PC What Happened To This Game?

[MaxTunnerX]

This used to be fun. Then they decided to make it so tedious that its completely abismol. I hope Alpha 20 brings back the balance between fun and challenging. I can't even catch my breath anymore. The Fun Pimps, this ain't Dark Souls, chill the hell out on the difficulty. I'm literally on scavenger, it SHOULD NOT be this annoying just to do the most basic of tasks.

Completely agree that the experience has shifted greatly over the years from a simple and accessible arcade zombie crafting game into a horror/Dark souls peasant simulator. I can't even play it without mods or creative menu anymore. Enemies are way too hard and frequent, technology is locked behind nonsense perks (good luck getting even the friggin' forge that was like 10 seconds gameplay back in the day) and the game is generally overcomplicated. And guess what? When you finally get the perks to start actually playing the game, enemies get better as well so you didn't even have to bother levelling up in the first place. The only thing I don't understand is why devs don't give people options to tailor their experience and instead started forcing this hardcore survival thing which is just not fun for me and many others. Just make a casual mode and hardcore mode, problem solved. Something like Fallout 4 has, except the hardcore survival would be much harder than FO4's survival.

 

[meganoth]

Completely agree that the experience has shifted greatly over the years from a simple and accesible arcade zombie crafting game into a horror/Dark souls peasant simulator. I can't even play it without mods or creative menu anymore. Enemies are way too hard and frequent, technology is locked behind nonsense perks (good luck getting even the friggin' forge that was like 10 seconds gameplay back in the day.) and the game is generally overcomplicated. And guess what? When you finally get the perks to start actually playing the game, enemies get better as well so you didn't even have to bother levelling up in the first place. The only thing I don't understand is why devs don't give people options to tailor their experience and instead started forcing this hardcore survival thing which is just not fun for me and many others. Just make a casual mdoe and hardcore mode, problem solved. Something like Fallout 4 has.

gamestage leveling has been in the game for years, at least since A15 when I started playing. 

The forge needs exactly one perk point which you should have available immediately after doing the tutorial quests. Damn, thats 2 minutes now, up by 1200% compared to the 10 seconds you dreamed up

 

[MaxTunnerX]

gamestage leveling has been in the game for years, at least since A15 when I started playing. 

The forge needs exactly one perk point which you should have available immediately after doing the tutorial quests. Damn, thats 2 minutes now, up by 1200% compared to the 10 seconds you dreamed up

Well I started playing at alpha 7/8 so yeah. At alpha 10+ the game started going really downhill for me, gameplay-wise and performance wise. I wouldn't even be able to play this game with the PC I used to have. I very much doubt it's only one perk for forge (which would still be 1 more perk than it used to be) but fine, I will give you a more acceptable example, how about cooking? I just had to level my strength (lol how is it related to strength?) to 3 or more to buy the cooking perk to make a damn soup. Not to mention the rations are super underpowered nowadays and even spaghetti gives you like 10x more food which doesn't even make sense. I have to admin spawn good food on me befe I grind enough to cook the food myself. Chugging cans of anything just coulnd't keep me fed. Absurd, these things are made so that you survive, not that you eat them and die from hunger.

 

[Roland]

Proof that the game is still complex and challenging despite what you often hear from players on this forum with 1000's of hours under their belt who want it to continually evolve into even more complexity and a tougher challenge.

 

[meganoth]

Well I started playing at alpha 7/8 so yeah. At alpha 10+ the game started going really downhill for me, gameplay-wise and performance wise. I wouldn't even be able to play this game with the PC I used to have. I very much doubt it's only one perk for forge (which would still be 1 more perk than it used to be) but fine, I will give you a more acceptable example, how about cooking? I just had to level my strength (lol how is it related to strength?) to 3 or more to buy the cooking perk to make a damn soup. Not to mention the rations are super underpowered nowadays and even spaghetti gives you like 10x more food which doesn't even make sense. I have to admin spawn good food on me befe I grind enough to cook the food myself. Chugging cans of anything just coulnd't keep me fed. Absurd, these things are made so that you survive, not that you eat them and die from hunger.

This is arguably a better example. Yes, surviving was made a lot more difficult (because this is also a survival game) and survival doesn't get any easier when you turn the difficulty dial down (except that it is easier to loot buildings when zombies go down faster)

The game doesn't make it easy to find out if you are using up too much stamina and therefore food (except if you read the journal which a lot of players don't do). For example running, running encumbered and running in heavy armor uses up much food. Simply don't do the latter two and run only sparingly, then you will need a lot less food. Don't dig through the night before you have some food supply set up. Make building up a farm your top priority.

It is only one perk point to know the forge recipe, you can simply read the description for "Advanced Engineering" Level 1 in the Intelligence tab to find that out. And you can test it trivially 2 minutes after starting a new game by getting that perk and checking that you now know the recipe.

Btw, in another thread you said you play on adventurer difficulty. But adventurer isn't the lowest setting, there is one even lower called scavenger. Now this only will make the zombies easier, but maybe you should use that difficulty setting first before complaining the game is too difficult for you.

 

[MaxTunnerX]

Btw, in another thread you said you play on adventurer difficulty. But adventurer isn't the lowest setting, there is one even lower called scavenger. Now this only will make the zombies easier, but maybe you should use that difficulty setting first before complaining the game is too difficult for you.

That would be very illogical. You always have to compare the same kind of thing to the same kind of thing. I've always used the default difficulty (I believe it used to be nomad before and now it's adventurer), but I'm comparing default difficulty from previous alphas to default difficulty of this alpha and it was much easier for me to survive before. Also keep in mind that only the simple fact of zombies digging increased difficulty by a huge percentage for me and it's not even related to the actual difficulty setting.

And like I said, why not just have casual and survival modes? Both groups of players will be unhappy if it stays all in one and it's logical because it's impossible to go both ways at once and extremely difficult to find balance (not to mention the balance still won't attract as many players as 2 separate modes). I also think the game will be clearer in terms of servers and mods if we do it this way. More servers will be vanilla because some servers only use mods to do what the 2 game modes would do.

 

[BFT2020]

And like I said, why not just have casual and survival modes? Both groups of players will be unhappy if it stays all in one and it's logical because it's impossible to go both ways at once and extremely difficult to find balance (not to mention the balance still won't attract as many players as 2 separate modes). I also think the game will be clearer in terms of servers and mods if we do it this way. More servers will be vanilla because some servers only use modes to do what the 2 game modes would do.

That is up to Madmole and the development team, but based on MM's past comments, I believe what we have today is their goal and if people want to play it differently, they are going to have to mod the game themselves or just play past Alphas.  They are working on simplifying some aspects of the game, but MM's intent with 7D2D is to have a game where choices matter.  They are working on giving us a solid baseline game, but it is up to us players to make the changes if we want it to be easier or harder.

At least that has been my takeaway based on comments made over several Alphas.  I don't claim to know the mind of MM and the development team.

 

[JCrook1028]

Proof that the game is still complex and challenging despite what you often hear from players on this forum with 1000's of hours under their belt who want it to continually evolve into even more complexity and a tougher challenge.

Nah, that's just proof that some people never learn anything even after playing a game for years and years.

 

[meganoth]

That would be very illogical. You always have to compare the same kind of thing to the same kind of thing. I've always used the default difficulty (I believe it used to be nomad before and now it's adventurer), but I'm comparing default difficulty from previous alphas to default difficulty of this alpha and it was much easier for me to survive before. Also keep in mind that only the simple fact of zombies digging increased difficulty by a huge percentage for me and it's not even related to the actual difficulty setting.

There is no rule or law that a game must not change between alphas. This goes for difficulty as well as overall feel. For example this game was once what some have called a pure sandbox game or what you called a simple zombie crafting game. But that was not because the game was supposed to be a sandbox game, it was because it was unfinished and major parts like the tower-defense game and the RPG game were not (fully) implemented yet.

Lots of people complained that they wanted a pure sandbox when later alphas changed the game, but TFP pointed at the kickstarter goals and said (in my words): "This is where we wanted to go, where we promised to go and where we are going".

So the game is changing and a difficulty setting that once was good for you might be too difficult or to easy for you the next alpha. A "cop out" you were using for many alphas might be in the game just because they didn't fix it yet and when it goes away you might just notice that you had played the game on a difficulty setting that arguably was too high for you. Digging zombies are not part of the difficulty setting because they are part of a long list of bugs or deficiencies they were fixing.

And like I said, why not just have casual and survival modes? Both groups of players will be unhappy if it stays all in one and it's logical because it's impossible to go both ways at once and extremely difficult to find balance (not to mention the balance still won't attract as many players as 2 separate modes).

Sure, maybe they can make a casual mode by introducing a difficulty setting below adventurer. Oh wait, it already is in the game but nobody is using it and instead saying the game is too difficult .

Now what you seem to want is a game mode that turns off most of the game, like the survival elements, the whole RPG stuff, the horror (as you want half the world 100% secure from the danger), the tower defense. That would then leave a simple shooter with some building, i.e. a better looking minecraft. Quite a tall order. I would say that is easily the domain of a mod and not of a difficulty setting.

 

[MaxTunnerX]

That would then leave a simple shooter with some building, i.e. a better looking minecraft. Quite a tall order. I would say that is easily the domain of a mod and not of a difficulty setting.

Yes, casual mode would be a better looking minecraft. That's also why I bought this game long ago and why I enjoyed it. And I think nobody will get offended when customers actually want less from the devs rather than more. Although I understand that if you develp a game in the style of "no backup jus tkeep rolling" it is actually difficult to revert things or remove them. I do hope TFP sitll have the earleir alphas on backup tho. As for the mod, I have never found it. If you personally know 1 mod that transforms the game the way I want it whilest keeping the game as vanilla as possible, give me the link, I will happily try it.

That is up to Madmole and the development team, but based on MM's past comments, I believe what we have today is their goal and if people want to play it differently, they are going to have to mod the game themselves or just play past Alphas.  They are working on simplifying some aspects of the game, but MM's intent with 7D2D is to have a game where choices matter.  They are working on giving us a solid baseline game, but it is up to us players to make the changes if we want it to be easier or harder.

At least that has been my takeaway based on comments made over several Alphas.  I don't claim to know the mind of MM and the development team.

I understand the logic. The only thing I want the dev team to do is not automatically overwrite everything they're doing and instead make a branch of the game whenever it feels neccessary. You know, most things I'm asking for had already been in the game before but devs decided to steamroll over them instead of letting people choose. I think the time has come for this game to branch out, unless they want to make it a niche game for 1 % of players or something. Also every alpha needs more and more modding (if you want to play casual) so I wouldn't really count on people to keep doing that. They will much rather "hibernate" (wait for update), downgrade or leave, which is a shame I think. Especially when we already had what these people wanted before.

 

[Laim]

I completely agree. IMO this game gets boring fast if you do single player.

I don’t know if this is true, I just started playing again and I’m enjoying single player more than co-op.  But thats just my opinion. 

 

[meganoth]

Yes, casual mode would be a better looking minecraft. That's also why I bought this game long ago and why I enjoyed it. And I think nobody will get offended when customers actually want less from the devs rather than more. Although I understand that if you develp a game in the style of "no backup jus tkeep rolling" it is actually difficult to revert things or remove them. I do hope TFP sitll have the earleir alphas on backup tho. As for the mod, I have never found it. If you personally know 1 mod that transforms the game the way I want it whilest keeping the game as vanilla as possible, give me the link, I will happily try it.

Mods that do not extend the game but narrow it down are seldom and I wouldn't know them. But just **one** mod that exactly does everything you want will never exist (except for the lucky persons able to write their mods themselves).

While this game is in alpha, mods will be short in supply and ephemeral anyway.

One possibility is to wait for the game to go final, let it simmer for a few more months and then check out mods available on steam workshop. Hopefully mods will grow in numbers and above all are easier to find once steam workshop is on.

You can go back to older alphas right down to 8.8 in steam, but it isn't trivial. You have to carefully wipe old settings, it may be that some of them don't run anymore... I was meaning to try out those older versions for a long time but never got around to actually doing it, so my information about them is very sketchy

You can use creative mode any which way to simplify the game, as you already do. You can even set up some rules, so you are  not overpowered immediately. Like giving yourself a budget for the stuff you get out of creative that slowly increases with level.

 

[Roland]

CASUAL MODE

Overall Settings

Difficulty: Scavenger  (This is the easiest setting in the game and disables the zombies from going into rage mode. Zombies die much easier needing fewer hits)

XP: 300% (This will help you earn skillpoints the quickest so you can get all your perks sooner)

Zombie Block Damage: 25% (This makes base defense easier and also lets you shut doors behind you in POIs and stay safe for longer so you don't get overwhelmed)

Blood Moon: Frequency 14 days Range 0 (This reduces the urgency for building and prepping for the blood moon.)

Loot: 300% (This will bring in more food and water and ammo for an easier survival experience.

Zombie Speed: Walk day and night (This will make night time less stressful)

Special Setting for Days 1-3

Zombie Spawning: Off (This will give you time to do some exploring and building and getting established before the zombies start coming. After Day 3, the next time you log on to play, change the setting to on so that zombies start spawning.

I think this will yield a much easier and simpler game that is still mostly vanilla.

 

[Morloc]

the game is

for

players

with 1000's of hours under their belt who want it to continually evolve into even more complexity and a tougher challenge.

Well, gotta' hand it to Roland. He knows what he's talking about.



-Arch Necromancer Morloc

 

[Roland]

Roland

knows

about

Morloc

More than you know....

 

[MaxTunnerX]

Mods that do not extend the game but narrow it down are seldom and I wouldn't know them. But just **one** mod that exactly does everything you want will never exist (except for the lucky persons able to write their mods themselves).

You can go back to older alphas right down to 8.8 in steam, but it isn't trivial. You have to carefully wipe old settings, it may be that some of them don't run anymore... I was meaning to try out those older versions for a long time but never got around to actually doing it, so my information about them is very sketchy

I was only talking about 1 mod because you specifically said a mod would easily do what I wanted. I'm not the one here claiming it's like that.

As for older alphas, yes, that's a partial solution, but the reason why I want casual and survival mode is that downgrading to older alphas gives you the good old things back, but removes the good news things. In other words, you're basically choosing whether you like more living with a leg or an arm, can't have both. If the game had those 2 modes, people would have the base of their experience even in newer versions, that means with all the optimization and quality of life improvements. If, and only if the people want more depth to these branches would I redirect them to mods. Making people mod the game to basically make a whole branch of (especially alpha) game is asking too much of them I think, they should have a larger home base, that would suit most people and then have mods for the small groups of players that don't find themselves in it. And if there ever is another big group of players again, they can have another branch (battle royale or whatever), after all game copies make the money, so the more people play the more the game can be developed.

 

[Kam R.]

I have a feeling that the common denominator you're asking for is a tad too low.

I've been exploring a bunch of the overhaul mods while waiting for a20 recently. Most of them add stuff. and difficulty. and crafting complexity.

Only one I've seen that seems to revert to simpler, older game mechanics seems to be "Classic Style Hardcore". But that one would still be too harsh by your standards because it has a heavy focus on struggle for food/weather survival. Also barely anything to loot. (It's different fun! :] )

The general tendency in this community seems to be towards less casual. The general tendency I even see with the many new players popping in our server is that they get bored faster every alpha and frequently start discussions about moving on from vanilla and get modding more stuff in or leaving the server fast never to return.

But they at least seem to have fun with the game while it lasts for them, so as a common denominator it's probably not in a bad spot as is.

Your only hope will be a mod that makes stuff easier and simpler, just like for (what I perceive to be) the majority of the game's fans the big overhaul mods are the only hope of continued enjoyment.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I disagree with 300% XP beeing easier for beginners. The first hordenight will overwhelm beginners due to the high gamestage from the 300% XP. @Roland

New players tend to do longer days. They might get demolishers on their first bloodmoon with 300%XP on day 14.

 

[meganoth]

I was only talking about 1 mod because you specifically said a mod would easily do what I wanted. I'm not the one here claiming it's like that.

"that is easily the domain of a mod" is a quite different message than "that is easy to do with a mod".

As for older alphas, yes, that's a partial solution, but the reason why I want casual and survival mode is that downgrading to older alphas gives you the good old things back, but removes the good news things. In other words, you're basically choosing whether you like more living with a leg or an arm, can't have both. If the game had those 2 modes, people would have the base of their experience even in newer versions, that means with all the optimization and quality of life improvements. If, and only if the people want more depth to these branches would I redirect them to mods. Making people mod the game to basically make a whole branch of (especially alpha) game is asking too much of them I think, they should have a larger home base, that would suit most people and then have mods for the small groups of players that don't find themselves in it. And if there ever is another big group of players again, they can have another branch (battle royale or whatever), after all game copies make the money, so the more people play the more the game can be developed.

A common sentiment among players who don't like the direction the game is taking. They want the old game, but with this and that feature added. Only that which features they want and which they don't want are often very different from player to player. Because TFP made a lot of experiments and let players try them out it feels like this game is a grab bag of features galore but the final game will only be a small selection out of it. But TFP can't make and support a game with hundreds of interchangable features and balance that all. The mix-and-match of all alphas is a nice dream but impossible to do. 

Try out what Roland suggested (except for the 300% XP). Maybe it is what you want, maybe it is so close that the rest can be done by just asking a modder for a minute of his time. 

 

[Roland]

I disagree with 300% XP beeing easier for beginners.

Try out what Roland suggested (except for the 300% XP).

@MaxTunnerX Don't listen to them. Try the 300% XP and see how it goes. If it turns out to be too tough THEN ignore it. But you specifically outlined how it took 3 points to get to the soup recipe you wanted to make and that took a lot of playtime to get there. 300% XP will get you your perks faster like you want it. It will make your gamestage go up faster but you are playing on Scavenger so those tougher zombies will still go down a lot easier to that fully perked weapon you have. That's why you play on Scavenger. These guys are thinking high gamestage on Nomad or Warrior but that's not you. Play 300% xp on scavenger and you'll thank me.

If the game had those 2 modes, people would have the base of their experience even in newer versions

The game does have those modes plus several intermediate ones. It's called playing with the settings to get the mode that works for you. I outlined some settings you could try to get a casual mode that reduces the challenge-- basically down to zero threat for the first three days...