[2022] The truth about reducing Zombie Reach

Originally posted by YOR:

Originally posted by JimmyIowa: I think this ir correct. I have long said the same thing is true for zombie move speed. Move speed affects effective difficulty way more than the difficulty setting does.

Playing the first few weeks of a new game on the lowest difficulty (whatever it's called) with 24/7 high speed zombies is way WAAAAAY harder than playing on "insane" with zombies set to walk.

Yep. As you noted increasing Z speed does affect difficulty in a major way. We tested for hours by altering Z speed, damage, health, and range.

Zombie range was the single greatest factor for difficulty. Zombie movement speed was also a significant factor, but nowhere near range. Range affected everything from melee combat to medium range combat.

We tested Z range at 1.0, 1.5, 1.65, 2.0 and 2.5. At 2.0, a melee player will not enjoy fighting a Z, and at 2.5 range a player will never want to face a Z. The built in range that TFP has provided is precisely dialed in.

Yep. Incidentally the longest reach of the most dangerous zombie is also just slightly shorter than the shortest reach of the player. There is never a point where a zombie can reach you but you can't reach them; And barring any buggy behavior, it is in fact entirely possible to just walk backwards and beat any walking speed zombie to death with your bare fists if you don't count the random chance to rage which gives them a speed boost.

This is why at 2.0 a melee player will not enjoy fighting a zombie- It puts the zombie's reach beyond many of the shorter range melee options, so fists and knives are out immediately, and clubs are only just barely out ranging the enemy. At 2.5 everything short of a spear is out-ranged, iirc.


There's also a reason why the minimum range for both players and zombies are so 'unnaturally high'- It's almost entirely because video games lack peripheral vision. The average human arm is 25 inches- Just over 2 feet in length(0.63m). Fighting a human sized enemy in a video game at that short of a distance basically makes them take up your entire screen and makes it very difficult to track more than one target. The lack of peripheral vision is dramatically impactful.

To put it into perspective(heh), Most video games give the player about 70~fov. Some pc games give up to 90. 7DTD's default fov iirc is 65 or 70? Human FoV is closer to 110.

Increasing FoV can compensate for the lack of periphery, but, as you go higher above 70, you essentially begin compressing all that information into and alongside the initial 70~ degrees of space; It's almost unavoidable since we're looking at a small square screen in front of us, The screen itself doesn't widen when you raise the FoV.

So, The reach is unnatural- But it's to compensate for our unnatural view, and many games with more involved/frequent melee combat compensates in much the same way.