The Indie Stone has released their latest update that includes more information on Project Zomboid‘s upcoming NPCs.
The Indie Stone’s latest blog update includes a brief video of “proof-of-concept of various aspects of our NPC tech”. The video shows various ai sneaking around buildings and fighting with the dead. AI characters have been experimented with for a long time in Project Zomboid, but managing director Chris Simpson recently shared in an interview with NME that they would be coming to the game soon.
The blog update also details a change of development style for Project Zomboid. Now there will be two teams working on the game. One will continue to improve the multiplayer by optimising the server, increasing the player count, and working on other multiplayer technology.
The second team will be aiming to bring new content to Project Zomboid. According to the latest Thurdoid, Indie Stone’s weekly posts, “one of those teams is going to be focusing exclusively on NPC development from this point on. We’ll also be able to talk about it (not necessarily every Thursdoid, but certainly no longer in a vacuum), rather than work away in secret due to our ‘only discuss what’s coming next’ rule we instigated after a few instances of talking far too early about stuff.”
The post also included a vague roadmap. The next build will contain expanded crafting and balance while work continues on NPC behaviours. NPC’s themselves will be added in build 43. Previously, The Indie Stone had planned to add animals for pets and hunting in the next update. However, this has changed.
“It’s very clear that human NPCs have long been the most requested feature that is still outstanding, and the source of most of the frustration and bad feeling from those who consider the game to still be incomplete.
“A big reason for not being comfortable with hunting and pets being first is they are still NPCs and would necessarily leverage all the technology we’ve being [sic] working on for years at this point.”
In other news, Fortnite players are being given xp boosts and a free pickaxe after issues with the Winterfest event.
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