Steer back to that "horde" feeling mentioned in the subtitle

[just.dont]

Ever since quite some time already (I believe it was A13 or A14 where all the zombie-related reworks started), 7DTD seems to be firmly moving into the direction of "less zombies", the amount of spawns dropping little by little every next version. In unmodded A20 as we have it now, zombie amounts outside of special events (hordes/screamers/bloodmoon/awaking lots of POI sleepers at once) can be described as "trickle" at best. Even worse, all special events don't provide much in the terms of quantity as well. And for example, for quite a while the most practical way to defend a bloodmoon remains to be "run around in an empty field, buffed up to your nose for movement speed, chucking explosives into the moderately-sized pile of zombies following you". While not entirely the same issue, it's strongly related to insufficient quantities of zombies, as currently it's very easy to have them spawned up to game's allowed maximum.

 

Surely, there's a lot of performance issues and considerations on this path; but I firmly believe that they *have* to be tackled on rather than ignored, for the game to achieve greatness. There are dozens of "usual" survival shooters out there, providing you with some targets to fight, typically in some totally unrealistic way like spawning them out of thin air. There's much, much, less survival shooters that do anything more interesting. Like, for instance, providing a really target-rich environment suitable for portraying a zombie apocalypse.

 

Instead, so far the game follows the easy way out: we're getting "better" zombies rather than more zombies. The horde is never quite there, but instead we slowly arrived to having three difficulty tiers of zombies (normal, feral, irradiated), and even "bosses" (which can wreck your base but can do nothing useful if you're simply outrunning them in an empty field). And not a single mechanic that makes zombies exercise their vast numerical superiority - well, currently it's not even there.

Edited December 11, 2021 by just.dont (see edit history)

[Matt115]

Yes and this is connected with bandits in te future

[just.dont]

For some reason, people keep repeating "bandits" in these discussions, despite it being a completely different thing. Having non-melee enemies is not related in any shape or form to the lack of properly sized zombie hordes.