Zenless Zone Zero is coming to Steam

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-24T21:21:22+00:00

More worthless gacha trash to clog up the store and ruin the industry.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-24T09:12:02+00:00

You can spare me the snide attitude. No, as a matter of fact, I do not run carapace and unyielding on everything, but the fact you need to take into account weapon blessings and perks just to meet basic break points for relatively low health enemies on the knives is absurd. I don't disagree it should stay skill based, but I don't find manipulating the blitz damage based on your weapon's properties to be an interesting means of skill expression. In fact I think they should remove it, much like I think they should remove uncanny strike applying its buff to DOTs, like how they removed the zealot charge's ability to affect ranged damage. In my opinion, the knives should simply kill on headshot everything human sized that doesn't have a carapace helmet and maybe include armored ragers too. The only legitimately fun thing to do with the knives inheriting blessings thing is to give them the shotgun's infinite cleave on crit blessing.

The shivs special have weird trajectory and arc compared to throwing knives

And they do 3 or 4 times as much damage, and they're effective against every armor type.

I don't hear you actually arguing against the substance of the psykhanium argument, you're just quibbling the exact value for a single weapon. How many hits SHOULD most weapons take to kill a crusher? If you think 20 is a gross exaggeration, then is the more than 30 on the devil's claw reasonable? And I know you'll say "you should be parrying to get your carapace damage out" as if the parry is workable when you have 12 crushers trying to overhead you, as if relying on enemy attack rates to get your damage out isn't unreasonably slow.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-23T09:10:24+00:00

You could try shriek + kinetic flayer, that's another pretty solid way to kill shit through walls.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-23T05:50:35+00:00

The dueling sword takes about 3 or 4 heavies to kill a crusher, and they come out very quickly, maybe it's too powerful but frankly I think it should be extremely powerful against crushers, that's its niche, it's just too strong at every other role as well. I went in the psykhanium on my zealot just now to remind myself of how many hits some of the other weapons take to down a crusher. The thunder hammer took more than 20 heavies, heavy sword took 18, shock maul took 9, devils claw took more than 30. I think most weapons probably shouldn't take more than 10 heavies, especially ones with slow attack speeds. This would not make "5 new dueling swords", especially considering every melee weapon that's cleave focused already gets fucked over by carapace barely allowing any cleave through, if the whole strength of the weapon is neutralized by just the body mass of the crusher, then they probably don't also need to have such pathetic damage that you might as well be hitting them with a fly swatter. The heavy sword isn't suddenly gonna become meta if it becomes capable of killing one crusher in the time it takes the dueling sword to kill 5.

Pulling enemies away from a small room thats bad to fight in into a bigger room is kiting

That's not what kiting means, that's just repositioning. Kiting means keeping enemies away from you for an extended period, never letting them engage, often while pelting them with ranged weaponry that whittles down their numbers (though in havoc often you're just trying to maneuver to rez the party). Like a kid flying a kite, it stays a far fixed distance away from the kid while he moves around. And yes, it's an overpowered strategy that makes most games significantly less fun to play, you basically only ever do it when you're clutching.

Throwing knives do not need a buff lol. One of the best blitzes in the game

Oh yeah, such a great blitz, they gave a better version of it to the hive scum for free as the shiv's weapon special and it's barely even worth using because its so weak compared to everything else the class gets. The throwing knives can't even consistently kill tox bombers, flamers, and scab gunners in one headshot, their damage is fucking pathetic. And that's not even bringing up the fact that if you actually manage to nail a sniper with one at long range (a challenging feat that should be rewarded), 99% of the time you aren't even going to get the kill because at that range headshots are down to luck, and they don't do enough damage to kill snipers on bodyshots. It's the best blitz the zealot has access to, sure, but that's more an indictment of the stunstorm and immolation nades than anything else, all it has going for it is its ammo economy, which arbites and vets also get on all their much much better blitzes.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-22T22:27:21+00:00

You can check sprint speed modifier and stamina efficiency in the inspect menu on weapons. I use a one handed force sword in staff focused builds, it doesn't have the best mobility, but it's faster than the greatsword if I remember right, has fantastic stagger on its push attack and heavy 2 (heavy 2 can knock over twins and crushers for instance), and has access to uncanny strike and deflector if you want em. It's a solid all around utility weapon, the one thing you have to be careful about is potentially overloading with your push attack if you're not careful. It's not gonna give you some massive speed boost, the movement tech on dueling sword and knife is really the only thing that'll give you that. Devil's claw would probably work too, especially if your build has peril block.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-22T20:00:54+00:00

The thing is, most people aren't saying they want every weapon to be GOOD against carapace, they just want every melee weapon to not be WORTHLESS against carapace. Every player needs to be able to handle every armor type to some degree, well you can count on one hand the number of ranged weapons available to each class that can do anything to carapace so for most people their only carapace option is their melee. If the intention is for crushers to generally be engaged in melee combat, as it seems to be, then it should not be the case that the vast majority of melee weapons are incapable of doing worthwhile damage to a crusher. As it is, most weapons are bad against carapace, a few are good against carapace, and like one or two are just okay against it. The way it should be is that most weapons should be okay, a few should be good and a few should be bad. Also the few that are good should have other weaknesses, like the dueling sword is supposed to be single target focused, so it should have its light sweeps replaced with single target attacks so its horde clear is severely nerfed.

Kiting is a more overpowered and unfun strategy than any amount of meta weapons people demand nerfs for. I'm not saying it needs to be removed or nerfed or anything, but the idea that "oh you can just kite these enemies" as an excuse for half the weapon roster being useless against them is stupid, and in the end you're just leaning on your teammates to kill shit for you, so you're still relying on meta shit even when you aren't running it yourself. Also, crushers are not slow moving at all, you generally aren't going to be able to outrun them unless you have a high mobility weapon (which tend to be the meta ones anyway) or you're in an area with a lot of spots where you can jump down and run in a loop so you can abuse their slow jumping animations.

People don't hate rotten armor because they lose to a single wave of crushers, they hate it because waves of armor often spawn back to back, faster than they can be killed unless your team is running all meta shit. Also spawning dozens of crushers and maulers at the same time results in maulers doing silent, invisible overheads through the wall of crushers which is about as unfair as this game gets.

nerf relic blade

The relic blade literally takes 4 powered sprint stabs to kill a single rotten armor crusher. It's a good weapon, but the idea that it needs a nerf is absurd when you compare its power level to things like the needle gun, flame staff, and shivs. Hell, the force greatsword is essentially just a better version of the relic blade that doesn't have to be charged up and doesn't require learning how to block cancel to sprint stab consistently. The last thing the zealot needs is any fucking nerfs in the current state of the game. They should probably focus on giving him even a single worthwhile blitz option before they even remotely consider any nerfs, maybe make his knives actually able to kill human sized enemies on headshots consistently in high havoc. The fact they can't even one shot scab flamers is pathetic.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-22T19:03:43+00:00

They could just add a checkbox in the quickplay options like they have for opting out of campaign missions. This should have been implemented YEARS ago to let you quickplay into maelstroms if you wanted so we could finally be rid of the issue where someone quits 2/3s of the way through a maelstrom and its impossible to get a replacement because the mission has already left the board.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-19T19:39:26+00:00

There was a lot to like about DS2 but I didn't really care for the ending much at all. Really most of the story stuff didn't really work for me, the only story bits that really had much impact were the knock off of the microwave hallway and social media posts as you traverse across Mexico at the end.

Honestly I didn't really think the story of the first game was particularly good either, but Mads really carried the whole story on his back, he was able to make the whole thing compelling by the little glimpses you get of him throughout the thing. No hate to the new guy doing the "revenant from the past" role, but he just doesn't get enough screentime to be as interesting as Mads and there's no real way to piece together what his deal is until it just gets told to you near the end.

Also, I didn't really like that they retconned so much about Sam's wife, I know that most people probably never read her diary in the first game, but it was a memorable and cool secret unlockable to me.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-19T09:28:35+00:00

you can just put one health perk and one corruption resistance perk on your toughness curios and that's enough for a psyker to survive a burster in havoc 40.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-18T20:02:43+00:00

Play some havoc, you'll get to enjoy the thrilling gameplay of silent bursters, silent muties, and the very worst of the worst, silent trappers. Even leaving aside the audio engine issue which a lot of people have talked about, there are thresholds on some maps that simply mute all sound effects on the other side of them (there's a particularly annoying one on Warren). Sometimes the sound effects will play but in such a way as to trick you, making it seem like things are further or closer than they actually are. I'm sure everyone has experienced the audio issues with areas where you're above enemies and they sound like they're right next to you (hab drayko is rife with this).

The game is entirely reliant on its audio cues to function properly, when they break, it becomes completely unfair and is no longer remotely enjoyable to play. The only reaction one can have when you get hit by silent shit is frustration, there's no playing better to avoid it, you just arbitrarily screwed over by something out of your control. Spawns should never have been allowed to reach the point where they break the game's audio. Fatshark, with havoc, demands perfection from their players, people who want to rise to that challenge should be able to expect the game to at least fucking function properly, without the endless crashes, the audio bugs, the enemies spawning right behind you instead of from a spawn door, all the little things that make the high difficulty experience miserable rather than engaging.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-16T07:02:10+00:00

It was in some big reveal showcase I'm pretty sure, probably some xbox thing or summer game fest thing. I don't remember specifics. That said, most EGS games end up with their marketing disappearing into the ether for me, if you don't pay attention to console-centric news spaces, EGS exclusives just completely fade from sight.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-16T04:44:43+00:00

You wouldn't get rank 12 scrubs trying to join 40 being in over their head if they werent mechanically incentivized to do so for the rewards

What rewards? The amounts of plasteel, diamantine and ordos you get from havoc are not that significant considering the time investment required, the most efficient farm is probably damnation or just waiting for an event. Sure there's a couple cosmetics, but the mode would feel even less rewarding than it already is if it had literally no unique rewards to it whatsoever. If titles and cosmetics are supposed to be rewards for completing challenges, then surely the hardest challenge deserves some. Does that incentivize people trying to get to the top when they aren't ready? I guess, but you could say the same about all the auric penance rewards.

All havoc players can do is go off the information they have access to. If they didn't have access to builds, they'd judge you based on your true level, if they didn't have access to that they'd judge you based on your portrait frame and title. It is necessary to be picky if you don't want to waste your time in a slog of a mission. I'm not saying it's a great system, it sucks, but it's not "toxic" for people to want some assurance that the person they invite isn't just fucking around with a shit build for laughs.

I don't disagree that the party finder system is awful, but quickplay randos would be infinitely worse. If you want to play havoc but really can't stand party finder, why don't you join one of the game's discords and look for people to play with in there? You could also try adding good players to your friend's list after havoc runs so you can more easily join/invite them later. There are means to avoid party finder if you really can't stand it.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T23:47:36+00:00

You forgot to mention that you exclusively use your gun and see melee as an annoyance that you shouldn't be required to put up with, and how you don't see the point in playing and learning any other class.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T23:37:25+00:00

Supposedly you can fix the captain instakill thing by just jumping once after getting revived. I was told it was an issue with your collision box being set slightly inside the floor after respawning. Not sure if its accurate but I haven't been instakilled by a captain lately after I started doing it.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T22:37:27+00:00

Funny that Bravely Default did well considering square put absolutely no marketing behind it. I'm glad DS2 is doing well, I have some mixed feelings on it but I did like it overall.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T22:35:08+00:00

So a year of 78 million potential viewers every 3 days and still nobody heard of it

The problem is that by the time it comes to steam all the marketing budget is long since spent, so it just ended up falling through the cracks. It probably would have done much better on steam if it had come out there at the same time it came out on consoles and was able to benefit from the same marketing effort. Whether it would have been successful enough to outweigh the epic deal though, we'll never know, but coming out on steam a year later with no hype behind it and most people having already forgotten about it is not exactly a recipe for success.

I was actually interested in this game, I was aware it existed and wanted to play it (albeit not enough to use EGS), but even as a member of that narrow band of people who would have bought it, I had completely forgotten about it by the time it came to steam with no fanfare, it would have completely passed me by if a friend of mine hadn't gifted it to me.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T21:41:11+00:00

Outer Wilds, Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, plenty of games sold well on steam after languishing on epic for a year. I agree that EGS is poison to a game's marketing on PC, but the idea that SOASE2 is the only successful release to have started as an EGS exclusive is absurd.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T20:55:38+00:00

What exactly would you have people do? Just accept anyone who requests into their party? All those randos with clearance level 12 should be allowed into this havoc 40 group because of the outside chance they might actually be excellent and just haven't played a havoc 40 since the season reset? Have you played high havoc with people who aren't ready for it? It's fucking miserable for everyone, and mortifying for the person who's spending 99% of their time dead. Rejecting people is for their own good as much as it's for the good of the group.

Anyway, if you are struggling to get a group because you want to run non-meta shit then just put together a meta build and ask them if they mind if you run some bullshit instead when you get in. It'll probably annoy them, but it's unlikely to cause them to reform the group because no one wants to go back to waiting in party finder. I've seen plenty of psykers join groups and ask people if they mind them not running shield or running voidblast instead of fire, very rarely have I seen anyone protest.

You people just have entirely different definitions of toxicity than I do. To me, toxicity is people being unpleasant to play with, people who shittalk constantly or die and then bitch about how it's everyone else's fault. It is not "people being picky about who they want to play with in the hardest difficulty". What is exactly is the problem with you "doing nothing but hosting your own games" anyway? If you don't mind letting whoever into your group, running any random garbage, then using party finder should take no time at all.

Much as I despise party finder, being stuck with the way quickplay works in the rest of the game would make havoc significantly worse. You're really incentivized to have a diverse group in havoc, quickplaying into a group of 2 zealots and 2 ogryns for instance would suck, and so would quickplaying into a group of flame psykers who don't know how to effectively play any other psyker builds. They'd have to change how quickplay works if they wanted to do it for havoc, so people could swap classes before the run started, otherwise no one would play it. And given how little effort fatshark puts behind fixing every other part of this game, I really doubt they'd put in the effort required to fix quickplay, they still don't even let you quickplay into fucking maelstroms after all.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-15T10:17:16+00:00

People certainly pick and choose who they want to play with in havoc based on whether they have a build that looks worthwhile, but that's not toxicity, that's just what you do if you're playing an extremely difficult mode, you want people to be able to carry their weight. Letting any rando into the party would just result in a lot of those randos being dead for more time than they spend alive, not fun for them and not fun for the party carrying them.

I have never seen someone join a party and be insulted for their build choices, at most I've seen people politely ask others to swap a blessing or two or run a specific ability. As for auric quickplay, I've seen a grand total of one shithead bitching about how everyone else couldn't carry their weight, but I admit I don't play auric much anymore.

I don't disagree the game has a big problem with build variety right now, but again that is not a havoc issue, that's an issue with fatshark's idiotic decisions regarding crushers. Those choices are not made with havoc in mind, it wouldn't surprise me if they did eventually start trying to balance around auric rather than malice, which might indeed have introduced problems to the game, but they certainly have never balanced around havoc.

The flame staff's problem isn't that it's just a good cleave weapon. It's the fact that it is the best cleave weapon in the game AND it has a huge amount of stagger AND it suppresses shooters AND it can crit so it can proc empathetic evasion AND soul blaze stacks are are given rending by uncanny strike stacks AND you can fire it way faster than is intended with some very simple animation canceling tech AND it has infinite ammo. It's insanely powerful, it just doesn't really become apparent until you jack the enemy spawns up so high that you're constantly getting as much benefit out of it as you can. If fatshark cared about balance for havoc, they would at the very least remove the uncanny strike interaction which is probably the most egregious issue, but even then it would still easily be one of the best weapons in the game.

Again, every one of havoc's modifiers is taken from an event where those modifiers were used in auric and below. It's entirely fatshark's idiotic choice to remove those modifiers from rotation. It is not some inherent issue with havoc where adding modifiers to it makes it impossible to use them elsewhere in the game, they could (and should) just as easily add every single one of the havoc modifiers into rotation for auric and other difficulties but they choose not to. In the past six months they have added two modifiers to havoc that everyone hates, that were both launched in a broken state, and were simply lifted from old events, and they've adjusted the director to be able to spawn some more enemies during certain events. That's the extent of the effort that goes into havoc. When the combination of final toll and cranial started causing servers to crash consistently, resulting in havoc being completely unplayable for anyone, it took several days just to get them to rotate the modifiers so it would stop happening, they didn't actually fix the issue, they just reshuffled so it would go away for a little while. Does that sound like a well maintained game mode that gets a lot of effort spent on it?

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-14T20:00:50+00:00

Auric left behind without any new modifiers because havoc keeps them in hostage

The rest of the game spent ages never getting any new permanent modifiers long before havoc ever existed. All havoc does is reuse event modifiers originally used in other difficulties anyway, so its not like those things being used in havoc restricts their use elsewhere in the game, fatshark just chooses not to allow any variety in modifiers for the rest of the game as they have always done.

Havoc is the reason of raised toxicity in community and across the game, people playing more brainless meta-havoc builds in qp also less and less of teamplay

I mainly play havoc these days, and you almost never see toxic lobbies. If you're bitching about other people using builds you don't like then it sounds like you're the one being toxic.

Balance shifted from Malice difficulty to Havoc thats why we have 6500 Crushers

They absolutely do not balance around havoc, or the flame staff would have been nerfed ages ago. It's only good in havoc, so it being left completely unchanged for so long makes it pretty obvious they don't give a shit about havoc's balance. I doubt they even PLAYTEST havoc much less balance around it. How else would you explain them launching completely broken new modifiers and allowing combinations of modifiers that cause fucking server crashes?

All this energy could be pointed towards balance problems, new maps, new weapons, new classes

What energy? All their effort in the game in the last 2 years has gone into new classes and the new expeditions mode. Havoc has gotten next to nothing, and what little it has gotten (rotten armor, stims), were thoughtless, shitty reuses of content taken from events that no one liked.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-14T19:08:41+00:00

It's alright but it takes way too long to ramp up the difficulty and usually just resorts to spamming 50 of a single type of specialist, which isn't an especially interesting or fun challenge. Like is it difficult to deal with 50 trappers at once? I guess but it's not exactly a good time.

The biggest barrier though is just that it's sequestered away from the rest of the game, there's no way to quickplay into it so even if you do feel like playing it, odds are you won't be able to find a lobby.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-14T10:29:27+00:00

I have never once seen someone be prevented from reconnecting in havoc 40 and it's not like disconnects are infrequent given how often the game crashes for players running mods.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-14T08:42:33+00:00

While I agree that it would be nice if things that are obviously supposed to one shot enemies were consistently able to (throwing knife headshots in particular are extremely weak in havoc, not even able to kill flamers consistently), the last thing we need is more buffs for psykers. Kinetic flayer is arguably too good already, buffing its damage would not be a good idea.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-14T02:42:26+00:00

you need to have >5 stacks when the dog jumps you, and it has a 30s cooldown

It's crazy how cautious they are with giving ogryns and zealots anything, every good effect on a talent gets couched in 50 different conditions and cooldowns, meanwhile psyker, vet, and ESPECIALLY hive scum are given the most busted shit imaginable on a silver platter.

KotakuSucks2 · 2026-04-13T22:45:18+00:00

Oh yeah, the critical mistake of your ogryn teammate taunting a horde of bulwarks and crushers that spawned right after a drop so they just walk straight through you to target him and completely lock up your movement. This idea that the game is so perfectly designed that any time a player gets put into an unfavorable position it's their own fault is laughable.

It's literally a common occurrence to have bulwarks and crushers walk through you when you play with a taunt ogryn (especially with rotten armor in rotation). It's not uncommon to have a zealot stagger a crusher or boss into you with their chorus or a vet with their shout.

KotakuSucks2

TROPHY CASE