Veteran 7 Days Player: Opinions

[Firenation]

I've played 7 Days for years now. I remember back when we forged by making clay molds, back when there was a dog horde a few days before the 7th-day zombie horde, (in fact, I remember back before there were hordes) etc.

 

Anyway, what I'm about to say is going to contain a lot of ranting. Bear in mind that I have played a lot of the game, and that I feel I have gotten more than my money's worth. That being said...

 

After all this time the game feels so unpolished. The hordes are pointless. Their coding makes them do things that restrict choices. Last game my buddy and I were playing for example, we built an underground base and hordes would just ignore the front door and burrow directly into the center, even if we weren't down there. This is no joke. We were standing on top of the entry door outside, watching them burrow a hole straight down... It's dumb. It nullifies the defenses of the base itself, and all the time it took to build. What ends up being the better solution is to just make a small build that more or less abuses the way the zombies are coded so as to make it trivial. That, or you get on a bike and zip around while your friend gets some kills, and rinse and repeat for a while, or something silly along those lines.

 

Basically if you're looking to actually feel immersed in any way, the way the game is currently designed generally strips all immersion as the zombies commit to feats of impossibility, such as burrowing through concrete with their bare hands, and for no rational reason.

 

Then we have zombies who would start to burrow just because they were in the area. Just at random. It makes no sense.

 

The game runs poorly, and this is another big rant of mine. I can play games that are leagues farther along than 7 Days that I can run at full settings with 60+ FPS--even games with dozens of enemies on the screen, but 7-Days feels clunky and choppy.

 

The hit-boxes designed the way they are don't make the game fun. It just makes it frustrating. Hyper-realistic hit-boxes aren't fun, and after experimenting, I've come to realize that's what the developers have done here. If a zombie's body moves erratically, such as when they walk, their head bobs around, then if you were to, for example, shoot an arrow at their head and at just the exact moment it could have connected the zombie's head happened to move an inch to the left, the arrow will fly right past its cheek. Almost no FPS games work this way. Hit boxes for one, are usually liberal, meaning they often contain pixels outside of the actual object itself, so as to be more forgiving. Additionally, hit boxes tend to stay stagnant. The hit box for a head for example doesn't bob around erratically.

 

That's it for now. I just wanted to get those things off my chest. I got to the point for one of the first times ever where I felt like the game wasn't fun to play during a horde anymore, and that's after going through I don't even know how many hordes. Hundreds?

 

What I'd like to see change:

• Zombies can't destroy stone or steel. MAYBE feral zombies can, but it would take them a long time on concrete, and steel would be impenetrable.
  
• Zombie hit boxes stay static. If I shoot where the zombie's head was when I fired, then even if the zombie bobbed its head, the shot still lands.
  
• Hit boxes are more liberal. This isn't honestly an argument to make the game easier... My friend and I aren't novices to shooters. It's just...annoying. It just means that I have to spend that much more of my time making more ammunition. In a game where time is the greatest currency, some routine matters can take some of the joy out of everything else you could be doing, or would like to do. If I want harder zombies, I can increase the damage they do, make them run in the daylight, or make them have twice as much health. There are plenty of ways to edit this, so making the hit boxes this strict is simply an annoyance.
  
• Starving due to RNG. This is silly. I guarantee you I'm not going to get food poisoning if I cook some meat on a fire. I've done it all of my life and I have never gotten food poisoning, yet it seems to happen all the time in the game anymore. When you're spending time mining and your character gets hungry fast, it can be a huge waste of food, and thus, time, when one piece of food can drop your hunger level to its minimum.
  
• Same goes for water and getting dysentery. Nobody is going to take the skills early on to lower these chances. Driving multiple skills into these things would deprive you of so many important skills that you'd have min/maxed your character into worthlessness. MAYBE if it was one skill to be impervious to these things.
  
• Feral hordes... I just don't know anymore. I know that you can remove hordes in the server options, or change their spawn variations, but I feel like something needs to change about the hordes. Maybe something just needs to be done about how the zombie AI works. Whatever needs to be done, much of the time these days I see zombie hordes as a way to xp farm through exploiting, and not something to be feared, or something exciting. Maybe that's just the veteran in me who's done it so many times, but these days I see so many stupid behaviors come from zombies that it literally makes more sense exploiting than actually trying to just feel like you're fending off a horde of ravenous zombies who can small my every move.
  

[Synvastian]

1 zombies can't break concrete or steel....so no challenge at all after the first horde? that sounds...boring

2 hit boxes being static...no, if the head moves from where the bullet would land, it misses, that's how bullets work...irl and games

3 hit boxes being more...stable sounds good, and does need some tweaks, a few times it feels like I hit through them too

4 RNG starving...Food poison should work on a timer imop, eat bad food, 5 minute timer appears so I can seek replacement food before the Oh SH** moment hits, but don't remove it

5 one skill to become immune to bad food and drink (do you mean 1 point or a perk, because an all in 1 perk exists it just takes multiple points) if you mean 1 point...no...

6 hopefully the random encounter hordes and some more...randomness will change this (maybe tossing in specific zombies who move at nightmare speed when they see you)

[Gamida]

I appreciate that trying to balance this game is a nutbreaker. Seems like if you change one little thing it affects 10 others.

That said I would also like reinforced concrete blocks to be extremely hard for zombies to damage, but to counter that I wouldn't mind if concrete was way harder to make. It may be my nature to want to play co-op in this game. If it is a struggle to make a good, safe base then more player may join forces. I'm all about the Us vs Them gameplay

[Aldranon]

As the value I have received from the game is now less than one penny per hour, there is nothing I could say that would not sound a bit hollow to me.

But, if I were to nitpick, then I have the following:

 

- Have no more than 50% if the zombies follow "The golden path" to the player. Maybe only special zombies (feral and above) "evolved" some thinking skills. I would love it if the demo zombie came straight for me. I would have to use bullets on him!

 

-The crafting system is convoluted. Maybe have some Class system or various sets of similar knowledge the player has at game start.

 

Thats about it.

[canadianbluebeer]

Ever since the digging for zombies was added back, it seems that is their preference.

 

They won't walk down the stairs in a POI, but try to dig down. I've walked up to them and started smacking them with a club, and STILL they keep digging.

 

They'll try to bash through a fence, and ignore the 4 block wide opening, that is 3 blocks away.

 

Mind you, they will stupidly run up a ram/climb the trellis, run across the trailer roof, doing 2 hop-ups along the way, in single file, just to be gunned down.

(this one I do like)

 

If the door to your base is stronger than the walls, they will bash the walls/windows. (that makes sense too)

 

I don't like the digging, as of course, in a POI sometimes you wake up a bunch, and they all try and dig down.

(and sometimes they stay asleep and you can shoot them in the head one by one, and the rest just stand there stupidly. non-stealth shooting)

 

zombie AI will never be "perfect", it just has to be entertaining enough. Yes there will be ways of 'cheesinng' the horde, but so what?

 

I build a horde base with about 8 steps up, 10 blocks flat to the little cage, and 60 dart traps w electric fences.

It takes 90,000 darts to fill those traps, plus all the mats to build.

 

It SHOULD eat the hordes. That's a lotta work to make.

 

Trailer base is easy to make (even if you have no handy trailer), but after a certain point, you need more active defenses.

 

Mind you, these are for machine gunning builds. Melee, bows, well, bow would work with the dart base, Melee the horde?

um, rather not.

 

Oh, wandering hordes deciding to see what yer up to in a POI on a quest? Annoying, but hey, they're zombies.

I just curse'em, then shoot'em.

 

The diggers tho, that's just annoying.

[FA_Q2]

The current digging through floors is just because the AI has not been taught properly how to path vertically. All they see is that you are below them. I assume that will change as the devs are well aware of thatbehavior.

.

[Tahaan]

There is a mod that changes the damage zombies can make on material so that not all zombies destroy all materials. I have not tried it yet though.

 

I want something like that to be in the vanilla game - early stage zombies should not be able to destroy end-game materials. perhaps they get some additional power during blood moon. But of course when an end-game zombie comes along and makes a path for the early game zombies....

 

I agree the current pathing straight down is frustrating.

 

About food poisoning - well all the uncooked water and even most of the cooked water are affected by the virus that caused this apocalypse so you can't compare it to your grilling-on-a-fire experience.

 

The wobbly-head hit-boxes adds something to this game. Yes it makes head shots harder. Head shots are very OP so they should be difficult!!!

 

I'd love zombies to choose one of several paths to get to you, in stead of all of them taking the same path!!!