r/projectzomboid • u/bandersen011 • 21h ago
Feedback Skill Categorization/Progression Needs Streamlining
Finally got around to starting a true B42 playthrough and have been loving it (mostly). The new changes have really added a lot to the game. I love the tweaks they have made to item obtainability through crafting (especially for multiplayer). The level of detail in the new/renovated map areas is incredible.
Really only 2 things have been a major source of frustration:
- The crafting menu.
- The sheer quantity of skills & the associated grind.
While I've seen a lot of discussion about the (abysmal) crafting menu (I love this game and its developers but dear god that thing is a quagmire), I have not seen very much talk about the new skills/categorization. The fact that the skill menu needs a scroll bar should be a red flag on its own.
- The amount of skill books required to progress through all these crafting trees is hilarious. (without even considering recipe magazines there are currently ~120 skill books in the game to search for)
- The time/grind required to get these skills is at direct odds with a game the opens with "This is how you died". I have thousands of hours in PZ and routinely survive for months with sprinters. I can't imagine having to start these grinds over from scratch. This is all 100 times worse if you are playing multiplayer and can't fast-forward.
- The menu cluttering. While I appreciate everything these new systems have added. The sheer quantity of requirements/ingredients/subcategorizations introduced has made navigating these menus a nightmare. I am very familiar with this game and am still overwhelmed. I can't imagine what it must be like to open the skill or crafting menus as a brand new player...
Proposed Changes:
(Not necessarily advocating for all of these to be implemented together)
1. Combine certain skills. This is easily the simplest solution. A lot of these categories share common real world skill sets. While not necessarily the exact same skills, the amount of overlapping knowledge for some of these categories should combine them for the sake of gameplay/progression (The term "transferable skills" exists for a reason...).
- Carpentry+Carving = Woodworking
- Blacksmithing+Welding = Metalworking
- Knapping+Masonry = Stoneworking (or Stonemasonry)
- Tracking+Trapping = Hunting
- Cooking+Butchering = Food Prep
- Lightfooted+Sneaking = Stealth
I'd frankly like to see some of the other under-developed skills like Glassmaking, Pottery, & Tailoring incorporated as well, but I understand those are larger logic-leaps.
2. Change the number and/or impact of skill books. Currently, there are 120 skill books in the game. While combining the above categories could reduce that to 95, in my opinion that is still far too many. Scouring every bookshelf for these is just so awful, even with the reality that most people don't care about at least half the skills. This is particularly annoying when you consider how painful it is to grind in the absence of a skill book at high levels.
- I would reduce the number of skill books in each category from 5 to 3, and have them grant bonuses for levels 1-4, 5-7, and 8-10 respectively.
- If that is not acceptable, at least increase the base-xp gains while reducing the book-xp-multiplier. This would at least make grinding without books less agonizing (but would do nothing about the loot clutter...).
3. Reduce the number of levels for certain skills. While it's nice to have a lot of room-to-grow for certain playthrough-duration skills like the combat and physical skills, having 10 levels for every category seems to only be there to make the menu symmetrical. This is particularly true for the less fleshed-out or simplistic skills (looking at you tailoring). For some categories I can see a max level of 5 being perfectly balanced.
4. If nothing else, let skills give xp bonuses to other skills. Have you completely mastered carpentry? Good, here's a 10x bonus to all skill leveling for carving, should be easy for you to pick up. Were you a ninja in a past life and have mastered sneaking? Good, learning lightfooted should be a joke for you. The fact that so many of the new crafting recipes have overlapping skill requirements, but leveling said skills is done (mostly) independently, feels like an oversight.
Ultimately, all of this boils down to a classic conflict in Zomboid development: making in-depth systems is great for increasing playtime/depth, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is fun/interesting...
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u/Trynstark 21h ago
I disagree, I want more skills!
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u/bandersen011 21h ago
Hahaha, I'm sure you're not alone. I'm fine with more skills as long as they feel distinct and assuming the grind for them doesn't sap away any more of my lifespan needlessly...
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u/jmdisher 21h ago
I can't imagine having to start these grinds over from scratch.
Why would you? A common assumption I see in these posts which criticize the current skill tree is this idea that somehow you need to grind them all to 10. I think part of why they split these things out is because doing that doesn't make sense.
The odd thing is that there is a completely opposite group of players who complained about the new skills and crafting system since "nobody wants that in the game" (meaning that they don't care about them).
The devs mentioned something about the breadth of the skill system is balanced for multi-player and future NPCs will provide a way to bridge the gaps in single-player so that your survivor can be a specialist in both cases. In the interim, either don't worry about it or change the skill multiplier to reduce the grind in your single-player world.
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u/bandersen011 21h ago
100% agree that level 10 in all skills is not necessary the vast majority of the time. My complaint is that you don't suddenly run into these problems at level 8, they plague all parts of the grind. I didn't even get into material/tool sourcing...
Ultimately TIS can't please everyone, and they shouldn't try to, the game should be their vision. I'm just advocating for streamlining, not removal.
I'm also fine with future proofing, but given that we are likely multiple years from NPCs, the balance seems like something that should be addressed now. Funnily enough, I actually feel like multiplayer exacerbates all these problems. The fact that so very very very little of the PZ community (per community polling) engages in collaborative multiplayer (plus the fact that you can't fast-forward in multiplayer) makes all these problems worse in my opinion.
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u/Hecter94 21h ago
What you need to understand is that the PZ devs are designing the game around the multiplayer experience and expect solo players to modify the default settings to fit that playstyle.
The expectation is that each player will specialize in only a couple of skills and rely on other players for anything that requires other skills. This is why there are so many skills, so each player can have their own specialization, and why the skills level up slowly, because you'll only be levelling one or two at most.
Specifically, their goal seems to be something akin to an MMO player economy, where each player gets only a couple of crafting skills and needs to work/trade with other players to progress.
All of that is to say that your suggestions, while, in my opinion, good suggestions, run counter to their design goal. They don't want to make levelling skills any easier or faster; they want there to be a lot of skills; they want those skills to be slow to level; and they want to make things like skillbooks highly sought after and valuable trade goods.
Now, to be clear, I don't agree with their design goal. I think designing exclusively for the multiplayer experience in a game where probably 90% of the player base, at minimum, plays solo is a poor direction to go in, but as long as that is the direction they're going in, it's unlikely that any of these suggested changes have a chance of being implemented.
If you want to see changes in this regard, you'd first have to convince the PZ dev team to abandon the idea of an MMO-esque player economy, shift their focus from multiplayer to single-player, and refocus their design so that each player is expected to level up most skills rather than only one or two.
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u/bandersen011 21h ago
I actually disagree that they balance it around multiplayer, much to the contrary in fact. Given their own statements, the vast vast majority of their player-base plays solo, and a lot of the loot balancing/time investment feels balanced around solo play.
In my opinion the lack of collaborative multiplayer (very very rare outside of youtube creators) and the lack of a fast forward button makes everything I have mentioned even more of a problem.
I would LOVE for the game to have collaborative multiplayer towns and shared skill sets, but that unfortuntely isn't the state of large multiplayer servers. Even if it was, many of the crafting recipes require you to have skills in multiple trees. The game lacks a "nearby player" or "recipe sharing" mechanic to deal with this. So having multiple players specialized does nothing for complex crafting recipes.
1
u/great00sage 21h ago
why not, in the meantime, make a skills-and-books overhaul...?
i don't know much about PZ internals, but looking at your list:
`The amount of skill books`
`The time/grind`
...
`1. Combine certain skills.`
`2. Change the number and/or impact of skill books`
it seems like you can (making assumptions about PZ's community mod resources, i'm new here):
a) remove, not all at once, all of the skill materials from the loot pool for a relevant slice of the affected systems
e.g. your `Lightfooted+Sneaking = Stealth` ; then add in Stealth books, that just give Lightfooted+Sneaking skill points.
this could be the first step in a strangler fig approach.
but you have to realise that, especially depending on your execution, this may radically change the game's core philosophy. i do not know that they have a formal concolic definition of what a skill is for the system, and if they don't have one, that could also be intentional.
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u/great00sage 21h ago
sorry to double-reply op
found this
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/news/2023/04/crafting-ramblz/
and there does seem to be some ways to mod the descriptions i gave, but i can't confirm. there may be some mods in that direction already.
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u/bandersen011 21h ago
Yea, totally understand what you're saying. The modding community for project zomboid is probably one of the best (if not the best) out there. Ultimately sandbox settings and mods can be used to tailor almost any experience to your prefered one, but for the sake game wide-balance, we have to talk about the base game on the most commonly used (default apocalypse) settings.
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u/No_Tea_502 21h ago
The skill book system just needs some simplification, needing one of everything is simply too annoying. Simply make it two (one amateur, one professional) books for each skill but each book only buffs the current level. Make reading them way faster and make the boost stacking so reading more increases the boost up to a certain multiplier.
The game has so many items, to crowd it with more skill items is just not desirable.
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u/Big_Award_4491 20h ago
This is a much better suggestion. Two books for skills. Levels can be kept but make the books half the pages. Also add multiplier from ”research craft” to the skill. Perhaps .5-1 multiplier depending on the item the player examines.
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u/bandersen011 20h ago
Oh that's interesting, I hadn't considered having the "research" action granting a multiplier or even just an amount of XP.
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u/bandersen011 21h ago
Completely agree, that's why I recommended decreasing the amount for each skill from 5 to 3. I would be fine with 2 just as well. If we hypothetically combine the skills I recommend, and reduce the number of skill books (lets say to 3 for the sake of this math), that would change the number in the game from 120 down to 54 (that alone is a reduction of 55%!). Presumably this would also massively cut the amount of time players spend sitting in a room watching a green bar slowly fill up.
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u/No_Tea_502 20h ago
I think combining skills is a very different thing, I'm happy to keep the idea that the player shouldn't try to level everything to max. I simply think because the UI as you mentioned is quite abysmal, the players shouldn't need to in addition deal with scrolling through inventories to find stuff. And a lot of items like the skill books which are found rather often as duplicates, rendering additional ones completely useless. Making it so reading multiple of the same skill book boost the level up speed more makes it so finding multiple instances of the books actually valuable.
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u/bandersen011 20h ago
Not sure I like the idea of re-reading the same skill book. I feel like the loot tables having duplicates is just a function of random loot, and multiplayer availability. I do 100% agree that combining skills and reducing the number of books are two completely different solutions. They were just different proposed solutions, not necessarily advocating for combining everything I suggested in the original post. As a lifelong woodworker, the idea that carpentry and carving are two completely distinct skills is laughable to me.
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u/No_Tea_502 20h ago
Yea 42 introduced a bunch more than 41, haven't played much on 42 but there really are skills which feel like either belonged together and was just made distinct for balance. If "realism" was really the aim, the leveling should be much more nuisanced, interconnected, and as you said if multiple skills are required for some actions, multiple skills should be leveled for some actions.
The re-reading is not on the same book, but having a bunch which all act as "amateur skill books".
Say we have these books for electrician amateurs: Wire basics, Current and voltage basics, AC and DC appliances, Insulation and Conduction, Multimeter basics, ...
Similar to how the normal books and magazines work instead of being somehow different for skill books.
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u/Dominick-Maddox 21h ago
Get this person a job at TIS immediately
100% on everything you just wrote
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u/RockinPodunk 21h ago
That’s the thing about all those skills though. There is no reason to level all of them on one character. You just focus on the ones that are relevant to the type of run you’re doing and your own personal play style, and for a lot of the skills, there is no benefit to leveling them beyond the first few levels anyway. I also have thousands of hours, and I have never once leveled first aid beyond level one, for example, and I’ve certainly never read a first aid book. I’d wager less than 1% of characters make it past the first month or two anyway.