I don’t know if that’s the correct version since I’m away from the computer, yadda yadda

I fired up Zomboid after watching this movie but I thought I’d play around with the guns first instead of going straight into a new playthrough.

So with the debug console open, cheats active, and Base.Pistol in hand, I took some shots at some 'boids. And it’s incredible.

You know how in Counter-Strike, its a classic joke to say it’s the game where your bullets can come out of the gun and make a 90° turn? Zomboid seems to have taken notes.

You can’t seriously be saying that I can knock a zomboid to the ground, stand on top of them, aim my gun one foot from their head, fully intent on executing them; pulling the trigger and watch the debug console as it says I hit them somewhere ridiculous like the lower torso or the hands and arms.

Bullets don’t feel real in this version. It really is just gambling which body parts you’re “calculated” to have hit, instead of calculating your chances of hitting your designated target. The Aiming skill just feels like a modifier for your chance to hit, and your crosshair is just a designator for which entity to run the calculations against. The crosshair doesn’t feel like it’s guiding a bullet to a target anymore.

And the salt on the wound is that the animation system acknowledges my intent to headshot most of the time. There’s a slight disconnect between the physical model and the hitboxes (I suspect its because the hitboxes aren’t rotating properly with perspective, center-of-mass is always fine) but otherwise the animation system is a delight.

Man, what I’ve just written feels off. Either way let’s talk about these gun changes. They feel really bad right now.

  • talEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    I’ve been more-frustrated about combat than just the guns alone.

    I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead more than Project Zomboid. A very large part of that is that I just don’t like the combat in Project Zomboid. I find the combat to be repetitive and not involve a lot of interesting decisions, but to demand close concentration and not be very permissive of errors (timing matters, plus the game has uncurable bites). Over the past couple years, I’ll every now-and-then pick the game up again and then set it down over not liking the combat.

    I do like other things about the game. But the combat just has always frustrated me.

    Here are others complaining about virtually the same points, so it’s not just me:

    https://old.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/vm5h1b/combat_is_horrible/

    Combat is horrible

    I got this game yesterday and I enjoy every aspect other than combat, one second I’m infront of a zombie killing it next second it’s behind me and I can’t hit it so then it bites me and I get infected boom run over.

    Zomboid has the worst combat of any game ever made. As fiddly and clunky and bug-ridden as they can possibly design it to be, with permadeath waiting for any misstep - then the creators and gambling addicts that stan for it, literally, can go on about “replayablility.”

    I’d like the game more if the combat were just redone from the ground up. Some games use real-time movement except when in combat – that could work. Or maybe keep it real-time, but make the combat more-interesting, where one has to make more interesting decisions about what’s going on, and be more-permissive of occasional errors.

    The combat is like…air-to-air refueling or something. The task you have to do isn’t very sophisticated, doesn’t require a lot of strategic decision-making, but it requires constant close attention and has very little tolerance for error.