So was the point of A19 to get rid of "Realism"?

[Boidster]

11 hours ago, Aldranon said:

I say, if you try a little bit, you can come up with any narrative you like. 

 

This applies to everything.

Take, for example, the Solar grand minimum happening as we speak.

-One side says: We are doomed and most of the worlds population will die off from starvation in a few decades (our sun will be cooler for some time).

-I and others say the greenhouse gases we have generated should offset the cooling.  Like earth wearing a blanket.

-One could go so far as saying the money grabbing industrialists are heroes, saviors of humanity!  😋

 

So, just try to find a way to enjoy the game... while it lasts. 

The stellar astronomer side says:

- the "grand solar minimum" is not actually happening (just a normal 11-year cycle so far), the Dalton Minimum was actually caused by volcanic eruption, and solar minimums have almost nothing to do with "cooling" of the sun and everything to do with reduced sunspot activity, fewer solar flares, etc. At most, the stratosphere might contract a bit due to reduced UV and low-earth orbit satellites will require less fuel to stay in orbit (yay!) and LEO junk might take longer to decay and fall back to Earth (boo!). Even a century-long solar minimum would be absolutely dwarfed by the effects of greenhouse gasses, and the planet will continue to heat up. Amusingly, one should not rely on The Sun for scientific information about the Sun.

[Ralathar44]

54 minutes ago, Xtrakicking said:

Notice how I never mentioned base building. The problem is with the items you get when looting. Now, obviously it seems like in spite of the new system you still find loot worth it in your experience. Wanna know my experience? Let's see what's in this Working Stiffs. Scrap, scrap, scrap, scrap. Great! I just got 8 stones out of that Working Stiffs. Woo hoo!

Game has always been RNG loot.  I don't know how many updates I've gotten stuck because I couldn't find a forge recipe early on and all the forges I found were broken.  RNG will continue to be RNG.  You're going to have boxes like that.  And then you'll have others that give you stone tool upgrades, recipes, materials, etc.  Difference is in A17 you were rocking full firearms by Day 7.   It was reliable you had multiple firearms by day 7.  Now you won't.  Early game matters now.

You know what's illogical?  Finding guns and tools everywhere in an already scavenged post apoc world.  Realistically the population centers are going to have picked basically everything clean of most of the valuable stuff and left only low value stuff behind.  There are traders, there are supply drop planes, and there is the note we get dropped off with so we already know population centers exist.  Bandits will only add more people who are constantly looting the countryside.

I'm sorry, but most of the places we are looting were already picked clean.  That's how an apoc works.  We got a mini taste of that in 2020.  If the boxes being "sealed" bothers you then the complaint should be to change the boxes to look as if they've already been opened before until high gamestage rewards.
 

54 minutes ago, Xtrakicking said:

So yeah, I'm glad there's people who are able to enjoy the way the new system works. I personally don't. However, the fact that it's still really illogical to find such loot in such POIs is exactly that, a fact.

And your feedback is valuable.  You making "statements of fact" that don't hold up however is not.

 

54 minutes ago, Xtrakicking said:

You seem to have the same mentality that madmole has, which is that for some reason you guys think a game can only have one thing or the other, and that neither can coexist together. Realism vs gameplay? I've got a better idea, how about this: Realism + Gameplay. Sounds better to me; doesn't it to you? Plenty of games have managed to have great gameplay and are very immersive, why can't this one? 

That's because you CAN'T have it all.  Development money and workhours are limited.  You always have to choose, always.  99% of games don't have everything a developer wants to put in it or even close.  But at some point you must ship and at some point you must move on to a new product.  So this comes down to determining what you core vision is and target audience is.  You HAVE to choose.  Only the biggest and most wealthy AAA titles can really start to blur that line.  Red Dead Remption is an example of a game that blurs the line.  But one of the largest complaints about Red Dead Redemption shows that the realism of that game is actually one of the biggest weaknesses.  Spending multiple seconds to loot a corpse, the lengthy hunting and gutting animations, etc.  It ironically became a game that many people loved alot, but started to hate playing it.

 

Maybe the fact I agree with Madmole here is because I'm QA and also work in the game industry :).  I understand alot of the realities of game development and how much of what you're shown doesn't actually exist but is actually smoke and mirrors to prevent you from understanding just how heavy of limitations games work within. Frustum Culling for example, which Kotaku actually has a pretty good article showing.  Though it seems they didn't know the term for it :P.

TFP is a small indie company, they have to be very focused and deliver not only what they think will serve the largest amount of the target audience possible but what they also believe in and are passionate about.  Because once that passion dies, everyone loses.  Quality slips, people leave teams, and typically the game stops receiving support.  Though in the really bad cases they start balancing almost exclusively via community feedback and that.....ends poorly.  Community feedback is valuable, but it must be balanced with proper game design and while the community can be surprisingly insightful and helpful they are also wrong quite alot too and a community having prolonged control of a games development usually destroys that game.  Successful community development comes from small tight knit groups who take over a game who basically become the new developers now having to content with their own community and that mentioned balance.
 

54 minutes ago, Xtrakicking said:

This is the problem with you, that you seem to be unable to understand what suspension of disbelief is, so I'll try again. Yes, your argument is strawman, because when I go "this doesn't make sense" you go "Well, this and that doesn't make sense either and you don't care about that, therefore it's invalid", just like you did here:

I understand it just fine.  But it must be applied consistently.  If your going to enforce realism logic as a virtue then you have to be consistent in your application of it.  You can't pick and choose.   Either realism is important or it isn't.  The moment you do not have firm criteria and instead start creating two sets of standards your entire system of decision making on that becomes debatable.

When I watched Amazon's "The Boys" my suspension of disbelief was fully active and it's critical to that show.  It's important that the show follow it's own rules.  When I watch "The Tick" I don't give a flying fig about whether the world is believable, because I'm there for humor.  Suspension of disbelief is very important for specific games and movies and etc and not very important for others.  Most fall somewhere in the middle.  It's not a binary, suspension of disbelief varies depending on the goals/genre/tone of the media involved.  It's not a very strong component of 7DTD.  7DTD is a very mechanical game that sometimes has nice thematic touches.  But at no time has the world been believable and it's never been set up to be believable.  The setting and the story are just a backdrop for a satisfying gameplay experience and a bunch of tense moments of panic.

If you're looking for an immersive survival game you're in the wrong place.  That's never been what this game is about.  If it was it'd play a helluvalot more like The Long Dark instead of making us low level superheroes building entire castles on our own while mowing through the zombies hordes with 5,000 lbs of stone and wood in our infinite bag of holding.  This is one of the most arcadey survival games on the market.

[Roland]

14 hours ago, Raestloz said:

It's about making it consistent with the setting of the game,

If that’s true then there really is no problem because in this game ALL sealed shipping crates have primitive tools and weapons of varying quality. There is no inconsistency so your objection is unnecessary. 
 

You know what else....there are zero Working Stiffs stores in the world today. No Shamways, no Poopy Pants Daycares, no AmIGone Funeral homes, no Shotgun Messiahs, no Crack-a-Books.  
 

it’s almost like none of the current businesses in the game even existed pre-apocalypse. It’s almost like civilization fell and then a new civilization rose up controlled by The Duke who had a psychotic sense of naming and the pre-apoc business all got new names slapped on them and dealt in a lot of hand-crafted merch. Of course this new civilization couldn’t sustain itself either given the zombie threat and it too fell to what we have in the game. 
 

See? If consistency is all your after then you just need a plausible backstory to make it work. There is no inconsistency with how the sealed shipping containers work. You just don’t like it. 

[Boidster]

"Shipping Container of Uncertain Provenance Which Must Nevertheless Be Broken Open Before Looting"

 

Stick that in your Localization.txt; problem solved.

[Dracula]

25 minutes ago, Roland said:

no AmIGone Funeral homes

That's where you're wrong, kiddo:

 

https://www.amigone.com/

[Boidster]

2 minutes ago, Dracula said:

That's where you're wrong, kiddo:

 

https://www.amigone.com/

HAHAHAHAHAHA...I want to break out the old SNL skit: "It's pronounced ah-MIH-go-nee!"

 

I searched for Crack-A-Book, thinking it the most-likely IRL doppleganger. Never thought to try Am-I-Gone. Poor Daniel and Molly Amigone.

[Dracula]

7 minutes ago, Boidster said:

HAHAHAHAHAHA...I want to break out the old SNL skit: "It's pronounced ah-MIH-go-nee!"

 

I searched for Crack-A-Book, thinking it the most-likely IRL doppleganger. Never thought to try Am-I-Gone. Poor Daniel and Molly Amigone.

I met the manager at a Funeral Director's conference a few years back; nice guy, and the name stuck in my memory.  I thought it was intentional when I first played the game.

 

There are a lot of oddly named funeral homes out there; another fun one is this:

 

https://www.adolfservices.com/

 

They get a LOT of cremation jokes; as is expected.

 

It's actually a SLIGHT secret in the funeral industry that if you have a name that's memorable it aids in retention when people are selecting a funeral home and gives a slight edge over your competition.

[Xtrakicking]

1 hour ago, Ralathar44 said:

I'm sorry, but most of the places we are looting were already picked clean.  That's how an apoc works.  We got a mini taste of that in 2020.  If the boxes being "sealed" bothers you then the complaint should be to change the boxes to look as if they've already been opened before until high gamestage rewards.

...

I see you still didn't get what I was saying. I don't know where exactly I said the boxes thing was an issue, but no, that's not it. Please read again. Also, the towns being picked clean thing is another example of suspension of disbelief that you're, sadly, just not understanding. Is it a problem to find loot despite there being an apocalypse? Maybe to a small amount of people, but if the loot is balanced and placed where it's supposed to be then it's a minor problem. Is it a problem if it's unbalanced and nonsensical? Yes, it's a problem on gameplay and immersion.

 

1 hour ago, Ralathar44 said:

And your feedback is valuable.  You making "statements of fact" that don't hold up however is not.

Baselessly saying they don't hold up won't help you. The way it is now, it makes no sense to find such loot in those places, no matter how you look at it. Sorry.

 

1 hour ago, Ralathar44 said:

You HAVE to choose.

Listen, I know games are hard to make, I'm not saying it's easy. If we were arguing over amount of zombies vs framerate, I would definitely agree with you here, but we're talking about balance in loot and immersion. Something that isn't easy to do, but certainly not a "one or the other" situation like you're trying to make it look. They can certainly achieve a balance between the two, which is what I'm hoping they'll do once they fix the current loot system that they themselves have said is not shippable.

 

1 hour ago, Ralathar44 said:

This is one of the most arcadey survival games on the market.

This I agree with, and I understand your point. However, you must also understand that just because a game is arcadey doesn't mean you can let immersion fall flat on its back. "Who cares, the game isn't supposed to be realistic anyways" isn't a good thing to hold on to.

 

While arcadey, the game still has a story that's told through the actions of the player in the world they're placed in. All the details are put together to make the player feel like they're part of the world presented to them; like they're part of an adventure in an universe that still holds the rules and logic of the real world to some extent. That's what makes it feel "alive".

 

The moment immersion starts going down the drain because "who cares just a gaem brah" is when many people stop enjoying the game, because the game keeps reminding them they're just playing a game all the time. It's like seeing the puppeteer instead of the puppets. Everything feels forced, artificial and staged, and that special feeling the game once had is now lost.

 

I'm not saying that's the case right now with 7dtd, but I will do all I can to prevent it from happening to it. I think the devs realize the importance of it as well, which is why they have worked on so many little details that make the immersive experience better within the latest alphas.

[Roland]

6 hours ago, Dracula said:

That's where you're wrong, kiddo:

 

https://www.amigone.com/

Well, smother me with honey and send me to The Bear Den....

[Laz Man]

56 minutes ago, Roland said:

Well, smother me with honey and send me to The Bear Den....

Here you go... 😅

 

https://untappd.com/w/bear-den-brewery/94516

[Raestloz]

12 hours ago, Boidster said:

...that is not the game that The Fun Pimps have in mind. It has nothing to do being "based on reality" except to the extent that The Fun Pimps see "based on reality" as a design goal. Which is not for us to decide.

I'm not so sure about that. If you're saying my interpretation of TFP is wrong, how can you say yours is right? At the end of the day, what I said is based on information I have playing the game: 7 days to die is based on bog standard zombiepocalypse: the world still makes sense, except for the part where the dead comes back to life. Pretty much the rest of the game works that way. The only time it's broken is with the sealed crate early game

 

12 hours ago, Boidster said:

People are very hung up on the word "sealed". They put that into the game so you would know you need to beat the crate open with an axe. It was not meant to carry all of the meaning people are reading into it e.g. "pre-apocalypse modern tools!" They should find another description besides "sealed" so everyone can get past this.

and yet it wasn't always this way. This problem, that people are "very hung up" about, is new to this patch. As far as I remember, you used to not find stone axe or stone shovel in those crates. It may be the fact that stone tools used to not be in the loot table, but I digress. As far as the "problem" goes, yes the word 'sealed' is the problem. Removing it, I believe, would result in people not complaining anymore because now there's plausibility someone's rummaged through it

[Raestloz]

9 hours ago, Roland said:

If that’s true then there really is no problem because in this game ALL sealed shipping crates have primitive tools and weapons of varying quality. There is no inconsistency so your objection is unnecessary

Sure, with retcon everything is possible. For example, apparently there's one last Time Turner out there somewhere

 

9 hours ago, Roland said:

See? If consistency is all your after then you just need a plausible backstory to make it work. There is no inconsistency with how the sealed shipping containers work. You just don’t like it.

Just like this one

 

and as far as I can see, that is fine. Effort has been made to rationalize it, and honestly despite the little personal attack there, if you think about it for a moment that's all that was asked: an answer to "why does a pre-apocalypse container have a post-apocalypse item in it?". If an answer has been provided, then whether it is good or bad, an answer has been provided regardless.

[Roland]

17 minutes ago, Raestloz said:

Sure, with retcon everything is possible.

Until there is cannon in the first place how can there be retcon...?

 

Everything is conjecture and personal imagination until an official timeline, backstory, and game period storyline is revealed.

 

19 minutes ago, Raestloz said:

despite the little personal attack there

 

Sorry if I generalized your motives. It just seems like a lot of the complaints have more to do with a desire to get the best stuff sooner rather than real outrage at the type of containers being rendered. If I unfairly lumped you in there then I apologize for my assumption.

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

Here you go... 😅

 

https://untappd.com/w/bear-den-brewery/94516

dammit...okay...

 

Well....stuff my pockets with singles and send me to The Booby Trap....

 

(I already googled it. Topeka, Kansas...who knew?)

[Aldranon]

12 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

Well....stuff my pockets with singles and send me to The Booby Trap....

 

(I already googled it. Topeka, Kansas...who knew?)

Just postulating.

 

If you put a single on some half-nude ladies g-string, they would all jump you and you would be rolling around the floor... with all those... hmmm... singles you say?

[Scyris]

Better question is: would you expect a loot room with a treasure chest inside of a small 2 floor house? IMO the loot rooms should have a VERY low chance to spawn in a poi. With most of the time they spawn without the chest in it (maybe 5-10% chance for the chest to spawn, higher in higher tier poi's). Its stupid that every poi just about has a treasure chest at the end loaded with loot, nevermind the fact that the people in this world are nuts or something with how most poi's are dungeons. I mean we got zombies that have a structural engineers degree, and can swim faster than a player can, which btw is still slow as @%$*#!, this really needs to be fixed, a 5 year old can swim faster than your char can, and most 5 years can barely doggy paddle properly lol.

[AtomicUs5000]

10 hours ago, Dracula said:

That's where you're wrong, kiddo:

 

https://www.amigone.com/

I was born in Buffalo, NY. Amigone funeral home was always joked about. Amigone is actually a pretty typical family name in the area. I knew several Amigones, though none of them were directly related to the owners.
There was also the Dengler Funeral Home, which we joked as being the place where the suicides end up.
There is also the Bury & Roberts Funeral Home.
Dengler and Roberts teamed up to create Perna, Dengler, Roberts Funeral Home. I don't know what happened to Bury in this arrangement, but Perna I wouldn't doubt is related to my primary physician when I lived there.

[Scyris]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

Until there is cannon in the first place how can there be retcon...?

 

Everything is conjecture and personal imagination until an official timeline, backstory, and game period storyline is revealed.

 

 

Sorry if I generalized your motives. It just seems like a lot of the complaints have more to do with a desire to get the best stuff sooner rather than real outrage at the type of containers being rendered. If I unfairly lumped you in there then I apologize for my assumption.

dammit...okay...

 

Well....stuff my pockets with singles and send me to The Booby Trap....

 

(I already googled it. Topeka, Kansas...who knew?)

Well what we have for canon is: there are 2 main gangs fighting over turf (sortof), the army tried to use nukes to deal with zombies (which backfired), but does explain the radiated zombies somewhat. Your char is basically in a "safespot" between nuke zones which is why there is a radiation border around every world. Government sends in air drops to show the rest of the world they are trying to help to save face, not really knowing if anyone is still alive for sure or not, unless they checked with Satelites, which while they couldn't see people they might notice some new structures and such being made which shows there is still people alive there.

 

Thats about all we got for canon lore so far.

[Roland]

But it isn't cannon yet because the game isn't released yet. All that "lore" could be placeholder stuff to keep the real story secret and fresh once they release it. And they don't have to worry about having the real story until all the elements of the game are in and solid. 

 

There is a distinct difference between "editing" and "reconning" and that difference is whether the changes come before or after the story is announced as finished.

[Onarr]

2 hours ago, Roland said:

Sorry if I generalized your motives. It just seems like a lot of the complaints have more to do with a desire to get the best stuff sooner rather than real outrage at the type of containers being rendered. If I unfairly lumped you in there then I apologize for my assumption.

dammit...okay...

 

Roland you jump to conclusions. Saying we do not like crap in loot does not mean we want best items there. All we are saying is we dont want absolute crap there. That is not the same. We get stone tools, spears, clubs etc. We dont want that. At least I dont. You think we immediately want pistols, ak-47, shotguns and iron tools. I would be much happier if I found some duct tape, cobblestone rocks, wood, forged iron, weapon parts, gunpowder, nitre, coal, perhaps some rare steel bar etc. Something that is actually useful in early game. Safes could have 100% chance for schematic so you are actually happy to see it and dont avoid it like a plague. Loot can be made fun even without giving you the best stuff ever. Just something useful.

[Solomon]

12 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

You know what's illogical?  Finding guns and tools everywhere in an already scavenged post apoc world.  Realistically the population centers are going to have picked basically everything clean of most of the valuable stuff and left only low value stuff behind.  There are traders, there are supply drop planes, and there is the note we get dropped off with so we already know population centers exist.  Bandits will only add more people who are constantly looting the countryside.

This game indicates that the post apocalyptic sceniario we are in is not that old at all.

 

Electricity is running in multiple places, we have working computers all around us im kind of sure that the whole thing happened no more than 10 max 20 years ago.

Take a look at the houses you loot  they are mostly locked and the generic look of them is saying that people used to live there pretty much max a few years ago.

 

The reason why you find valuables and is because this was a flash apocalypse and not a slow one, you can see multiple newspapers explaining how it happened.

First you had a nuclear war what prompted people to leave their houses so everything with some value was closed down and they evacuated then came the flu bio-weapon what prompted the zombies so the people returning to their abadoned homes (if the house survived the bombs) now had to fight the illness.

 

People proceeded to fortify their houses to save themselves from the zombies only to find out that the illness is still in the air and they got zombified by the time we wake up in the middle of nowhere most humans have vanished.

 

Also you can clearly see the signs of places being picked near clean, take a look around your house and imagine the impending apocalypse and ask yourself "Should i take my 14 different knifes with me along with all these acid drain clearers just to make sure i might need them in the future?" then after you done with that repeat that question while crossing out all stuff you might see as valuable and you quickly see the exact same sceniario most houses look like as in 7 days to die.

[Onarr]

12 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

You know what's illogical?  Finding guns and tools everywhere in an already scavenged post apoc world.  Realistically the population centers are going to have picked basically everything clean of most of the valuable stuff and left only low value stuff behind.  There are traders, there are supply drop planes, and there is the note we get dropped off with so we already know population centers exist.  Bandits will only add more people who are constantly looting the countryside.

I'm sorry, but most of the places we are looting were already picked clean.  That's how an apoc works.  We got a mini taste of that in 2020.  If the boxes being "sealed" bothers you then the complaint should be to change the boxes to look as if they've already been opened before until high gamestage rewards.
 

 

The argument that all those boxes have already been looted is just bull@%$*#!. How do you explain that the more you loot the better rewards start appearing? The game should work backwards from your argument. You find best stuff day one and worse and worse crap as time passes.

[Solomon]

13 minutes ago, Onarr said:

Roland you jump to conclusions. Saying we do not like crap in loot does not mean we want best items there. All we are saying is we dont want absolute crap there. That is not the same. We get stone tools, spears, clubs etc. We dont want that. At least I dont. You think we immediately want pistols, ak-47, shotguns and iron tools. I would be much happier if I found some duct tape, cobblestone rocks, wood, forged iron, weapon parts, gunpowder, nitre, coal, perhaps some rare steel bar etc. Something that is actually useful in early game. Safes could have 100% chance for schematic so you are actually happy to see it and dont avoid it like a plague. Loot can be made fun even without giving you the best stuff ever. Just something useful.

Literally thats it, i dont care if i no longer find tons of T1 pistols if they are replaced with actual necesseary items.

 

I dont need 7 of the same T6 stone axe, i need some iron, a couple pain killers, some cans of food and a magazine.

[AtomicUs5000]

If all the weaponry has been picked clean, where did it end up? Someone probably gathered it and probably placed it in a box somewhere. So, you find that box instead, right? How do you tell the difference between that box and the original box? Someone in the apoc turns, does their stash just disappear from the world?

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Roland said:

It just seems like a lot of the complaints have more to do with a desire to get the best stuff sooner

From where I'm sitting it seems like you're pretty consistently misrepresenting people's arguments because it makes for easier points to attack. Also, it's funny to see that after weeks of complaints about the loot progression, the "great new looting system" is actually an obviously unfinished mechanic that's going to change for the better. Never change, TFP 🙃

[Guest]

2 hours ago, AtomicUs5000 said:

If all the weaponry has been picked clean, where did it end up? Someone probably gathered it and probably placed it in a box somewhere. So, you find that box instead, right? How do you tell the difference between that box and the original box? Someone in the apoc turns, does their stash just disappear from the world?

Plus what kind of mental gymnastics do you have to perform to explain all those crappy stone items magically turning into modern weaponry after a few weeks of zombie bashing? People sealing stone shovels into gun safes while dumping their actual pistols and schematics in toilets and garbage bins is another fun thing to try and explain.

 

In the end I don't really care about the rationalizations, TFP can drop acid and go nuts with it for all I care. I just want it to matter where I go, what challenges I take on and which containers I look for. Right now the main gameplay loop is so much rinse & repeat and devoid of surprises or cool challenges that I find myself bumming out on the idea of starting a new game, which used to fill me with anticipation a few alphas ago. Surely general burnout plays a role, but this game just feels way flatter than it should with all the moving parts involved. I guess I'll have to wait and see what A20 brings next year and check out some mods in the meantime.