AttilaThePunn

If the new change seems silly, it's because it is.

The new mechanics have finally helped singleplayer, but broken multiplayer Whenever recommending this game to people I would always clarify that multiplayer with friends was terrific, 7 days at its peak, but singleplayer wasn’t worth playing. For A21, that’s flipped. I’ve seen some very glowing reviews of this update form people who sound like they only play singleplayer, and some terrible one’s form people who sound like they only play multiplayer. Personally, I could never get into singleplayer, I’m sure I could with A21, but I’d still rather spend my time playing with friends, even if we have to revert back to an older version. Singleplayer mainly didn’t work due to the old perk system. You’d find yourself putting your first ~20 skill points to max out a certain skill to craft something you wanted, while still not having access to basic items from other perks. The new system lets you unlock recipes across all categories gradually while letting you pick which ones you wanted to learn faster. It’s a slower progression system overall, which is the main point of criticism I’ve seen for it from people who play singleplayer, but I think it works better than the old one. I can’t say the same about multiplayer, where the new system is more tedious and more exploitable at the same time. The old system was perfect for dividing and conquering into different perk sets. One player would unlock cars and turrets, another medicine, another would invest in mining skills, etc. Now if a party wants to do that in A21, it requires a lot of coordination. Everyone has to decide who’s reading what volumes first before we even load into the world. There’s no point in having 5 people gradually progress in everything when one person knowing how to make something is enough. On top of being a headache, it’s very exploitable. Now, multiple people can invest a few skill points into the same thing, each find around 15-20 of that same book (depending on the party size), and give it all to one player to reach the top tier. Repeat this cycle a few times for the first few days of the game and soon enough the party as a whole should have most end game items unlocked, faster than could be achieved with the old system. While this is technically optimal, it’s not fun, at all. No part of the new skills system is fun in multiplayer. I feel like there were simpler solutions to the old progression system that would’ve created the desired result of preventing players from getting end game items too quickly. The new books system could’ve been implemented for more technical crafting recipes like vehicles and electronics, but not seeds, food, or clubs. No one needs 12 books to learn how to plant a “potato seed.” (Please never remove potato seeds btw, it’s hilarious). This would prevent someone rushing gyrocopters while also keeping the number of books they would need to find at a reasonable level. Having 1920 total books needing to be read for all of the crafting recipes is a lot, even if a player doesn’t plan on reading them all; and remember the perk book series’ like Urban Combat are still out there, putting the total number of books to find at over 2000. For unlocking some items, the required number of books is excessive. 27 unique books for, yucca juice, 75 for powered doors, and 75 for a crucible being my personal least favorite. Crucibles were always a high-level item, but in this progression system the amount of time between unlocking steel tools and weapons (which require around 30 books depending on the item) and unlocking crucibles is a lot longer, buying and looting crucibles is still possible but mass producing steel will be out of the question for much of the game. The game had a strong enough emphasis on looting already, even late game I would never stop looting, I love looting in 7 days. In A21, the need to loot is much stronger, but the need to kill zombies isn’t. I’ve found myself even avoiding zombies when looting since the books are more valuable than the xp, especially now that every 5th zombie hit causes bleeding or infection. Speaking of that change, I actually like the idea, but with hit detection still broken after all these updates, it’s a nightmare. Zombies occasionally punching you from 10ft away has gone from a bit annoying to a serious problem, especially in the early game. The crafting system isn’t the only new problem with multiplayer, although the other ones mostly already have mods out that reverse them. The Dew Collector is an interesting idea for a more survivalist style but makes no sense in the game. The entire point of it is destroyed by the water purifier mod. Even in multiplayer, everyone can just share one. Once that single item is acquired the struggle for getting drinking water is over. What’s now a challenge is getting enough clean water for crafting recipes, such as glue, which used to require murky water. To get enough water for the glue that me and my friends need a lot of these collectors, we would need our base be the size of a Walmart just to have room for them. Another oversight is the amount of water they make seems to be tired to in game hours. We play on 6-hour days. It takes forever. I don’t mind it being in the game as a gimmick if someone wanted to try a no vending machine all desert map as a challenge (also because I think they look cool), but there was nothing wrong with the old system. Too many mechanics would need to be overhauled or removed entirely to have drinking water scarcity make sense. I’m also not a fan of the HUD telling me how difficult every building I walk in is, it breaks immersion. From what I’ve seen that’s the least popular feature so far, but there’s already a mod to remove that. I think it should be in the game as an option for the HUD but off by default. There are sometimes I think to myself “what on earth is the tier of this building? There’s so many zombies!” Quickly enabling it would be an easier way to check then looking it up on the wiki. I also like the addition of HUD-less mode, I won’t be using it personally, but I think it’s a fantastic option for people who like playing that way, I’m glad to see it in the game. Last change I haven’t touched on yet is the removal of secret stash and introduction of “trader stage.” This change isn’t a deal breaker for A21 for me, but I just don’t think it was necessary. Have I seen 4x4’s for sale on day one? Yes. Did I buy them? No, I didn’t have 45k tokens on day one. Even when me and my friends were trying to advance as quickly as possible the only breakthrough’s we’d ever get from traders were crucibles and auger semantics. I like this game a lot, and there’s things in this update I like a lot too. The art team has outdone themselves. The interior decorating in the trader shops is absolutely stunning, it’s like walking into a completely new game. A lot of work clearly went into the new cars, doors, posters, and new POI’s. The quality of life changes like the shelves looking empty when empty, the crafting materials checklist on the HUD, and a respawning near your backpack option are also great. The in-game map gen is going in the right direction, although there’s still some bugs (my maps don’t look like the previews and I’m getting zero towers in any of them) but I expect that will be fixed with the stable version. The roads making sense and the towns feeling natural is a big improvement. This isn’t the first controversial 7 days update, but I do think it’s the worst in many years. I understand the desire to extend the early game, I too think it should be extended, ideally by adding more early game content, but was a short early really that big of a problem? 7 days is one of the few games that gives the player a lot to do even once end game items are already acquired. There’s always a reason to keep building since there’s no limit to how cool your base can be. There’s always a reason to keep looting since level 6 items you find can have better stats then the ones you’re already using, more importantly you need to find valuables to sell to traders for tokens, so you can then smelt those tokens for brass to make ammo. There’s nothing that I stop doing in late game 7 days that I did in the early game; I just get more efficient at it. I’ve run into people that play this game in many different ways. Some people live for trader quests, some wish traders weren’t in the game. Some play primitively and never even make forges, some mass produce everything because they want to thrive, not just survive. Open world games are at their best when everyone can play how they want. This update attempts to force a survivalist playstyle but in multiplayer it has created a more exploitable and overall less fun experience. With basic core mechanics of the game being overhauled every few updates, what will the game look like in the future? Will things keep getting removed and reworked or will we soon see updates that just add stuff? There’s always some small change in every update I find that I don’t like, but the new version would usually have so many other improvements it wouldn’t matter. My best memories of this game were in A18, me and my friends were able to use a dedicated host to get horde nights to last 90 real life minutes with 6 hours days. Thousands of zombies against tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, a heavily fortified underground base that would barely last the night, all on max difficulty, it was like the third matrix movie. Our 90-minute horde nights stopped working in A19, we don’t know what broke, something on our end probably, but and our horde nights did get closer to around an hour again after getting really high game stage. We were upset, but A19 had so many new features we were fine leaving those A18 horde nights behind. In A20, we switched to every night being a horde night to make up for the horde night length being even shorter somehow, despite our custom settings. There were other changes we didn’t like such as farming and KingGen no longer working but we played it because it was new. Our consensus on A21 is that it’s unplayable (and believe it or not, they all think A21 is worse than I do), we’re going back to A19 just to get our money’s worth for the new server we rented. I hate missing out on the new textures and quality of life improvements but A21 just isn’t a good time.

This update was a year in the half in the making for a game that's still in Alpha. It's also the only game this studio makes; they need feedback. No one wants to feel like they're making compromises by playing on a new version, it should be an easy choice, but it's not. For A21 the art team has outdone themselves, but the gameplay changes are awful. It's a shame.