The dumbing down of 7 Days to Die

[Scavvy]

As a relatively newcomer to the game (A18) it astounds me how much the game has reversed on its original depth after i learn more about what used to be in the vanilla game. I saw a video of A16's gun crafting and i simply can't fathom why it was removed and dumbed down. The removal of wet concrete, the narrowing of the build upgrade order. It's 'QoL' gone too far IMO.
I've got 5k hours in this game, so i love it to bits, and im glad there are mods that try to return this original depth, such as overhauls like Afterlife or Ravenhearst. What features do you miss?

[Shadex]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

the reason for the dumbing down is really simple :

game got too sucessful. the moment a game becomes too succesful or too popular it starts to attract the mainstream "gamer" which arent actually gamers. but besides that these people want mindless entertaiment. they just want to consume product. they dont care about depth. they want to turn thier brain off when playing and just enjoy themselfs.

to these "gamers" gameplay depth is bad. as it requires them to THINK when playing.

there is plenty of popular game franchises that fell prey to this and got "streamlined" (the modern buzzterm devs love to use to not say "dumbing down" anymore but it means the precise same thing and is just wordplay) till there wasnt much game depth left in the game.

example beeing vehicle quality of materials mattering etc. all removed.

the sole reason for all of this is to cater to the lowest common possible type of "player" on the market to sell the most amount of copies.

most mainstream triple A games did the same thing. the results are now showing : triple A gameing is falling apart and is getting worse each year. because they have dumbed it down so much that only that player type above can still enjoy such games. every actual gamer is bored to death by such games and thier crazy almost insulting level of handholding.

there is very few big boi developers left now who refuse to give in to this nonsense of the market (fromsoft comes to mind where the devs still rather tell these "gamers" to git gud instead of changeing thier designs to appease them but that is just an example). this is why the indie scene is so sucessful as never before in gameing now.

sadly 7 days became to successful for its own good. this cannot be undone aside with mods.

you can see this in any game that becomes "too successful" money wise.

This pretty much 100%. Don't sell a prime rib to 100 people when you can sell chicken McNuggets to 10,000 people. Unique, creative ideas rarely survive in modern gaming when the sole driving force is selling as many copies as possible regardless of end product. But like others have said, thankfully we have a brilliant modding community that can put the magic back and to them I will always be extremely grateful for saving the game.

[Queltis]

Originally posted by Yak:

Saying 'go back and play the old alphas' is missing the point. The game should have kept the features and depth to various features and continued to polish and optimise the game. Instead, it seems to be catering to these new age players who don't want to work for their rewards or think any kind of depth to a game is 'a grind'. There's so many games that cater to those players, and its unfortunate when developers change their original vision to cater to them just to boost the player counts.

The thing about vision is that it changes with experience.

And far too many people, especially those of us who come from older generations of gaming, confuse tedium with depth.

[RTX 5080 FE(Mr Happy)]

Originally posted by Yak:

As a relatively newcomer to the game (A18) it astounds me how much the game has reversed on its original depth after i learn more about what used to be in the vanilla game. I saw a video of A16's gun crafting and i simply can't fathom why it was removed and dumbed down. The removal of wet concrete, the narrowing of the build upgrade order. It's 'QoL' gone too far IMO.
I've got 5k hours in this game, so i love it to bits, and im glad there are mods that try to return this original depth, such as overhauls like Afterlife or Ravenhearst. What features do you miss?

I miss the game mode they are now releasing as a separate game.

[Scavvy]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

the reason for the dumbing down is really simple :

game got too sucessful. the moment a game becomes too succesful or too popular it starts to attract the mainstream "gamer" which arent actually gamers. but besides that these people want mindless entertaiment. they just want to consume product. they dont care about depth. they want to turn thier brain off when playing and just enjoy themselfs.

to these "gamers" gameplay depth is bad. as it requires them to THINK when playing.

there is plenty of popular game franchises that fell prey to this and got "streamlined" (the modern buzzterm devs love to use to not say "dumbing down" anymore but it means the precise same thing and is just wordplay) till there wasnt much game depth left in the game.

example beeing vehicle quality of materials mattering etc. all removed.

the sole reason for all of this is to cater to the lowest common possible type of "player" on the market to sell the most amount of copies.

most mainstream triple A games did the same thing. the results are now showing : triple A gameing is falling apart and is getting worse each year. because they have dumbed it down so much that only that player type above can still enjoy such games. every actual gamer is bored to death by such games and thier crazy almost insulting level of handholding.

there is very few big boi developers left now who refuse to give in to this nonsense of the market (fromsoft comes to mind where the devs still rather tell these "gamers" to git gud instead of changeing thier designs to appease them but that is just an example). this is why the indie scene is so sucessful as never before in gameing now.

sadly 7 days became to successful for its own good. this cannot be undone aside with mods.

you can see this in any game that becomes "too successful" money wise.

this is true. the only exception i can think of is escape to tarkov, where it's got more features the community disliked as development went on, but adds depth. Now these are getting toned down as 'copycat' titles are threatening it.

[Josh]

I really do miss the anxiety looking at my recently upgraded concrete very shortly before horde night

dry dry dry dry dry dry dry dry

[Tahnval]

Originally posted by Josh:

I really do miss the anxiety looking at my recently upgraded concrete very shortly before horde night

dry dry dry dry dry dry dry dry

4 days till horde night, no need to work on the base.
3 days till horde night, no need to work on the base.
2 days till horde night, I'll think about working on the base. After raiding a couple of POIs and doing some exploring.
Horde night tomorrow. Better work on the base after doing a couple of jobs for a trader or two and seeing what's over there where I haven't been yet.
Horde night today. I don't have enough time to prepare!

Not that I'd ever do that. No, not at all.

[Kraftkanzler]

The thing that really irritates me … where are the zombies? When I think of the start of EA, where you were largely overrun if you got too close to a settlement. I mean, where did they go, the 8 billion people minus you and the traders?

Ok, you've got the fat moms, cops, and the green glowing zombies that I'll probably never like because they don't make any sense to “me”. Swallowed a glow stick at a rave party?
Well, then there are the water glasses.
I can't say anything about construction, I was a nomad. I took the essentials with me on my bike, motorcycle, or car and headed towards the sunset. Stop, refuel, look for a building or two and follow the roads. Spend the night as hidden as possible. Drive through the night of the blood moon and hope that the fuel will last, and the vehicle won't fall apart. Just like I would do in reality.

Unless I find a nice troop that hires me as a scout.

[Crashtian]

Originally posted by Kraftkanzler:

<b>Drive through the night of the blood moon and hope that the fuel will last, and the vehicle won't fall apart. Just like I would do in reality.</b>

People thinking they will be driving anywhere during an actual zombie apocalypse when 282 million abandoned cars are on every road in America.

[Razorfish]

Don't worry guys.....
EVERYTHING is fixed in 1.0... just watch the video
hoards of tens of zombies, it looks fantastic...

[Tahnval]

Originally posted by Crashtian:

Originally posted by Kraftkanzler:

<b>Drive through the night of the blood moon and hope that the fuel will last, and the vehicle won't fall apart. Just like I would do in reality.</b>

People thinking they will be driving anywhere during an actual zombie apocalypse when 282 million abandoned cars are on every road in America.

Maybe, maybe not. There's a lot of road in the USA. I think urban areas would be utterly jammed but nowhere in the 7DTD world is really an urban area. Even the biggest "cities" are very small.

The biggest "cities" in 7DTD are a handful of square kilometres in size. The whole map is between 36 Km^2 and 256 Km^2.

I'm from the UK, so London is the obvious comparison. Technically it's ~1700 Km^2 in size, but that's an arbitrary distinction, just a line drawn on a map. The official urbanised area is ~9000 Km^2 and even that's just another line on a map. In 7DTD terms, that's about 90 entire 10K maps. Granted, London is a big city. But not bizarrely big. It's not like Rome ~2000 years ago, a city bigger than any ever known before. There are at least a couple of dozen bigger cities.

I think the bigger issue regarding driving anywhere would be that modern petroleum based fuels have a surprisingly short shelf life. No way would you be getting usable fuel from abandoned vehicles or fuel stations (even if the fuel station somehow still had power for the pumps) even a year after the collapse of civilisation. We don't know how long after the collapse 7DTD is set, but it's not very recent. It's also impossible to tell because the signs are (unsurprisingly for 7DTD) highly inconsistent. e.g. all cars have heavily degraded paintwork and many are heavily rusted but vegetation hasn't overgrown even the edges of urban areas.

[Scar]

Originally posted by ShatteredPumpkin:

i just watches a video of someone reviewing the old version of 7 days and bro wtf happened to this game? it lookes 10 times more fun back then like srsly more action etc in the old version theres zombies everywhere like in an actual apocalypse game and now you barely see any zombies moving arround outside of building including the performance of zombies in the older version there could be 20-40-60+ zombies walking arround barely doing anything to your performance and now if theres only like 10-20 zombies arround the starts to :♥♥♥♥: itself no matter how good your system is... the game has downgraded like crazy...

I mean you really think there's going to be 60+ zombies out there?, once majority of the world has been eaten the zombies still continue to decay this game most likely doesn't take place straight after the outbreak, and the zombies that do get to eat maybe they can retain their flesh for a little longer but either way a horde will starve and further decay till they're just skeletons.

You're looking for a zombie shooter more than a zombie survival, arizona sunshine or dead island has your back for that.

[Dark Dev]

I'm from way back in Alpha 4 or something.

I played consistently until the zombie spawning just got absolutely stupid. No matter what you did, a zombie would spawn behind you. The moment the game detected you were "distracted", a zombie would spawn behind you and you'd have to circle trees just to avoid being hit in the back.

I stopped playing, and came back once a year to see if they stopped that. I didn't play again until alpha 15.

Three things I miss from alpha 15 and earlier and that's about it.

1) spam craft. I like having something to do during the nights. And it makes sense with reality. You get better at a skill if you practice it. But I can see this isn't an argument I'm going to win, so I gave up.

2) Zombie AI. In the old AI, zombies would just charge straight at you. They didn't weave through your base for the opening. It makes sense, zombies just know, "someone is alive in that direction" so they bang down everything in their way. It's a realistic zombie horde defense setup.

3) Easy water. If there's a river around, getting dirty water shouldn't be hard. Same with empty containers.

And all of those changes are debatable. So what can I do.

All these complaints are just a result of the game being in alpha for so long. You have imagined the game one way and only one way. Any deviation from that is sacrilege.

If this game had come out directly like this, you wouldn't have complained.

[Shadex]

Originally posted by Dark Dev:

If this game had come out directly like this, you wouldn't have complained.

Many of us also would never of bought it... so there is that.

[⛩️ BOT Mushin ⛩]

Originally posted by Shadex:

Originally posted by Dark Dev:

If this game had come out directly like this, you wouldn't have complained.

Many of us also would never of bought it... so there is that.

Correct!

[⛩️ BOT Mushin ⛩]

Originally posted by Razorfish:

Don't worry guys.....
EVERYTHING is fixed in 1.0... just watch the video
hoards of tens of zombies, it looks fantastic...

I love how we only see that for one scene.. almost like someone spawned them in but then you see the dead unpopulated world in all the other shots. x'D