Overview
Have you reached a point in the game where you think it’s too easy? Do you like a more realistic experience in games? Then look no further! In this guide I’ll be talking about an extra hard, extra punishing set of rules to make surviving in Harran that much more realistic.
The Essentials
There are a few essential things you’ll need to do/remember for this mode to have the full effect.
- Set the game to the ‘Hard’ difficulty. I mean, you’re adding extra rules, so you may as well play it on hard.
- Disable/turn off film grain, because it’s unrealistic and it sucks.
- Stick to the rules. Chess becomes less fun if you throw away the rules midway through, right? Same thing applies here.
Anyway, that’s all for what you need to know right off the bat, now for the proper meat of the guide.
Skills
Despite how fun and useful some skills may be, it’s often more fun to try playing without them for a different experience. Below, I’ll be listing the few skills you can use in this mode. Get ready to cringe, because there’s not much left.
Survivor Tree
- Survival Starter Kit
- Barter
- Haggle
- Hard Bargain
- Crafting Expertise
- Camouflage
- Shield Mastery
Agility Tree
- Dodge
- Grapple
- Brutal Grapple
- Slide
- Freerunning Adept
- Escape
- Light Drop
- Foward Roll
- Backlash
- Freerunning Expert
- Tic Tac
Power Tree
- Stun
- Melee Throw
- Combat Adept
- Conserve Weapons
- Focus
- Power Attack
- Stomp
- Ground Pound (Cannot use, merely to unlock Drop Attack)
- Drop Attack
- Combat Expert
- Takedown
Ugh, that’s depressing. But anyway, on to what you can carry.
Inventory
You thought this bit’d be nice? Think again. Despite being a video game protagonist, in this mode, Crane is not Superman, and he cannot lug around an entire armoury whilst climbing a radio tower. I’ll be explaining how much of what you can carry now.
Weapons
Sorry, but you can only carry 4 weapons, the ones you can select in the weapon wheel. However, it’s not that easy.
One handed weapons (Machetes, hammers, etc) take up one of your 4 available spaces, so you can carry four of those.
Two handed weapons (Axes, sledgehammers, etc) take up two spaces, meaning you can only carry two two-handed weapons, or one two-handed and two one-handed weapons (That was a mouthful of a sentence).
Small firearms (Pistols) take up one space and large firearms (Rifles and shotguns) take up two.
Resources/Materials
As for materials (Electronics, Household Supplies, etc) and including valubles (Cigarettes, coffee), you can only carry 30 (Or 50, if you wanna be nicer to yourself). Oh, and yeah, that also includes med-kits and lockpicks, so you might want to make it 50. Damn, that’s mean of me. Your storage bag (In safe houses) will become your best friend, as you can store as much as you like in there.
This means resource management will be key. If you do completely forget and go over, you can either be harsh and drop stuff until you’re okay, or just give up your ability to sprint, which is actually even worse.
Now, on to dying. Yay!
Death
Well, this is a bit dreary. Normally, if you die in the game, you lose some Survivor Points and you’re promptly placed a few metres away from your place of death. However, this mode intends to make death more punishing, like in a real apocalypse. But of course, I can’t exactly make you kill yourself if you die in-game.
It’s pretty simple, really. If you die, you have to drop everything you had on you at the time of dying. Yeah, I thought you wouldn’t like that. If you wanna be a bit nicer to yourself, you can sell everything so you at least make money out of it.
However, if you truly, truly believe that your death was not by any fault of yours (E.g. Game bugs, freerunning not working), then you can keep it.
And now we can relax, and I’ll suggest a couple of things you can do to immerse yourself more.
Immersion
Don’t worry, difficulty won’t be discussed here much. I’ll just be talking about a couple of things you can do to generally immerse yourself more.
Try wearing headphones, it’s an entirely different experience, especially at night time. It becomes far more tense hearing a Volatile grunting a few metres away as you hide in an old shop (Or is that just me?).
Also, despite it not being mentioned in the game’s options, there is a way to hide the HUD (the minimap, skills bars, crosshair, etc). However, I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this. The guide will be updated when I find a way.
Conclusion
And that brings us to the end of this ‘True Apocalypse’ guide. It took me a while to make, so a couple of comments or ratings would be nice, if you have the time (It is my first guide, nudge nudge).
I hope you enjoyed (Or cringed) reading about this mode and I also hope you try it out and have some fun with it.
Thanks for reading!