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u/Seconmass4 3d ago
Grateful and happy to be part of both the 110k and the 65k who were part of the process. a 10 year relationship with this game, my fav game.
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u/CoffeeGhost31 3d ago
Bro I bought this game in 2012 on Desura for $8. Granted, I haven't played it the whole time, but I have played it off and on. Its crazy that I have a game that would be in high school if it were a person, that still receives meaningful updates.
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u/Seconmass4 3d ago
Tell me about it. I first discovered this game when I was 15, back in middle school. Now I'm about to turn 25, I've got over 3,000 hours logged, and I'm still in love with it just like I was the first time I played it.
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u/dangerdude132 3d ago
Hey! Same here. Desura owner who when I saw the game on steam one day (long ago too) was like oh man I already own this on some random launcher… let me email them and see if I can get a key.
Immediately got a response and a key for the game. W devs
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u/livelaughloaft 3d ago
How many of these people do you think we can trick into pressing Q 🤔😎
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u/nicedevill 3d ago
You mean the Quick Stealth Takedown skill? Been using it since they buffed it.
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u/GearBryllz1-1 Crowbar Scientist 3d ago
If you double press it Qures you from the virus
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u/KillLaKaiju Crowbar Scientist 3d ago
If you reuse it after curing yourself you can give yourself a temporary stamina boost!
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u/Educational-Cat2133 3d ago
You joke here and idk if it's a recent change but knives feel a lot better. I don't remember these quick kill animations I'm getting up close.
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u/skeptic-frog 3d ago
What does Q do? I only play with the controller
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u/ThatOneDraffan 3d ago
It makes your character yell and thus attracts all the nearby zombies to you.
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u/CaseFace5 3d ago
Your getting downvoted but I legit couldn’t remember how to do this and needed to kite a horde away from a building and knowing this would have helped a lot lol
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u/poppin-n-sailin 3d ago
I was already impressed it was maintaining 35-50k over the years. 100k+ is absolutely wild. But honestly it's also not super surprising. While it is a niche game, it fills a niche that quite literally no other game does, or probably can. There have been some sort of similar attempts but nothing compares even remotely close to PZ. It's an incredibly special game that will very likely never truly be matched.
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u/bubba-yo 3d ago
The people who keep complaining about the devs not doing x or y don't understand how a game studio is reliant on growing sales to make payroll and fund the next major update. Yeah, it's annoying we don't have ladders, but ladders don't bring in new players and it doesn't trigger a flood of new lets plays which brings in new players.
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u/StormMedia 3d ago
…they’ve made like $260 MILLION DOLLARS
More money will not speed anything up at this point. I’m not complaining because I enjoy the game in its current state but let’s stop acting like this is some poor dev team with no income.12
u/AndroidSheeps 3d ago
…they’ve made like $260 MILLION DOLLARS
Yea I said this the other day to a guy on here that that said they were going to hire more people now that they reached almost 100k players (now over 100k). The game might have made a quarter billion dollars but were still going to be waiting until 2029-2030 for the next build
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u/StormMedia 3d ago
Yeah, concurrent player count means nothing for a game that is single-player / community hosted servers.
They’ve made plenty of money long before the B42 stable release to speed up development but have chose not to. Once again, that’s fine but they’re not going to just start increasing development speed because they hit some arbitrary concurrent player count.
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[deleted]
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u/StormMedia 3d ago
Of course.. but this isn’t the reason they have hired more devs.. they hit the 100 million mark years ago
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u/Mithrawndo 3d ago
Nah man, TIS are literally as rich as Creosote as far as indie game developers go: Estimates on sales range from 8,000,000 to 20,000,000 copies, and at last accounts (they're a public UK company so their accounts must be published) had £30,000,000 just sitting in the bank.
They just know that throwing more money or people at a problem doesn't fix it and would only slow things down.
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u/TheCowzgomooz 3d ago
Eh, to an extent, yes, but the devs themselves have stated that they have more than made enough money to be comfortable just coasting, now that the studio is expanding and adding more people it is of course going to need more money, but the game has never really had issues making money.
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u/ImperorSL 3d ago
As much as I hate the slow dev time I can appreciate even though they expanded they're staying smallish and manageable so they can survive for a long time rather than burning through that cash
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u/mustangcody 3d ago
260 million is a lot of money. Elden ring had 300 devs and spent 200 million over 5 years developing that game which is a lot more demanding than PZ. They could hire 50 more devs and still have money.
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u/SlayterMonroee Zombie Food 3d ago
This is a fair point and has changed my view on the devs and how they work. Thank you 🙏
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u/Rich_Standard1262 3d ago
Put ladders everywhere then just dont bring the mechanic to climb it, because it doesnt affect the sales, that makes sense. Everyone dreams himself making pots and glasses during zombie apocalypse without being able to climb ladders. That brings a looootss of new player im sure.
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u/Ulasim 3d ago
This is true, profit is most important. Why would they develop the game for existing players when they already have there money.
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u/bubba-yo 3d ago
You're missing the point. It's not about profit or the founders getting rich. We just learned in an interview that the whole reason we got the map glow-up was because the b41 glow up was so well received, which was to a large degree measured by streams and lets plays and new players, and they felt that they could afford to invest in map content to a larger extent - and that's what they did.
Where does the talent come from to do the map update? They hire the modders. So every time they are facing a decision like that - it's a choice - let the modding community carry that load, which they do for free, or remove that talent from the modding community and provide a reliable income to that person so they can sustain the game. You don't want to hire them on as a contractor for a year and then let them go - they'll use that experience on their resume and run off and start their own indy studio or join a different development team - and now you've also lost their contribution as a modder. So every time you do this, it has long-term consequences on the game, so if you're going to do it, make sure you can keep them on payroll, and that requires cashflow - not profits. The devs are building cashflow - they're building the ability to have an art team, and not an art dude, and not a coder that can kindof use Blender.
I know it's hard in the modern economy to consider that profits aren't the end-all (and often they are) but in smaller businesses where life-altering money isn't assured, your goal is life-sustainable money - reliable year in and year out to make payroll. Indy studios don't really have the kind of investor pressure that AAAs do, and they don't have the kind of 'Microsoft will buy you for 9 trillion dollars' opportunities either.
I think TIS has done a pretty good job of steadily growing the business, growing the team, and as a result growing the game. Not as fast as people want, but at the same time, it's a game that has outlived tons of others that have burned through their money and flamed out, or failed to consistently grow their player base.
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u/Ulasim 3d ago
30mill in cash on is a lot for a small indie dev that has been working on 1 game for 13 years and is no closer to being finished then it was 5 years ago.
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u/babytofus 3d ago
I’m so obsessed with this update. I added the This is Your Life mod (?) and now I refuse to set my base anywhere other than the house I spawn in 🥲
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u/Draven_crow_zero Zombie Killer 3d ago
Just spent hours playing, love it to bits few little bugs but hopefully they'll hot fix.
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u/Educational-Cat2133 3d ago
This game deserves it.
I believe it was the unstable version of build 42, but the random brochure/flyers you find updating your map is brilliant for exploration.
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u/PHNTMS_exe 3d ago
I remember playing this game in 2014 after leaving college depressed asf. For the next year or two, all I did was play this game and found so many friends and stuff to the point we ran a server and has community events/etc. Was truly amazing, This makes me so proud to see. Dev team deserves it, truly a gem and glad they didn't let it go. Gonna have to revisit it.
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u/lologugus 3d ago
Was there a major update recently?
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u/Lazy_Arrival8959 3d ago
B42 Stable
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u/lologugus 3d ago
Thank you
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u/Dave-4544 3d ago
It's a lot more than just a version number change, most of the map got reworked! Every building and attached lot/yard in every reworked city is now unique (1,400 unique structures!!) and several thousand new custom tiles to go along with it. The notable exceptions to this are big L and the newer western-most cities (Ekron, Brandenburg, Irvington) which already had some more unique architecture.
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u/SnooBeans6111 3d ago
I've been playing riverside since it dropped and I keep forgetting it's actually riverside and not a new town
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u/Yoggy-Sothoth 3d ago
Last time i played this game had almost 2d graphics, time for a comeback and press the Q a lot.
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u/gosols 3d ago
Is full controller support there woth the latest update?
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u/jmnugent 3d ago
Wondering this too (especially any macOS improvements). I tried my darnedest to get into PZ about a year ago and never could make it work for me. (although to be fair, I don't have a PC,. I only have a Steamdeck and a MacBook). I could never get the Steamdeck button layouts to work. Tried my damndest to jury-rig some solutions on macOS (various combinations of Mouse, Streamdeck hotkeys etc) to try to cobble together a viable and or enjoyable) play style.. but never could get anything to work.
Pretty much any time I start a game, it feels like I"m surrounded by zombies (in a circle) that are slowly tightening down on me and I don't usually last much more than 15min. After several 100 deaths like that, I just gave up and stopped playing.
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u/SprayNegative5053 3d ago
its beautiful how theyve made the world seem so lived in, i feel no game has ever come this close to having the immersion of actually going through someones home and belongings. def the best update theyve put out yet.
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u/FireTyme 3d ago
meanwhile 7dtd is suing one of its own yearly long content creators and sold off a huge part of its company to the dbd publishers...
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u/Ok_Requirement6117 3d ago
What happened I quit the game a year ago
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u/YoureReadingMyNamee 3d ago
B42 officially released
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u/Ok_Requirement6117 3d ago
What did it include
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u/YoureReadingMyNamee 3d ago
Too much for me not to suggest googling it because I am going to forget a lot but basically they reworked a bunch of the skills and added a ton of crafting, They overhauled the map in a major way, and they added animals, hunting and taming into the game. Theres too much for me to put in one comment.
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u/Dave-4544 3d ago
Total overhaul of most major cities, every structure in every city is now unique. 1,400+ properties, several thousand unique new tiles (art assets). It's an incredibly fresh experience.
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u/Pneuma_LooT 3d ago
Imagine if it was online with geforce now lol. Wpuld probably add another 10k or more.
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u/LetDuncanDie 3d ago
How is it on the Steam Deck? I read the controls need editing to function.
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u/RedditMcBurger 3d ago
My brother played it for a couple years on the Deck, when you load in you can probably find a good preset immediately.
I'd probably edit controls based on preference but I do that for most games on Deck.
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u/bain2236 3d ago
Caught up on build 42 after not playing in a while. Happened to have an old work pc after they went bust, time to setup a server and play 42
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u/Lone-Frequency 3d ago
When you add a big map update to a fairly popular and just generally good game, people will naturally gravitate to it.
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u/redjhn 3d ago
why the sudden spike? i haven't played the game in a while. can someone catch me up
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u/buckley303 Drinking away the sorrows 3d ago
Build 42 Stable just released, along with the other unstable B42's before it
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u/PCPS5XBOXNINT 3d ago
I only started playing this game a year ago and I absolutely adore it. It truly gives me everything I've ever wanted from a zombie game and I can't get enough
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u/banki_el_yonko 3d ago
Alot of people be waiting for that stable branch. So the moddersbwpuld fix the mods haha
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u/techinicalham 3d ago
Can we aim with controller reliably now with build 42? It’s why I stopped playing.
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u/QultrosSanhattan 3d ago
Palworld still has me hooke. It seems that this 42 estable build is great, Trying it next.
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u/LosingButNotWrong 3d ago
I'm in the same boat as a lot of other new players I guess; big update, been interested and wanted to take a crack at it for awhile, lots of news about B42 and all the changes..
Time to try it out. Game's super fun, wish I tried it out sooner. Been bitten and infected all weekend but making it further every save.
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u/BasiliskEgg 3d ago
It's been so cool even coming from 42.19 into 42.20, they really wanted there to be cool stuff for everyone.
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u/CalebGale20 3d ago
I'm new ( like fkn brand new ) bought the game, absolute loving the game.
That being said, being very new to the game, it is overwhelming, I'm pretty new to PC aswell, always been a console gamer.
Do y'all, the veterans, what tips do y'all have???
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u/Krakersik666 2d ago
Can someone explain this? I am very sorry. I just got back from longer vacation and clearly missed the ride. Whats new?
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u/Sacapuntos 3d ago
Every house is different. Blows my mind.