Dead State - Dev Q&A Thread Update

After a week of posts it's worth catching up with Brian Mitsoda's Q&A thread on the Dead State forums.  There's far too much to post here but here's a small sample of the responses:

I've been wondering how complex the combat system is.  Will you be able to crouch, go prone and sidestep?  Will the terrain provide various degrees of cover ala JA2, or will "cover" simply involve getting out of the enemy's line of sight?

Currently, you can't crouch, go prone, or sidestep and cover is mostly about staying out of the lines of sight. Most of these options would only benefit long-range weapon users, which would a small percentage of builds. We'd also have to spend time teaching friendly and enemy AI to deal with it, not to mention do additional into/out of animations for hits or grapples to prone/crouching enemies. It just wasn't worth the time, especially since we wanted to balance the game for melee/ranged rather than tailor the game to styles of ranged combat. The zombies tend to keep people moving, which is another reason we don't have a lot of options to dig in and fight. We'll evaluate defensive bonuses for firing from inside a building, probably, but we want to make sure guns aren't completely overpowered.  

A lot of the strategy comes from the different weapon types, how you employ them, how you use thrown items (like noisemakers), where you choose to engage enemies, how much your allies compliment your style, and how you pick your battles.