I finished my first horde ever on Insane Nightmare last night, I made a melee killing corridor to use my sledgehammer in. At the end, for the day 14 bloodmoon, I'm constructing twin towers connected by an Iron bar bridge, with iron bar walkways around the top of each tower; That's where I'll go if they breach my killing corridor, entering phase two, where I rain death down on them from above with pipe bombs aplenty. This game is still really fun at times, may not be as fun as it used to be in terms of dopamine hits and the anticipation of "Is there a mining helmet in this car or a piece of cloth?" but it's still pretty fun. But I have to admit... Getting pretty tired of my first 20 POIs having nothing but stone and blunderbuss crap. It's not just weaker weapons, it's also more unrealistic and less conducive to immersion. When I crack open a gun safe in a gun store I don't feel like I should find 4 stone arrows, a homemade Blunderbuss, and a shovel. Rather than forcing stone tools down everyone's throats, you could literally remove them entirely and the game would only benefit from it. Just make it next to impossible to survive, make Insane Nightmare Permadeath the game's base ruleset, bring back chaotic loot, and level by doing. That way every run, every player has an adrenaline rush of the highest order, every player adapts to the weapons they find, progresses through level-by-doing, and allows the free-form of the world's exploration and loot found to define their character in the early-game, until they get what they'd prefer in the mid-game, and slowly invest into everything they'd like to have in the end-game.
You can manipulate people into more playthroughs to ramp up play time on steam, through a gameplay style that is more grindy and less fun like the attribute style and restricted loot, but it's just that, more grindy and less fun. A disservice. Genuinely feels like in the end, Zomboid might beat you guys in terms of game quality, only because those developers are leaning into the gritty realism and gameplay elements rather than the player grind and the graphics. I don't get terrific immersion from 7 days the way I would from Zomboid or Darkwood, only because it's easy to tell you guys sold the soul of the game to increase play time and make it more grindy. I have this dream, deep down, inside my heart... That you guys are just using the accessibility of Alpha 19 to make money, to recover from the telltale fiasco, and that it's your intention to, in the end, at least make a toggle option upon world creation which allows for chaotic loot, and freeform non-attribute-based leveling. I'm holding out hope that you guys are pretending to be EA in simplifying your game so you can pull a Hello Games at the last minute lol.
Look at Star Wars Battlefront right, it was such a disappointment. All graphics, but a fraction of the available heroes compared to the PS2 version, it had space battles, but you couldn't land in the enemy starship and sabotage it from inside. There was also a mere fraction of available planets and maps. They made a good game worse just because graphics, not gameplay, was EA's focus. But the other end of that developer spectrum is Hello Games, the redemption of the ineffectual, and the implementation of whatever will make everyone happy, in the end. That's all I'm hoping for... That in the end, Alpha 16 gameplay with chaotic loot and free-form leveling will be an option, alongside the graphical improvements we're seeing today. I know jumping repeatedly so you can level up your jumping skill is stupid but killing zombies to be a better miner is more stupid lol. At least level by doing is in alignment with reality, and you could easily explain-away the fact that player characters don't need sleep; They are immune to zombification, but the virus which zombified everyone else made us no longer need sleep. It ramped up every survivor's vitality who was fortunate enough to be immune to its entropic effects. Bam, plot explanation for not needing sleep in 7dtd.
