I had a coworker describe this as "oh, it's like Day Z meets The Sims" and I guess that works? Really, I think the best point of comparison is NEO Scavenger, but that game gives me the impression that its fans use command-line web browsers, and Backloggd probably doesn't look great on those, so I'm assuming there's not very many of you here.
I normally despise survival games, and I think it's because for most of them, the "challenge" in surviving is that you have to run around for a long time before you can find the right thing to press E on to fill whatever bar is currently low. If you've only played a couple hours of Project Zomboid you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's similar, since you can survive pretty well doing just that for the first few in-game days. Food rots quickly, though, and canned food is finite, so you'll need to find a food source that isn't just "my neighbor's refrigerator" pretty early. Survival requires real planning and investment in Zomboid, not just reacting to short-term needs. And given that a single mistake of basically any kind can cause your death on standard settings, setting and achieving a goal (or even just surviving a week) feels like a real victory, no matter how small the ambition.
The early game of NEO Scavenger and PZ are pretty similar, although in my experience you escape "early game" much faster in PZ - unless you chose the "starter kit" option, your earliest moments in the game will be defined by running around the map with whatever you can cram in your pockets/hands: a bag of some kind (probably a trash bag), some vaguely weapon-like object, a couple ready-to-eat food items, and the most portable water receptacle you can get your hands on. If you survive long enough to set up a secure-ish base, you're probably set until the power and water cut off. After that, your next big difficulty hurdle will be to do all of this in the winter, with all that entails.
Big flaws? It's survival for its own sake, there's no endgame, and the developers have indicated that they have no interest in adding an end other than death for the player. If you can survive the winter and have a sustainable food source, only respawned zombies (on by default) will still pose a threat, meaning that the player will have to come up with some additional goals that aren't survival-related to keep things going. There's also the matter of early access - as things stand, the level of detail present in the game can lead players to make some misleading conclusions. In a game where you can die from cuts acquired while walking without shoes, you would assume first aid is a useful skill - wrong. Levelling carpentry or foraging will radically change your capabilities when interacting with those systems, but some skills (first aid is just the worst offender) function as noob traps, something that you should never go out of your way to improve. For the impatient, this game is also updated slowly - every new system added has comparable levels of depth right from the start, so while the devs post about upcoming changes constantly, no major content has been added since their (massive, overhaul-level, and yet remarkably stable) Build 41 update 7 months ago.
PZ seems to be one of the great success stories for Steam's Early Access program - you could release this game as-is and I don't think people would have much to complain about, so it's exciting to see that the devs are still feeling ambitious - NPCs, animals, an overhauled crafting system, etc. I think I've given somewhere in the range of 10-15 copies of this game since it first arrived on Steam 9 years ago, so I'm probably not the best suited to an impartial evaluation of this product, but $20 seems like a no-brainer of an investment for a product that has steadily improved this much and maintained a consistent level of stability/polish along the way.
I normally despise survival games, and I think it's because for most of them, the "challenge" in surviving is that you have to run around for a long time before you can find the right thing to press E on to fill whatever bar is currently low. If you've only played a couple hours of Project Zomboid you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's similar, since you can survive pretty well doing just that for the first few in-game days. Food rots quickly, though, and canned food is finite, so you'll need to find a food source that isn't just "my neighbor's refrigerator" pretty early. Survival requires real planning and investment in Zomboid, not just reacting to short-term needs. And given that a single mistake of basically any kind can cause your death on standard settings, setting and achieving a goal (or even just surviving a week) feels like a real victory, no matter how small the ambition.
The early game of NEO Scavenger and PZ are pretty similar, although in my experience you escape "early game" much faster in PZ - unless you chose the "starter kit" option, your earliest moments in the game will be defined by running around the map with whatever you can cram in your pockets/hands: a bag of some kind (probably a trash bag), some vaguely weapon-like object, a couple ready-to-eat food items, and the most portable water receptacle you can get your hands on. If you survive long enough to set up a secure-ish base, you're probably set until the power and water cut off. After that, your next big difficulty hurdle will be to do all of this in the winter, with all that entails.
Big flaws? It's survival for its own sake, there's no endgame, and the developers have indicated that they have no interest in adding an end other than death for the player. If you can survive the winter and have a sustainable food source, only respawned zombies (on by default) will still pose a threat, meaning that the player will have to come up with some additional goals that aren't survival-related to keep things going. There's also the matter of early access - as things stand, the level of detail present in the game can lead players to make some misleading conclusions. In a game where you can die from cuts acquired while walking without shoes, you would assume first aid is a useful skill - wrong. Levelling carpentry or foraging will radically change your capabilities when interacting with those systems, but some skills (first aid is just the worst offender) function as noob traps, something that you should never go out of your way to improve. For the impatient, this game is also updated slowly - every new system added has comparable levels of depth right from the start, so while the devs post about upcoming changes constantly, no major content has been added since their (massive, overhaul-level, and yet remarkably stable) Build 41 update 7 months ago.
PZ seems to be one of the great success stories for Steam's Early Access program - you could release this game as-is and I don't think people would have much to complain about, so it's exciting to see that the devs are still feeling ambitious - NPCs, animals, an overhauled crafting system, etc. I think I've given somewhere in the range of 10-15 copies of this game since it first arrived on Steam 9 years ago, so I'm probably not the best suited to an impartial evaluation of this product, but $20 seems like a no-brainer of an investment for a product that has steadily improved this much and maintained a consistent level of stability/polish along the way.
jobosno
1 year ago