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A Few More Ideas for The Walking Dead: No Man's Land

4/23/2016

Recently I wrote a post about my love/hate relationship with the game The Walking Dead: No Man's Land. As part of that post I offered a list of design ideas, and today I want to expand that list with some additional thoughts.

Since writing that last post a ton of work has gone into improving this game, which I applaud, and I hope the momentum can continue forward. I also hope some of my ideas are helpful to the developers (if they see this).

New ideas:

Mega-structures. As the game continues to grow and new building types are (hopefully) added, and as space in the town shrinks, one fun solution is to allow for combining of buildings. For example, you take 4 farms that are at least level X and combine them together to become one larger farm. This new farm would take up only 50% of the space of the previous 4 individual farms, but the output would be +25% (slightly higher output overall).
Guild gifting and trading. Recently, the ability to gift your entire guild a random treasure was added, which is a nice start, and ideally only the beginning of a gifting and trading foundation. The ability to gift and/or trade gear and characters to guild members would add a significant dynamic to the guild experience.
Council level building options are lacking. As the council levels up, new buildings can be added, at least, at first. At the higher levels, there are literally multiple level gaps where no new buildings can be added. This is a massive hole in what should be a rewarding experience.
Longer levels. At this time, I have yet to see a level that isn't longer than the equivalent of roughly 3 screens horizontally. Longer levels would up the feeling of exploration, which is a reoccurring trope in the Walking Dead universe.
Gathering 3 resources is repetitive. Most levels and challenges require the team to collect 3 resources. In the latest content, I have seen less of this, which is adding needed variety. For levels that are about collecting resources, why not change things up and have the characters scavenge for, say, 10 resources? Just something to add more diversity.
More achievements. Adding more achievements is an inexpensive development opportunity that adds high value (especially when you leverage stats you are already recording). For example, have additional achievements for killing a total of X walkers (multiple tiers higher than the current achievement that I acquired long ago), add an achievement for killing X saviors, and add achievements for upgrading gear and characters.
Character stats. The memorial shows the statistics of fallen soldiers, so then why not show statistics (elsewhere) for living characters? Clearly you are recording this data, if you are able to display it for the dead characters, so it just needs to be displayed.
Unequip. It's frustrating to have, for example, character Bob that levels up to be the best base-layer character and I cannot unequip gear from character Charlie, to provide to Bob. Currently, if I want to get that better gear from Charlie for Bob, I need to "sell" Charlie.
Survivor select UX needs an overhaul. When you select survivors to take into battle, the interface is cumbersome once you have acquired a large count of characters. There is no way to sort by character type, for example, and there is a lot of swiping needed to replace character by character. I recommend something more like a grid/matrix for the character view, possibly only after receiving more than X characters, or as a UI that can be toggled on and off. And/or a way to save favorite teams that can quickly be pulled in and out.
Hospital queue. Often I find some of my key characters being in the back of the hospital queue, waiting to be healed, behind in line weaker survivors. But what if the hospital gains the ability at X level to allow the player to sort the order of the queue?
Stunned opponents that are actually stunned. When raiding, I noticed that if I stun a defending character they still have the ability to counter-attack me. I think stun should mean you are truly stunned (and cannot counter). This feels more like a bug than a feature request.
More visual differences in building upgrades. The buildings have little variety in terms of visual differences when upgraded, often showing no visual change when leveled up multiple times in a row. It's a big let down moment to save up, upgrade a building, wait hours as it builds, and then see it looks exactly the same as before.

Ideas from previous post:

Balance the character types. Far too often do I find myself using the same character types over others, because of the unbalanced/overpowered nature of the design.
Add diversity to the special abilities. With the amount of grinding expected of your userbase, consider for a moment how utterly bored we may be of the repeated, simple abilities. Perhaps some characters within the same character type can have different abilities? Or maybe the player can select abilities? Or maybe as characters level up they gain secondary abilities? Or what about ability trees to unlock and grow? Or there could be a second or even third tier to every ability, so the player has to decide if they should spend the first tier with an attack or save up to the second or third tier? Why not some defensive abilities (e.g. smear walker blood on your body so that walkers ignore you for a turn or two)?
Grow the story mode faster. Again, this is where I see the most promise, at least, within the current feature set. It’s a shame that I always feel like I have to wait many days (or weeks) before I’m barely powerful enough to complete the next level.
Automated clearing of walls. What if, after, say, counsel level 12, the player can build up a sniper tower within their town, and the sniper will clear those 10 walkers off the walls automatically. It’s just plain tedious to click on those 10 walkers over and over again.
Build out guild features. How about trading or gifting unused gear to guild members? Or trading farm supplies with crates?
Fix the bad grammar and spelling errors. It’s just…unprofessional.
Redesign Challenge mode. I get it: you needed more content early on, and this was a quick solve, just like with the ability to replay the story mode in harder difficulties. But now, longtime players have hit high levels, and the mode just doesn’t make sense anymore. How about, for example, you start at a difficultly more inline with your current level? And/or have the levels be more dynamic, such as the loot crates being random. And for those enemies that spawn out of doors and gates, have that be more random too. I don’t even find myself thinking anymore as I cruise through these levels.
I love the idea of permadeath, I’ve just never had anyone actually permanently die. The Explore levels are simply not that threatening. I recommend that those levels become slightly more difficult, to raise the chance of death, and balance that out with better rewards.
Those pesky ads and promotions. I get it: you want to make money. But let’s consider for a moment all of the various ways that the players are inundated with ads and promotions: pop-ups when logging in, a limited time offer icon on the edge of the screen, a menu with various options for purchase, a theater with 30 second ads to watch for a prize, and an optional 30 second ad that unlocks more crates at the end of a level. Maybe tone it down a little?
Ability to unequip weapons and armor. Sometimes players like to swap gear. As it is now, you need to sell a character to free up the gear.
Ability to switch back to default uniform. I own one custom outfit, which happens to be female. I put it on one of my male characters, because, why not? But then I decided I wanted to switch it back to the default outfit. Not too surprisingly, this isn’t an option.
Add cosmetic decorations to purchase. Cosmetic items would be those things that don’t serve any function other than to decorate your camp. This could be things like a pile of walker corpses and wandering chickens.
Add solar panels. Solar panels would harvest the energy of the sun, making other building types, such as the hospital, more effective.
Add spiked cars. This would be a building type that you place outside the wall. The spiked car catches roamers milling about the wall while you are offline, with a finite limit which encourages you to log back in and collect the walkers that have been captured by the spikes.
Allow for building up (and breaking down) of the walls. A key element of the comic and show is fortifications, and the building and maintaining for those fortifications. But in this game, that element is ignored, as you start in a fully guarded camp from the beginning. What if you could build up walls to be stronger, and this strength tied into gameplay? What if walls occasionally broke down if not maintained? What would be the repercussions of an invaded town?
Include a mission where you wear walker suits. A reoccurring motif of the series is the wearing of walker guts and blood in order to blend in with the enemy. There could be a level where the characters kill some walkers, camouflage themselves in their innards, and then have to carefully traverse through a walker infested region.

1 Comment

The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land - A Love/Hate Relationship

4/3/2016

3 Comments

I want to love this game. I really do.

I’m a huge fan of the Walking Dead comic and show, as well as the zombie genre as a whole. But this game…oh this game. A mixture of the now cliche Clash of Clans style freemium gameplay mixed with the tactical strategy games of old, The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land feels like an ongoing experiment in bad game design, put forth for all to cringe at as the developers slowly massage it into something presentable. Yet beneath the layers of grinding and clicking is the framework for something special. Something that desperately wants to come to life. There is so much room for growth, however, in its current form, The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is a menagerie of lackluster, unbalanced, and lame design decisions, sprinkled with obnoxious pop-ups and ads.

The pie chart below shows how I find my time is typically spent in this game, with an explanation of each slice. At a high-level, you will notice a trend where I argue that the most interesting features are where you spend the least amount of time, and vice-versa, which is primarily a failure due to the lack of content and feature diversity.

Upgrading - Behind the safety of the town wall, players can build crops, storage areas, and stations for upgrading players and gear. While on the outside of the wall, with a recently added feature, players can now add and upgrade a walker pit. Supplies are spent to upgrade buildings, gear, and characters. Supplies which are obtained overtime and by scavaging. After the first couple of days of play I found that building and upgrading is an activity that is extremely infrequent, even after spending hours grinding to gather additional supplies.

Story Mode - The story mode is, by far, the most interesting aspect in the game, and unfortunately it’s what players will find they will spend only a tiny fraction of time participating in. What gets so utterly frustrating about the story mode is how infrequent it can be played, because the difficulty curve is an insanely steep arch. Rather than including more levels that can be played more frequently, the developers opted for a drought of content that is stretched so thin that it cannot even be enjoyed.

Raiding Outposts - Every time there is an update I get excited again, hoping for some fun, new features. And occasionally there are new features that, unfortunately, always feel flat, like a quarter of an idea, birthed from the womb far too early. Outpost raiding is one of those recent additions, where players build their own defensive outpost and raid the outposts of others in search for yet another type of resource. Raiding feels far too formulaic, not only in the limited environments, but in terms of strategy as well: kill the walkers, which charges your special skills, then unleash a flurry of your skills on the human enemies.

Grinding

Log in, click on the 10 zombies outside your gate for pitiful resources, then click on your tents and farms for accumulated supplies. Rinse and repeat.
I’m lumping the Challenge mode into the grinding section, because that’s exactly what the Challenges always feel like: a grind. It’s an incredibly boring mode of play that yields weak individual and team-based rewards, cycling through a small set of reusable levels. Challenge mode always starts you off on the weakest version of each level, no matter how powerful your characters are, forcing the player to grind, grind, and grind some more through familiar levels. And since the prizes match the difficulty, you will be rewarded with low-level junk over and over again. There are rewards that the entire guild works towards, but those rewards are not worth the time spent, and further, the challenge creates a system whereas if a player within the guild has not participated then they reap the benefits regardless, creating angry guild leaders. Like most of this game, it is designed in a way that creates a lengthy experience with reused content and minimal enjoyment.
Replaying previous Story levels on harder difficulties. The levels are exactly the same, just harder. This is one of the oldest design tactics for extending gameplay as cheaply as possible.
Similar to replaying previous levels you can also Explore previous areas in order to get more resources and gear. Again, like the Challenge mode, these are reused levels with the exact same layout time and time again.

In short: great framework, terrible design, obnoxious ads, and an extreme lack of unique content.

Next, I want to offer up some suggestions, that I feel could greatly improve this game:

Balance the character types. Far too often do I find myself using the same character types over others, because of the unbalanced/overpowered nature of the design.
Add diversity to the special abilities. With the amount of grinding expected of your userbase, consider for a moment how utterly bored we may be of the repeated, simple abilities. Perhaps some characters within the same character type can have different abilities? Or maybe the player can select abilities? Or maybe as characters level up they gain secondary abilities? Or what about ability trees to unlock and grow? Or there could be a second or even third tier to every ability, so the player has to decide if they should spend the first tier with an attack or save up to the second or third tier? Why not some defensive abilities (e.g. smear walker blood on your body so that walkers ignore you for a turn or two)?
Grow the story mode faster. Again, this is where I see the most promise, at least, within the current feature set. It’s a shame that I always feel like I have to wait many days (or weeks) before I’m barely powerful enough to complete the next level.
Automated clearing of walls. What if, after, say, counsel level 12, the player can build up a sniper tower within their town, and the sniper will clear those 10 walkers off the walls automatically. It’s just plain tedious to click on those 10 walkers over and over again.
Build out guild features. How about trading or gifting unused gear to guild members? Or trading farm supplies with crates?
Fix the bad grammar and spelling errors. It’s just…unprofessional.
Redesign Challenge mode. I get it: you needed more content early on, and this was a quick solve, just like with the ability to replay the story mode in harder difficulties. But now, longtime players have hit high levels, and the mode just doesn’t make sense anymore. How about, for example, you start at a difficultly more inline with your current level? And/or have the levels be more dynamic, such as the loot crates being random. And for those enemies that spawn out of doors and gates, have that be more random too. I don’t even find myself thinking anymore as I cruise through these levels.
I love the idea of permadeath, I’ve just never had anyone actually permanently die. The Explore levels are simply not that threatening. I recommend that those levels become slightly more difficult, to raise the chance of death, and balance that out with better rewards.
Those pesky ads and promotions. I get it: you want to make money. But let’s consider for a moment all of the various ways that the players are inundated with ads and promotions: pop-ups when logging in, a limited time offer icon on the edge of the screen, a menu with various options for purchase, a theater with 30 second ads to watch for a prize, and an optional 30 second ad that unlocks more crates at the end of a level. Maybe tone it down a little?
Ability to unequip weapons and armor. Sometimes players like to swap gear. As it is now, you need to sell a character to free up the gear.
Ability to switch back to default uniform. I own one custom outfit, which happens to be female. I put it on one of my male characters, because, why not? But then I decided I wanted to switch it back to the default outfit. Not too surprisingly, this isn’t an option.
Add cosmetic decorations to purchase. Cosmetic items would be those things that don’t serve any function other than to decorate your camp. This could be things like a pile of walker corpses and wandering chickens.
Add solar panels. Solar panels would harvest the energy of the sun, making other building types, such as the hospital, more effective.
Add spiked cars. This would be a building type that you place outside the wall. The spiked car catches roamers milling about the wall while you are offline, with a finite limit which encourages you to log back in and collect the walkers that have been captured by the spikes.
Allow for building up (and breaking down) of the walls. A key element of the comic and show is fortifications, and the building and maintaining for those fortifications. But in this game, that element is ignored, as you start in a fully guarded camp from the beginning. What if you could build up walls to be stronger, and this strength tied into gameplay? What if walls occasionally broke down if not maintained? What would be the repercussions of an invaded town?
Include a mission where you wear walker suits. A reoccurring motif of the series is the wearing of walker guts and blood in order to blend in with the enemy. There could be a level where the characters kill some walkers, camouflage themselves in their innards, and then have to carefully traverse through a walker infested region.

I’m at that point again where I’m ready to, once again, uninstall. I’ll check back in again, one more time, and hope the positive elements of this game have been amplified, and the negatives have been sorted out.

3 Comments

A Few More Ideas for The Walking Dead: No Man's Land

The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land - A Love/Hate Relationship

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