If those behind this were really motivated, it would have been finished a while ago….
It might not be an issue of motivation only. They might have run into difficulty.
For example, pathfinding seems to have been (and still might be) troubles.
When the party enters a location, some zombies stand at various points.
Zombies are attracted to noise. Weapons create noise. Taking out hostile make noise. Zombies might leave their standing point to move toward the noise origin.
That is for zombies that are originally placed at the start.
If the noise level is loud enough (for example, during a fire fight with another faction party), zombies from the outskirts of the location are attracted to the location. They enter the location by the entrance/exit zones on the map. And they stay. As a consequence, if a scavenging run gets noisy, the area might be swarmed with zombies and end with a higher number of zombies. Depending on the location, the number of zombies roaming the outskirts might be higher or lower, the flood might happen faster etc
How does it matter? Characters are ordinary people confronted to a societal collapse. They are prone to breaking, to panicking.
Two ways to induce panic: high level of damage or horror.
Horror (is supposed to) happens when enough zombies surround a character.
The issue with path finding makes it that zombies had (and still might have) all kind of troubles to get from point A to point B. So situations when a character is surrounded with zombies are unlikely to happen. It also put the player in a comfort zone as it gives the player all the time required to loot everything.
Zombies moving toward the player's position would act as a way to pressure the player into acting faster and possibly leave the place if the player does not want to engage.
During my playtime, I never witnessed horror triggering itself. Not a single time. I tried to engineer the situation by myself. It did not tick. I am unsure the mechanics is implemented.
Nevertheless, without zombies able to move reliably from point a to point b due to path finding issues, the question is irrelevant.
There are various items to make noise in order to control the flow of zombies to achieve this or that (for example, zombies can be used to create a second front during a fire fight. Some levels are clearly designed to that effect)
As zombies could not make it to a specific point, it breaks one fundamental mechanics: panicking.
Beside that point, when a character panicks, the player loses control over it.
Typically, three behaviours might be adopted:
- aggression: the character tries to get of the threat causing the horror
-stupefaction: the character is stuck on the spot (could be silent or noisy)
-evasion: the character tries to flee.
Out of the three behaviours, only aggression is implemented. It is unsure that the other two, even if the developpers manage to bring situations that push characters into panick, will be implemented.
Stupefaction does not seem troublesome. Evasion though implies that the panicked character might run into zombies, make it to an exit point. In the last case, this will call for additional mechanics to determine whether the fleeing survivor makes it back to the shelter once separated from the part.
The behaviours might also apply to hostile NPCs.
NPCs come with various labels like nervous looter, tough looter, serious looter, crazed looter that might reflect their panick threshold: a nervous loot might look for evasion when in sight of a larger party than his, crazed looter know no fear and will keep going until terminated etc
As pathfinding issues were meant (and might still exist), it might have pushed behind associated features.
Without zombies reliably moving accross the map, it is hard to surround the characters with zombies, useless to work on the behaviours due to panick since the situation causing panick are unlikely to happen etc
As stated, the gameplay is an alpha stage, this leaves a lot of question marks.
