12 hours ago, FramFramson said:Opinions are one thing, but internal consistency is another. Sometimes it feels like the game just cannot decide if it's 7 Days After or Mad Max.
A lot of this has to do with the deliberate ambiguity of how long ago the apocalypse took place (and how bad was it - we know some areas are safe enough that they send airdrops to affected zones, and that those airdrops never stop). Shops have been looted and some buildings destroyed but nothing's picked clean and most buildings are largely intact. There's even still gas in gas pumps and cars and you can still find unrotted produce once in a while!
Some of the Mad Max-y outfits can work in a 7 Days After-type situation, but some of them are a stretch. Building weird Mad Max cars feels bizarre when the streets are littered with innumerable regular cars, many of which are almost entirely intact (incidentally, this is why I'm really hoping we see Vehicle Madness resurrected soon. Honestly the vanilla vehicle system should already involve restoring ordinary wrecks as it is).
Ultimately it seems like the devs themselves never really decided on a time period, which means different teams or individuals are going for whatever look they're interested in without any of it necessarily being consistent within the game world.
EDIT: My personal take based on the environment is that we're looking at anywhere from a couple months to MAYBE a couple years - no more than 4 or 5. There's room for weird stuff in a world like that, but there should still be more "normal" than "weird" in a situation like that, in the same sense that among the buildings and towns and cars and streets, there's far more "normal" than there is "weird". Having goofy outfits is fine as long as there's still normal clothes - plain pants, boots, shirts, etc. - too.
There are hundreds of games where most or all of the buildings are impenetrable blocks you can't step into. Those buildings are effectively decoration just like the cars in 7D2D. There are racing games where you can't even leave your car or leave the racing track. All you see around is decoration.
So yes, the cars are just there in 7D2D as scrap heaps and probably they will never move in vanilla and at the same time this will never be explained.
Similarily you will never brew a coffee in any of the coffee machines standing around or turn on any of the computers. At some level of detail the simulation ends and the "game" with its artifical rules starts.