We're all new to this game, so no one here is an expert on what EMPerish is or what it should be. But here are my first impressions.
The game is similar in format to Urban Dead, Shartak, Nexus Clash, and Quarantine 2019. All of those games are quite old, so there may be opportunities to innovate.
The game is similar in style to Project Zomboid and DayZ. Those games have good atmospheric settings, but they are held back by a sense of directionlessness.
The game seems to lack any sort of objective. Avoiding getting knocked out and robbed is not enough. Why should we care about losing our items, if all those items do is help us avoid losing our items? We should have unlimited opportunities to struggle towards a larger goal. It’s great if we have the opportunity to roleplay or invent our own goals, but we need some grander project we can always work towards, in either a focused, efficient way or a casual, intermittent way.
To me, the most concerning thing I see about EMPerish is the lack of any core game mechanic. d4yz needs to think about what goal players will be working towards and what activities players will perform in pursuit of that goal. The vast majority of content should consist of different methods of pursuing that goal.
Clothes, stick traps, hunting, and fishing do not contribute to a core game mechanic. These things should not be prioritized! Seasons can contribute to a core game mechanic, as long as it affects players’ long-term strategy and isn’t just functionally cosmetic. Base building can contribute to a core game mechanic as long as players don’t finish their first base and then wonder why they bothered.
Survival itself is not an adequate goal! There’s no satisfaction to be gained from merely maintaining such an easily maintained condition. Survival can serve as an excellent first step along the way to pursuing a larger goal. For example, maintaining a reliable supply of food and water might be a necessary prerequisite before players can pursue more ambitious aims, and interruptions to the supply of food and water may require players to divert their attention from what they’d like to be accomplishing.
Goals I might suggest would be improving the condition of all players, improving the condition of a group of allies, thwarting the efforts of rival groups, controlling territory etc. I could imagine players contributing desperately needed resources to their group. I could imagine groups fighting frequent wars with neighboring groups to capture more territory. I could imagine certain areas such as bridges and resource points being more hotly contested. I could imagine players burning their enemies crops and poisoning their enemies water supplies.
Other thoughts:
As I understand it, only one person can enter a barricaded building. Players should have the ability to grant access to their group and/or a whitelist of trusted players. Players should be encouraged to congregate together and interact.
The EMP theme is nifty and d4yz should stick to it, but it does prevent the addition of radios, walkie-talkies, or phones. It would be helpful if players had opportunities to talk with each other in-game without needing to track each other down and speak.
Many similar games include skills. I don’t know if this would be a good feature for EMPerish, but I think d4yz should think carefully about what purpose skills would serve before reflexively implementing them just because everyone else does. For example, Urban Dead makes unskilled characters mostly useless, which helps reduce the effect of alt abuse.
What systems will be implemented to prevent alt abuse? Will one account be able to control multiple characters, or will each character have a different login? Perhaps the world could be divided into a few different regions and you can’t have one character enter a region occupied by another one of your characters. Will multiple characters even be allowed?
When the player is indoors, the 3x3 grid placed over the interior shot seems unnecessary and confusing.
We need the option to disable the randomly generated flavor text that refreshes with every action. Detailed descriptions specific to locations are okay (but not a priority).
A statistics page would be interesting and make the game less opaque.
A map of the world will not necessarily be necessary. If an adequate group of people contribute to the wiki, it should be easy enough for the community to build and update maps.
I don’t know DukoWiki and I’m reflexively skeptical of anything other than MediaWiki.
Because this might be the first time a stranger has criticized d4yz’s work, I will say that I hope they don’t take anything personally and remember that people usually criticize a game because they like it enough to want it to be better.
