I know Cataclysm DDA is a different type of game but the richness of the environments in CDDA makes it really hard for me to sink my teeth into Project Zomboid in comparison when I have tried it in the past. CDDA immerses me in a way Project Zomboid never has even though CDDA is turn-based and almost doesn’t have graphics at all lol, there is just so much more going on in every way that it feels more like a choose your own adventure story than an action game.
hmmm… maybe it is time for me to check out Project Zomboid again though? It isn’t that I don’t think the idea of Project Zomboid is awesome!
I’ve kept hearing about CDDA over the years, often in discussions about PZ. Apparently it was also one of the inspirations for PZ.
I find PZ to be very immersive, so I’m curious what makes CDDA even more immersive for you? Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?
Could it not having much graphics perhaps help your imagination in a way similar to how books can sometimes immerse us more than movies can?
Oh absolutely! I am a firm believer that a book is one of the most intense virtual reality experiences you can immerse yourself in, it just takes a bit of effort.
What makes CDDA so immersive for me is that it has reached a critical mass of richness where most of the things you would think about being in environments are there. Looting thus doesn’t feel contrived, for example the windows on most homes have curtains, you can ALWAYS tear down those curtains and use them as a crafting material. How many survival games have you played where you need cloth to craft something and you keep looting 3d objects that clearly have cloth animated on their 3d model but the game mechanics say you found no cloth? I am fine with this to a certain extent, I get it, game balance is far more important to me than silly things like having a problem with this, but because CDDA goes so far the other way you really do start to see the environments you are moving through like you would envision them while reading a book about a character moving through them. I am not someone that usually values games that are a million miles wide and only an inch deep, but the diversity of systems in CDDA has a quality all of its own that is difficult to put into words precisely. I guess what I would say is that simple survival tasks feel so much more meaningful when they are in such a rich context, it makes the experience of interacting with the systems feel much more alive.
Also there are just SOOOO many monsters in CDDA, just zombies is… cool I get it as a design choice but CDDA is WAYYY more terrifying of a universe to me and that helps immerse me too.
Lastly I do want to shout out the Sky Islands mod in CDDA, it now comes as part of the base game because it is so good. Sky Islands turns CDDA into a run based survival game where you are stuck on an empty island in the sky and have to do “runs” to get materials, food and water by entering a portal that teleports you to a random point on the map and you have to reach a portal placed randomly a certain distance away in a certain amount of time to get back to your island or you die and respawn on the island having lost everything you had on you.
https://github.com/TGWeaver/CDDA-Sky-Islands
This mod addresses one of my major problems with open world survival games, I love open world games but after a certain point of developing a bubble of safety around your base survival becomes too easy unless survival mechanisms are onerously difficult, Sky Islands places a consistent pressure on you to survive in a way that immerses me further and doesn’t put me into the dead end of realizing the safest thing to do in an open world survival game is sit in your safe base and do boring safe things and NEVER take risks. Sky Islands forces you to take risks but ALSO encourages you to take risks by making death a severe penalty to your longterm survival rather than an immediate, discontinuous abrupt end to a potentially very long saved game you have invested lots of time into.