Well, here it is, folks! Our very first Early Access update is now live.
Important things to note:
This update includes some cool new features.
Curveballs! Zombified survivors! Pipe bombs! Seedy hotels! We're excited to see you get into the changes and to hear your thoughts. The full list of all new content and changes is below. Don't forget to join our Discord to chat with the dev team and share your feedback, and please let us know as soon as you can if anything looks like it's not working as intended.
This update includes some major balancing changes.
Our vision for the game has always been for players to weigh up difficult decisions. Do you push deeper into a location to get what you need or get in and get out quickly? Do you welcome a desperate survivor into your shelter or refuse them because there's not enough resources to go around? Do you align yourself with a ruthless faction or betray them? These decisions should test your strategy and also your humanity, and they're part of what makes the game fun the first time around and satisfying to replay.
But lately we've been watching players and noticing some decisions just aren't as tricky as we intended them to be. The most noticeable of these is the decision of whether to welcome a new survivor into your shelter or not. We always wanted this to be a difficult decision, but currently there are very few downsides to recruitment and large numbers of players eagerly say yes to every single recruitable. While it's cheerful to see all our lovely characters with full needs all hanging out in a shelter, this wasn't exactly the way we pictured it. Instead, resources should be scarce, morale fragile and stomachs rumbling. Sending someone out into an infested world rife with enemies should be extraordinary, tense and dangerous. And having increasing numbers of people holed up in a tiny shelter in the middle of a Texas summer during a violent, apocalyptic outbreak should be a lot more challenging.
For this reason, we have rebalanced the game to make the decision to say yes to recruitable survivors a little trickier. Namely:
- We have decreased the number of survivors you can send scavenging to just one per phase, but you can upgrade your Map station at the Workbench to unlock the ability to send two per phase.
- We have increased how much Hunger drains each phase and decreased the amount of Hunger that food restores, so it will be harder to keep your survivors' stomachs full.
- We have increased the number of timeslots it takes to dismantle an item and decreased the number of items you get.
- We have removed the ability to use medical items while out scavenging.
- The zombie threat will increase over time, meaning discovered but not yet visited locations will increase in difficulty as days progress.
We know these are some big changes! But our playtests so far have shown us that this a) makes the overall experience more enjoyable and b) aligns the experience closer to our original vision for the game.
As always, though, we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Now onto the full notes.
Update #1 Notes
Curveballs
Environmental and world events can now affect your shelter over time. These will appear in the form of shelter event popups, and can be positive or negative. The events can happen at random, or can be based on certain conditions such as the district you're in, the survivors who are in your shelter, or certain dates.
Zombified Survivors ("Zurvivors")
If your survivor is killed by a zombie while out scavenging, there is a chance you will encounter them as a zombie when you return to that location.
New Throwables
We've expanded the range of throwables options. The Brick does damage to enemies when thrown and can knock them back or down. The Pebble will cause an enemy to go into a searching state, and is best used to split a single zombie from a group or move a stationary zombie. The Pipe Bomb will explode immediately on contact with zombies or humans, or bounce on surfaces and explode after a certain amount of time. This explosion can also damage the player. These new throwables can now be discovered as loot around various locations, and the Pipe Bomb is also craftable.
Door Barging
If you run at an unlocked door fast enough, you can now crash through it. This causes minor health loss and a chance of injury, and means the door cannot be closed again.
New Starting Shelter
Stanton & Son Meats in the lovely district of Seneca is a new scavenging location that is also included as a potential starting shelter.
Other New Content
- Added Elkins Family Clinic in the Kingside district.
- Added the Indigo Rose Hotel in the Downtown district.
- Added Heatwave, Sunburn, Sunstroke, Influenza and Queasy states.
- Added dialogue interactions when recruiting Aubrey, Frank, Joe and Rahul.
- Added more attack variations to human enemies.
- Added Map panning, which gives players the ability to move around the map using the middle mouse button or the right controller analog stick.
- Added an additional suite of mouse actions, including the ability to use your mouse to interact with more of the shelter HUD, move between survivors in the shelter, and go to the next item in NPC interactions.
- Added the ability to cancel a survivor's assignment to a shelter station without having to enter the shelter station screen.
Adjustments
- Changed survivor recruitment so If you visit a location and decline to recruit a survivor, they will not be there when you return.
- Cooking recipes no longer have a water requirement to start with. This changes with certain Curveballs.
- Adjusted Barb's specific loot point so that it only appears after she mentions it.
- Adjusted Hudson's specific loot point so that it only appears after he mentions it.
- Stealth killing will now ragdoll zombies, causing them to fall to the ground using physics.
- Adjusted zombie spawning in Bloomingburg Books so it starts off easier but gets more difficult later in the game.
- Changed the speed of certain zombie reactions when using different weapons.
- Reduced the damage from some of the human enemy weapons.
- Adjusted the pistol and revolver's muzzle flash so it now emits a light that illuminates the environment around them when they are fired.
- Human NPC scavengers now only appear after 5 days.
- Survivors with the first aid training trait now have cheaper recipes for splints.
- Survivors without a wrist fracture can't consume splints.
- Millwood Manor's shed now requires a lockpick to unlock.
- Fire Station No.13 now has more areas to loot.
- Moved loot at Pogo's on 9th, Old Ballard and Jenson Elementary.
- Improved zombie behavior at Victory Meat Processing so zombies don't run into walls.
- The shed in 15 Independence Blvd no longer shakes.
- Added additional survivor animations.
- Updated the pool cue stealth execution animation.
- Added and updated sound effects throughout the stages and in some UI screens.
- Graphical improvements and further optimization on Mercer High School, Bloomingburg Books, Texway Gas Green St, Mitchum Powell Plaza and RM&K Communications.
- Simplified and Traditional Chinese text are now left aligned instead of center aligned for better readability.
- Adjusted the Map station so you now unassign a survivor by holding the right mouse button, circle on the Playstation controller, or B on the Xbox controller.
- Entering the Map screen again now saves your previous assignment.
- Map location information now doesn't show Threat bar if you have selected your own shelter.
- Added tips to the loading screen.
- Added icons for the buttons on the side of the mouse.
Fixes
- Fixed a bug with the conversation choices in The Network plan, so you can now only sell out Eva after you receive her note.
- Fixed an issue with Eva's dialogue attribution.
- Fixed an issue where you couldn't attack Red in the Airlift plan.
- Fixed a bug where you could consume Alcohol, Beer, Moonshine or Coffee while scavenging.
- Fixed an issue where shelter survivors in Texas Sports Supply sometimes walked into a left window.
- Fixed an issue with the rear fence in Texas Sports Supply where it was only climbable from one side.
- Fixed an issue at Texas Sports Supply causing zombies to see you when climbing the drainpipe.
- Fixed an issue where the emergency lights didn't persist in St Bernadette Hospital if you left and re-entered the stage after the power cut off.
- Fixed issue where sometimes zombies don't follow you into the next building in Bloomingburg Books and get stuck in the doorway.
- Fixed loot points in Fire Station No.13 where there was no visual for the item being looted.
- Fixed issue where survivors sometimes stalled out or clipped into things when roaming around the shelters.
- Fixed a bug where you could end up controlling two survivors in the shelter at the same time.
- Fixed an issue where you could sometimes jump instead of climb down even when you are inputting down.
- Fixed a bug where holding aim and interacting with an NPC caused you not to be able to use the NPC dialogue screen.
- Fixed an audio bug where some feminine human enemies were using masculine sounds.
- Fixed revolver so it plays reload audio now.
- Fixed some issues with loot point accessibility.
- Fixed an issue with the Map where if you selected the Map after you'd assigned someone, it unassigned them.
- Fixed issue where Exit to Main Menu popup didn't highlight your selected button when you were out scavenging.
- Fixed a crash related to the Options screen.
- Fixed some graphical issues on certain surfaces in the environment on medium settings.
- Fixed a bug where the Hope state in the Plans UI was missing translations.
- Various animation bug fixes and improvements.
- Various fixes and updates to UI screens and layouts.
- General fixes and improvements.
And last but not least...
Some news on Update #2
The major features of Early Access Update #2 will be
- Infection
- Difficulty settings
- New zombie threat
and will be coming in July. But more on that soon...
Harriet
& the Into the Dead team