Your game was similar to Project Zomboid in the sense where it was a REAL and RAW apocalypse experience, with infinite potential and all of my faith. Now? It's a god damn arcade game. Candy super powers. Growing skills like farming, cooking, engineering and hunting by... Killing, and building. Locking people's progressions into limited lists of perks by boxing everything into neat little attributes. Looting a tool store and finding a stone shovel instead of an Iron or Steel one. Looting a gun store and finding an improvised Blunderbuss and some stone arrows instead of a pistol. You, devs, used to embrace chaos as both the nature of your game and the flavor of your game's progression. When you took the chaos away, you took the soul of 7 days to die away. You could have embraced the game's nature: Implemented more weapons, power attacks, kept and improved leveling by doing, kept and improved chaotic loot, implemented PERMADEATH, and balanced the game around all those elements of SHEER BADASSERY. Instead? Hell, you're catering to casuals, children, and beer drinkers. Inflating Jen's tits and putting super power candies into the game, taking away every chaotic element the game had, and boiling it all down into some orderly, linear, garbage fire. Go to your trader, base-up, do quests for them. Find stone tools and blunderbusses so often, that you may as well not even loot any POI's until after the first bloodmoon. Just do buried treasure quests repeatedly to get your gamestage up until there's actually something worth finding in POI's. Yeah you can play how you want, but if you don't follow the developer-selected path of trader focus, then your playthrough suffers for it. The game used to have way more soul, and way more options than that. Leveling is linear, item progression is linear, there's way too much order now. The sheer chaos was what made this game great back in the day. It was... Badass.
Sales aren't everything; If the masses are idiots, then you can indeed make something simple, and sell it well. But the opinions that truly matter, like mine, will always be disappointed if you do that. Which you have, and seem content to continue to do. Yeah, making a thousand wooden clubs so you can make level 600 bows is KIND OF weird. But you know what's weirder? Building and upgrading a house so you can learn how to craft a bicycle, so that you can learn how to throw a spear better. Learning by doing at least made a modicum of sense. Candy that gives you superpowers... While I love that idea, on top of every other change to the game it sadly betrays what you guys think of your game now. It's no longer serious. It's a joke. You guys messed up. Alpha 16's skill progression and loot system was perfectly tailored to stimulate dopamine releases constantly. At this point you're just boiling the game down, into this... Linear garbage fire where every player is punished for choosing one attribute over another. I was never wrong about all this. I was simply your last island. I'm the reasoning, I'm the truth here. I'm the good sense, the thought, and the contemplation. You guys? I'm sorry, but the current iteration of your game tells me exactly how deeply you've thought about it. To redeem your game, polish Alpha 16's progression system, keep the chaos, and definitely keep the POI redesign and graphical enhancements from the latest alphas. I'm trying to talk sense into you guys but like I said, you're all the kind of captains who insist everything's fine as their hull slowly fills with water and their crew loses faith in them.
I watched Cobra Kai so, I know a thing or two about being badass. And the game was badass. It is no longer badass. You guys no longer seem badass. You seem old and irrelevant, because that's what you're making the game seem like lately. It's a boring cardboard cutout of many games I've played before rather than the unique experience it used to be. I level up by killing things in Dark Souls. In Pokemon. I won't even start that list, it's too long. But to sacrifice the leveling system you had, for the one you have now... Tsk tsk tsk, that's shameful. That's like taking the sistine chapel and drawing mustaches on the characters, just to make children who see it laugh. You dumbed down a work of art to satisfy the masses and sell more copies, just because your console port flopped. It conveys this horrible notion that the game's potential (vast potential) was wasted on you guys. Like the game could have been given to EA Games, and ended up the way it is now. I'm sorry for these hurtful words. But my god are they ever the truth. I'm just trying to help. But you all seem remarkably closed off to good sense.
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