consists of builders and sheriffs.
That’s where I am now, and I’ve had issues where I am not able to upgrade something because it requires more laborers than I have, as other people are manning watchtowers etc.
I lose most of my resources to my asshole survivors, "Oops, I was smoking by our fuel stores!" "Oh sorry, I accidentally dumped half our food in the garbage." It seems to happen constantly, multiple times a day. Meanwhile, resources trickle in one a day from outposts.
I'm guessing as we iterate communities there are buffs or passives that would reduce the resource drain, particularly with food. I get 3 food a day and consume 4.75 units of food with my present setup. I don't have a garden or anything yet either though, kind of want to see how that works out but I don't have enough room. I'm still in the very first base. :T
One of the enclaves I'm friendly with offers laborers as a perk though. And another offered to repair cars, but IDK if enough time passed for them to get that far. I'd settle for repair kits.
As for bugs, I've been playing since launch just about and the only only buggy thing I've encountered are gates being visually open yet acting as if they're closed (you have to open them again). Seems to be something with the NPCs opening/closing them.
Deadly ladders are a feature.
However, if you abandon them or ignore them long enough for them to time out-one of my community members kept asking to find him a record player-they eventually come back. He took a brief morale penalty though, and it took several hours of gameplay for it to autofail.
edit: also just randomly lost an entire unit of food because someone saw a roach crawl out of a food bin. that... seems like a first world problem.
Win10, running latest nVidia drivers. No idea what’s going on.
Sorry Turtle.... I did not mean to get you literally ripped in half.
Bravely Default / 3DS Friend Code = 3394-3571-1609
I wound up going to 7 survivors and now I have to take on a new place in the Valley. Or swap an outpost over to one that offers beds but I can't find one that offers beds + collections (haven't looked and using the ingame map doesn't pause). Situation where I took on the 7th was interesting, in that the person I took in only had options that would get them killed based off the progression in that enclave's relationship to mine (they were the one that got sent in to dangerous things all the time). It doesn't help that their enclave is in the vicinity of two plague hearts (gg RNG) and they'll probably die soon too.
I'm thinking of taking a farm. Here's a video (I'm waiting for a better one to add to the OP) that has some light information on all the homes in the valley. It's ~30 minutes and doesn't seem to have the actual layouts of the bases so... not as useful as I'd want to post:
He also did the other two areas (same issue):
In the valley, you can get power and water via the water tower and power substation, you're looking at 2k for water and 1k for power I think. I have the third level generator which has no noise and there's water at the camp already. I found the baseball diamond, it's pretty central. Right now my concern is my dumbasses attacking a juggernaut, which hasn't happened even tho one wandered past our base.
My main base leader is a real all star, she's second tier in most of her abilities, maxed out for swordplay so decapitations all around. I've been swapping to my other pinheads and just having them run laps around the base. I need a pile of circuit boards to run upgrades. What annoys me is they constantly lose things to "oh, we left something out and the gas evaporated." It doesn't seem like they get better at that, and it happens ALL THE TIME. I'm hoping Undead Labs clues in and allows for some Conan Exiles level customization of difficulty and such. I'm having fun, but this feels like an incredibly lazy sequel. The reviews haven't been great, but there's no reason why this can't be a real solid franchise if they'd just put the resources into it. I don't want MMO, but I'd love to be able to run a server or have better co op for pals.
So that new community member that I took in because I figured she'd die in her enclave has the trait "Afraid of Everything" wherein she will annoy anyone that gets irritated easily and now I understand while the npc enclave may have sent her off to die so many times...
Also, when I got a quest related to that enclave and asked her to come, she says no. It does feel like they put a little more into the interactions this go round. I took her anyway, to see what happens. She was in the process of being pulled apart, and shortly thereafter everyone else was too as my fatigue counter triggered at the start of a siege, I was forced to enact the groundhog day protocol.
***
On the review front, from what I've seen it's gotten mixed to positive reviews from professionals, and negative reviews from users, some of whom were State of Decay 2 to be a AAA title when the price tag would make it fairly obvious that it is not one, but eh. Then there's the people dropping negative reviews because of Sea of thieves, and people that are upset they can't find players when they are playing a game days before it has actually been released... The first State of Decay also had issues with the simulation triggers being annoyingly frequent to some, and not to others, which is why I would have thought a slider to determine how often you get them would have been included. All in all in terms of sequels and improvements, I think they did good.
Other than the door/gate thing I can't say that I've encountered any major bugs or issues though.
***
On another note, if you have ordered the State of Decay 2: Ultimate Edition Preorder, apparently hidden within bundle's State of Decay 2 Add-on Pack Bundle is the Doomsday Pack, which contains a very powerful baseball bat, sword, full auto shotgun, silenced AR, SMG and vehicle.
It also had a supply drop with First aid kits, molotovs, pipe bombs, 2 suppressors and 2 8-slot backpacks.
Lost one survivor to plague heart because I got swarmed and ran out of explosives. Now managed to pull back and get a decent amount of supplies, sheriff leader and a upgraded base.
It's pretty fun, lots of plate spinning but it's good. Definitely have had some nice water cooler moments which I think it's all part of the sandbox experience.
Re: Plague Hearts
If you have a hard enough hitting weapon it is possible to both trigger and simultaneously kill everything that is summoned by the heart by killing it outright. Adds that are drawn in as a result of the noise from your fighting will not die though.
I will also add a note that you can not stealth kill Juggernauts, in Turtle's memory.
Oh cool, that's tomorrow. I guess I'll be giving this a run with the free trial to see how I like it compared to the first one.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
@Syngyne this sounds like a bug that I encountered when playing Sea of Thieves (and reddit made it out to be a Windows Store issue). You should be able to uninstall/reinstall any app (I used the XBox Insider Hub, but others have used Netflix) on the store and then be able to play the game again. (Also why I would think it's the same issue is because you uninstalled/reinstalled the game and it worked again)
Also, I think the quickest way to diagnose/resolve is to uninstall/reinstall a small Windows Store app. I never figured out the trigger because of how intermittent it was, though I want to say that towards the end of my 2 weeks playing, it happened a lot less.
I'm going to add this to the OP eventually, let me know if I missed anything:
State of Decay 2 - The Game Loop
New to this game is the plague heart mechanic, in which 9-10 nests are seeded randomly throughout the map. Plague hearts are the source of Plague zombies, who are faster, blood covered zombies that carry the blood plague, an additional mechanic added to the game. Get hit enough and you build up infection, fill the bar and the character has the plague and must be cured or turn. Destroying plague hearts and zombies drops an item that can be used to craft the cure to the infection. With an appropriately leveled infirmary, resting a character who hasn't gone full blown infection will allow them to recover. Some survivors can provide a buff that increases your communities' resistance to this "damage" when they become heroes. Survivors also have a trait that can apply to them individually. As you progress in the game over time, upgrades and plague hearts killed, the map grows more difficult. You cannot place mines and 100% zombie free buffer zone around your base via outposts this go round. You win by either moving your community to another map (same as the Breakdown DLC), or completing the Legacy of your leader. I believe you have to clear all plague hearts from a map before you can establish a Legacy though. (NOTE: Be careful with the quests for your leader because there may be an issue with completing all their quests before making them a leader). Which we'll talk about next.
New to State of Decay is the leader system. Completing quests and generally doing things with a survivor earns XP and standing for your characters. After they gain enough XP they will become a hero. There are four types of heroes in the game: Sheriff, Builder, Warlord and Trader. These provide perks to the player and their legacy. Once a survivor becomes a hero they can become the leader of your community, at which point they can progress to a legacy. Heroes offer benefits to the community, and are random. Completing a legacy finishes the campaign for that community, at which point you have to start a new one. You can use old characters to start a new community. Depending on the type of hero that triggered the legacy you can select up to two Legacy boons for your new community:
You would have to beat the game four times to be able to choose from all four, obv. I do not know if a legacy character dying in a later community would remove access to a boon, however that character would be gone for good regardless.
Once you pick your new starting group, you pick one of three maps and go from there. And that's the loop.
Quick google is failing me: Is this a midnight Pacific or midnight Eastern release on the Windows Store? I'm assuming the latter, but Undead Labs is physically in the Pacific time zone.
Vehicles that are not suited to go off road may have a terrible time of going off road. From getting legit beached on rocks and terrain, to actually being able to drive them into ditches that they can't back out of. This is especially true if you're driving at night with the headlights off. If you manage to flip your car over, it will not blow up. You can just press Y and it will flip over because if you press Y to flip over your vehicle it will right itself easy peasy. You can also use another car to ram your stuck vehicle out of its predicament, or enlist the help of a friendly juggernaut.
Just saw this and that's a damn fine deal. I can not believe that the company that so spectacularly botched their introduction to this generation of gaming (and still lags in regards to content) offers a value pass like this.
. . .however, I can not believe that there is an even more dog shit storefront than Steam. Holy shit is the MS Store bad. The "downloading" screen is completely useless, and you kind of just have to let the thing run it's course as the download speed is completely borked; my download updates in 1GIG bursts it seems. Sheesh. In any case, excited to jump in this as SoD1 was quite fun, warts and all and this honestly seems like more of the same - just in a prettier, more fleshed out package.
EDIT: Game installed. Go to sign in. And now I have a weird ass Login name, and can't actually start the game. Good god. Wasn't Games For Windows Live and their account horseshit terrible enough. . .did they learn nothing?
EDIT 2: Seems a computer restart was needed. In case you run into a weird MS error (from possibly not using Xbox Live or anything MS in years) that seems to fix the issue. . .though I seem stuck with this silly name.
. . .and yea the music is pretty great so far. Also, for getting a warning about being under minimum specs (my computer cores or something) the game defaulted on High and seems to be running at a good speed. I do wonder if there's anyway to limit it to 30FPS for a smoother performance.
(Also, I'm glad there's mention of ladders here. I had forgotten how they ... "worked")
Your name in game should be the same as your gamertag, whatever your xbox name/microsoft account display name is. It's all connected. The storefront could be better but I don't think it's particularly terrible.
Tried some of the co-op last night and it seems really fun, nice that you can stash supplies and stuff for your own base.