#L4D2-Trial
##Goal The goal of this project is to create a truly immersive realistic L4D2 experience that people who love realism in games can truly enjoy. Might end up taking some inspiration from Holdout or other excellent mutations with interestin features.
##Features
###Weapons And Ammunition Are Scarce (And So Are Other Items)
In L4D2 there are weapons everywhere. Players can freely choose what weapon they prefer and adapt to different situations however they want. In addition to this, a single weapon spawn can magically generate an unlimited amount of weapons that every player can pick up as many times as he wants!
In this modification all weapons will be single pickup, and there will be a lot less of them around. Ammunition piles will have a limited amount of ammo with different amounts of ammo for each different kind of weapon.
It does not make sense that there's so many items around either, especially in saferooms. If it's the apocalypse and there's other survivors, I'm fairly sure at least one of them would've been a jerk and would've looted all of the first aid kits, weapons and ammo. In fact, the 4 survivors that we play as are jerks! They always take all of the health items and whatever's available. You can't blame them for wanting to improve their own chances of survival, but as the graffiti on walls clearly proves, other people have been through those saferooms, and they wouldn't be leaving a plethora of utensils behind.
Another thing: static machine guns/miniguns never run out of ammo! They overheat, but ammo is unlimited. This is unrealistic.
###Carried Items Are Not Weightless
In L4D2 you move at the same speed and with the same ease regardless of how much stuff and what kind of stuff you're carrying.
Every item, weapon and bullet will have a weight, and players will be progressively more encumbered the more weight they carry, leading to a slower movement speed when heavy, but also a higher speed when carrying few items.
###Amount Of Carried Gear Is Less Limited
In the game you are only allowed to carry at most 1 throwable, 1 small health item, 1 large health item, 1 side-arm, and 1 primary weapon.
This doesn't make that much sense, so a possible feature will be the addition of a backpack of sorts, or some way of accessing alternate weapon sets, so that players can carry more of the gear that they find, though they will be punished by encumbrance.
Note that players will be able to carry ammunition for weapons that they don't currently carry, which has an impact on other features!
###You Can Exchange Weapons And Ammo
You can't drop your weapon naturally in the game unless you pick another one up. You also cannot trade ammo with allies or drop ammo.
This will be changed so that you are free to distribute weapons and ammo any way you like, including just ditching gear to be less encumbered.
###Gunfire Noise Attracts Zombies
When you shoot a gun, it makes loud noises. Yet zombies in L4D2 are deaf for the most part, only reacting if you're noisy within a few feet of them. This is silly!
So the game will be changed so that each gun generates a certain amount of noise, and too much noise too close together calls the attention of a small zombie horde. If the noise continues, zombies will continue to join the mob. If you're too noisy taking care of the mob, you'll call even more zombies on yourself, leading to your eventual death (or to the death of every zombie within earshot).
###Lack Of Noise And Flashiness Does Not Attract Zombies
A common event in L4D2 is having an... well, an event, where you have to wait out for a bridge to lower or a gate to open or something of the sort while the infected swarm at your position. This makes sense in cases where there's a lot of noise and lights being emitted by the event object, but in many cases there is no noise or light!
So only events that actually do attract attention will call swarms of undead, although there may be an increased chance of being attacked by special infected to make up for the decrease in difficulty on these events.
###Population Density Is Realistic
In L4D2 you somehow have a lot of zombies everywhere, whether you're in a rural setting, in the middle of god-forsaken woods, or in the middle of a once thriving metropolis. This makes no sense: there would not be as many people to be infected in a farm as in a city!
So it is a goal to change this into a more logical distribution of infected.
###Pain-Pills and Adrenaline Have Side Effects
In the regular game you can take an endless supply of pain pills and everything will be okay. You just chug them, whole bottles at a time, and it gives you a health boost. This cannot be.
Pain pills will have side effects, which will get worse and worse the more you take. Side effects will include auditory hallucinations, maybe visual ones if I find a way to do that, blurred vision, slowed movement/shooting/looking, taking damage at first before the pain pills take effect, and at some point death.
Adrenaline will have a similar effect.
###Defibrillators Are Not A Cure To Death
In the regular game, you can just use a defibrillator to bring any player back to life, no matter what killed him or how long he's been dead. In real life defibrillators are only useful in case of tachycardia or fibrillation (or something like that, I've never studied the subject).
This will be changed so that defibrillators are only used in situations where it would be logical for them to have an effect, and only for a short time after the player's game death. Defibrillators may end up being removed altogether though, we'll see after I've done more research into the subject.
###Death Is Permanent
In the regular game, people want to play, so even if you die on a map you will be reborn on the next one or rescued from a closet as if you were a different person!
Once a player dies, he will be dead for good - assuming he can't be brought back through medicinal methods.
###Common Infected Might Have Useful Objects
Common infected were people too, many of them trying to survive this apocalypse: so it is only plausible that some of them might have had useful items with them when they were turned that are still on their body. This is especially the case for zombies from hospital settings, as well as riot guards (who should have more than just tonfas), army men, the passing's bikers and swamp fever's swamp people.
The change is simple: cause them to have a small random chance of dropping something useful.
###Weapons Are Not Always Fully Loaded
Whenever you pick a gun up, it will have a full clip in it along with several other clips of ammo!
This makes no sense, so weapons will have a fairly random amount of bullets in them, often none, and will very rarely have any extra clips with them!
###There Is No Ambience Music There is no soundtrack to real life, so it obviously has to go!
###There Is No HUD There is no HUD telling you information you should be able to tell from the situation: how much health you or your fellow survivors have, what items they're carrying, what weapons you have and how much ammo you have in them. Note that you will be notified of how much ammo you pick up each time you pick it up, and when going through your backpack you can determine how much ammo you have and whatnot. There must also not be any kill/FF notices (the small text that appears on the left of the screen) and no hint messages!
###There Are No Magic Coloured Outlines Just like the realism mutation, survivors do not have a magic outline and cannot be seen through walls. In addition to this, items also do not have any outlines.
###As Time Passes By... Unlike in the regular game, time will pass, leading to changes in the amount of light, possibly even until nightfall. While survivors will usually leave each saferoom at dawn and sleep in them by night for safety, if they take too long getting to the next saferoom they will find themselves shrouded in darkness. Time of day might be tracked cross-map, not sure yet, and survivors might not sleep in every saferoom since maps aren't that big. Maybe time will pass cross-map but if it was night when they got to the saferoom it becomes day again. Maybe survivors have the chance to decide how many hours to sleep, which affects their health and whatnot.
###Dynamic Weather In the regular game you usually have pretty normal unchanged weather: clear skies. In Hard Rain you get to have some rainy storms, but only in 1 or 2 maps. The hope is to have a reasonable degree of randomness in weather, perhaps even with flash rains in a single map that only last for half of it, or a growing fog that gets worse and worse with each map that's played through.
###Being Incapacitated Underwater Drowns You To be fair, this already happens in the game, but it is insanely slow, taking maybe close to a minute to lead to death. That's not very realistic, so it needs changing.
###Survivors Do Not Say Silly Anti-Climactic Things In L4D1 there was no real problem with this, but with L4D2 there's a tendency for survivors to be overly playful for someone who is stuck with 3 other people in a world with millions of zombies who want to kill you. It sometimes ruins the mood. So survivor chatter will be partially filtered to dispose of the worst offenders.
###There Are No Survivor Protection Mechanics
There are several mechanics in place to protect survivors from taking too much damage: one example is the invulnerability timer (aka 'godframes'). Another is the limit to the time after a common infected hit is registered before another one can register again. Hits during this interval will deal no damage and have no effect on the player. Also, common infected magically do half damage when attacking from behind: makes no sense. Yet another instance of such protections happens when a survivor is pinned: he becomes immune to friendly fire until he is released. This shouldn't happen.
So all of these mechanics will be removed.
###Boomer Bile Is All-Consuming
In L4D2 boomer vomit will attract infected to people hit with it: yet if it comes from a vial thrown by survivors it doesn't cover survivors, and if it comes from a boomer it won't cover infected. This makes no sense.
So the game will be changed so that all sources of bile cover all possible targets in it!
###Weapons Jam or Break Sometimes it happens: weapons jam. If a weapon gets wet it won't usually work very well. Homemade pipe-bombs can fail, and molotovs won't ignite if the cloth is completely wet. Not all melee weapons would be unbreakable in real life. Shoving infected away with a weapon might slowly cause damage to that weapon. Things like these will be added.
###Melee Weapons Don't Make Mincemeat Out Of Zombies A frying pan killing 4 infected with a single swipe? Really? That has to be changed.
###Survivors Are Not Fire-Retardant In L4D2, infected will be ignited until they die or walk into water if they walk through fire. Survivors, however, somehow manage to be extinguished the second they walk out of the flames! This makes no sense, and needs fixing.
###Windows Don't Instantly Break In L4D2 and possibly other more recent Source games, windows have a tendency to be broken just by having someone walk into them. This doesn't make much sense, like a lot of other things! Hopefully it can be remedied.
###Flashlights Run On Batteries Unlike the regular game, flashlights will not have unlimited power!
###Taking Damage Can Actually Cause Damage In this game, as in many others, "damage" is a virtual concept that affects a virtual loose representation of your "health." It is an intention to make the virtual damage you take do more than just alter your 'health': it may cause damage to your internal organs, or break bones, causing you to suffer more damage over time, be slowed down, have impaired reflexes and aiming ability, lose consciousness, etc. You might take extra damage each time you take a step if your leg is broken. Situations like taking fall damage, being viciously attacked by special infected or swarms of common infected, etc will be of special concern.
###Medkits Are Not A Quick Fix To An Unhealthy Life-Style Instead of giving a free increase in health of 80% or whatever it is, medkits will still heal you, but a lot less. The main focus of medkits will be on curing special wounds like the kind mentioned in the point above.
###Special Infected Cannot Be Deadstopped If a very-high-speed 70 kg former-man crashes against you, you're not going to be able to magically stop it with a shove.
###Chargers Cannot Be Leveled Without Consequences Leveling chargers is alright, it makes some sense that an axe to the head would kill a zombie even if it's a large fast one, but if you're standing in front of it when you kill it, his corpse would smash against you and send you flying away! Expect consequences from leveling chargers face-to-face.
###Blunt Melee Weapons Can Stagger Targets
###Unrealistic Item Spawns Will Be Removed Sometimes there's a weapon spawn in a place that doesn't make much sense, or a defibrillator on top of a bed in a kid's bedroom or something of the sort. These spawns will be progressively filtered and removed. Spawns that would make sense but aren't in the game may be added as well.
###Weapons Should Have More Recoil Weapons should have a larger kickback than what is seen in game!
###Sprinting As opposed to the game's normal shift-walk, nonshift-run way of doing things, the roles will be reversed: people will walk slowly by default, and be able to sprint with shift. It may be allowed for players to be able to both walk slowly and sprint in addition to the normal running, but in that case the speed for running will be changed: players will have slightly slower crouch, walk and run movement, and a slightly faster addition which will be sprinting.
###Fatigue Related to the previous feature and many other subjects. Players will not be able to run all day or jump all day or shove infected away all day or swing melee weapons all day. They will be fatigued which will slow them down in everything they do, and if overworked may lead to exhaustion and other effects. The more encumbered they are, the more quickly they'll be fatigued. The more fatigued without going overboard, however, the more used to it they will be, and the higher their endurance will be in the future.
###Witch Will Not Be A Killing Machine The witch is just a very sad zombie. She might have some seriously sharp claws, but if a hunter ravaging you won't kill you in 3 seconds, neither will being slashed by a witch a single time. Witches are also overly resistant to damage, considering they're just sad skinny emo zombies with no titanium-alloy plating over their skin. They will, however, be allowed to go after more than one player, since it doesn't make sense for her to freak out after a kill and run for the hills. She will also probably become angered more quickly.
###Tank Will Be A Killing Machine, But Stoppable It makes sense for the tank to do a lot of damage: in fact, he doesn't do enough damage on coop on difficulties other than expert! He is a giant hulk, he should be able to kill/incapacitate people with only 1 or 2 hits. He should not however, take so long to kill when you don't have the best weapons or are missing a few teammates. His damage will be high, but his health will be reduced when compared to typical game modes.
###Realistic Friendly Fire A bullet to the head would outright kill people most of the time: yet in l4d2 it can take more than that. It shouldn't.
###M60 and Grenade Launcher Can Be Refitted It makes no sense that you are somehow forbidden from finding additional ammo for these weapons. Sure, it should be rarer, but if you make it possible to find these weapons it is also inherently possible to find some more ammunition for them somewhere!
###Survivor Bots Are Not Stupid Survivor bots often do very stupid things, like staring at infected who have you pinned for 30 seconds before doing anything about it, or following a jockeyed player around instead of shoving it or shooting it off. They are also afraid of using melee weapons and never even pickup throwables. Sometimes they use health items when they should be saving them. This will be changed to the best of my ability, though I think there's already an addon that greatly improves survivor AI which might save me the work.
###Infected Bots Are Not Stupid Infected bots also have a tendency to be a bit 'simple.' They tend to just charge in without thinking, or stare at players for a few seconds before attacking (smokers/boomers). Hunters get scared away with a few shots and never wall-pounce. Jockeys just walk in slowly instead of leaping everywhere. Tanks throw rocks at seemingly random times. Hopefully most of these things can be improved.
###There Is Cross-Campaign Consistency Supposedly the 5 main campaigns are part of the same storyline, each taking place very soon after the previous one. The same happens with the L4D1 campaigns. Yet somehow survivors always seem to completely recover all of their health and lose all of their items at the beginning of each campaign. This doesn't make any sense, so if someone wants to play several campaigns in a row, this will be taken into account.
###There Are Survivor-Survivor Collisions If you walk inside of a survivor, you will very very slowly be pushed away, but you will be able to be inside of them for a bit. You are also able to walk through your teammates, for example to take the lead in a tight hallway. If you are surrounded by spit and only a tiny corner is safe, you can just pile into each other in the corner and avoid the damage when logically you wouldn't all be able to stay in that corner. None of this makes any sense! There's collisions for everything else, which does make sense, so survivor-survivor collisions will also be added.
###Survivor Incapacitated Weapon Issues Are Tweaked These issues are: a) survivors do not drop their secondary weapon(s) on death, and b) survivors somehow summon a miracle pistol out of the void if they had a melee weapon when they are incapacitated. For a), survivors will drop everything they had on them when they die, and they will be allowed to use weapons other than their secondaries (ie throwables and primary) if I find a way to do that; and for b), they will just hold on to their melee, if that is possible, otherwise we might just have to live with miracle pistols.
###New Events
There are very few different kinds of events currently in the game. You have bosses, ie a witch or a tank. And then you have a few variations of horde panic events, where for example you have to run through a gauntlet to shut off an alarm that's calling infinite hordes (infinite hordes make no sense and will be removed too), you have to gather fuel cans, or there's just a finite horde coming after you, with little variation to those. Static boss spawns like in the sacrifice and the passing make things interesting, but there's still not that wide an array of events.
So additional events will be added! One, inspired by the holdout mutation, will be to have a few witches spawn in a cluster. For example, if you set off an alarm, it might irritate them so that suddenly you have a handful of witches coming after you. You might have more than one tank at the same time, like in the sacrifice finale. You might have static-boss-ish things in maps other than the sacrifice and passing ones, for example you could have a lot of tables and party material spawn in a place because it was some girl's birthday party, and you'll have her as a witch there. General special infected might be used in events, for example a hunting pack of 6+ hunters stalking you at one point.
####General
#####Tank
Spawn 1 tank, with a 2% chance of spawning a second tank with it.
#####Witch
Spawn 1 witch, with chances of spawning additional witches with it (unlimited, but with decreasing probability).
#####Hunting Pack
Spawn 6-9 hunters in close sequence.
#####Charge Spit
Spawn 1-2 chargers and 1-3 spitters in close sequence.
#####Jockey Squad
Spawn 4-6 jockeys in close sequence.
#####Natural Horde
Spawn a mob with 20-30 common infected.
###Multiple Tanks and Witches Already mentioned in the above point, but now generalised: you might have several boss spawns of both types throughout the map. You might have 1 tank at the beginning, 1 halfway through and 1 near the end, you might have 3 witches spawning right next to each other, you might have a lot of other things.
###Damage Received By Special Infected Is More Realistic Headshots, stomach shots and chest shots should do more damage. Arms and legs should do less damage, but maybe cripple the infected. SI healths may also be adjusted, because the jockey should die quicker than he currently does.
###There Are No Pain Perceptors The red pointers that appear in your screen when you take damage, pointing to the source of damage. Those are not realistic!
###Dynamic Paths/Settings This is not really a question of realism and immersion, but something cool to make the game more interesting. Maps will have randomly chosen modifications beyond the normal ones. You might have additional obstacles, maybe a barricade you have to climb over, maybe an additional panic event, maybe just a stash of items in a hidden room with the fresh corpses of other survivors (or rather, former survivors). Random props in some places. Other such things.
###No Addons Just because.
###No Floating Names You can't see the name of a player by looking at text floating above his head!
###No Crosshair
###No Skeets No skeets as in the skeeting mechanism which kills off hunters (in versus anyway) when they take 150 damage or more in one pounce is not in effect. They'll still die if their health was low enough of course.
###Car Alarms Are Always Set Off In L4D2 if the car alarm was to be set off through gun fire or an explosion when survivors are too far away, it will in fact remain disabled. Also, car alarms would not be set off by infected walking on top of them/crashing against them. This must be changed!
###No Black And White Effect After taking 2 (by default) incapacitations, your screen loses all color and goes black and white. This will be removed, though the black and white effect may still be around as a consequence of taking extreme damage or having broken bones or something like that.
###Infected Health And Speed Are Variable Not all infected have the same constitution. Some might die extremely quickly, but others might be unyielding. Some might've been sprinters while others were fat slobs. Applies to both common and special.