8 1/2 wrote:Is that your 121 million at #1? That's not a bad run at all for the game just coming out. I'm playing on the PS3 version and broke my all-time high with 168 million last night. I did the final boss in four lives. I've done him in one before, but that was when I was actively tuning it. His attacks may seem cheap, and they are, but there is actually a method to destroying him (arms first helps a lot) that will get you through it without too much of a bloodbath.
Yeah, that's me. That score has since been beaten by a couple people with 260 mil+... WTF? Is that even feasible? Something seems off about those scores, I refuse to believe they got through with hardly any deaths.
The last boss... well, I tried to take out some of the arms but I would always get killed because they would place me so far away from the chaingun and by the time I got it my invulnerability wore off, then I have to figure out where they are in the dark, then by the time I start firing I get killed by something else (usually those lasers since it's impossible to move and dodge them while you're slowed down by the chaingun). There's way too much stuff going on and it seems impossible to deal with everything without dying... a lot. I guess I would've done better if I'd had some practice in that scenario.
I want to write up a proper post-mortem someday soon, but for now I thought I'd just throw out some random thoughts.
First, you're right. The game is WAY too long. My run last night took me almost five hours. There are quite a few reasons for this, and I can tell you that we were completely aware of the pacing problems, but were unable to fix it late in the process.
1. The game is by a very small team, and the encounter design didn't begin until very late. We were nearing Beta when the last of the enemies finally came online. Encounter tuning was done over a fairly brief period and by three different people. My share of the "Days" is up through Day 30 when you fight the first boss. After that, one of the other designers took over. So what you have essentially, up to Day 30, is my take on the full game, and then after that you have his full take on the game. You end up with a bloated and uneven experience. I'm a more sadistic designer I think, so the difficulty really peaks in my levels. Once you're past Day 30 it's pretty much smooth sailing and it just becomes about hoarding extra lives to survive past the final boss. He also likes longer stages than me, with lots of peaks and valleys, so his days tend to be very long and it makes the second half of the game start to feel like work after a while.
2. I over-promised on levels. At some point we had the idea that each level should be a day. I then ran with that, up to the point where I wanted to do 365 days. A "Year" with the undead crisis. This was obviously way outside scope, so the list just sort of sat in limbo. At some point we were up to almost 75 levels, and evententually we cut it back to the 55 we have now.
3. The game needs an editing pass, but they wouldn't let us. I think we have some damn good levels in there, and there are moments when the whole thing really flows. We knew it was way too long, and wanted to get it down to 30 Days. 30 just seems like such a perfect number too. But again, the timeframe was so short that by the time we realized that, we had already told Konami we had 55, and in turn Konami had already put out press releases that said things like "survive 55 days of terror." Konami seemed to really like the idea of 55, and so that number became something unavoidable, as we couldn't go back and tell them we were cutting the game half.
4. I would kill to do a "Director's Cut." Knowing now what I do, I'd love to go back and offer up some DLC that gives you a clean and focused 20 days that takes you out to the out extremes of difficulty and gives you something more managable for score runs. It wouldn't be too hard to do either, but any talks of DLC are all up to sales now. It's something we'd like to do ourselves, but ultimately it's up to Konami.
Ok I know the point has been driven home about the game's length, but... let's take Geometry Wars for example, since it's also an arena shooter and stuff. In the original, people got so good at it they could effectively play it until they got bored, thanks to the constant stream of extra lives/bombs. In GW2 they changed that in Evolved mode, and added in other game modes that pretty much assured that you wouldn't be playing one game for hours and hours. This was the absolute best thing they could have done to it, gameplay-wise. No longer were you forced to be stuck playing the same game doing the same stuff over and over. Now you were free to play for just 15 minutes if that's all you had time for, but you could also find yourself playing for hours on end because of the game's addictive nature, trying to improve those high scores. This is exactly what I want in an arcade game, being able to pick it up and play for as long as I feel like playing.
So ok, unfortunately this didn't happen with Zombie Apocalypse. If you were forced into making the game 55 days because of original promises then that's unfortunate. But the damage could have been controlled a little if the days were made shorter! A lot of them just drag on for so long, with enemy spawns that often aren't really all that interesting. This is what makes the game feel so repetitive, any sort of changes that made days shorter would have been for the better.
One of the other annoying problems in regards to playing any of the modes for score is of course that you have to start from day 1, which is completely understandable. But the early days are ridiculously easy, there's no threat of dying until you get to the Big Boys but even then they're not difficult to deal with. The grannies are more dangerous because of their annoying tendency to throw knives in random directions that aren't aimed directly at you, making it hard to predict whether or not you'll inadvertantly run into one. Either way that's about the point where you actually have to start paying attention to the game, meaning you always have those same 10 days to go through first, which aren't difficult and of course drag on too long.
And if you want to make the early days drag on even longer, try playing for score! In other words, chainsaw execution EVERYBODY. Scoring-wise it is clearly the best thing to do since it keeps driving up the multiplier, and when you're surrounded by the first three zombie types all you have to do is just hold down the left trigger and keep chainsawing. If you're pointing in a direction where nobody is then you'll get grabbed from another direction, but I never have a problem breaking out, unless it's Turbo mode of course. Either way, the chainsaw execution animation takes way too long to finish, which in essence makes the early levels even more grueling if you decide you want a high score. (Also what really makes the levels around 9-12 or so is the game's insistence in thinking that molotov cocktails are a really good weapon. They're horrible! Stop giving them to me and give me a weapon that actually works consistently!)
Ultimately I think it would've been better if the game had some sort of lifebar. Make it so that if you get grabbed by regular zombies you'll most likely take a little bit of damage before you can shake them off. It doesn't seem right that you can always run into one and then immediately shake them off and get a few seconds of grab-free invulnerability... but pretty much every other enemy that attacks you kills you instantly. That just seems so... unbalanced. Some form of lifebar system so that everything else isn't instant death (you could still let the Big Boys be instant kills or something) would make things a lot less frustrating at times... it would just need to be offset with fewer extra lives or something. Not saying a lifebar is a perfect substitute, but it just doesn't seem right the way things are regularly.
I still haven't played 7 Days of Hell through yet because it's so hard to find the time (or motivation) to set aside 4-5 hours strictly to play this game. I guess that's my fault for not wanting to play it without it counting for the leaderboard... guess I want SOMETHING to show for the time that's going to have to be put into it (no, I don't really care that much about the achievement).
Oh well. Like I said there's still some enjoyable things about the game so I don't feel ripped off or anything, but still disappointed. Congrats on being the #1 downloaded game on XBL last week, BTW.
