The game should become more hardcore

[Biscoitoso]

4 minutes ago, Scyris said:

Most players do, and TFP is being stuborne about bringing back the learn by doing that made A16 so memoriable, or part of the reason why it was anyway. Now I miss A18, because other than the graphical things, A18 was overall a much more fun entertaining game, and as I said, the new loot system removed most of the fun from the game for me, and apparently for quite a few others too, as most people that reply do not care for the new loot system in a19 either. They can revert it in a 19.x patch, just copy a18's loot system over (its just xml entries iirc), and add in the new things. Maybe tweak it so a bit harder to find higher technology tier things, but otherwise leave it like a18 was.

Agreed. But now we have this stupid RPG Attribute system that force us to play with pre-made characters.

TFP: "Oh, you want be a miner? Ok, but now you will fight using shotguns and clubs."
Player: "But I dont like shotguns and clubs, I like knifes and machineguns."
TFP: "That is not our problem."

[HungryZombie]

 

On 7/26/2020 at 12:05 AM, calebelt said:

The developers plan to make it so that the zombies jump on their heads and coins fly out of them?

I would so play this game.

[Solomon]

9 hours ago, Biscoitoso said:

Agreed. But now we have this stupid RPG Attribute system that force us to play with pre-made characters.

TFP: "Oh, you want be a miner? Ok, but now you will fight using shotguns and clubs."
Player: "But I dont like shotguns and clubs, I like knifes and machineguns."
TFP: "That is not our problem."

I dont understand why this kind of enforced connection was needed, the whole perk system could have boiled down to perk related effect with a 5th tab called combat efficiency where every weapon related thing is.

 

You put a point into any of the main perks and gain 1 for combat efficiency.

[Biscoitoso]

2 minutes ago, Solomon said:

I dont understand why this kind of enforced connection was needed, the whole perk system could have boiled down to perk related effect with a 5th tab called combat efficiency where every weapon related thing is.

 

You put a point into any of the main perks and gain 1 for combat efficiency.

Hyeah... But MM said it not will change.

[Jugginator]

9 hours ago, Biscoitoso said:

Agreed. But now we have this stupid RPG Attribute system that force us to play with pre-made characters.

TFP: "Oh, you want be a miner? Ok, but now you will fight using shotguns and clubs."
Player: "But I dont like shotguns and clubs, I like knifes and machineguns."
TFP: "That is not our problem."

Yeah, the perks may be there, but I'm not going to lie, I rarely in my runs spec into a particular weapon perk until mid to late game. Guns in general are very effective without the perk, same for other weapons. Sure you may need sex T to be able to melee a lot but it's not needed unless you're going sledge hammers. You won't be the best using a weapon you're not perked into, but you'll be able to kill stuff effectively with it. You're not forced to play with pre-made characters.

[PoloPoPo]

10 hours ago, Biscoitoso said:

Agreed. But now we have this stupid RPG Attribute system that force us to play with pre-made characters.

I agree with Jugginator there. You are not forced to play with anything you don't like. No one stops you from being a miner and using knifes and machineguns as primary weapons. Both work excellent even without any skill points spent on them. Some skill points are a must have for me but that does not apply to weapon stuff as well. If you are able to increase efficiency of your weapons with skill points that is a nice bonus but not mandatory.

 

By the way, what prevents you from spending skill points on both mining and fortitude (for machineguns e.g.)? If every weapon could be skilled individually you had to put skill points on both anyway.

[JaxTeller718]

On 7/28/2020 at 1:29 AM, calebelt said:

What for? Imagine there is a game about racing. In this game, there are few turns on the tracks and slow cars. Players are asked to add interesting tracks with obstacles and increase the speed of cars. But you say: you need to do 20 laps on a circular track at a speed of 30 km/h. And if I say that it is no more fun, Then you will offer to do 50 laps on a straight track at a speed of 10 km/h.

 

In games, you can make settings with checkboxes. Weak players will disable all difficulties.

In early versions of the game, they survived in the desert and wilderness. The rules of the game were more complicated than you can now set in the settings. When the bridge appeared, spare parts for it could only be found in rare air conditioners and shopping carts.

You must be a real new player. Weapon mods didnt exist two alphas ago and traders didnt 6-7 alphas ago and the game was perfectly playable and fine well before these "essential" mechanics came in.

 

 

 

[Dracula]

Getting rid of the loot system, digging zombies, and return to learn by doing and the game would be excellent.

[calebelt]

For fun, I installed 16.4 and 19 v173. Played for 30 minutes in each version, then increased the character's level by 10.

In version 16.4 it is interesting to explore the world, zombies really scare and can kill if you relax. The default settings are average. I just set the option where zombies always run.

In version 19, you have to stand and not move so that the zombies will kill you. I've played 60 hours of version 19 before and I've never been killed by a zombie. The level set the highest, always running.

I don't know about You but I don't like this new mechanics of increasing the level of zombies along with the level of the player. If the player is weak, then even a zombie mouse should bite him. And if the player is strong, he can fight several zombies and survive.

Try running version 19, summon the screaming zombie girls, don't kill the zombie girls so that the zombies run from all sides. You will notice that you can easily run and dodge while killing zombies with any weapon.

Try to do the same in version 16. The difference is visible immediately. In version 16, scary zombies and the apocalypse. Version 19 has a sandbox with colorful and cute zombies.

[meganoth]

At the time when A15 and A16 were the current alphas, there were a group of oldtimers critizising the direction the game took and singing the praises of earlier versions. Some even claimed to be the majority because it was them that made up a big chunk of the posts and the majority of new threads. Stands to reason, players content with most stuff in the game seldomly created new threads.

 

Oh look, there's a Deja Vu crossing the street 🙂. Now some of you are the new generation of grumpy old (wo)men who pine for the old times. Yes, it is bad that this game can't be the Swiss army knife for all players without installing some mods, but that's a fact: Some players who discovered 7D2D in its very dynamic EA history will see versions they like much more than the version eventually released.

 

Their only hope are mods, mods that also will only really shine once the game is released. Because now changing for new alphas takes too much work and TFP can't help modders at the moment with a stable and mostly buf-free mod-interface.

 

[JaxTeller718]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

At the time when A15 and A16 were the current alphas, there were a group of oldtimers critizising the direction the game took and singing the praises of earlier versions. Some even claimed to be the majority because it was them that made up a big chunk of the posts and the majority of new threads. Stands to reason, players content with most stuff in the game seldomly created new threads.

 

Oh look, there's a Deja Vu crossing the street 🙂. Now some of you are the new generation of grumpy old (wo)men who pine for the old times. Yes, it is bad that this game can't be the Swiss army knife for all players without installing some mods, but that's a fact: Some players who discovered 7D2D in its very dynamic EA history will see versions they like much more than the version eventually released.

 

Their only hope are mods, mods that also will only really shine once the game is released. Because now changing for new alphas takes too much work and TFP can't help modders at the moment with a stable and mostly buf-free mod-interface.

 

I mean i want to believe. I really do.

 

But some wish to look at this development through rose colored glasses and sing praises for every little decision made. I own enough games, been part of enough EA titles and played enough survival genre titles to see the forest for the trees. You can LOVE the direction the game is taking for sure. No one can criticize someone for liking something.

 

But the fact is this is one of very few EA survival titles that every alpha cycle since A16 has been REMOVING complexity, difficulty and mechanics that have been around for years. Some games like Empyrion do go through major overhauls, but then you have others like Project Zomboid, or Terraria or Subnautica or so many others where every major update you see enemies and mechanics getting simpler and more complex rather than more streamlined.

 

You cant really blame people for expecting great things. The game will always be great at its core, but for 16 alphas the community watched and experienced every new patch bring more complexity, more enemies, more items, more everything. Since 17 however many new developers they brought on decided it was a good idea to rip out that infrastructure. Their prerogative sure. But i sometimes do wish they had moved on when they wanted to to a second 7 days game or a new game because i suspect what we are getting now is feature creep from their next game. This is definitely not the same game we were playing 4 years ago.

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, JaxTeller718 said:

I mean i want to believe. I really do.

 

But some wish to look at this development through rose colored glasses and sing praises for every little decision made. I own enough games, been part of enough EA titles and played enough survival genre titles to see the forest for the trees. You can LOVE the direction the game is taking for sure. No one can criticize someone for liking something.

 

But the fact is this is one of very few EA survival titles that every alpha cycle since A16 has been REMOVING complexity, difficulty and mechanics that have been around for years. Some games like Empyrion do go through major overhauls, but then you have others like Project Zomboid, or Terraria or Subnautica or so many others where every major update you see enemies and mechanics getting simpler and more complex rather than more streamlined.

 

You cant really blame people for expecting great things. The game will always be great at its core, but for 16 alphas the community watched and experienced every new patch bring more complexity, more enemies, more items, more everything. Since 17 however many new developers they brought on decided it was a good idea to rip out that infrastructure. Their prerogative sure. But i sometimes do wish they had moved on when they wanted to to a second 7 days game or a new game because i suspect what we are getting now is feature creep from their next game. This is definitely not the same game we were playing 4 years ago.

I may have rose-colored classes. I definitely am in line with the direction of the game, especially the move from LBD (which I personally don't much like for its railroading) to RPG and the changes to zombie AI.

 

Before A17 building for me was boring, since A17 I have designed and built an always different craft base and/or horde base in most of our co-op runs. Before A17 I left that mostly to someone else. At least with the building aspect I can prove that it isn't just the classes but I became a lot more active in the game because of the changes.

 

With railroading I mean that if I decide to have rifles as my main ranged weapon I'm practically forced to shoot that weapon to improve it instead of just using whatever I have at hand and works at the moment, for example too much melee or even a bow. You may like that, I don't. I also like distributing perk points, but A15(?) and A16 had that too, so I would give them a pass on that count.

 

I may have a blind eye but I don't see the complexity vanishing, I see myself becoming expert in everything 7D2D. The "complexitiy" of A15 will never again happen to me because I was a newbie then and didn't know all the details of the game. Even then, at the end of A15 it became apparent that I knew too much and the game played the same except for the uncertainty when the dump@%$*#!s book dropped.

 

Actually A17.0 was the the only time the vanilla game became difficult and complex again (mainly the horde base defense), much more difficult than A16 at any time.

 

If it is the complexity of crafting you are refering to, sorry, I don't see sticks or other intermediate crafting steps as complexity, it is just one more pair of tokens in a game of memory and more grind. The only real loss of complexity I can see was with the weapons system. Yes, that got streamlined.

 

As a last point, the heavy experimentation TFP has done might be seen as a detriment because it was "REMOVING mechanics that have been around for years", but for me that is one of the main reasons that kept 7D2D fresh. Even if some aspects changed in a way I might not have liked.

 

Any mod that tries to recreate that old stuff shows that once played it gets old fast. After a new alpha my group always starts with vanilla and then we make a round through available total convs. And the rather fixed additions to vanilla they already had the previous run often feel old and used up immediately. Only the new features really look interesting.

 

 

[JaxTeller718]

1 minute ago, meganoth said:

 

 

Any mod that tries to recreate that old stuff shows that once played it gets old fast. After a new alpha my group always starts with vanilla and then we make a round through available total convs. And the rather fixed additions to vanilla they already had the previous run often feel old and used up immediately. Only the new features really look interesting.

 

 

Agree to disagree there bud

[meganoth]

9 minutes ago, JaxTeller718 said:

Agree to disagree there bud

Good. I don't want to discourage modders.

 

Official message: "Mods are always fresh and shiny. Some of my best friends are modders" 😉

 

[Jugginator]

Just my personal opinion, but the only complex thing about a16 was trying to figure out how to build a base that was fun to defend (without breaking the insanely dumb AI) or how to actually get a challenge/editing a ton of XML to make survival an actual thing lol.

[calebelt]

4 hours ago, meganoth said:

At the time when A15 and A16 were the current alphas, there were a group of oldtimers critizising the direction the game took and singing the praises of earlier versions. Some even claimed to be the majority because it was them that made up a big chunk of the posts and the majority of new threads. Stands to reason, players content with most stuff in the game seldomly created new threads.

Let's admit that earlier versions of the game also had some very interesting ideas. I liked a lot of things before version 15.

[Kalen]

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

With railroading I mean that if I decide to have rifles as my main ranged weapon I'm practically forced to shoot that weapon to improve it instead of just using whatever I have at hand and works at the moment, for example too much melee or even a bow. You may like that, I don't. I also like distributing perk points, but A15(?) and A16 had that too, so I would give them a pass on that count.

 

Wait a sec.... so your complaint with LBD is that you had to use the weapon you chose as your main weapon to get better at using it?   But you're ok with the current system where the perk structure dictates which weapons you're going to be good at?

 

[Jugginator]

34 minutes ago, Kalen said:

Wait a sec.... so your complaint with LBD is that you had to use the weapon you chose as your main weapon to get better at using it?   But you're ok with the current system where the perk structure dictates which weapons you're going to be good at?

 

But the current system doesn't dictate which weapons you're going to be good at. You gain a level, click a new weapon thing and add the point. You can be good at any weapon with no points and adding one more gives you a nice bonus.

[meganoth]

2 hours ago, Kalen said:

Wait a sec.... so your complaint with LBD is that you had to use the weapon you chose as your main weapon to get better at using it?   But you're ok with the current system where the perk structure dictates which weapons you're going to be good at?

 

My main RANGED weapon. I want to use it in the right situations. But with a good melee weapon mosts POIs can be done just with melee. In horde night I'm trying to design good horde bases where the traps do much of the damage and I often have melee cages. I actually use very little ammo even when I do a FOR/rifle build.

 

It is my decision what I do with my points in the system the game puts in front of me. I have been playing RPG for years. If I play a mage in AD&D I know getting good with heavy axes or tracking is difficult to impossible for me. The interesting part is always to use the perk points optimally in the limits the system puts in front of you.

 

 

[SickPuppy]

2 hours ago, Jugginator said:

...You can be good at any weapon with no points...

That's the problem. Casual. Immersion is at an all time low for me now nearing 5k hours. Due to lbd removed and this attribute/perk system I haven't even tried a19 yet, then I saw devs showcasing the new 'sprites' (fancy word for crap) all over the screen, more immersion being removed I literally said "NO!" while watching the video.

Character creation / progression is non engaging. Some have offered advice to 'fix' it eg give yourself 2 points every level just to by pass these useless Attributes. Some have mentioned zomboid, very interesting character creation over there. I get it, catering to the thousand hours players would drive away new casual players. There's really no other way than learn to mod, wait for mods or have a good old rant in the forums. 

But back to OP. More hardcore for me would be to make survival much more challenging, think The Long Dark survival in 7Days, pretty sweet.

[Jugginator]

If you bump the game to survivalist or insane those "useless attribute points" become useful again. 

 

Want survival? Nomad play style, ditch the starter quest, dont go to the trader before day 8(or not at all), play on nightmare speeds, survivalist (insane after day 8), change the 24 hour cycles to 30 mins. Sure Long dark has hardcore survival. But, there would only be a handful of people willing to play 7 days to die with zombies the bloodmoon and all of that with THAT much survival. I do agree about the sprites everywhere; I hope they make those toggleable at some point. I prefer no UI heh.

[SickPuppy]

Yer all done and dusted, jaxteller has some nice mods to 5x the zombies, you can still outrun nightmare zeds. Insane/nightmare, 25% loot, stone age tools and bows only, permadeath, no trader, no can food. I think I've just played too much and needed a breather. I'm sure I'll try 19 at some point. 

Its mainly the perk/attributes system, i just don't find it engaging. I came to have a look if there's any news on a revamp but it seems they're gonna stick with it. 

[Kalen]

6 hours ago, Jugginator said:

But the current system doesn't dictate which weapons you're going to be good at. You gain a level, click a new weapon thing and add the point. You can be good at any weapon with no points and adding one more gives you a nice bonus.

Semantics.... I'm pretty sure you know what I  meant.  With the current system you cannot be an expert miner and an expert with pistols without significantly more investment of points than you would to be an expert miner and an expert with a shotgun.   That was not an issue with LBD.  

3 hours ago, meganoth said:

The interesting part is always to use the perk points optimally in the limits the system puts in front of you.

 

 

Fair enough.  The interesting thing for me was the lack of limits in previous alphas.

 

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Kalen said:

Semantics.... I'm pretty sure you know what I  meant.  With the current system you cannot be an expert miner and an expert with pistols without significantly more investment of points than you would to be an expert miner and an expert with a shotgun.   That was not an issue with LBD. 

Correct. No system is perfect.

 

[Perramas]

I agree, that is why I remove Traders, turn off air drops, turn off loot respawn, remove treasure maps from loot tables, reduce the frequency of canned food and play dead is dead.