PC The New Gamestage Design and Replayability

[Liesel Weppen]

The old system was a problem cause we could abuse it aka get stones and wood and craft hundreds of stone axes So this problem would still appear...I think that our ideas wouldn't be implemented thanks to this abuse.

I wouldn't call that abuse, because it consumed time and ressources. Of course this is cheap for stone axes and simple bows. It's another design question that this also increased crafting ability for e.g. iron or steel tools. And there are other mechanics possible to reduce spamcrafting. E.g. make crafting in inventory use stamina. Add cooldowns for specific items, reduce XP given for crafting same item shortly after another. Or being unable to move while crafting.

You could also run in circles in your base during night to increase your atlethics skill, but that should burn food, so there is still a cost. Since in current version many people complain about food shortage in early stages, this shouldn't even be an option.

There are several mods that readded LBD and they work fine, they just applied different balancing.

 

[Diragor]

I wouldn't call that abuse, because it consumed time and ressources. Of course this is cheap for stone axes and simple bows. It's another design question that this also increased crafting ability for e.g. iron or steel tools. And there are other mechanics possible to reduce spamcrafting. E.g. make crafting in inventory use stamina. Add cooldowns for specific items, reduce XP given for crafting same item shortly after another. Or being unable to move while crafting.

You could also run in circles in your base during night to increase your atlethics skill, but that should burn food, so there is still a cost. Since in current version many people complain about food shortage in early stages, this shouldn't even be an option.

There are several mods that readded LBD and they work fine, they just applied different balancing.

Sorry but whats LBD?

 

[JCrook1028]

learn by doing

 

[Jeraal]

Sorry but whats LBD?

A superior skill system.

 

[doughphunghus]

I agree with the mining changes that have been done (ruining a game mechanic) but I think it’s because I like the game enough *before* the changes and got to see how mining worked without “markers” of where deposits were.  Without the markers, yeah you “dig here for awhile and pray” and that’s a little Grindy but when you hit an ore, any ore, it was a celebration, and you mined that ore vein and followed it wherever it went because you needed that ore.  you ended up with a cool cave maze, with torches , and maybe made it into a base. Now, I run around and maybe make a mental note or map

marker when I see a few ore markers , and I dig a little until it’s “too deep” and jump Out, because I can so easily  find another ore marker as I do other things. 

it would be nice to have a “ore marker off” option, just for this case. I’ve seen “new players” on twitch play the game and I now know why TFP keeps making the game “easier” (IMHO) as it seems a lot of players just play a game for a few rounds and more to another game. If mining is “hard” or “Grindy” fewer people will do it and just walk away.  You’d think with Minecraft being so big this (randomly digging for fun) would have rubbed of on people but I guess not enough? 

I personally think a better solution would be to have a slider where you could find top level ore blocks, but rarely. The rest would be hidden. Or if you wanted. Slide it to “always have them”. 
 

for other concerns about “the game replay is about the same every time” the only fix for this I’ve found is to load a LOT or mods.  So many that the options you have are so numerous that you have to go back to specializing and choosing one option other over another. The “proper path” is no longer clear. And a lot of these mods are “unbalanced” (so to speak) so you can find a special gun or knife or something on day 1, but it’s still not super easy. With a lot of mods, the vanilla loot tables get all diluted and it becomes “random” again in terms of “what you can find”.  The secret to this is to not load any mods to make the game easier (super guns, bigger backpacks, etc) only load those that make it harder or add a lot of items. Then for other non-mod options (like days until blood moon, hours of daylight, hours in a day,etc) set them lower.  At some point you’ll have a lot of trouble playing the same game as before, and suddenly it becomes a new adventure. I think this is why people have been choosing premadeath games, because they actually have to fear/worry about every zed, they can’t just go running on like Rambo into every Situation, which the vanilla defaults kinda let you do once you’re used to the game (enemy attack patterns, dogs, etc) and know exactly how to take them down.

having said all that: I too am guilty of “walking away” from a game that initially looks like a big time suck (or having to learn 5000 special

key combinations or characters to really play it well). Sometimes you just know “I don’t want to invest a lot of time on this massive complicated game“.  I think for 7D2D, it either hit me in the right place, or (more likely) I went into it blindly with friends on console.  No one new how to even play, we just played for fun. No one knew how much of a grind it would be, so it wasn’t a grind!  It’s  hard balance to hit, and I think most people don’t game as much as I do (well, “we” as were literally posting on these forums I bet were the 1% of people who really want a tough complex game in this format) , so their tolerances are so much lower, and time dedicated is so little.  So the vanilla game has to be super easy to pander to the moons and the casuals and have the ability to be deceptively complex for those that want more from it.  What I hear myself and a lot of people on these forums complain (ahem, loudly wish) for is the vanilla game to have more (vanilla) settings and options available to bring back as much of the “old harder ways of playing” that have been tuned out over time. We miss the struggle, but love the game.

 

[Maharin]

A superior skill system.

Not really, especially if you consider skill progression.  Honestly, what about making stone axes makes you better at making iron shovels?  The answer is very, very little.  To get learn by doing to something resembling reality you'd have to have hundreds of skills all affecting each other in complicated ways and that just isn't a good way to build a game.  A simulation, maybe, but not a game.  So you'd make compromises to simplify things and eventually you distill it to something that doesn't really represent any form of reality.  Superior?  Nah, you're just trading compromises.

But maybe you are using a different definition of superior?

 

[Roland]

I don't see the problem, Roland: Just don't perk into cooking and the few INT perks that give you the majority of your recipes and you have 80% of what you want. Only tier2 weapons and tier2 tools would still be confered by perk because you usually need the perk bonuses as well to progress in combat or mining efficiency. And you could also restrict yourself to only buy the first point of Living of the Land after you have found both the seed recipes for chrysanthemum and goldenrod.

I don’t see a problem either. It is just a different feel. I’m fine with making different choices in order to create a different play experience. Just not taking certain perks is exactly what I do and I have fun that way. But before we had perks of any kind we had the books which were  a placeholder system. And in that system the way your play experience was changed was not by refraining from taking this perk or that but simply what luck would have it. 
 

I don’t see the current system as a problem— just a different feel and I wouldn’t want the old way to come back as the default system but I would enjoy playing a mod that removed perks and made it all book based again like it used to be. 

 

[7daysexpert]

Love the game, but a little bit worried about the game-stage introduced; it has kind of ruined the replayability of the game for me and my friends I will try to explain.

There used to be more randomness in the game, which made each new game very different from the last game; which made the replayability of the game really high (We have probably started more than 100 new games together). There were several mechanics that made each game unique:

- Loot Dependencies: Some things could not be built if you did not find the right thing (component or recipes). While this was frustrating for some, it was also a mechanic that made the progress of the game very varied. This caused games to develop very different, and it forced you on some serious loot runs, where you could spend weeks looking for that specific components, and building forward camps, closer to cities - just to be able to sleep close to large loot areas. I get that this might be very frustrating for some people, but for us it provided interesting challenges, and boy there were some massive high-fives when someone actually found that component unlocking some awesome progress! 

- Random loot drops: The new game stage development, where loot drops is determined by game development turned looting into a grind for us. There is really nothing fun in looting, because you keep finding very much the same thing, and it is almost never better than what you can craft anyway. Again, the magic of finding a really high-level good thing is gone; and I even stopped doing looting in close easy access perimeters to the base - because it is simply better to wait until later; you know you are not going to find anything proper until the next game stage anyway. (Gunsafes etc, is pretty useless to open early as an example, compared to the time it takes to open them with simple tools)

- Mining: We just to have to build large mining labyrinths, just to find the right ore; and now it is simply too easy. Again, it has removed one of the game dependencies, so now you can always get what you want when you need it, causing each game to play out the same. (And yes it was grindy!!)

It does seem like the game it getting streamlined into "the right way to play it", and I get that it can be important from a story telling perspective; but it really has removed a lot of the replayability. We used to have highly diverged characters where we needed to swap skill-books between ourselves; some needed to focus on specific areas of the character development - and handing over sweet loot to each other, because another character could make use of that high-level item you found. This almost never happens anymore. Our charcters are much more similar, our games play out the same way, with the same progression both in the game and on character level. Any diversity is more of "taste" and habit, rather a practical need for the team. 

Now, I get that you devs are just in the early stages of the rebuild of the game stages; but I really wanted to highlight this as a real concern for us who like to start new games. We used to start a couple of new games each month - not it is one every 3 months, basically just trying out the new versions. And it is not because we don't like the game, we love it; but it has become very stale - and very "been there done that". New missions and POI are of course good, but for us it does not work if it is at the expense of the core gameplay experience, sadly

So are there any thoughts about maybe having some option, for "override game-stage loot drop" at least? (I understand that the skill dependencies and build progress might be harder to randomize as it is a deeper mechanic). Also, it would be fun to hear how the rest of you fans feel about this new gamestage progression system -hit or miss? Are we just whiny or do you feel the same?!

Thanks for a great game and many fantastic hours in it

I agree on the mining and most everything it has kinda gotten easy and boring for example i started minin and ore vein before i realized it i came out with 120k iron and i was only about 30 blocks down too

 

[meganoth]

I don’t see a problem either. It is just a different feel. I’m fine with making different choices in order to create a different play experience. Just not taking certain perks is exactly what I do and I have fun that way. But before we had perks of any kind we had the books which were  a placeholder system. And in that system the way your play experience was changed was not by refraining from taking this perk or that but simply what luck would have it. 
 

I don’t see the current system as a problem— just a different feel and I wouldn’t want the old way to come back as the default system but I would enjoy playing a mod that removed perks and made it all book based again like it used to be. 

When I started playing in A15 I was praising this variability as well. But after some playthroughs I noticed that the variability depended mainly on just two or three recipes. And in a typical multiplayer game we got the minibike book for example after some days without fail. Sure, in the forum I could read about someone who had not found it after 80 days, but even in my SP games I never had a problem finding it.  The variability only had an impact on people who deluded themselves into thinking they could not survive without a solar panel

 

[Rince]

I like to start new games, and honestly I like much more the current game than the previous versions.

Being in the stone age for a while is pretty neat, and when good thing start to appear is quite exciting.

You still can be lucky and have some loot that change your game completely. In my current game I'm playing an all snow world, and on day 3 I found an AK-47. Was pretty game changing!

And with the mining, I for sure prefer the current system. But of course, mining for me is pretty boring. Just something that I need to do to get to the interesting parts.