métaphore

Actually, I didn't made up anything about that. I do remember now that I get it from the Fun Pimps interview with Guns, Nerds and Steel where they said that they had hired a team of external dev to work on the console version. So those are probably not counted into their staff. And about that again: You might not remember what was posted by TFP about the console version dilemna, nearly 4 years ago, on this very same website. In fact, it's really worth reading again as they were making some very interesting points about how much investment this project to port the game on console would cost them while they didn't have, at this point, neither the ressources nor expertise to do it: ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... "The Fun Pimps are a PC game developer and publisher and we do not have the resources or expertise to do ports/updates to the console, so we licensed the console publishing rights to Telltale Games who hired Iron Galaxy who have done the ports with minimal TFP assistance. We all had a great thing going a full Alpha 16 port was in the works, that is, until Telltale’s insolvency broke the cadence of builds, hurt our sales, reputation and created this unfortunate situation. Instead of investing in a new update, TFP spent a very large sum of money regaining the rights back in an auction, in addition to ongoing legal and auditing fees… Now that we are the console publisher, as an operational business and out of obligation to our investors and our hard working team (who need to provide for their families too) we have to evaluate the expense and risk of porting any future versions of the game to consoles relative to the income it could generate. Full console ports cost into the millions of dollars, not to mention the restrictions the platform holders have on not breaking saved games which would be inevitable given our current framework and the technical challenges associated with porting a resource intensive game like 7 Days to consoles. With Sony and Microsoft, no matter how small, any update has to go through a rigorous testing/submission process. As you can see, this is not an easy problem to solve. We are exploring all options that would eventually deliver a new version of 7 Days to consoles but this would likely happen after the PC version has gone gold and could end up being an entirely new product or on the next console. Please understand: Telltale going under has put the console version of 7 Days in this situation. TFP are just trying to lookout for the future of our company and the game we care about…"

It wasn't clear if they were talking about their staff working on A21 or if it was for the whole studio. Any console release would probably need a dedicated team working on specific parts for integration with Microsoft and Sony framework. Of course, many shared ressources can be used for other parts of this project. I haven't seen any previous alpha that was ever close to "full release" standard. Since, they keep re-doing things over and over, including core parts of the game and they have barely added any real new content in years (a drone and a few pipe weapon?) - they are rather removing quite a lot of stuff and are making things much simpler. So, yes, they could have labeled any previous version "Gold" and go for DLC "updates" instead. Then what? Would they have been more successful at making more money out of it with a bugged base game and such underpar graphics & animations? Really? When I started playing it, they said 7d2d would be going Gold... "soon". And some people thought A21 was going to be released for console. My guess: they probably won't see A22 either. Don't you? For years now, they do have three main projects all running at the same time: going Gold on PC, releasing for Xbox and Playstation, developing a new game. And all that, following you and others on the forum, solely out of 7d2d sales. My point is that it's taking too long to get any of the three to materialize in the close future and they rather be sitting on a big pile of cash in order to be able to complete any of the three. So many things may change in the long road ahead. Having sunk a big deal of money to recover and dev in house the new console version is also certainly not helping the PC game going Gold faster. All investors are promised one thing only: it's called ROI. There is usually a schedule attached to it. But they didn't release 4 years ago for a good reason: it really felt too much "early access" and they couldn't have possibly sold again the same crap every two years after this point.

3. Perks At first, pick your main mêlée weapon and use all your early points into it to increase it as fast as possible, to at least level 3. Your life depends on you being strong enough at smashing zombies with mêlée. The speed of stamina recovery will improve with each point added, and you will probably clear most early POIs using only bow and mêlée - but you don't need points into bow at first. Use any gun as an emergency weapon only, like running into a dog or worse. Hence, the best weapons to focus on, at start, are under strength (clubs and sledgehammers). Other weapons trees are for more seasoned players because strength also have shotguns and tools (miner 69 - mother lode) that are also really helpfull.

2. Trader As a general rule, you'll have to set up your initial base as close to the first given forest biome trader as possible because you'll go back there every time a quest is completed. But Navezgane is not probably the best first world to play: trader Joel is in the middle of nowhere and there isn't an easy biome trader at the outskirts of a big town. I haven't been playing there for years, so I can't exactly know how it evolved, but trader Jen was also in the forest biome, near a burnt town, and it was more enjoyable to quest from her place than Joel's.

An answer to a few of your questions 1. Hordes: There is no special (big) reward for surviving a horde night, only the satisfaction to do it, and yes, it's becoming harder and harder the more your game stage is increasing and it's taxing time, ressources and ammo. In fact, it' kinda the main challenge of the game to get ready for the next horde. But, at one point, you'll learn how to manage it and you'll get tons of XP for killing tons of zombies and you'll get more and more of those loot bags dropping from dead zombies, which will probably cover the cost put on it. So, it's an important part of the learning curve to discover how to fight those hordes. Personnaly, I'm not using my guns during day 7, 14, 21 but only melee and I'm saving all my ammo for the later hordes.

During A21 Dev stream, they mentioned a staff currently over 60 people and I would guess that this figure doesn't include those people working on side projects like the console version and the secret brand new game. There is so many facets of the game that still need a good deal of polishing that it would take quite some time and human ressources to finish it. In the mean time, their only revenue come from the sales of 7d2d, mostly at 67% discount. Yup. They are probably expecting a major income boost from this one but it's still not advertised as being close to be released yet. On the other hand, they have already sunk a great ammount of money and energy fighting the legal battle in order to recover the publishing rights for the console market. Releasing a game for this market is subject to very high standards and very large fees imposed by console makers. Oh, having investors pouring cash (Banks are just doing that when lending cash to every business on earth) doesn't mean that they are not independant anymore. It's just placing some pressure on the leadership to reach a certain income level at a certain time in order to recover all this money, or risking to be cut off the lifeline and go belly up. I do remember (Joel?) talking about their investors a good while back (A19 Dev stream?) Finally, they rather still have a big pile of cash (in a hidden box) somewhere as a 7d2d Gold edition won't be published before at least a couple of years from now. You should also understand that in game monetizing would be the easier way to have an incentive for those 15 million Early Access customers to contribute again. Less than 1% of their player base would be able to cover over 50% of their future income. So maybe it's the plan for later, even if moding the core game is still possible in A21.

Of course we won't have to buy this game again after it went Gold... Hence, TFP perfectly know that: we already bought it and we won't pay again (the vast majority of us), even to support them out of sheer love. That's the point. Because we are not going to buy the Gold version again, we'll also not be their targeted customers for Gold. What TFP would have studied, in order to cover their investment, are all those other people who still didn't buy it after more than a decade on the market. In fact, it might represent quite a different population and a new business model (my assumption). The question we don't know the answer is would a Gold edtion of Seven Days to Die be rather bought at $60 or $40 by [insert the min number of sale required] of new people - or would it rather be successful as a barely Free to Play version with in game monetization? What I've spent on hardware, only for running 7D2D, was mentioned to underline how cheap the software is compared to hardware upgrade. Since I've bought 7D2D, I've added no more than a dozen games to my library and, put together, it's probably less than 0.5% of the money I've spent to run them with my gaming set in the mean time. And out of this software money, only a fraction is actually going to the Publishers. Unity and Valve would be taking a good share of TFP sales. Hence, even if they had sold 15 millions copies over a decade - an impressive number nonetheless, they probably would not cash, in average, a very large amount per unit. In fact, their strategy would be based on their actual level of sales and projection for the future rather than what they have sold in the past. Making game content is certainly a very expensive business but I agree that they have been, so far, quite successful at it. When (if) they release an updated console version in the close future, I guess that we'll have a better understanding at what they are aiming for the gold version of this game.

I have overestimated you as, for one single moment, I thought you had catched the irony in this statement.

Well, I'm not confused at all. TFP certainly need to make money out of the game, like any other game studio, from the smallest to the largest or they will go belly up. Otherwise, they would be some kind of charity funded by unknown donnors, which they aren't ... or they would be spending taxpayers money granted by zombie-slayers officials but, last time I've checked, they were not listed as public contractors. Take me as an example: I've bought the game a few years ago and paid less than $10 for two copies, including the one actually used by my wife. Later, I've build a $5.000+ home dedicated server for our co-op campaign that we played back in Alpha 16 to 20. We spent offline several thousands of hours on our LAN (but I've still managed - I don't know exactly how - to log over 1.000 hrs on my 7D2D Steam account). So, in fine and mostly to play this game, I've spent about a thousand times more for my computers (server and laptops), than what I did spend for the game, including what didn't go directly into TFP pocket but was paid instead to Valve and Unity Engine. And since the Alpha phase is still running after 10 years, no matter how many millions of copies they have sold up to his point, all this money would be now largely behind them considering the actual cost of development in order to finish the game - with an end line at least several years from now - and for releasing a new console version. So I'm pretty sure that TFP are backed by investors. And, as you know, those Investors will need their money back at some point. But, are you, like me and almost everyone posting here, going to pay again for this game when the day of its full release at full price will come? I'm pretty sure you won't.

I wish I'm wrong. By the way, I'm not paranoid as I'm absolutely positive they are out to get me. We don't know yet how the creative menu will look like when the game will be completed. A good benchmark would be to look at the next console release and we'll see what direction they are taking. In fact, they probably could restrict whatever they want or simply disable such feature in the basic game. I'm just skeptical about the development path since more than a couple of Alphas: the game is made more and more "Trader-centric" with each new release and pretty much less "Sandbox". Beside, what about their business plan? They have 60+ people now on the payroll on top of subcontractors and expert costs while the game is mostly selling for a few bucks only. They probably have had to sell yearly several millions of copies only to get TFP running once distribution cost is substracted. Game features are subject to change but what matter most is what was changed in the late years in order to predict where they are heading next.

Fair point if you really can get your RWG spawning the right number of cities with their attached trader, depending of your map size, relief and seed. I do know that I can't do that. Simply making a flat map with my selected biomes having the correct size and place seems already quite complicated actually.

I've got no insider knowledge about that but what they are doing seems pretty obvious to me: step by step, they are making the game closer to be ready to catch as many whales as possible. Following behavourial psychology / looting game design 101, they will catch those big fat ones simply by making some part of the game as grindy as possible while also proposing a very fast line thru the Store: "Weekend Limited Special Offers: get 10.000 Dukes for $9.99 or 150.000 for $99.99; Get your limited edition Full set of Madmole Armor for $19.99; Horde Day in Sight? Do not miss our 50% discount offer for Armor Piercing and Hi Power ammunition boxes".

As you know exactly what you want, why dont you do it manually rather than trying to play with distance and such? Generate a map with a lot of traders > open prefabs.xml in new world folder > select five which are at the best spot > remove all the others (delete the lines) > change the names in order to have one of each: "trader_jen"; "trader_bob"; "trader_joel"; etc. > save prefabs.xml > launch and play !

Ok. I think that's my final word with you: I'm not complaining of "anything wrong", I'm just stating the difference of gameplay between the previous build and the current one for someone who (maybe) missed it. I wish you a very good sunny day

Then, thank you for sharing But, you know, there was also this very large Savage Country POI right next to the Crack a Book POI that I've found. Guess what, did I go for the thousands of cloth rather than looting dozens of books? My point is that, with the previous build, I would have had enough fabric at the end of this Crack a Book looting in order to make everything I needed without bothering to go next door for scavenging more clothes. With A21.1, I couldn't even craft more than a single spare bandage and a single Duct Tape with all the fabric I get from this Crack a Book POI. Hence, very very far from 300+ pieces I needed. Hence, in my humble opinion, this is an update worth trying. But, now, if you ask me if I really liked all this extra banging (taking several minutes) for each couch scavenged (those with several parts and high hp) with my Q1 stone axe, only to get a few extra pieces of cloth for it? ... well not really. In fact, I went out the next day and gathered coton instead, which is way faster, and one can also get a chicken spawn as a bonus. What about the bottleneck for crafting? The previous version had one with murky water because it would be obvious that the priority use for water was for drinking or cooking but not for making tons of glue out of bones. Now, there is another one with fabric because, like iron, stone, wood or any other ressources which are practically in infinite number in the world, it simply takes a lot of time and (very boring) effort to collect it in the large quantity needed. Hence, you'll end up being short of them (grind) when crafting.