State of Decay 2

[BadAssHskr]

Re: State of Decay 2

i don't generally do the zombie thing, however i've been following this one. has me really excited.

my game said it was ready to play last night, however i was stuck on FNC.

will be getting some game time in today.

[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

does the game continue on even you're not playing?

This I'm not sure about. I'll find out for sure in an hour or two when I get back from work and get back on.

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[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

Whats the plot/story line of this game (or the first one)?

The short version.

In the first game, you and a friend are out camping/fishing/hunting in an isolated area, when all of a sudden you get attacked by a zombie. Your friend gets bitten, so you head back to the ranger station to find help, only to find it's been overrun and everyone dead. After exploring and looting nearby buildings around the campgrounds and ranger station, you and your friend eventually make it into town after discovering someone on the radio, you meet up with a group of survivors at a church.

To help save your friend, you have to do some missions to bring a doctor back to the church while simultaneously trying to loot enough supplies to keep your community stocked and any needs fulfilled, all while trying to avoid being killed by the ever growing and size increasing zombie threat.

Eventually you get your friend healed, you can leave the church to find a new home base of operations (nearly everyone immediately heads to Snyder Trucking in the nearby city as it's the biggest and best defensible of all home bases. You meet the military and other enclaves of survivors, doing various missions for them, and eventually the story results in one big final mission with the military where you escape the previously sealed off valley.

During this time, again, you're collecting supplies, looting buildings, dealing with large hordes and special zombies and trying to stay alive while also keeping your home base stocked with supplies and happy.

I can't go into details on the second game, other than what the tutorial is like, since I'm only in the very beginning, though you can seemingly ditch the tutorial story. Like the first, in the second game, your friend gets bitten in the tutorial and ends up with what's called blood plague and where I got to, having met up with a soldier and doctor to form a four person community, you have to find supplies to start your home base and find a cure.

I started a second community, where you can skip the tutorial entirely, with the only result being you start with just three people instead of four. However, you can roll and reroll those three people until you get the stats you want! I have one person who is one star below a max level mechanic, another who is one star below a max level medicine stat (along with 3 stars fighting and 4 stars shooting), and one who has high wit and a shooting skill nearly maxed out, along with a low level planting skill.

So of those three starting characters, I've got a good mechanic to keep stuff repaired, a good doctor to keep people healed, two good shooters, one good fighter, and an okay for now gardener to help when I start planting crops to feed my community.

If you skip the tutorial, you can't choose what map you want to play on, it's a random selection for you. And it starts generally the same way the game starts after the tutorial, you arrive on the new map in a vehicle that just ran out of gas, so you're forced to explore forward on foot, scavenge supplies and set up a home base. The good part is, no one is sick or dying of blood plague amongst the three of you, so you're not racing some invisible clock or dealing with a bunch of story missions to save your friend like you are if you have a community where you went through the tutorial.

For now, I have two communities going, one from the tutorial and one I custom created. I'll play the tutorial one to experience the story as Undead Labs designed it, but I also have the custom community so I can just dive straight into the whole community building, scavenging for supplies and surviving hordes gameplay that I loved so much from the first game.

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[Skyboxer]

Re: State of Decay 2

So any more impressions...?

[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

So I'm not sure if the game continues "living" even while you're offline like the first one did. I got back on tonight in my non-tutorial community and I didn't notice anything missing or lower supplies. Granted half the community supplies were still at zero because I was only an hour in and hadn't built up the community properly yet.

I'm currently hiding out on a billboard during the middle of night 3, waiting for dawn of day 4. It feels just like the first game did to me so far with some changes and additions.

So far I've managed to get my population up to five with the addition of two strangers. Put up a watchtower, machine shop and infirmary in my three available spaces. I still don't have any outposts. Outposts are a lot more expensive than I remember them being in the first game. To put an outpost in a house costs 400 influence. I have yet to spend any influence at all after probably 4 or 5 hours of gameplay and I'm only up to 465 influence currently, which I'm saving up for the 1,000 influence I need to move to my next home site.

I don't know if it's the best home site you can have in Meagher Valley, but I discovered Mazzara Farm while helping a stranger find his buddy. It's a big *** site like Snyder Trucking in the first game. It comes with existing country kitchen, well house, crew house, grain silo storage and two parking spots, with the ability to build on 2 large slots, 1 small indoor slot and 2 small outdoor slots for a total of 5 additional facilities that you can choose.

Now that sounds pretty damn good to me, granted there might be something even bigger and better since I've only discovered at most 10-15% of the entire map via billboard and cell tower spotting.

Be ready for infestations up the ***. I've already destroyed 3 or 4 infestations and I'm looking at another four currently active infestations on the map right now. At least one or two seem to pop up 15-20 minutes in real time.

Also, be careful and try to keep various enclaves happy. While in the first game you never really had any dangerous enclaves of other human survivors, this time around, it's possible to piss off other survivor groups or have them turn hostile towards your group through your actions or choices, leading to war between you and other groups. And from what I've read, the AI doesn't suck at shooting in this game. One review talked about how they had trouble lining up headshots on an enemy survivor and one of their community members got shot and killed during a shootout. So make sure you work on training your people in the firearms and shooting skill, because it may come in handy.

And as I've been typing, a FIFTH infestation popped up down the road from my home site. It lead to an interesting comment from my follower about how if we don't start knocking down these infestations, we're going to have a siege on our hands. Now, as someone who really didn't watch any of the new features videos, I don't know if that's just a one-off comment, or if you let infestations go and build up on you, then it leads to something called sieges. I'm sort of intrigued at the possibility of zombie sieges.

Edit - So I'm not sure about "sieges" being in the game, but you do get hordes up the *** if you let a bunch of infestations build. I have 5 active infestations and at one point in the middle of night 4, there were 8 different hordes in my quarter of the map. Even right now there are still 5 active hordes and that's after killing 5 or 6 others I've come across.

Also best to wipe out infestations early. When an infestation forms, it has 6 zombies and 1 screamer inside. If you let it go long enough, that eventually increases to 8 zombies and 2 screamers. And if you still don't clear it yet, it eventually increases again to the point of 10 zombies and 3 screamers inside the building. Yeah, learn a lesson from uncle Pancakes. Four of my five active infestations have reached that 10 zombies/3 screamers level. Those are going to suck to actually clear out. Learn a lesson from me and clear your infestations out early while they're still small and easy.

One thing that I sort of dislike from the first to the second game, hordes are underwhelming. Most hordes are only 6 zombies and maybe a screamer in size. I have seen one or two that go up to 8 or 9 in size. But nothing like the massive roving 10-15 or more zombie hordes like there were in the first game. The first game, I would avoid hordes unless I was near outposts that had traps enabled or was in a vehicle. Now, I just go running in swinging and bashing and wipe them out.

There also seems to be a lack of special zombies so far. In 4 or 5 hours of gameplay, I've seen one bloater zombie and that's it. No juggernauts, no ferals, no other special zombies. So they seem to be a bit far and few inbetween in this game compared to the first. The only thing you have to really worry about is blood plague zombies as your characters can easily become infected with the blood plague from attacks by blood plague zombies. Then you gotta deal with the whole finding and making a cure that the tutorial started community has for the storyline.

Also, cars are definitely fewer than the first game. There's no more having your choice of a couple trucks, a couple two and four door cars and a cop car or two in one small neighborhood like the first game.

So far, in an area probably a quarter size of the map, I've located a working ambulance with 3/4ths of a tank of gas. A Rhames V van with an empty tank that is your vehicle you abandon due to no gas at the start of the game. A Rhames V that does work and has 3/4ths of a tank of gas, though it's located next to an infestation. A Desperado SUV that is both destroyed (needs to be repaired) and has an empty tank. A second destroyed and empty gas tank Desperado. A working military truck that has an empty gas tank. And a working passenger van with over 3/4ths of a tank, though that likely belongs to the nearby community of survivors that I'm supposed to meet at that house.

One quarter of the map, and only seven potential vehicles that can be used, and only three of them that actually have gas in them. Yeah, vehicles are a whole hell of a lot more rarer, special, and something you don't want to just go banging around and destroy while driving somewhere. You better do your best to make those babies last.

Edit - OK, now that it's daylight and I'm jogging the 750+ meters back to my home site, I've since come across one bloater that was walking and a second bloater just now that is lying in the middle of the road like a booby trap, as well as just watched a horde from right in front of me 20 yards away. So now I'm up to 3 bloaters so far for special zombie sightings.

Edit 2 - Well, I just had my first "**** my pants" moment. It's late at night, maybe 4 or 5am, it's just barely starting to get light out and you can just start to see more than 10 feet in front of you. I'm running a mission with a survivor of another enclave, going to save his buddy trapped in a garage. We get there and there's an infestation inside the house next door, a horde passing by, and out of nowhere, I get attacked by a feral while a juggernaut is 30 yards away. After literal minutes of hacking and slashing, there is a mound of probably 20 or 30 dead zombies on the ground and somehow the four of us come out of it alive (although both my people were near death levels of health. Thankfully the juggernaut seemed to disappear.

Or so I thought. As I was starting to type this up, with the map window pulled up, suddenly the map disappeared and I got yanked back into the world with the picture of a ****ing juggernaut screaming next to my active character INSIDE my home site. It took dozens of gun shots from all 5 of my community members to get him down on his knees so one of my AI members could run up and kill him.

So make that 2 "**** my pants" moments in a matter of 10 minutes or so.

And now suddenly I'm seeing a lot of special zombies. I went from seeing none to having seen over two dozen bloaters, one feral and one juggernaut so far.

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[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

Ok just seen that as long as you are not playing multi player you can pause the game.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this game doesn't pause during single player. When I hit the pause button to bring up the menu, at the top in bold, capital, red letters, it says "GAME IS NOT PAUSED".

And as I just discovered, when you have the game map, home site or community windows pulled up, you are still extremely vulnerable, as I discovered when the map window suddenly closed and there was a juggernaut standing right next to me while I was standing inside my home site.

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[SeaTownGamer]

Re: State of Decay 2

The short version.

In the first game, you and a friend are out camping/fishing/hunting in an isolated area, when all of a sudden you get attacked by a zombie. Your friend gets bitten, so you head back to the ranger station to find help, only to find it's been overrun and everyone dead. After exploring and looting nearby buildings around the campgrounds and ranger station, you and your friend eventually make it into town after discovering someone on the radio, you meet up with a group of survivors at a church.

To help save your friend, you have to do some missions to bring a doctor back to the church while simultaneously trying to loot enough supplies to keep your community stocked and any needs fulfilled, all while trying to avoid being killed by the ever growing and size increasing zombie threat.

Eventually you get your friend healed, you can leave the church to find a new home base of operations (nearly everyone immediately heads to Snyder Trucking in the nearby city as it's the biggest and best defensible of all home bases. You meet the military and other enclaves of survivors, doing various missions for them, and eventually the story results in one big final mission with the military where you escape the previously sealed off valley.

During this time, again, you're collecting supplies, looting buildings, dealing with large hordes and special zombies and trying to stay alive while also keeping your home base stocked with supplies and happy.

I can't go into details on the second game, other than what the tutorial is like, since I'm only in the very beginning, though you can seemingly ditch the tutorial story. Like the first, in the second game, your friend gets bitten in the tutorial and ends up with what's called blood plague and where I got to, having met up with a soldier and doctor to form a four person community, you have to find supplies to start your home base and find a cure.

I started a second community, where you can skip the tutorial entirely, with the only result being you start with just three people instead of four. However, you can roll and reroll those three people until you get the stats you want! I have one person who is one star below a max level mechanic, another who is one star below a max level medicine stat (along with 3 stars fighting and 4 stars shooting), and one who has high wit and a shooting skill nearly maxed out, along with a low level planting skill.

So of those three starting characters, I've got a good mechanic to keep stuff repaired, a good doctor to keep people healed, two good shooters, one good fighter, and an okay for now gardener to help when I start planting crops to feed my community.

If you skip the tutorial, you can't choose what map you want to play on, it's a random selection for you. And it starts generally the same way the game starts after the tutorial, you arrive on the new map in a vehicle that just ran out of gas, so you're forced to explore forward on foot, scavenge supplies and set up a home base. The good part is, no one is sick or dying of blood plague amongst the three of you, so you're not racing some invisible clock or dealing with a bunch of story missions to save your friend like you are if you have a community where you went through the tutorial.

For now, I have two communities going, one from the tutorial and one I custom created. I'll play the tutorial one to experience the story as Undead Labs designed it, but I also have the custom community so I can just dive straight into the whole community building, scavenging for supplies and surviving hordes gameplay that I loved so much from the first game.

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If that’s the short version I don’t want to imagine the long version lol


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[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

If that’s the short version I don’t want to imagine the long version lol


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Lol, sorry, trying to give you a broad overview of the entire game and carried on a bit. It really is a fun as hell game. I've played, beaten and started new games multiple times on the first game. And so far 8 hours into my custom community I the second game, just starting day 5 of survival, I'm having as much fun (if not more) as I did in the first game.

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[Skyboxer]

Re: State of Decay 2

Actually, I'm pretty sure this game doesn't pause during single player. When I hit the pause button to bring up the menu, at the top in bold, capital, red letters, it says "GAME IS NOT PAUSED".

And as I just discovered, when you have the game map, home site or community windows pulled up, you are still extremely vulnerable, as I discovered when the map window suddenly closed and there was a juggernaut standing right next to me while I was standing inside my home site.

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According to dev that replied in a YT video there is a pause for single player. That's where I seen it...
I'm waiting until Tuesday's release to make up my mind whether to grab or not.. so hopefully it will be clarified by then for me.

EDIT: Exact words were "The game actually DOES let you pause if you turn off multiplayer"

[callmetaternuts]

Re: State of Decay 2

Thanks for the feedback. So its a zombie survival game in short? Im in need of one of those.

Edit: Is it more RPG? Single player? Are there fights involved? I love the Walking Dead (TV show, well, I loved the first few seasons, I've tolerated the last few) and would love a game to simulate that. Is this close?

[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

According to dev that replied in a YT video there is a pause for single player. That's where I seen it...
I'm waiting until Tuesday's release to make up my mind whether to grab or not.. so hopefully it will be clarified by then for me.

EDIT: Exact words were "The game actually DOES let you pause if you turn off multiplayer"

Hmm, alright, I'll have to go back in and check that out. It must be because I have the co-op option set to friends only currently, instead of entirely off/none.

It certainly would be nice to be able to check the map while driving back to base in my ambulance without worry of nearby zombies swarming me.

Last night I had to build up speed on straight sections of road and let the vehicle coast forward on its own while I pulled up the map to check my position and see if any turns were coming up.

Although the living, persisting world going on while I try to check the map on check on something back at my home site while I'm out in the wild somewhere away from home actually sounds intriguing! It adds another layer to trying to survive.

If you want a safe place to stop and do stuff on the map or in the menus, better find a quiet house you can sneak inside of or do like I did to survive the darkness of night 3 when you're over 750 meters away from home and stuck on foot, climb a billboard and just hang out on top until dawn/until you do what you need to do.

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[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

Thanks for the feedback. So its a zombie survival game in short? Im in need of one of those.

Edit: Is it more RPG? Single player? Are there fights involved? I love the Walking Dead (TV show, well, I loved the first few seasons, I've tolerated the last few) and would love a game to simulate that. Is this close?

At its base, yes. You start with a group of 3 or 4 people in your community (depending on whether you do the tutorial or skip it), have to find a safe place to call your home site. And once you have your home site settled, you have to survive the persistent zombie threat (from single zombies to hordes of 6-10 zombies to infestations of 6-10 zombies in a single building).

There are also special zombies.

Juggernauts, which are giant *** hard to kill sumbitches.

Screamers, which are armless zombies that scream extremely loud, loud enough to temporarily stun you, with the scream drawing in a bunch of nearby zombies, so you can easily end up surrounded very quickly.

Armored zombies, which think soldiers or swat cops that ended up as zombies, they take a little extra bashing to kill, and can't be simply headshot with a single bullet due to their helmets.

Feral zombies, which think a zombie hyped on meth or crack. That little bitch will sprint at you on all fours like a dog, it reacts very fast, jumps and rolls around a lot. Don't even bother trying to shoot it (because you'll never hit it), just bash at it as often as you can until you finally kill it.

Bloaters, which are greenish ugly *** zombies with giant bubbling stomachs. If they see you, they run towards you and explode into a giant cloud of toxic gas that drains both your health and stamina. These little *******s also like to lay in the middle of the road like freaking zombie IEDs waiting for you to accidentally drive over one so it can go kaboom.

And lastly, and new to SoD2, blood plague zombies that are covered in blood and have red eyes (instead of the yellow eyes of regular zombies) that can expose you to and eventually infect you with the blood plague, which if left untreated and cured, will kill your character.

Which brings up something else. Both the first State of Decay and this game are permadeath. If your active character gets killed, that's it, they're permanently dead. There is no way to revive them and you lose them and their skills forever. All that will remain of them is their backpack on their dead body with whatever they were carrying at the time of death, which you can take another character and go retrieve.

In addition to surviving the persistent threat, you have to keep morale of your community up. Low moral is a death sentence for members of your community. You also have to keep your community supplied. Your supplies are used and depleted every day. Right now in my game with a community of 5 people, my medicine supply is depleted by 2 per day and my food supply is depleted by 3.5 per day.

So you spend time searching houses, garages, farms and businesses, scavenging for supplies, looking for stashes of food, medicine, ammo, gas, building materials and spare parts so you can keep your community well stocked and be able to build and upgrade facilities. However, resources are finite. Once you've cleared a house or building and taken everything that can be taken, that's it, that house is empty and there will never be supplies or resources there again.

So it's a mix of zombie survival, resource collecting/management, a small degree of base building and community building/recruiting as you try to add more people to your community.

While all that is going on, you're doing missions as they pop up, clearing out infestations, helping random survivors who call for help on the radio. You don't have to help the random calls for help, this is sort of like recurring settlement missions Preston kept giving out in Fallout 4, there's always another survivor asking for help a few minutes later. But it can be worth doing. You make friends with area enclaves of survivors, and lots of times when you help someone, they'll give you a free stash of supplies, usually your choice of food, medicine and a random choice of ammo, gas or building materials.

And unlike the first game, from what I've read, in this second game, you can piss off other enclaves of survivors and end up at war with them.

This can be played both single player (you can take one other AI community member with you as help while making scavenging runs) or you can play co-op with up to three other people. You can either have them join your game or they can join theirs. You can bring stuff that you earned in their game back to yours, and whatever skills you upgraded carry over back to your game.

Skills are another thing I forgot about. All survivors have four base skills. Cardio (influences stamina level), wits (influences quality of loot you find in containers), shooting (directly impacts ability to fight with firearms) and fighting (directly impacts ability to fight with melee weapons). The skills are rated from zero to seven stars, obviously seven stars being the best.

These can all be leveled up. Sprint for a period of time and you'll level up Cardio. Go around bashing zombies with a crowbar, you'll level up fighting. Simply search enough containers inside buildings, you'll eventually level up wit.

It's the random, advanced skills you want to focus on when inviting people into your community. Survivors can randomly have the skills of Acting, Chemistry (improves crafting options and abilities at workshops, infirmaries and stills), Cooking (can prepare better dishes, leads to better morale), Computers (useful for upgrading your radio), Craftsmanship, Driving (100% fuel efficiency, 50% vehicle impact reduction and 50% vehicle loudness reduction), Fishing (+2 food per day), Geek Trivia, Gardening (can help with increased food production from gardens), Hairdressing, Literature (+6 morale and 100% experience rate), Making Coffee, Mechanics (improves workshops), Medicine, Movie Trivia (+6 morale, 50% experience rate), Music (+6 morale, 25 influence per day and 100% standing rewards with other enclaves), Painting, People Skills (100% standing rewards, 25 influence per day), Political Science, Plumbing, Scrum Certification (50% global action speed and +2 free labor), Self Promotion, Sewing (+20 max health), Sports Trivia (100% cardio experience rate, 100% fighting experience rate, +20 to stamina), TV Trivia (+6 morale, +50% experience points rate) and Utilities.

There is also specialization of skills. You can specialize Cardio, Wits, Fighting and Shooting, picking between four different options for your specialization. You can also specialize Gardening, Chemistry, Mechanic and Craftsmanship with two options for specialization.

There are also traits. Every survivor has four random traits drawn from a pool of over 1200 traits. I'm not even about to attempt to list them all, but if you're curious, you can check out the work in progress list this guy is building.

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[Kanobi]

Re: State of Decay 2

I joined my son's game on a second xb1 in the house but was unable to help him search/scavenge. All i could do was help him fight. Is that restriction? Or is there a way to adjust that option?

[Smooth Pancakes]

Re: State of Decay 2

Well ****. I ran into a hostile enclave. It was 3 on 2 gun battle, I managed to kill all three of them (barely, a couple more shots and I would have died), but in the process my follower, who had a 6 out of 7 star Medicine skill died! Damnit! I was depending on that medicine skill. He was one of the three original survivors that I rolled to start the community. Now I gotta find a new medicine guy.

[BadAssHskr]

Re: State of Decay 2

Digging the game, however I feel like I'm playing the tutorial mode? I was presented the option to pick my initial 2 players, then met up with An, and the soldier, and essentially the game is walking me through what i need to do.

How do i go about playing the non tutorial version, or Am I possibly doing this. I was at one time given the option to play offline, private or Multi I believe, and I chose to play private.

Just want to ensure i'm getting the most out of the game before I end up spending a bunch of time in the game and have to start over.