This perk system is pretty confusing. Bad design?

[toores]

I find the perk progression very cumbersome and unintuitive.

I have started less than 10 games from the scratch (not counting test worlds) after A17 dropped but in every single one, I've bought perks that are useless because I didn't notice some level gate behind the perk I was really aiming for.

 

The last game I had all the stuff to build a forge and I dropped all my points into intelligence and "hammer & forge" at level 10 and discovered that iron tools are gated to level 20. Well, I would have used the points differently if I'd noticed.

 

I know that once you start the game from scratch more frequently you get used to scanning the "perk excels" but my point is precisely that it's unintuitive and combersome.

IMO, it's a bad design. Every time I want to buy some cool perk I have to review the perk tables for the level gates. And since you're usually working towards many perks, it gets very confusing to keep this information in your memory. So you constantly go checking for the infromation.

 

And the information isn't even clearly displayed. There are no visual cues about what perks might be level gated and you have to hover over icons to even see the information. When you search an item in the craft menu, you might notice that that item has to be learned before it can be crafted but there's no information where it is in the perk tables.

 

Of course it is confusing when you compare it to the previous system tha made much more sense. You build a forge -> now you can build stuff that can be built with forge.

 

 

This turned into a bit of a rant but the little time that I have to play the game, I don't want to waste time scanning the perks. Either make it visually more intuitive or make the system simpler. It would make much more sense if items were gated by technologies not levels.

[Ghostlight]

All I can say is...yes, bad design.Video game design courses at college, will probably include 7 Days A17 as a real world example of where a neat and satisfying game system was replaced by a badly designed one, that can almost be proven to be much worse. It is an absolute classic example of this.

[Bhaaltazar]

All I can say is...yes, bad design.Video game design courses at college, will probably include 7 Days A17 as a real world example of where a neat and satisfying game system was replaced by a badly designed one, that can almost be proven to be much worse. It is an absolute classic example of this.

 

My thoughts and thoughts of many many other players. A16 was great and sort of a backbone of 7d2d and should be kept and maybe upgraded. A17 brought some very nice perks that were missed in A16, but these should just be added into A16 system. Dunno why TFP are so stubborn about a new system that wasn't accepted well among players.

I played through the game in A17 like 5-6 times now and I still don't like it - its so plain and linear. I don't like it, but i guess its still work in progress and TFP thinks its great and better than A16 - its their game so nothing we can do about it if they dont want to change their minds.

[toores]

All I can say is...yes, bad design.Video game design courses at college, will probably include 7 Days A17 as a real world example of where a neat and satisfying game system was replaced by a badly designed one, that can almost be proven to be much worse. It is an absolute classic example of this.

 

I'm actually not so grim about it. All in all I actually like a lot that A17 brings to the game. I just think this aspect of the game could be vastly improved. If TFP want to keep the perk progression as it is, it should at least be easier to grasp. Like, there could be better visual cues about what perks are unoptainable.

For example, if you select the "hammer & forge" perk, it shows you the the gate thresholds at the end of the line, colored red (INT 4, LVL 10) instead of a lock icon that you have to hover over. Once you get intellect level 4, the "INT 4" turns to green but the LVL 10 stays red until the level is reached.

But even then it's bunch of numbers to keep in mind from multiple pages of perks. There is this constant loop of checking the numbers over and over again, to make sure you spend them right, every time you want to spend points. (or even calculate how many points you need before you can reach a perk)