Wow - that sure took a while! A year since the first part of build 42 released and just in time for the holidays, Project Zomboid build 42 finally goes online.
I know Cataclysm DDA is a different type of game but the richness of the environments in CDDA makes it really hard for me to sink my teeth into Project Zomboid in comparison when I have tried it in the past. CDDA immerses me in a way Project Zomboid never has even though CDDA is turn-based and almost doesn’t have graphics at all lol, there is just so much more going on in every way that it feels more like a choose your own adventure story than an action game.
hmmm… maybe it is time for me to check out Project Zomboid again though? It isn’t that I don’t think the idea of Project Zomboid is awesome!
I’ve kept hearing about CDDA over the years, often in discussions about PZ. Apparently it was also one of the inspirations for PZ.
I find PZ to be very immersive, so I’m curious what makes CDDA even more immersive for you? Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?
Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?
Oh absolutely! I am a firm believer that a book is one of the most intense virtual reality experiences you can immerse yourself in, it just takes a bit of effort.
What makes CDDA so immersive for me is that it has reached a critical mass of richness where most of the things you would think about being in environments are there. Looting thus doesn’t feel contrived, for example the windows on most homes have curtains, you can ALWAYS tear down those curtains and use them as a crafting material. How many survival games have you played where you need cloth to craft something and you keep looting 3d objects that clearly have cloth animated on their 3d model but the game mechanics say you found no cloth? I am fine with this to a certain extent, I get it, game balance is far more important to me than silly things like having a problem with this, but because CDDA goes so far the other way you really do start to see the environments you are moving through like you would envision them while reading a book about a character moving through them. I am not someone that usually values games that are a million miles wide and only an inch deep, but the diversity of systems in CDDA has a quality all of its own that is difficult to put into words precisely. I guess what I would say is that simple survival tasks feel so much more meaningful when they are in such a rich context, it makes the experience of interacting with the systems feel much more alive.
Also there are just SOOOO many monsters in CDDA, just zombies is… cool I get it as a design choice but CDDA is WAYYY more terrifying of a universe to me and that helps immerse me too.
Lastly I do want to shout out the Sky Islands mod in CDDA, it now comes as part of the base game because it is so good. Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based survival game where you are stuck on an empty island in the sky and have to do “runs” to get materials, food and water by entering a portal that teleports you to a random point on the map and you have to reach a portal placed randomly a certain distance away in a certain amount of time to get back to your island or you die and respawn on the island having lost everything you had on you.
This mod addresses one of my major problems with open world survival games, I love open world games but after a certain point of developing a bubble of safety around your base survival becomes too easy unless survival mechanisms are onerously difficult, Sky Islands places a consistent pressure on you to survive in a way that immerses me further and doesn’t put me into the dead end of realizing the safest thing to do in an open world survival game is sit in your safe base and do boring safe things and NEVER take risks. Sky Islands forces you to take risks but ALSO encourages you to take risks by making death a severe penalty to your longterm survival rather than an immediate, discontinuous abrupt end to a potentially very long saved game you have invested lots of time into.
Cool, thanks for your detailed reply! I can totally imagine that the less graphical approach would have that effect on the imagination. Is it multiplayer too, or single player?
It’s interesting that I think of Zomboid as having super-deep mechanics, although the impression that I have of CDDA just from hearing about it before is that it’s even more so. However, the example you used about curtains and cloth is pretty well-resolved in Zomboid too. You can craft out of curtains and you can make cloth (and thread) from the clothes of any zombie corpse.
What you described about the long survival game seems like it could have some added risks from a graphical approach. The example I have in mind is that I’ve heard of people dying after being in a fully setup base for a while because they had a misstep and fell off the roof of their base. Another example is someone walking a little too close to an open fire they had started and their clothes catching on fire. I think they even ended up burning their base down because they walked into it trying to put their clothes fire out. :)
This 42 update is also supposed to add a lot more depth to some of the crafting mechanics and allow for thinks like hunting and animal farming (vegetable farming has been around for a long time). I hadn’t tried it yet though because I mostly play multiplayer with friends.
Cool, thanks for your detailed reply! I can totally imagine that the less graphical approach would have that effect on the imagination. Is it multiplayer too, or single player?
No the reason Project Zomboid is a nice compliment to CDDA is that CDDA plays like a true “Rogue” type game. It is turn based where every time you take an action everything else moves too, it isn’t suited to multiplayer really.
Oh, I see. I don’t think I remembered that CDDA was turn-based. It seems like making that work in a multiplayer scenario would be an interesting programming problem to resolve.
The multiplayer aspect is one of the big attractions of Zomboid for me. I’ve barely ever played it alone because I feel it’s too disconcerting of a game to be played that way. The multiplayer does offer some pretty cool and unique experiences too.
I’ll check CDDA one of these days to see what all the hype is about. :)
Definitely do, as I said before Project Zomboid is a perfect compliment to Cataclysm DDA because they optimize for opposite experiences, one realtime, multiplayer and set on a high quality human handcrafted landscape the other turn-based, incredibly deep, singleplayer only and set in an astoundingly varied procedurally generated landscape.
One last thing, CDDA definitely feels intimidating at first but I have to say I actually think the interface is wonderful once you start to get the hang of it. Remember you can always press ? and search for commands by what they do! (i.e. if you forget what button is for throw you can press ? and type “throw” and see the keybinding is t).
The advanced inventory management system opened with / is the best inventory management system I have ever used in any game ever, I wish I had it for real life…
CDDA does not deserve its reputation as having an overwhelming and obscure interface, yes it is different than most games you have played if you haven’t played a game like Caves Of Qud, but wait a second why haven’t you played Caves Of Qud???!?!
Sounds great, thanks! I’ll definitely check it out. Oh, interesting, there are tilesets for it.
Haha, I had never heard of Caves of Qud before. That looks super old-school. Brings back memories of 8-bit games. I’ll take a look at that too. Thanks!
Not to muddy the water but there’s also cataclysm: bright nights & cataclysm: the last generation as alternative forks as cataclysm is an open projects & c:dda devs are known for… interesting choices & attitudes so its good to look around at the forks to which variant is more for you!
Also they’re all free from their github pages, I really would not recommend if you do go for cdda, buying it on steam.
I know Cataclysm DDA is a different type of game but the richness of the environments in CDDA makes it really hard for me to sink my teeth into Project Zomboid in comparison when I have tried it in the past. CDDA immerses me in a way Project Zomboid never has even though CDDA is turn-based and almost doesn’t have graphics at all lol, there is just so much more going on in every way that it feels more like a choose your own adventure story than an action game.
hmmm… maybe it is time for me to check out Project Zomboid again though? It isn’t that I don’t think the idea of Project Zomboid is awesome!
I’ve kept hearing about CDDA over the years, often in discussions about PZ. Apparently it was also one of the inspirations for PZ.
I find PZ to be very immersive, so I’m curious what makes CDDA even more immersive for you? Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?
Oh absolutely! I am a firm believer that a book is one of the most intense virtual reality experiences you can immerse yourself in, it just takes a bit of effort.
What makes CDDA so immersive for me is that it has reached a critical mass of richness where most of the things you would think about being in environments are there. Looting thus doesn’t feel contrived, for example the windows on most homes have curtains, you can ALWAYS tear down those curtains and use them as a crafting material. How many survival games have you played where you need cloth to craft something and you keep looting 3d objects that clearly have cloth animated on their 3d model but the game mechanics say you found no cloth? I am fine with this to a certain extent, I get it, game balance is far more important to me than silly things like having a problem with this, but because CDDA goes so far the other way you really do start to see the environments you are moving through like you would envision them while reading a book about a character moving through them. I am not someone that usually values games that are a million miles wide and only an inch deep, but the diversity of systems in CDDA has a quality all of its own that is difficult to put into words precisely. I guess what I would say is that simple survival tasks feel so much more meaningful when they are in such a rich context, it makes the experience of interacting with the systems feel much more alive.
Also there are just SOOOO many monsters in CDDA, just zombies is… cool I get it as a design choice but CDDA is WAYYY more terrifying of a universe to me and that helps immerse me too.
Lastly I do want to shout out the Sky Islands mod in CDDA, it now comes as part of the base game because it is so good. Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based survival game where you are stuck on an empty island in the sky and have to do “runs” to get materials, food and water by entering a portal that teleports you to a random point on the map and you have to reach a portal placed randomly a certain distance away in a certain amount of time to get back to your island or you die and respawn on the island having lost everything you had on you.
https://github.com/TGWeaver/CDDA-Sky-Islands
This mod addresses one of my major problems with open world survival games, I love open world games but after a certain point of developing a bubble of safety around your base survival becomes too easy unless survival mechanisms are onerously difficult, Sky Islands places a consistent pressure on you to survive in a way that immerses me further and doesn’t put me into the dead end of realizing the safest thing to do in an open world survival game is sit in your safe base and do boring safe things and NEVER take risks. Sky Islands forces you to take risks but ALSO encourages you to take risks by making death a severe penalty to your longterm survival rather than an immediate, discontinuous abrupt end to a potentially very long saved game you have invested lots of time into.
Cool, thanks for your detailed reply! I can totally imagine that the less graphical approach would have that effect on the imagination. Is it multiplayer too, or single player?
It’s interesting that I think of Zomboid as having super-deep mechanics, although the impression that I have of CDDA just from hearing about it before is that it’s even more so. However, the example you used about curtains and cloth is pretty well-resolved in Zomboid too. You can craft out of curtains and you can make cloth (and thread) from the clothes of any zombie corpse.
What you described about the long survival game seems like it could have some added risks from a graphical approach. The example I have in mind is that I’ve heard of people dying after being in a fully setup base for a while because they had a misstep and fell off the roof of their base. Another example is someone walking a little too close to an open fire they had started and their clothes catching on fire. I think they even ended up burning their base down because they walked into it trying to put their clothes fire out. :)
This 42 update is also supposed to add a lot more depth to some of the crafting mechanics and allow for thinks like hunting and animal farming (vegetable farming has been around for a long time). I hadn’t tried it yet though because I mostly play multiplayer with friends.
No the reason Project Zomboid is a nice compliment to CDDA is that CDDA plays like a true “Rogue” type game. It is turn based where every time you take an action everything else moves too, it isn’t suited to multiplayer really.
Oh, I see. I don’t think I remembered that CDDA was turn-based. It seems like making that work in a multiplayer scenario would be an interesting programming problem to resolve.
The multiplayer aspect is one of the big attractions of Zomboid for me. I’ve barely ever played it alone because I feel it’s too disconcerting of a game to be played that way. The multiplayer does offer some pretty cool and unique experiences too.
I’ll check CDDA one of these days to see what all the hype is about. :)
Definitely do, as I said before Project Zomboid is a perfect compliment to Cataclysm DDA because they optimize for opposite experiences, one realtime, multiplayer and set on a high quality human handcrafted landscape the other turn-based, incredibly deep, singleplayer only and set in an astoundingly varied procedurally generated landscape.
One last thing, CDDA definitely feels intimidating at first but I have to say I actually think the interface is wonderful once you start to get the hang of it. Remember you can always press ? and search for commands by what they do! (i.e. if you forget what button is for throw you can press ? and type “throw” and see the keybinding is t).
The advanced inventory management system opened with / is the best inventory management system I have ever used in any game ever, I wish I had it for real life…
CDDA does not deserve its reputation as having an overwhelming and obscure interface, yes it is different than most games you have played if you haven’t played a game like Caves Of Qud, but wait a second why haven’t you played Caves Of Qud???!?!
Sounds great, thanks! I’ll definitely check it out. Oh, interesting, there are tilesets for it.
Haha, I had never heard of Caves of Qud before. That looks super old-school. Brings back memories of 8-bit games. I’ll take a look at that too. Thanks!
Not to muddy the water but there’s also cataclysm: bright nights & cataclysm: the last generation as alternative forks as cataclysm is an open projects & c:dda devs are known for… interesting choices & attitudes so its good to look around at the forks to which variant is more for you!
Also they’re all free from their github pages, I really would not recommend if you do go for cdda, buying it on steam.