saltychipmunk

Just play an overhaul mod pack. pretty much all of them focus heavily on overhauling progression to give the game a better tail.

I agree with the op, the pacing of the game and its current content is kind of sparse. I realized this almost instantly when I started a play through in alpha 21 after playing darkness falls in alpha 20. The quests that are in the game allow you to skip too much progression too quickly as they seem hell bent on giving you as rewards anything and everything you would need to progress into the next tier of quest. And since you can just focus on crushing quests for one trader you can easily get to the high tier quests , and the high tier rewards, WAY before the rest of the game keeps up. forget day 130, I ran out of @%$# to do on day 50 thanks to these quests. Worse still is that the level of challenge provided by the quests , events and ambient zombies really does not in anyway keep up with how extreme a player can ramp up their own production.

I get the feeling they did not focus on the armor much because they were of the mind that they were going the change the system a bit anyway in the next alpha

There is realism and there is internal realism. no one here is asking for true realism. But the game does need to do a better job making sure all of its forms of progression are internally consistent with one another. And right now they are not and it is breaking the experience. I should not have tier 4 steel tools before I can craft teir 5 iron ones. I should not be offered a tier 5 pump shot gun as a reward before I can craft quality 3 pipe shotguns. The devs have spent all of this time making sure everything is tied to game stage. The loot we find: game stage The zombies we fight: game stage The loot vendors sell: game stage But for some reason the quest tiers we can do is not blocked by game stage. And worse still the rewards we get from completing a tier of quests are all effectively progression skips. Like think about how ridiculous it is that we can just get a bike for running 10 tier 1 quests. It effectively invalidates needing to invest any perk points or crafting magazines into vehicles. why even have the first tier of vehicle?

True, but atleast that way the player is making an actual skill investment to do so which I feel is less of an issue. It is a big issue if a player can skip progression without even doing that kind of investment. Something tells me that the teir of quests offered by the trader should also be tied to game stage first over just being a simple quota of quests done that way a team of three cant just do 30 quests in 5 days and be at tier 3 quests before the first 7d horde. Either way, its too fast. like and order of magnitude too fast.

nope , never take those perks , they arent needed the progression is already too fast as is

I am fully dedicated to strength. so i am 7 str 5 miner 69r 5 motherload , 4 with clubs and 4 with shotguns. Nothing else. From experience lucky looter basically does nothing until you really juice your game stage. Frankly I think the core problem is less the traders inventory and more the quest rewards. if you blast through quests (not that hard if you know what you are doing) you can easily hit the milestone rewards for a trader. and when you do that the choices you get can be waaaaay over tuned. And this is only made more problematic if you play with other people and share quests with them. The traders probably need a setting for scaling how many quests you need to do to progress through the tiers because right now if you even have a handful of friends you can blast through them. And this recent patch really over emphasized questing as the main method of progression since quests = easy looting, and easy looting = magazines. Frankly, I do not think the game needs the milestone rewards.

Yeah I noticed this too. I barely found enough magazines to craft a teir 3 pipe shotgun and the freaken trader just gives me a tier 5 pump shotgun. and before that a tier 3 double barrel shotgun. Now my only upgrade is the auto shotgun but ill probably earn one off of a quest long before i can craft it .. which is just.. crazy... Its only day 9 in my world

This is something that always bothers me. Every time a discussion crops up people tend to misuse the term "realism" to describe a similar but still different concept. And it usually ends derailing the conversation as one side then proceeds to take the word at face value. There is realism and there is "internal realism". "Realism" would say there is no way a zombie could exist. Internal realism would say , if there WERE such a thing as zombies I would probably still need to eat and drink. It is about playing by the rules set out by the fantasy. And every good fantasy STILL has rules that need to be followed. Especially when that fantasy is using them to ground itself as something plausible but fanciful.

But I think that is the whole point. before alpha 21 you could very easily sustain your fuel almost exclusively on salvaging cars and raiding gas stations which kinda made making your own at scale in the chem station a bit redundant unless you wanted to make some crazy power heavy base which also meant going to the desert biome for shale was also a bit unnecessary. And that last point i feel is particularly important because I feel the various biomes need to have more stuff that is unique about them. we only have a handle of them in a universe where most other survival games will come with a dozen or so distinct biomes.

This is not necessarily true. It depends on what content you are talking about and if it contributes to whatever is bottlenecking your project. if for example in the case of the fun pimps if the big thing preventing a release of content is nailing down the ai of some bandits so that they are fun without murdering resources then progress to the next release is really not going to care much is someone decides to make another 100 high resolution asset replacements for various objects in the world. This is probably why alpha 21 has so many new assets in the world. They weren't the bottleneck and they did not actively impede the progress of whatever the bottleneck is

Dear me the entitlement on display here is impressive. You are frankly not that valuable. The most you can give to the developers is 1 the money you spent on their game 2 the word of mouth you can generate within your comparatively small social circle 3 any feedback you write down in social media / forums. Streamers spend a significant amount of time cultivating a following of people to whom they can influence and market. That means more customers for TFP and more sales. A tangible monetary benefit beyond a single sale of the game or simple word of mouth . You call them plebs out of some misguided and ignorant idea that because they some how manage to make playing video games their job they are some how lesser than you are. But to the TFP you are frankly the pleb for all the value you dont generate and conversely the streamers are the royalty. So get off your high horse. you did not earn it. If you want to get the same perks. then you need to comparatively generate the same amount of value. It really is that simple.

I just like having more reasons to expand the footprint of a base. It may just be me but I have kinda gotten over building big structures just for the hell of it about 10 years ago. I want utility I want a reason. And for all the great things 7d2d does for justifying making big durable defensive buildings ( Seriously its basically one of a handful that actually nail the justification with just pve content) it could do more with filling those big chunky buildings with stuff to craft with, or maintain etc. I was hoping the farming system would carry this. but honestly crops are so efficent in 7d2d and so quick to grow that you really do not need a large space to grow. Usually throwing some planters on a roof solves this issue. Which means they barely factor into my base design. So having these water collectors is weirdly attractive to me from a base design aspect. Kinda also wish we have food spoilage just because of all the stuff that would add like . smokers, drying racks , juicers, and actual need for refrigerators etc. But hey I am sure If i bug a notable modder enough maybe that will go somewhere.

Anyone else wish the infestation quest wasn't just a harder version of clear quests? Would have been cool if we had to go through pois to destroy corpse piles or something that spawned zombies. And the big challenge is going through and destroying the spawners before you get overwhelmed

I Agree, The snow biome is full of predators that can and will kill you in early game if you don't prepare properly it should have some reward to pair with that danger, otherwise there will be even less reason to go in said biome ( frankly that is already a problem)