The Endgame: Will There Ever Be One?

[Paiper Zombee]

I'm not sure if any discussion on this has taken place before or not so if so please forgive me, but what is the plan for the endgame of 7 Days to Die? Will it ever have one given the type of game that it is?   

[Maharin]

The game ends when you are beaten unconscious by the Duke and left someplace random with minimal supplies and a raging case of bad body odor, for all the worst definitions of bad.

[SURVIVE]

The modders will take care of it.

[Pernicious]

If it's not official, I'd love someone to make a mod where once you finish tier 5 quests with all traders, you have to collect a full hazmat suit and fly into an irradiated zone with a gyrocopter or the upcoming helicopter.

 

Once there, you have to fight your way through a castle, with only the guns and ammo, and first aid supplies you have on you. (5 first aid kits, or another stack of 9mm? Antibiotics? Or a stack of grenades? Choose wisely)

 

Finally, you confront the Duke, and you see it was you all along... Ah wait, no, too many drug store novels. Nah, there should be a final battle with the Duke of some sort. Credits scroll.

 

That's my hope at least.

 

 

[8_Hussars]

3 minutes ago, Pernicious said:

If it's not official, I'd love someone to make a mod where once you finish tier 5 quests with all traders, you have to collect a full hazmat suit and fly into an irradiated zone with a gyrocopter or the upcoming helicopter.

 

Once there, you have to fight your way through a castle, with only the guns and ammo, and first aid supplies you have on you. (5 first aid kits, or another stack of 9mm? Antibiotics? Or a stack of grenades? Choose wisely)

 

Finally, you confront the Duke, and you see it was you all along... Ah wait, no, too many drug store novels. Nah, there should be a final battle with the Duke of some sort. Credits scroll.

 

That's my hope at least.

 

 

We are already past the endgame.  We failed to address the duke and woke up naked and afraid.

And like bond villains, "the duke" failed to deal with us...

[Pernicious]

But when Bond villians fail to deal eith Bond, it's not the end of the movie. Why isn't there more game when the Duke fails to deal with us?

[theFlu]

11 hours ago, SURVIVE said:

The modders will take care of it.

+

10 hours ago, Pernicious said:

If it's not official, I'd love someone to make a mod where once you finish tier 5 quests with all traders, you have to collect a full hazmat suit and fly into an irradiated zone with a gyrocopter or the upcoming helicopter.

 

Once there, you have to fight your way through a castle, with only the guns and ammo, and first aid supplies you have on you. (5 first aid kits, or another stack of 9mm? Antibiotics? Or a stack of grenades? Choose wisely)

=>

 

[Matt115]

Well... ofc not. This game trying to be more realistic  that let say terraria so end  game cannot be added

I mean end game in typical meaning - for someone end game can mean have best weapons with best quality 

[Paiper Zombee]

17 hours ago, Maharin said:

The game ends when you are beaten unconscious by the Duke and left someplace random with minimal supplies and a raging case of bad body odor, for all the worst definitions of bad.

 

Wait...so you're telling me that the beginning of the game is actually the end? The mind boggles!

 

 

17 hours ago, SURVIVE said:

The modders will take care of it.

 

Oh I'm sure they definitely will and probably already have. lol.

 

16 hours ago, Pernicious said:

If it's not official, I'd love someone to make a mod where once you finish tier 5 quests with all traders, you have to collect a full hazmat suit and fly into an irradiated zone with a gyrocopter or the upcoming helicopter.

 

Once there, you have to fight your way through a castle, with only the guns and ammo, and first aid supplies you have on you. (5 first aid kits, or another stack of 9mm? Antibiotics? Or a stack of grenades? Choose wisely)

 

Finally, you confront the Duke, and you see it was you all along... Ah wait, no, too many drug store novels. Nah, there should be a final battle with the Duke of some sort. Credits scroll.

 

That's my hope at least.

 

 

 

Yep. Watch out for those drug store novels, they'll twist your bwain. A confrontation with The Duke is where I would think that things would lead up to. Unless I've heard incorrectly he's the one who sends the siege of creature out after you during Horde Night. How does he pull this off? Has he found a way to create and control zombies? We've already seen one of his twisted creations in the Demolisher. What else could he have at his disposal?

 

16 hours ago, 8_Hussars said:

We are already past the endgame.  We failed to address the duke and woke up naked and afraid.

And like bond villains, "the duke" failed to deal with us...

 

That's a good thing for the character, bad on The Duke.

 

But I've always been curious if plans were ever discussed about an endgame or where things would go. In my personal opinion, once you get past that initial 7th day, or whichever day you hold your Bloodmoon on, it's pretty much rinse, lather, repeat until your next horde night, and the next one, and the next one. The concept of the Horde Night never changes, the zombies just get stronger leading up to Demolishers and Irradiated. So once one reaches this point, it feels like Horde Night progression ends. It would be cool to see Horde Night events, like helping to defend a vendor, or defending a POI where precious cargo will be dropped once the area is secure.

 

We've got the vendors, which provide quests and will eventually send you on to the next biome to meet the next vendor. But there are only so many vendors, they all top out at Tier V quests, and the amount of biomes to visit can be counted on one hand so even this progression hits a brick wall eventually. I like the concept of the night quests to restore power. That should be expanded upon. And bring back the random notes from the various clans that used to be in game. Where are these clans? Can we find them and join them if we do enough of their quests?  

 

Even character progression (which seems to be the driving force of this game) gets stale after a while. Once the struggle of getting the perks you need is over, there's really nothing else to drive the character to continue to improve.

 

Since this is the type of game that it is, is this all that we'll have to look forward to as the game continues onward on it's  path to gold?

[meganoth]

Once there are bandits in the game the player will get the chance to join one of two factions and remove the other (or both). That is the planned endgame as far as I know.

 

[Maharin]

42 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Once there are bandits in the game the player will get the chance to join one of two factions and remove the other (or both). That is the planned endgame as far as I know.

 

 

I would be happy with this.  Especially if they had some sort of slider that would allow you to quickly adjust how big each side was at the start and additional adjustments for growth rates if such a thing made sense.  One man versus army would be a cool scenario to try... repeatedly as I get used to the idea of dying regularly.

[pApA^LeGBa]

I doubt that bandits are gonna be challenging enough to justify 300 levels. Or even 100 tbh. As the game struggles hard with high numbers of enemies they can´t put up a huge bandit army to get more challenge for late game. And if they didn´t make a huge jump in AI development suddenly, the bandits are not gonna be a real endgame other than storywise.

 

If it´s about a challenge after gettting level 50, mods are your best chance. If it´s about story then you propably won´t need mods.

Edited May 17, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Matt115]

19 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I doubt that bandits are gonna be challenging enough to justify 300 levels. Or even 100 tbh. As the game struggles hard with high numbers of enemies they can´t put up a huge bandit army to get more challenge for late game. And if they didn´t make a huge jump in AI development suddenly, the bandits are not gonna be a real endgame other than storywise.

 

If it´s about a challenge after gettting level 50, mods are your best chance. If it´s about story then you propably won´t need mods.

Well 7dtd can't have 7dtd if they want to keep "WD" setting

[Orclover]

20 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I doubt that bandits are gonna be challenging enough to justify 300 levels. Or even 100 tbh. As the game struggles hard with high numbers of enemies they can´t put up a huge bandit army to get more challenge for late game. And if they didn´t make a huge jump in AI development suddenly, the bandits are not gonna be a real endgame other than storywise.

 

If it´s about a challenge after gettting level 50, mods are your best chance. If it´s about story then you propably won´t need mods.

 

Thats the one thing I have always liked about my other favorite zombie game is that fighting 5 zombies can be a real fight.  At 20 zombies you have to use real tools and strategies because they arent fast but if you HAVE to get rid of them it can be a challenge with just melee weapons.  Sometimes the game throws HUNDEREDS of zombies at you.  You aint fighting that with conventional means.  You can make a plan and burn them all with a vehicle and enough planning and tools and time (molotovs do wonders).  But just going in swinging would be suicide.

 

In 7d2d they cant have too many zeds spawned at once. I think at most we dealt with a few hundred with more than max zed settings on a server and a half dozen players (the server of course did ok but our systems were screaming for mommy).  Which is a shame as having a f'nuk-ton of zeds coming at you at once that you have to survive (especially solo) is the height of survival games like this.  They have to optimize a game for minimum settings of the average single player and the limitations just get in the way.  The work around for that of course is to make tougher single zombies (glowies everywhere, lil hulk like mutants).  It is what it is, even if it isn't what we always want.

 

I can't see bandits changing that honestly.  Unless there is some massive leap of AI work coming down the pipe.  You can't have too many bandits and working the bandits to both drive cars and use guns will be an insane challenge.

[Maharin]

21 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I doubt that bandits are gonna be challenging enough to justify 300 levels. Or even 100 tbh. As the game struggles hard with high numbers of enemies they can´t put up a huge bandit army to get more challenge for late game. And if they didn´t make a huge jump in AI development suddenly, the bandits are not gonna be a real endgame other than storywise.

 

If it´s about a challenge after gettting level 50, mods are your best chance. If it´s about story then you propably won´t need mods.

 

My hope is that they add all the features they can into the base game, even if as a starting point for modding.  It will make this game interesting to play for far more years that way.  The base game will be what it will be... but the ability to mod it into a very different experience over and over again is what makes this game an extreme value.

[Paiper Zombee]

On 5/17/2022 at 1:53 PM, meganoth said:

Once there are bandits in the game the player will get the chance to join one of two factions and remove the other (or both). That is the planned endgame as far as I know.

 

 

That's too bad if this is true.

 

I know that Fun Pimps have been working on the Bandits for quite a while now, but I hope this isn’t the way they plan to use them. Any time I hear the whole choose ONE faction to be a part of, and the other becomes your enemy gives me been-there-done-that-World-of-Warcraft vibes. There will always be one faction that is better than the other one, leaving no real incentive to join the lesser one except to see what it’s like.

I hope the Fun Pimps take the Ultima Underworld approach to Bandits. In that game there are multiple factions from green and gray goblins, to mountainmen, to mages, to lizardmen, to undead (yep, you can befriend a faction of undead) to feral trolls. Green and gray goblins don’t like each other, but they give not a care if YOU are friends with both of their factions. You won’t get jumped by gray goblins because you’re friendly with green goblins and vice versa. Mountainmen don’t like either of the goblin factions I believe, but they have no problem if YOU are friends with those factions. And it keeps going on like this.

 

The player can and will run across hostile versions of all the non-human creatures, and even some human ones. But they are not part of their specific factions and can be killed without repercussion.

 

The only way to have the factions turn against you is if the player attacks and kills enough or all of an existing faction. Word will spread about the player’s actions throughout the abyss and eventually the player will find themselves the enemy of the state versus the still remaining factions.

 

On 5/17/2022 at 2:43 PM, Maharin said:

 

I would be happy with this.  Especially if they had some sort of slider that would allow you to quickly adjust how big each side was at the start and additional adjustments for growth rates if such a thing made sense.  One man versus army would be a cool scenario to try... repeatedly as I get used to the idea of dying regularly.

 

I think we've got this already when it comes to the Bloodmoon Horde Night. If you play solo, you're Ash vs Army of the Dead. I'll take a hard pass doing the same thing but with humans.

 

 

23 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I doubt that bandits are gonna be challenging enough to justify 300 levels. Or even 100 tbh. As the game struggles hard with high numbers of enemies they can´t put up a huge bandit army to get more challenge for late game. And if they didn´t make a huge jump in AI development suddenly, the bandits are not gonna be a real endgame other than storywise.

 

If it´s about a challenge after gettting level 50, mods are your best chance. If it´s about story then you propably won´t need mods.

 

2 hours ago, Orclover said:

 

Thats the one thing I have always liked about my other favorite zombie game is that fighting 5 zombies can be a real fight.  At 20 zombies you have to use real tools and strategies because they arent fast but if you HAVE to get rid of them it can be a challenge with just melee weapons.  Sometimes the game throws HUNDEREDS of zombies at you.  You aint fighting that with conventional means.  You can make a plan and burn them all with a vehicle and enough planning and tools and time (molotovs do wonders).  But just going in swinging would be suicide.

 

In 7d2d they cant have too many zeds spawned at once. I think at most we dealt with a few hundred with more than max zed settings on a server and a half dozen players (the server of course did ok but our systems were screaming for mommy).  Which is a shame as having a f'nuk-ton of zeds coming at you at once that you have to survive (especially solo) is the height of survival games like this.  They have to optimize a game for minimum settings of the average single player and the limitations just get in the way.  The work around for that of course is to make tougher single zombies (glowies everywhere, lil hulk like mutants).  It is what it is, even if it isn't what we always want.

 

I can't see bandits changing that honestly.  Unless there is some massive leap of AI work coming down the pipe.  You can't have too many bandits and working the bandits to both drive cars and use guns will be an insane challenge.

 

And now we know the limitation that cripples this game in certain places. Can't have too many enemies or it will murder systems.  It makes me wonder if they can expand on the "quest" and "note" technology to  create instances so to speak. Everything else outside of that area is noted, but deactivated to allow the quest or note to spawn as many or as little zombies/others as need be. You will already fail a quest or note if you move out of their areas, so this would solve any shenanigans in trying to exploit them and have no enemy spawns in the world until that quest/note is complete. 

 

But as it stands the last thing one would want for an endgame is just another variation of Horde Night. Come on Fun Pimps. You've been working with this system for how long now? I know you can show us something innovative, different, and creative instead of same thing, different skin.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Paiper Zombee
Message forgot how to paragraph again.... (see edit history)

[meganoth]

3 hours ago, Paiper Zombee said:

 

That's too bad if this is true.

 

I know that Fun Pimps have been working on the Bandits for quite a while now, but I hope this isn’t the way they plan to use them. Any time I hear the whole choose ONE faction to be a part of, and the other becomes your enemy gives me been-there-done-that-World-of-Warcraft vibes. There will always be one faction that is better than the other one, leaving no real incentive to join the lesser one except to see what it’s like.

I hope the Fun Pimps take the Ultima Underworld approach to Bandits. ...

 

That would be a multi-year project alone and the game is supposed to be released as soon as possible (which probably still means more than a year). AFAIK there were never plans to make this into a full-fledged openworld RPG, I have heard Roland warn us multiple times about not expecting too much with the story.

 

[Roland]

Please don't expect more than two factions. If you want a realistic expectations protip then just expect bandits to be another type of enemy with a heavier emphasis on ranged attack ability and smarter pathing (A17 zombies). Just assume the faction system is a perfunctory price adjustment at traders who like you or hate you and that's it. Expect the "story" to be a series of readable notes you will find in loot on specific days that will reveal how the outbreak happened and what the Duke is doing. Expect the duke to be a really tough boss character that will be a bullet sponge and require you to spam consume first aid kits as you struggle to live long enough to kill him.

 

There's the minimum and if you just focus on that then any extra special sauce the pimps inject into these features will be an exciting surprise. 

[theFlu]

25 minutes ago, Roland said:

Please don't expect more than two factions. <snip>

Who are you and what have you done to our optimistic SuperMod?

[Roland]

I’m optimistic that it will be better than minimum effort but less than pie in the sky expectations. 

[Maharin]

7 hours ago, Roland said:

... if you just focus on... extra special sauce the pimps inject... exciting surprise. 

 

This is a clue about their new game, isn't it?

[Gamida]

3 hours ago, Maharin said:

 

This is a clue about their new game, isn't it?

Ah you have stumbled upon it.

 

" You wake up naked in a McDonalds. You are open a note you have saying you have displeased the master, Ronald (not to be confused with Roland). You have a quest to make basic tools. Spatula, spoon, paper napkins... .

Your fate and your course is clear...you have.... 7 Days To Fry"

[Paiper Zombee]

On 5/18/2022 at 8:05 PM, meganoth said:

 

That would be a multi-year project alone and the game is supposed to be released as soon as possible (which probably still means more than a year). AFAIK there were never plans to make this into a full-fledged openworld RPG, I have heard Roland warn us multiple times about not expecting too much with the story.

 

 

Ah. So technically....this could mean there will never be an "Endgame" so to speak. The game would just keep following the same routine in perpetuity until one finally makes it to level 300. Lackluster to say the least, but at least Roland has warned that it was so. 

 

[meganoth]

22 minutes ago, Paiper Zombee said:

 

Ah. So technically....this could mean there will never be an "Endgame" so to speak. The game would just keep following the same routine in perpetuity until one finally makes it to level 300. Lackluster to say the least, but at least Roland has warned that it was so. 

 

 

No, 300 is a limit that nobody expects you to reach. Well, you can do it, but the current game is finished far earlier for most players: When they have the best gun and armor they can get for their specialization and at the highest quality, found all the books they wanted and have a base that withstands even a group of demolishers. Then most start a fresh game, in a new alpha, or a with a mod they didn't play for a while.

 

The endgame will happen at that time (at your choosing) and is probably about that fight I told you about.

If you want to continue after that, you surely will be able to, but apart from building fancy houses or  bigger and bigger horde bases there is nothing much to do then.

 

"Endgame" was never properly defined and is something different for each player. If you for example expect an endgame MMO-style then you probably have to wait for mods to add that.

Some mods already provide contents for a longer playtime, some eventually might also add endless grind-loops like Diablo or whatever else you are looking for.

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Apocalipservice]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

No, 300 is a limit that nobody expects you to reach. Well, you can do it, but the current game is finished far earlier for most players: When they have the best gun and armor they can get for their specialization and at the highest quality, found all the books they wanted and have a base that withstands even a group of demolishers. Then most start a fresh game, in a new alpha, or a with a mod they didn't play for a while.

 Spot on - I'll add wanting to play on a new map because it looks cool because of its particular biome arrangement, POIs, islands, etc etc  - maybe concentrating on different skills/roles (<-- still not a farmer...) or just "doing it better" next time. Love games that let you generate new maps. So yeah, "end game" isn't really a thing to us.

 

...if it was, it being limited to "just' wiping out a faction or factions is a bit disappointing to me but just a bit - I love the gameworld. I'm wondering where the zombies came from, why they all look the same, why so many folks have labs and weird equipment hidden in bunkers - also if there's an outside world to escape to, or surviving a certain number of Bloodmoons in each biome "cleanses the land of Blood Moons" or something, lol.  Otherwise as long as the game we paid $10 or something a year ago keeps improving for free and modders keep making it better for lots of different tastes, we're good. If someone's not self-directed and doesn't enjoy coming w/ their own end goals and achievements  (...or have buddies that do) early access games must be pretty aggravating. I dislike narrative driven and linear games so I think that I can understand - i.e. opposite of open-ended. *shrug*

Edited May 21, 2022 by Apocalipservice (see edit history)