Why the survivors suck so much. (DR1 Only)

[progarbageman]

Well, in this point, I'll give you 2 reasons.

1. The navigation itself. (There is a reason why spending so little time on the a.i. is such a bad idea. Also, thanks to these survivors becoming something from a escort quest, it makes the a.i. unbearable sometimes. There were some guides saying that the survivors work well with only way points. But, since this is basically a split-second type of game, it's kinda hard to do so.)

2. The zombies themselves. (I know, this might sound weird...but just play along.)

(So, due to personal experience, (I have a Xbox 360 but no JTAG) I found out that the zombies have no wait time with the survivors.)

(In other words, think about it like this. In the TGS/Concourse build, the zombies had no wait time so they could grab you over and over again. Due to this unfairness (?), Capcom added some sort of wait time (5 seconds ?) to FRANK so the zombies would be seen in a more fair light.)

(However, with the survivors at the other hand, they contain no such of a thing. So, you can have situations that contain Frank standing in a crowd (of zombies) and them doing basically nothing (They are waiting for the wait time to finish. They started it by either scratching or grabbing you in the first place.)).

(Or, you can have Jeff Meyer (with a golf club) basically getting clawed to death by zombies because these zombies didn't have a wait time with the survivors.)

Note: Hitting (but not killing) a zombie will refresh/restart the wait time, allowing your neighbor zombie to attack you again. 

[screamhurt]

Like I said many times, Dead Rising 1 is a unique game with many qualities, but it's also HEAVILY flawed. You can't even call them survivors; suiciders would be far more appropriate. Seriously, their AI is so idiotic you have a hard time deciding whether you should start laughing or crying from endless frustration which these so called "survivors" provide so happily. It's astounding this feature made it into the final game in this state. What you wrote only proves even further how badly this idea was thought-out and executed.

[SWEGTA]

>instructs survivors to wait while I go clear out the 250 zombies we'll face ahead
>walks 10 yards away from them
"FRAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!!!!"

[SWEGTA]

That doesn't really excuse it though.
If they wanted to implement a feature such as survivors in the game, then they should've put more time and effort into it.
There are over 50 survivors in the game. And the achievements and PP Points constantly encourage you to escort them.

I could understand if survivors were just mere backdrop things to make the environment feel more alive.
But when they're a big focus point in the game, I can't help but to feel like Capcom should've given more of a fuck about it.
Just my two cents on this situation.

[screamhurt]

I agree with Sweg. If you can't implement a feature so that it's good enough to be in a game, then just don't. What happened during the beta testing? There certainly must've been numerous complaints regarding the survivor AI. In addition, there were no day-one patches back then, meaning Capcom knew that what they released was what players got. There's a huge gap between a hardcore approach and bugs/broken features, and Dead Rising 1 is an exeptionally great example of this fact.

[SWEGTA]

Imagine what a really good survivor AI would've done to this game.

* If a survivor is unarmed, they'll look for any nearby meele weapons or firearms to arm themselves with.
* Good path finding.
* Survivors will help to carry injured survivors (like Burt carrying Leah on day 1).
* Survivors will run back to help surrounded or grabbed survivors.
* The ability to individually instruct each survivor's behavior. For example: Telling Survivor A to stay put, while Survivor B follows you.

Shit like this would've made it so much for fun to rescue people.

[progarbageman]

I would agree with you for the most part, but that seems a bit excessive. Personally, I just think that Dead Rising 1 had either Chop Til You Drop or Dead Rising 2 A.I., the game would have been fine to say the least.

[SWEGTA]

That explains their hatred for the plant outside the warehouse.

[Janson]

May 18, 2016 14:02:29 GMT -5 screamhurt said:

I agree with Sweg. If you can't implement a feature so that it's good enough to be in a game, then just don't. What happened during the beta testing? There certainly must've been numerous complaints regarding the survivor AI. In addition, there were no day-one patches back then, meaning Capcom knew that what they released was what players got. There's a huge gap between a hardcore approach and bugs/broken features, and Dead Rising 1 is an exeptionally great example of this fact.

I don't think there were ANY patches for it. Or any other games in 2006. They weren't the norm.

[progarbageman]

Except the game had DLC. Granted, it didn't have much but it least had enough to cover a few outfits...

[SWEGTA]

Yeah.
For whatever reason, Capcom wanted to turn it into DLC.
Perhaps they ran out of achievements to grant the player clothing with, so they just turned them into downloadable extras?
It's also possible that those were variants of clothings that just didn't get used. If my memory serves me right, one of the suits has a lack of tie, which is the only suit to not feature a tie. So it's not just a plain retexture, but also a different model (for whatever reason).

I'm not saying it's beta related, it could just be shit that Capcom deemed not good enough to feature as actual freeroam clothing.
Eventually they said "Hey, let's just have people download some free DLC. They'll think we're giving them new content, but what we're really doing is handing them the leftovers that nobody wanted."

[screamhurt]

Speaking of which, these DLC outfits apparently can't be downloaded in Continental Europe I don't understand why Capcom didn't include them in the Complete Collection.