Followup Q&A: Vehicles

We managed to find some more information on the vehicle mechanics for State of Decay locate on their forums, so I want to share them with you the fans. Each section will be in Bold and Underline questions will be in bold and answers will be in Italics underneath the questions.

Weight/Hauling Stuff

Survivalting, Fideon, and Norannyo: Does the fact that you’re in a car affect how much you can carry? If we use the car to carry a lot of stuff, will it go slower? Finally, can we actually store things in the back of the truck or in the trunks of cars?

No, not this round. Inventory is calculated per survivor, not vehicle. Vehicles don’t have their own inventories, and therefore there’s no visual to see or weight to calculate.

You can put two other people as passengers in the back of the pickup truck, if you’re feeling confident that you won’t be attacked by zombies on the way to your destination. Zombies can crawl into the bed and go to town.

Jonathan Montes: If the zombies are clinging on your car, will they weigh down your car down or make you lose control?

Yes, zombies will absolutely affect the handling of your vehicle and even bring it to a halt. The calculation isn’t weight, though, it’s a specific characteristic of the zombies themselves (and of course, how many of them there are – one zombie’s not going to take out a car).

Survivors

Survivalting: Can your passengers shoot while in the car with you?

We’re still working on options for passenger behavior, but we do not think shooting is going to be one of the possibilities in Class3. However, we do think they’ll be able to open their own doors and bash some zeds!

Peter Peach Jenkins: If you have three people with you, how well do they get into the car? Is it like in GTA where if you’re up against the wall, they will go into the other door, or is it like other games where the passengers will always try for individual doors even if it means risking their life?

Well, we’re working on having your passengers do things the smart, least-risky way. I don’t want to promise anything until we’re further into testing, but we want the passengers to choose the closest available access point.

Damage/Repair

Budwyzer: Tires take damage too, yes?

Yes, you can get a flat tire. Or tires. And yes, it will affect the vehicle’s handling.

Deffcon_1: If parts can be replaced (headlights, windows, wind shields, etc.), will you need to find the parts or will you just be able to fix them? If the parts are needed will they be vehicle specific or all general? Will all headlights fit all cars or will you need specific headlights, or other parts?

We don’t want you to kill yourselves looking for the precise part, or to lose one of the limited number of vehicles because the only part that would work was unavailable. Instead, you will need to have raw materials in stock in your workshop, and someone that knows car repair inside your compound. If you have those elements, you just park the damaged vehicle and let your people get to work.

Javarant: How will vehicle damage be handled? Will cars just up and explode? Or will they just break down? Also, will the cars actually have ‘health’? Like if I shoot a car’s trunk, slowly wearing down its health, will it eventually break down/blow up? Or will the damage have to happen to the important parts (engine, battery, fuel lines, etc.) to actually cripple the car? Final question: can we strip the car down and go all Kanye-West-and-Jay-Z-In-Otis-Music-Video?

There’s no health bar. That’s more of that math stuff we’re trying to keep invisible. Doors can be ripped off, and that will allow zombies to get into the vehicle with you. Zombies can do damage to the body. You can blow a tire by driving over rubble, glass, zombies, or just popping a curb too sharply. If you just keep going without stopping to address damages, the car will get to a point where it won’t start.

Ramming things is super fun, but try to keep it to squishy things (and even then you should bring the vehicle back to base for maintenance – nothing drives well with a zombie limb in the engine compartment). If you ram something like a wall really hard, or medium hard but more than once, the engine will blow up. That will admittedly look cool as hell, but once the engine blows, the vehicle cannot be repaired.

If it can be driven, it can be fixed. There are no mobile repair units in Class3.

(P.S. Don’t forget, different vehicles have different strengths. Sports cars go fast, but they’re more fragile. Just think about what you were do for real in a given situation and you should make out all right.)

As for the music video… no, you’re not going to be able to saw/torch/weld like that. You could probably get the hottest survivors in your group, stick them in the back of Norma (the pickup), and do donuts in a parking lot, though. Hey, you’ve survived the apocalypse. You make do with what you’ve got.

Interface:

ZeGudWone: How will the camera be for driving, third person (behind the car) or first person (behind the steering wheel)?

The whole game is in third person, including the driving.

Fleshblight: In vehicles and on foot, will we be able to adjust the camera? Zoom in and out? Lock the camera into a desired position? Move the camera around ourselves?

To a point, you can move the camera, but there’s no zoom/lock option.

Customization:

A lot of you had questions about customization options for vehicles. I liked the guy looking for lift kits. But as I said in the question about recreating the Otis video, we’re not going to have customization options in Class3.

Orryan4918: Do you think we’ll have a vehicle at the start?

You will have the option to get a vehicle very near the start of the game.

Dupidorian: Will cars ever disappear? For instance, can I leave my mustang out in the woods, or will it have to be in a garage to be ‘saved’?

Cars will not disappear. Zombies do not drive, and in Class3, the other survivors are not necessarily friendly but neither will they stone cold rob you. The game is very carefully tracking the number of vehicles in the world for gameplay reasons, and a side effect of that is that a car will always be wherever you left it, in the condition you left it in.

Deffcon_1: Will you be able to turn the headlights on and off at night? Being able to turn them off would help keep zombie attraction down, but make driving harder of course. A second part to this, will headlights get damaged if you hit zombies or poles or what not, and will you be able to replace them if they get broken?

Yes, you can turn the headlights on and off. While light does attract zombies at night (which is something to keep in mind when you’re strolling around at night with a flashlight), we tend to think the most important factor is going to be the engine noise. Since you’re already creating a commotion that’ll attract every undead within hearing range, you might as well turn them on and be able to see where you’re going.

With that said, we will be fine tuning the zeds’ reaction to light and sound throughout the testing process.

Oh, and yes, your headlights can get broken, but as I said in the repair section, you don’t have to go out and unscrew a bulb from another car. Just take it home and make sure your workshop is stocked with material.

Christie: When you say finite, does that mean if we break all the cars, we can’t get any more? Like they stop spawning?

There are a finite number of cars in the world… sort of. If you blow up all of your cars, you won’t find any more on the streets or alleys or ravines of Trumbull Valley. But if that happens, you might find an NPC who knows where another one might be… for a price. Ahem. (That’s our mechanic for saving you from yourself if you are so terribad at the game that you lose every car.) 

Bryan Robert Turner: I have a question because I’m like Brant but a carfreak, You guys at Undead Labs did say there is around 10 different types of vehicles and my question is, what vehicles did you guys model after real life vehicles?

Gran Torino represent! (I learned to drive in a ‘72 Torino wagon.) None of our cars are intended to be exact models. For one thing, exact models would require some serious licensing hassles. You’re going to be smashing and bashing these things, and getting the pretty paint all smeared with gooey zombie innards.

But that’s not actually the most important reason. Gronk was telling me during the original interview that he did a lot of blending – he took several kinds of sedans as inspiration and then tried to produce something that would evoke “sedan” for a wide range of people, in terms of age and brand preference.

What I mean is that we want everyone to feel like the world is familiar and real, and that means that whether you’re a Ford guy, a Chevy guy, a Mopar fan, or into imports, we want you to feel like you recognize the car. Maybe even drove it as a teen, or rode in it as a kid. It’s all about making the world feel familiar, so you’ll know on a gut level as you’re playing that the outbreak really could happen where you live.

Robert Mackrell: Can I have twenty cars all piled up at my Home in a barricade or something?

Yes, yes you can. I cannot WAIT to see your screenshots of this.

This is Just awesome to read about, with seeing all of this information It makes it even harder for me to wait. But since I am not a huge Video game company or Major player like IGN or Gametrailers I will wait like the rest of the fans.

Stay tuned into dK Games for more as it unfolds, until then check out these related articles
About State of Decay(coverage)

State of Decay — Garden Building

State of Decay..Vehicular Zombicide

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