So, 28 years after the Chernobyl accident (probably unintentionally but eh) the first alpha got finally released to the public.
Since I discovered I have a spare 13 dorra on my paypal, I decided to bite it and give the early alpha a whirl.
First hotfixes and updates are also underway, been playing with update 2, update 3 is underway as we speak, mostly with compatibility fixes.
Not surprisingly, the thing is a very early alpha, there's not a lot to do at the moment, and what you can do still needs quite a bit of polish.
Played for about two hours, I think I saw most of the stuff that is there to see.
For what it's worth, it looks promising. If you saw the vids in this thread, you know what to expect, at the moment there's nothing more and nothing less in the game.
Didn't get any game breaking bugs or crashes yet, which is pretty impressive at this stage. Though I didn't really bust my balls trying to "break" it, to be fair.
A short review of what to expect & first impressions:
Exploration
> You can generate various world sizes, even the basic 32x32 feels pretty big. It takes less than 5 minutes for it to load. Its 14 000 square kilometers according to the game, and you can go much bigger (haven't tried it yet)
> Hard to tell if the figure is bull or no, but it took me close to an hour to reach the edge by following the road and the game generated another "zone" of the world for me.
> There's no minimap, so hard do say if I spawned close to the edge)
> The scenery is nice (if a bit dull), all you get is trees, some roads leading to the samey house and barn combo where you find loot.
> There are some nice touches like broken cars, irradiated trees, ponds, edible mushrooms, and an occassional zombie. More features will be added later, so this aspect will get better, but you can still do some serious hiking.
> The random generation sometimes goes bonkers (I saw the occassional levitating rock and grass growing inside the house.
> Loot is totally random, one time you get a can of beans and a glowstick, another time you get a fireaxe and a G36.
> The world is not saved yet - if you quit the game or die, you have to regenerate it from scratch.
Survival
> The bare bones are implemented - hunger, thirst, radiation, stamina and exhaustion. Not all of them seem to have actual effects implemented, apart from exhaustion and hit points.
> You technically can scavenge for food, water and pick shrooms in the woods, but it is totally random and it feels like a very rough draft.
> You can chop down trees (first gotta luck out and find an axe) and start the fire like in the video. I only saw fire propagate from one log to another,
> Other than lighting and marking areas with smoke, the fire doesn't seem to have much use.
Combat
> There's one enemy type at the moment, the female zombie. It has an AI (reacts to sound and being shot at) and comes at you to bite you in the ass. Sounds and animations are still wery WIP.
> Zombie spawning depends on your luck, sometimes you get two at a time, other time you can travel for 20 minutes without seeing one.
> They aren't particularly dangerous though, unless you have absolutely no luck finding weapons.
> Killing zombies in melee is not as fun as it could, due to missing animations. Guns are much more fun to shoot (you saw the ballistics vid, it's basically like that, and I gotta say, both the Skorpion and G36 handle nicely).
> Fair warning though, unless you get lucky, be prepared to do some serious hiking if you want to go ballistic.
(Most I could find was a G36 with 30 rounds and a 50 round ammo box, found a submachinegun with roughly the same amount of ammo on another play. It may be the RNG hating me, but when I actually had the boomstic, I had trouble finding zombies to shoot it with, though I eventually managed to do some "sniping" at ~150 meters, pretty satisfying even though there's no animations yet to show hits).
Controls
> Standard fare FPS and you can rebind them.
> You can change stance (which doesn't seem to do much atm), interestingly enough, jumping isn't in yet. You can only climb the barn ladder.
Sounds
> Being a tone deaf oaf, I can't really say much about all the promised 3D environmental audion, but is is still very WIP, sound volumes are mismatched and lots of the sounds are missing or placeholder.
Visuals
> Looks more or less like the vids, maybe slightly less impressive in action.
> Most textures are very WIP.
> The UI is very barebones, with no clear descriptions yet.
> All the lighting and day/night effects are there. I also saw some lightning, but no rain effect, unfortunately.
Here's some screenies:
Your typical scenery in the alpha.
Another typical bit of scenery, this time with a road.
The enemy, slowly shuffling in our direction
Another typical bit of scenery, a house with barn as well as a car wreck. You can also see a bonfire I made in the distance.
Jesus fuck, I can't decide which I hate more, photobucket or tinypic...
TL;DR
If you saw the vids, you more or less saw all what's there to see at the moment.
Procedural generation is there. Looks promising so far, but what you get for 13 dorra is an obvious alpha build.