State of Decay 2 - Oh the pain

[Froggy]

Well fuck me, I don't think I have ever played a game this buggy on release ever and with a 5 year dev cycle. I've been trying to play it with a couple of mates the last week and last night I think 2 out of 4 of them gave up. The game was quite fun as a multiplayer game when it worked but when we had 4 on it just shat itself, highlights:

Disappearing zombies
Disappearing team mates
Team mates appearing in two places at once
Random cars going spastic
Your own character becoming invisible on screen, visible to all else, dieing and becoming a zombile whilst you can still move around with no issue and are still alive just invisible.
Your own character getting into a car but appearing to sit mid air 5m away from car but then you are in the car and drive away.. when you exit the car wherever you have gone you then are back where you originally got in the car and are the character that sat down 5m away again (the fuck?!)
Network drop outs
Network issues just getting in
Unable to see the storage box of whoever games you join
about 6 zombies on screen at once
framerate drops to 0 with a multiplayer game of 2 for multiple seconds
multiplayer teethering, this is the worst part, if you don't stay within about 600m of the game map of the host then it just load screens you back to the host.

Anyway it's so bad that the bugs became quite amusing until the point of the network drop outs last night and invisible zombies made people just snap.. anyone else given it a go?

[guttermouth]

Yeah, spent over 20 hours so far, really enjoying it. Pretty much seen all the glitches you have mentioned. Playing co-op is so damn fun. My last two sessions have been glitch free, but the other night teaming up with a mate, the glitches got pretty frustrating. Playing it through game pass, so don't feel too jibbed

[t0mby]

Microsoft AAA game right there. From what I've read no one that bought it can believe MS let it ship in this state and I'm sure half the time these big companies just treat all gamers like retards. "Just ship it, that'll do, TweediePie will make a few funny videos about the glitches and the kids'll lap it up"

[lestat]

I wouldn't call it AAA, it's still a small size studio behind it and priced at $49, the original was an arcade title.

Anything "online" these days will have bugs galore, online creates so many test case possibilities, it's virtually impossible to ship things bug free.

[Froggy]

There's shipping bug free with online issues and then there's just not testing at all and shipping something you know is completely busted.

[lestat]

Well they're listening, looks like they should have had a longer open beta period to find/resolve a lot of these issues.

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So basically, the game is CONSTANTLY checking the players location in relation to the host. This causes a slew of issues, the most noticeably the invisible zombie. The zombies are being generated based off of the host and their location, instead of being placed on the server/game client or being generated per player. The reason why you get an invisible zombie, is that the tethering code missed that particular zombie when it ran it's check against the host. This also occurs when your friends return to your supply locker. How is a fixed location supply locker not always available for your friends? Because instead of KNOWING (hard cosed) that the supply locker is in that location, the check to see if the player is within tether range missed it.

Lots of issues go away if you play single player, online is hard bro.

[F for Fake]

Your own character getting into a car but appearing to sit mid air 5m away from car but then you are in the car and drive away.. when you exit the car wherever you have gone you then are back where you originally got in the car and are the character that sat down 5m away again (the fuck?!)

[Froggy]

That tethering code must be completely stuffed then (why do they even want tethering) because only once playing online (when I could get in a game online) could I see my mates supply box anywhere. When we had 4 of us on the other night none of us could see it and 2 of us had constant invisible zombies. We also had duplicates of where people were, so the host would see one thing and move his car somewhere, then another person following would be driving seeing the host but in the hosts version he's running into his car so he's yelling at him to stop hitting him, the guy's like im not im following you on the road and then the other two of us would see their characters at some other place again. It's like it does it's check and tries to sort out where everyone's at and render to the host on that but in the meantime it just screws everyone's sync, so in the above scenario whilst those two were arguing about not actually running into each other I saw the hosts car going spastic jumping all around then crashing into a building I was in with his character in it lol. Two of us had the invisible zombies that game as well, the entire game was just basically unplayable with 4 players.

[lestat]

The developers didn't want to shoulder the cost of running dedicated servers, so they tried to implement a peer to peer system to track all those zombies, user connections are pretty noisy and won't be as reliable as a dedicated data center. I think it's too ambitious, especially for our shithouse Australian internet.

We'll have to see how they go with patches, but due to the nature of the connection I think the experience is always going to be "buggy" as the game copes with dropped/delayed packets.

[Froggy]

We were playing all with 50+ connections, < 10ms pings. They just fucked it.

[Froggy]

It's also hard after playing multiplayer dead rising with thousands of zombies on screen, can go anywhere on the map and do anything without any lag with a mate or 4 and then you get hit with this, it's hard to comprehend how bad it is in comparison in all facets, zombie count being a major one how it can't seem to handle more than 6 on a screen at once.

[GameHED]

Buy Kingdom Come instead. That other buggy game is better than this buggy game and it pisses off a SJW when sales of it increase making game companies more brave to make a non-PC title. It's what Witcher 3 could have been. (superior combat - these guys will probably become the next CDPR in a decade or so imo. Maybe they can make a Game of Throne open world game? )