- Exodii issue:
Part of dialing back the sci-fi elements meant bionics, which do not really exist in our world in anything like Cataclysm form, need to come from
somewhere. Enter the Exodii, a group of human(ish) interdimensional travelers from worlds parallel (and largely similar) to ours. They show up on worlds being ravaged by the Blob (the source of the zombie infection) and loot everything they can before fleeing. This is not, in and of itself, a terrible idea. The problems were that the Exodii, being not from our Earth but one sort of like it, speak a sort-of English that can be a bit of a pain in the ass to interpret, because the creator is not nearly as clever a writer as he thinks he is. They also became effectively the sole gatekeeper for
all bionics: no more looting underground labs or dissecting zombies or breaking into bank vaults or whatever. The biggest problem, however, is they got added but only partially developed - their stuff was largely incomplete for something like 2 years. Meanwhile, since the dev is butt buddies with Kevin, no one was allowed to touch or modify this unfinished faction. Irritating, to say the least.
- Re: The advanced tech justification they have a whole design document about it (and much other lore background) here:
- Pockets:
Pockets are one of those ideas that sound good but really don't add that much compared to the hassle they create. The "old" method of inventory storage was to simply abstract it all away: Bag A gives you X liters of storage, Bag B gives you Y liters, and it all combines seamlessly, so for example, if you had an item Z, that was larger than X or Y, by wearing both bags (X+Y > Z) it still "fit" into your inventory. The pockets system means that's no longer true: each item has to be stored in a well-defined pocket, which means in the example above you had to carry item Z in your hands, since it was too large to fit into any individual pocket.
In principle this is fine, but their implementation has a couple consequences: consider a rifle that's too long for a backpack. In real life, you might settle for letting it stick out the top of the backpack and just zipping the backpack up as much as you could. Not with pockets! It also would make very random and abitrary decisions about what items to put in what pockets. Defenders of the system point out that you can specify rules to ensure that only certain items go into certain pockets, which is fine if A) you enjoy having to
script what goes into your fucking pockets and B) seems to immediately break down once you pick up some new item that's capable of storing things. There's also the problem that the pockets system doesn't interact at all with the advanced inventory system, where I tend to live: it only can show you the container, not what's inside of it. Zones also don't seem to play well with it in my experience.
- Portal Storms:
Another neat idea that, at least the last time I played with it, was poorly done. You can get teleported to some weird space, with fairly arbitrary rules so that you can fight unkillable monsters, wander around a constantly changing maze, etc. It's fun once or twice, but after that I found it was mostly just "haha we're going to fuck with the player."
- Scifi elements removed: caseless ammo, atomic coffee machines, etc.
- The mods:
In terms of "no fungal growth" the problem with fungal growth is it will take over the entire map. Fairly uniquely in Cata, fungal terrain spreads, and produces mobs (fungaloids) which send out spores which further spread the fungal terrain. Fire works quite well on the fungal terrain, but it can become a huge pain in the ass if you don't keep after it. Vitamins, at least in BN, aren't actually fully implemented anyway so far as I can tell, so it doesn't harm anything either way. I've only ever needed to feed NPCs when I get them to join me, which I generally don't do, and when I did, they needed to be fed as part of the faction camp system.
Incidentally, you don't need to butcher all the zombie corpses; smashing them should be sufficient and is much quicker, assuming you don't intend on harvesting anything from the body.
DA, it's all gone to increasingly high levels of autism and shittery, not surprised it's getting actual fag flags in now. Anyone know if the Bright Days fork also has this?
