PC Has this game turned from a scavenging game to a dungeon crawler?

[meganoth]

Yep, but as you say, you can pick 4th grade twice with the same cost as one time 5th grade, you have picked 2 out of 5.... classes.

I'm not saying it is a class less system and I think neither is Roland. But you are not locked into a class.

Lets assume it was a typical skill-tree. In such a system you would as well either have to choose between knowing one skil branch perfectly at some point or know two branches less perfectly or far. Does that lock you into a branch?

 

[Liesel Weppen]

That's right, you are not locked into a class. I didn't say that either.

But there are 5 classes predefined by the skill tree, even if they disguise as attributes.

 

[Roland]

What I meant is that once you choose a tree you are not locked out of weapons and gear that belong to a different tree. If I focus on Agility, shotguns are never grayed out and no message pops up to tell me that my class isn't allowed to use such weapons and I'm not restricted from wearing heavy armor if I want to. 

It is more expensive to go broad instead of specialized but it isn't impossible to play even late game with a broader mix of skills. Sure, it is fun to progress with the intent of maxing out at least one weapon but it definitely is not a forced situation.

This game let's players do whatever they want even if those actions lead to an unsatisfactory result. Banging on a gun safe with a stone axe was never the intention. It was meant for the player to mark the gun safe on their map and then come back to it with better gear but because it was allowed to happen players still did it spending a lot of time trying to get those safes open with stone axes. Then they would come on the forum and complain about the HP cost of the safe and claim that TFP was forcing them into unfun and grindy gameplay by making it so difficult to open the safes. Given, that was before the current loot progression. NOW players are griping that TFP is forcing them to ignore gun safes until later because they know there won't be anything good.

In either case, the only person forcing anyone to do anything is that person restricting themselves. Which is fine. Play how you want. But if the way you are playing isn't satisfying then consider making a different choice.

 

[BFT2020]

In either case, the only person forcing anyone to do anything is that person restricting themselves. Which is fine. Play how you want. But if the way you are playing isn't satisfying then consider making a different choice.

My next playthrough is going to be broad instead of specializing, knives as melee, only can use items I can craft myself (ammo, canned food, health items exception), can't sell Traders anything except raw materials and items I craft myself.  Food spoils in 3 days and refrigerated in 7 days (not sure yet how I am going to micromanage that).

This is why I love playing this game so much.  Each playthrough I can change the rules and get a completely different experience.

 

[Roland]

My next playthrough is going to be broad instead of specializing, knives as melee, only can use items I can craft myself (ammo, canned food, health items exception), can't sell Traders anything except raw materials and items I craft myself.  Food spoils in 3 days and refrigerated in 7 days (not sure yet how I am going to micromanage that).

This is why I love playing this game so much.  Each playthrough I can change the rules and get a completely different experience.

Exactly. Whereas if all you do is treat the game like a spreadsheet for leveling-up, then it really doesn’t matter whether you play this or Ark or Conan or Empyrion, or Valheim or....whatever else has character progression because then the various themes are just skins covering the same grind to get top gear and stats as quickly as possible from one game to the next. 

 

[Liesel Weppen]

Whereas if all you do is treat the game like a spreadsheet for leveling-up, then it really doesn’t matter whether you play this or Ark or Conan or Empyrion, or Valheim or....

I do not do spreadsheet leveling. But however those kind of games become more and more similar and the main difference in the end is just the "skin".

I play 7d2d, mainly because it's fully voxelized. But on the other hand, in the meanwhile i'm oversaturated with zombies (from various genres).

I play(ed) Empyrion, because of (voxel built) spaceships. However, exactly those voxel spaceships for me ALWAYS started to completely bug out, making the game unplayable sooner or later.

I play(ed) Ark, because the retro-futuristic setting is somehow nice and the main difference is, it's centered around the dinosaurs. Basically they do the work, not the player directly.

I play(ed) Minecraft, because it was the first crafting/voxel/survival game.

I skipped Conan, because for me it looks like "more of the same" as Ark, just with a Conan skin.

I skipped Valheim, because it looks like "more of the same", just with vikings (and i absolutely dislike its graphics).

I skipped Green Hell, because different, but somehow anyway more of the same.

I skipped Atlas, because somehow it's Ark with pirates.

I skip such games in general, if they can't be played in multiplayer, because imho it's boring. I tried Subnautica once, and that confirmed my expectation, that SP is somehow boring.

In deed an interesting question, why do you play this but not that...

 

[7daysexpert]

If you started in A15 then you have progressed from beginner to expert in that time which changes a lot. Yes. vanilla at default is easy, but vanilla is made that way for beginners and at the same time for people with minimum spec hardware. Experts are supposed to do some of the following things;

1) use mods

2) play on harder difficulites like insane

3) increase zombie numbers if your hardware allows it

4) decrease loot amount

...

the only thing insane difficulty has done is turn zombies in do bloody damage sponges

 

[meganoth]

the only thing insane difficulty has done is turn zombies in do bloody damage sponges

So what? It makes the game more difficult. Now increase zombie spawn like in most mods and zombies get harder. I listed 4 things to do, do it all and you will find yourself challenged.

Or start A16 again and feel as bored as you are now. I know, I have visited the hub city in A15 when I had more experience with the game and it was much less dangerous than when I had been a newbie.

 

[doughphunghus]

Personally, I have played this game enough to find the vanilla, “all defaults” game way too easy. From what I read on these forums:

- this happens to a lot of people.

- this is by design, per TFP

there are some global pre game defaults to change to make the game “harder” and I usually change some. I personally find that I don’t enjoy putting the game to “insane” setting because the zeds become bullet sponges.  I like zeds to go down in a way that feels “better”.

I also like finding loot though, so I don’t normally turn down the loot percentage, but I believe this is a good idea (as mentioned above)

personally, the solution I have come up with to make the game feel more  “survival” and less  “dungeon crawler” is to do everything in my power to make the “early game” last as long as possible.  So I play modded games.

to do this, I have found this kind of works:

- load in as many mods as you can that cripple the player (high infection rates, small backpack size, increase darkness of nighttime, punish punish punish!)

- load in as many mods as you can to add as much content as possible.   The point of this is to break the “I know how everything works” concept as well as to dilute the loot tables a lot.

- load in as many zed mods as possible to make them faster, more dangerous, more numerous. Snufkins zed mods, all the creature packs, telrics, etc.

- feel free to add as many weapon mods as possible.

- load up the compbopack

- generate a random map.

then play some test games. Maybe to the first horde. Anything that seems to make you “OP”, you either remove that mod or hand tune the mods XML as you see fit.  Usually this is just lowering a loot value or dropping a single number.

I find if I do this “to make me happy” I have a game so hard (for me) that I literally cannot enter most POI’s for DAYS without the real possibility of dying.  I can take on a zed or two, but 3? Likely to die unless I can get high ground. Eventually I am able to take over a POI and build a base and things are a tiny bit easier. And then it’s more survival grind just to take over more POIs.  Then horde night hits and I have no ammo, etc.  usually in these games I finally get 1 item (like a bicycle/car) and it’s like YESSSs! All over again. Sure, the POIs are all mostly dungeon crawlers, bits it’s much more fun now as they are very dangerous, but I can still kill a “normal” zed with 3-4 well paced hits with a club. But not all zeds are “normal” on day 1, so it’s easy to get hit and suffer.

and when I see a “not normal looking vanilla zed”, I usually try to avoid it as it likely is OP and will wipe me out as I literally cannot defeat it with early game weapons.

anyway, just throwing this out there.  The only other option i can see is to load up any of the mod overhauls and play them, as they are generally harder and more varied, and I recommend this to most people as hand tuning a modded game takes some time.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Imho the current lootstages are to strict, however i think it is still better than complete randomnes.

Best way imho is a risk-vs-reward system. In theory you should be able to find a M60 on day one. If you are brave enough to go into a shotgun messiah factory on day one. And ofc the difficulty in the factory has to be high on day one also.

But that requires lootdrops to be bound to POIs instead of just what type of lootcrate. You should not be able to find a M60 from a shotgun messiah crate in a lonely garage where not even a single zombie spawns. But you should be able to find a M60 in the same kind of shotgun messiah crate if you made your way through the factory.

The second thing is, that requires also difficulty to be bound to POIs instead of just the players gamestage. There should spawn cops and radiateds in a factory, even on day one, when the player is still just gamestage 1.

And if i understood it correctly, this is about to come true with A20.

In my opinion there should also still be a few oh %#$@ moments that pop up every once in a while, but nothing too extreme. You're not going to find a level 6 M60 on day 1, no sirree. But rather perhaps small but ultimately insignificant jumps such as rarely finding a level 1 iron pickaxe on day 1. Now you can smash open doors faster, but it drains more stamina. Sure it might take less hits to harvest stone, but the stamina problem comes into play once again. Unless you loot a Pass-N-Gas and find a stack of repair kits on day 1, you probably won't be able to afford repairing that pick anyway. Another example is a rare chance of finding a level 1 chainsaw on day 1. Potential lack of repair kits comes into question again, as does a high need for fuel. One final example would be that very rare piece of quality level 1 iron or leather armor on the first day. Sure that piece of armor would grant you greater protection than the lower tier scrap iron/padded armors (but certainly not the higher quality level versions of those items) but at the cost of stamina regen reduction and mobility. (I'm making the final example since the outfit system has been delayed until A21 at least.)

As an extension to what I've said above, hopefully gamestaged POI's make it into A20.

 

[BFT2020]

Exactly. Whereas if all you do is treat the game like a spreadsheet for leveling-up

When you posted this, I had a guilty laugh .  Not that I do spreadsheet leveling-up, just that in several long play games, I have used Excel spreadsheets to track things, like when I use the Sim Settlements mod and use a spreadsheet to track my Empire. 

 

[MechanicalLens]

When you posted this, I had a guilty laugh .  Not that I do spreadsheet leveling-up, just that in several long play games, I have used Excel spreadsheets to track things, like when I use the Sim Settlements mod and use a spreadsheet to track my Empire. 

There is a 7D2D skill calculator if you're interested.

 

[7daysexpert]

So what? It makes the game more difficult. Now increase zombie spawn like in most mods and zombies get harder. I listed 4 things to do, do it all and you will find yourself challenged.

Or start A16 again and feel as bored as you are now. I know, I have visited the hub city in A15 when I had more experience with the game and it was much less dangerous than when I had been a newbie.

cant increase zombie spawns or amount of BM zombies my PC cant  handle it even with teh standard 8 default zombies i have trouble

 

[geengaween]

I consider it to have moved away from a scavenging game. Scavenging is going through shelves and shelves of stuff "hoping" to find something, now its just "if i raid this, i KNOW i'll find nothing useful, but once that number goes higher, MAGICALLY more stuff appears".

Edit, I forgot to add the first bit. In A16, raiding POIs was a daunting experience because there was less stuff to loot, a lot of places had almost nothing, and the zombies were quite horrifying. Now its just running quests endlessly to level up and get more money to purchase an item because places will NOT get any loot other than stone items. Its a game of leveling and a game of questing. Not so much a horror/survival.

I agree 100%, and this is why they need to overhaul the zombies to make certain PoI's more difficult, so the loot system stops relying on RNG quite so much. Some RNG is good, but you've outlined the reason why it can't be the sole decider of what kind of loot a player recieves.

Dungeon crawling is great and that's fantastic if this is the direction they want the game to go in. Dungeon crawlers are fun as hell and dungeons as ruined supermarkets puts a great twist on it.

But with that, fundamental changes need to be made to the enemies. In dungeon crawling games, there's a clear progression between low level dungeons and high level dungeons. 7DTD should be no different, PoI's with fat loot need to have a huge risk factor involved, have a big reward, and actually be daunting for fresh toons to traverse. Do you really want to risk your life for those power tools?

So, PoI's should have different types of zombies to reflect their risk and reward. Maybe the in-game lore could visually explain it by making the "outside zombies" dessicated skinny weak skeletal husks, while different types of "inside zombies" and sleepers could come with different clothing and danger levels. There doesn't have to be any logic to explain why a gun factory zombie bites harder than a suburban house zombie. They just do. Or explain it visually - just make them look more frightening and scary.

 

[pipedream]

All the Top Servers in the World are Modded Servers. The only thing that keeps this game fun and interesting are Mods. Mod the Map, Mod the Zombies, Mod the items, weapons, food etc. Mod the Armor, Use a third party program for waypoints, teleports, and other features then you will have fun and a challenge. This is why in my opinion most of the "BIG" updates are more than half of what is already out there in the modded World they just implement it. Sure I will get chewed out for this comment but it is whatever..Lol

 

[meganoth]

All the Top Servers in the World are Modded Servers. The only thing that keeps this game fun and interesting are Mods. Mod the Map, Mod the Zombies, Mod the items, weapons, food etc. Mod the Armor, Use a third party program for waypoints, teleports, and other features then you will have fun and a challenge. This is why in my opinion most of the "BIG" updates are more than half of what is already out there in the modded World they just implement it. Sure I will get chewed out for this comment but it is whatever..Lol

Just ask a modder what he thinks of your opinion

 

[Roland]

All the Top Servers in the World are Modded Servers. The only thing that keeps this game fun and interesting are Mods. Mod the Map, Mod the Zombies, Mod the items, weapons, food etc. Mod the Armor, Use a third party program for waypoints, teleports, and other features then you will have fun and a challenge. This is why in my opinion most of the "BIG" updates are more than half of what is already out there in the modded World they just implement it. Sure I will get chewed out for this comment but it is whatever..Lol

I don’t think you are factually wrong about the following:

1) The most popular servers are modded servers

2) mods have extended the life of this game for many people beyond when the basic game would have stopped being fun.

3) Modders can work faster than TFP to add content and sometimes that content is similar to what TFP planned to put in place at their slower pace. 
 

I just hope you don’t see this as a bad thing. TFP made this game to be modded. They want the community to go wild with adding content and doing overhauls and increasing complexity and challenge. It’s not a cop out or a negative mark against the developers that they have allowed so much community content to enter the game.

I’ll never understand people who praise all the mods on one hand and then use those mods to criticize the very group of people who made it all possible in the first place.

Finally, it’s just naive to think that TFP just implements mods that they’ve seen but just six months to a year later. 
 

Sorry if this was not the chewing out you were bracing for.

 

[Maharin]

Sorry if this was not the chewing out you were bracing for.

Well, this is a zombie game so chewing out is kinda expected. 

 

[MRMetaIMan]

I came over from console last year, and I can definitely feel the difference in terms of dungeon crawler/survival+scavenging. I love how POI's are more engaging and scripted, but the fact that your gamestage determines what you'll find is kind of a turn off. On console, I would find a shotgun messiah and be excited. Now I learn that I should avoid looting it early because all I'll find is a level 1 pistol at best. So it makes it feel more like I should quest and rank up before I infiltrate notable POI's, when in the past, I felt it was worth it to go in because the loot was actually useful for survival. But I'm in between, because I'm still relatively new to the PC version so it's kind of a welcome change. I'll check back when the high wears off.

 

[Laz Man]

I came over from console last year, and I can definitely feel the difference in terms of dungeon crawler/survival+scavenging. I love how POI's are more engaging and scripted, but the fact that your gamestage determines what you'll find is kind of a turn off. On console, I would find a shotgun messiah and be excited. Now I learn that I should avoid looting it early because all I'll find is a level 1 pistol at best. So it makes it feel more like I should quest and rank up before I infiltrate notable POI's, when in the past, I felt it was worth it to go in because the loot was actually useful for survival. But I'm in between, because I'm still relatively new to the PC version so it's kind of a welcome change. I'll check back when the high wears off.

Yep, hopefully once biome difficulty is rolled in there will be more risk vs reward dialed in.