This is a rant that has been coming for a long time.

What has really changed over the years? I bought this game back in 2017. Before you say anything, I'm entitled to my frustration. I bought this game FOR the promised features. I wanted to support the devs. I convinced my friends to buy it. I wanted to support the devs.

Where are the promised features? Multiplayer is currently gone. There have never been any servers for the game. I know this has become a meme at this point, but NPC's were on the docket in 2016 ... hello? That was 5 years ago. In five years they could have made a completely new game, and we're just talking about a single feature. The cars aren't in yet (I know, they are in beta, but that isn't the same as being a stable part of the game.) The core gameplay loop of pushing over zombies and stomping on them is identical to what it was 5 years ago. The biggest change, the one I've noticed the most, after all these years, and this isn't a compliment, is that the rolling pin doesn't look like a baseball bat anymore.

Before I say anything else, I'm NOT saying that the devs are lazy. You can be very active and unproductive at the same time. The map is easily 4x as big, and the art for the game looks great. But, what that really means is that the game now has an incredible amount of bloat from years of updates that don't support the longevity of play. I don't want to play a zomboid game again. I put 100 or so hours into a custom server that I had to host myself, 20 hours single player on this account.

I'm completely serious when I say this -- this game isn't playable without mods. I can stomach it for a while, but the truth is that if you want to play the Zomboid that they promised when you bought the game years ago, you have to forget about the devs and their weekly updates about how they tweaked shadows or whatever for the 12th time.

It's just frustrating. I don't want to play the game anymore, and neither do my friends. We launch the game once a year to see what has changed and, to be honest, it's a joke every single time. This game is right up there with Bannerlord, or Exanima with absolutely brutal development cycles.