Are you guys over at the game studio okay?

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I'm sure you've gotten the memo about the recent 2.0 update not being great and I doubt you need me to hammer it in any further, but are you, like, okay? This is the kind of update I'd expect out of EA employees being constantly overworked and stressed to the limit (overtime with no pay), given deadlines less than a third as long as they should have to work on their updates and forced to add features they don't like by corporate big-wigs who don't actually understand the game. It feels passionless and rancid, like nobody in the studio actually wanted to make any of the changes they were forced to develop.

I just cannot emphasize this enough. It takes too much willpower to constantly refrain from emailing the poor, poor employees developing AMD driver updates, since Fallouts 3 and New Vegas haven't run without mods on AMD drivers in, what, 1-2 years by this point? This is the kind of thing I'd expect from them, not a (for lack of a better term) AA game studio (usually the kind of developers that pump out the absolute best games, like Coffee Stain or Team17). It especially feels like there's corporate interference because of the recent paid DLC packs, which consist of (I actually had to stop to check and be sure here) singular cosmetic outfits for $9 each.

You guys doing okay?
 
The DLC´s might have surprised people, but there was already talk about them years ago. TFP is indie if you take it literally as in publishing the game themselves. The size of TFP isn´t what most people consider indie anymore. They are around 50 people now i think. And they hired a studio to develop bloodmoons and TFP is the publisher. TFP is the corporate.

My guess is, that they are simply running out of time and things don´t go like planned. They work on two new games already (one is in a very very early phase though) plus they have to pay for the development of Bloodmoons.
 
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If I had to play mindreader for the devs I would say they probably feel the dev process for 7DTD has been down other paths away from finished development too many times. They now have a plan, (with the most recent roadmap), to finish the game. They probably aren't going to change the systems they are implementing on the roadmap so they can actually finish the development of the game.
 
If I had to play mindreader for the devs I would say they probably feel the dev process for 7DTD has been down other paths away from finished development too many times. They now have a plan, (with the most recent roadmap), to finish the game. They probably aren't going to change the systems they are implementing on the roadmap so they can actually finish the development of the game.
Oh I really hope they don't just move on from this... this... thing of an update and 100% finish development without fixing it. This update is absolutely off the rails. There are a lot of nice additions, like improved placements of towns and foliage and stuff, but so help me I will find a way to mod some of this 🤬🤬🤬🤬 out of the game.
 
The DLC´s might have surprised people, but there was already talk about them years ago. TFP is indie if you take it literally as in publishing the game themselves. The size of TFP isn´t what most people consider indie anymore. They are around 50 people now i think. And they hired a studio to develop bloodmoons and TFP is the publisher. TFP is the corporate.

My guess is, that they are simply running out of time and things don´t go like planned. They work on two new games already (one is in a very very early phase though) plus they have to pay for the development of Bloodmoons.
Paid cosmetic DLCs are 100% fine, and these seem to be of good enough quality, but it definitely says something when they're selling cosmetic armor one set at a time for more than like 99 cents a pop. Maybe I could understand 2-3 bucks if the cosmetics were really, really, really good, and I could understand around $5 if there were two per DLC, but $9? For that price, you'd expect three.
 
There are a lot of nice additions, like improved placements of towns and foliage and stuff, but so help me I will find a way to mod some of this poo out of the game.
It's funny; I dislike the implementation of most of the update, but the worst parts seem just completely ignorable.
Badges? This far I've had to chill out mining for a resource I didn't want, twice; and grab a few mushies "out of sync". Other than that, no effect. No point either.
Storms? Early on did a chain of shelters between my base and the "local" trader, would've had to waste time at trader a few times if not. A bit annoying, but what's 300 frames between friends... Now later on, if I'm travelling, I just eat a medkit and ignore it.
New enemies? Haven't seen a frostclaw in the wild yet, but the mummies are just a matter of aggressive removal. See one, run it over or unload a mag to the face. You can just keep running past if not interested. New enemies are welcome, but can't say I'm too bothered by these; in good and bad.
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cosmetic armor one set at a time for more than like 99 cents a pop.
Yeh, I might grab the thirst set for a buck, but deffo not more.
 
It's funny; I dislike the implementation of most of the update, but the worst parts seem just completely ignorable.
Badges? This far I've had to chill out mining for a resource I didn't want, twice; and grab a few mushies "out of sync". Other than that, no effect. No point either.
Storms? Early on did a chain of shelters between my base and the "local" trader, would've had to waste time at trader a few times if not. A bit annoying, but what's 300 frames between friends... Now later on, if I'm travelling, I just eat a medkit and ignore it.
New enemies? Haven't seen a frostclaw in the wild yet, but the mummies are just a matter of aggressive removal. See one, run it over or unload a mag to the face. You can just keep running past if not interested. New enemies are welcome, but can't say I'm too bothered by these; in good and bad.
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Yeh, I might grab the thirst set for a buck, but deffo not more.
One of the complaints I saw was that the game is meant to be somewhat realistic and it now has yetis and mummies and stuff (why does this forum, primarily centered around an M-rated game, censor swear-words?).
Now normally, I would think that the people who complain about realism are fucking stupid - immersion is not automatically equal to realism and literally just refers to how immersed you are in the game. If you feel like you are your character, you're immersed, if you're questioning things from the perspective of your real-life self, you're not (and your character wouldn't question why physics are weird or things look off, because that's just normal). In a game which is already primarily realistic, it is kind of immersion-breaking to have to fight a yeti, because I'm questioning why there's a goddamn yeti.
This game is realistic enough to have gravity collapse buildings when they don't have proper support, and now you basically have to fight Bigfoot? Its very... thematically inconsistent. It isn't just normal for your character, or anyone in the game world, its weird. Its like if they added a song from Rent to the soundtrack of Fallout, it doesn't fit in at all.

As for the storms, interesting enough idea. I don't really care enough to play the 2.0 update long enough to get to a storm, but I'm assuming storms are just random things that come along, last 5 minutes and slowly damage you while outside (based on context clues). I think it'd be more interesting if storms posed more of a threat and lasted longer, but there were ways of predicting them (like skills or magazines, with higher levels providing more warning) and they got worse as the game went on. Like horde nights, but more erratic and necessitating hunkering down or minimizing time spent outside. They'd need to have protective gear you could find eventually, though, otherwise it'd get old fast. Overall, they should have storms, even if they only lower visibility or something, because storms are cool and provide a more interesting and engaging game-world.
 
it doesn't fit in at all
It doesn't fit in at all because AI wouldn't know the difference. Those two zombies are based on AI generated images and that, along with some former Working Stiff tool trucks going bland red and orange throughout to try and introduce some variety as well as a number of other supposed additions/improvements makes me think they don't have an art department or lead artist or any other personnel I would think a studio would have on staff given the game's financial success, but rather a bunch of coders trying to do artists' and sound designers' work. I'd imagine the look of the new dire wolf and Grace were arrived at the same way: AI generation. At least they still look somewhat wolf and boar- like, but that's hardly an excuse

It's exceptionally difficult to get work as a straight up web designer because companies are too cheap to pay someone to develop the functionality of a web site (the back end) and someone to consistently brand/make it visually appealing (the front end) and I think the same thing applies in the indie game development space. Indies just flat out don't have that kind of money. TFP should at this point, but perhaps doesn't for whatever reason and I might believe up to 50 or 60 developers revolving in and out and/or being contracted off and on over a decade in a very generous stretch, but not permanently on staff. All I've seen is a few guys in their home offices. {And hugs to them.}

The story is great. A couple of brothers, one with modding experience, get together over Thanksgiving dinner and say, "Hey! Let's make a game of our own." And you want to root for that. In fact, I've given TFP as much leeway as I have because I honestly think they've been learning as they go, sometimes the extraordinarily hard way if their history with Tell Tale, et alia, is any indication. Being on the smaller side, though, you'd think they'd want to buck the more nefarious industry trends coming both theirs and our way, but they appear to have embraced them whether consciously or not; whether out of desire or perceived necessity on the part of leadership or not. I don't really care which. I'm not going to support TFP or endorse the game or any other studio and their games if they keep it up like every other drop in the bucket gesture I've made to try and turn those more nefarious industry trends -- which are affecting both developers and players and no person's or group's fault -- on their heads. Most everyone blames "the developers" when things go wrong, ethically and otherwise, but it's not the developers' fault. In fact, developers appear to be becoming part of the "gig economy" whether they want to be or not and are very much in the same economic boat as players are.
 
I'm sure you've gotten the memo about the recent 2.0 update not being great and I doubt you need me to hammer it in any further, but are you, like, okay? This is the kind of update I'd expect out of EA employees being constantly overworked and stressed to the limit (overtime with no pay), given deadlines less than a third as long as they should have to work on their updates and forced to add features they don't like by corporate big-wigs who don't actually understand the game. It feels passionless and rancid, like nobody in the studio actually wanted to make any of the changes they were forced to develop.

I just cannot emphasize this enough. It takes too much willpower to constantly refrain from emailing the poor, poor employees developing AMD driver updates, since Fallouts 3 and New Vegas haven't run without mods on AMD drivers in, what, 1-2 years by this point? This is the kind of thing I'd expect from them, not a (for lack of a better term) AA game studio (usually the kind of developers that pump out the absolute best games, like Coffee Stain or Team17). It especially feels like there's corporate interference because of the recent paid DLC packs, which consist of (I actually had to stop to check and be sure here) singular cosmetic outfits for $9 each.

You guys doing okay?
I feel like I should mention my other problems I've had with the game as of late while I'm here, because I've been holding my tongue under the belief that they didn't really matter in comparison to other problems, but they're clearly just wasting their time on random things anyway.

First off, the skimpy zombies. I'm glad they got rid of the topless zombies (I think), cool, there are still lady zombies with tattered clothing doing all but flash their honkers at the camera (I believe jiggle physics are included). That's nasty. It's one thing to have sexualized living player characters, but I don't wanna see a literal corpse with a gaping hole in it running around wearing skimpy, tattered clothing, that's disgusting and The Fun Pimps should feel ashamed. Its not even logical, obviously there would be tons of naked zombies who got turned while doing the dirty in real life, because humans can hardly think of anything but shagging, but this isn't a fucked-up adult game. How did the zombie's clothes even get tattered like that?

Second off, the goddamn 1.0 crawler model. I'm all for gore if it actually adds something, but most of the time it doesn't. Many pointlessly gory movie scenes could be improved by having the camera cut away and still have the same effect, if not a more potent effect because you're not distracted by your nausea, and this is the same way.
Normally, I can handle gore - a regular amount of average gore.
The crawlers literally have their entrails spilling out, and it is absolutely, positively disgusting. For the first little bit after seeing the model, I wanted to throw up. What, uhh, the 🤬🤬🤬🤬? Did the person who designed the model get exiled into the forgotten realm for doing so but then they were out of time so they just had to put it in? Why would they add something which is so much more gross than the entire rest of the game combined? Did it not occur to them that they could have crippled zombies which aren't missing their entire bottom half? It'd even make sense if someone tried to cut off their legs after they turned into a zombie to keep them from spreading the infection with hopes of curing them, but it makes less sense that so 🤬🤬🤬🤬 many people were involved in freak accidents where they were sliced in half right around the time they got turned into zombies.
 
corpse with a gaping hole in it running around wearing skimpy, tattered clothing, that's disgusting and The Fun Pimps should feel ashamed.
I .. respect the opinion, but I do disagree. The party girl is used for many contexts here, some are bona fide strippers, some are in essentially night gowns, and some are just typical bar hoppers. It's not the game that's messed up, it's the society it is based on - our reality. Imo, they fit right in.

Normally, I can handle gore - a regular amount of average gore.
Now, I'm an old fart; the last "gore" I remember having an effect on me was the early Saw movies, about two decades ago. The game world is full of corpses, walking. Some have their eyeballs hanging out, some their spleens. Take a closer look at the soldiers.. or don't ;) The POIs are full of grim stories, like car accidents pinning corpses to walls and obvious suicide scenes. It's Not a happy game. The half-a-man zeds could imo use some more variance to the damage, just for the morbid; but I don't see it being out of place in this game.

Don't get me wrong, your opinion is just as valid as mine. I just wanted to throw mine in as food for thought; if you don't want to end up a jaded old fart like me, stop playing gory games ... ;)
 
One of the complaints I saw was that the game is meant to be somewhat realistic and it now has yetis and mummies and stuff (why does this forum, primarily centered around an M-rated game, censor swear-words?).
Now normally, I would think that the people who complain about realism are fucking stupid - immersion is not automatically equal to realism and literally just refers to how immersed you are in the game. If you feel like you are your character, you're immersed, if you're questioning things from the perspective of your real-life self, you're not (and your character wouldn't question why physics are weird or things look off, because that's just normal). In a game which is already primarily realistic, it is kind of immersion-breaking to have to fight a yeti, because I'm questioning why there's a goddamn yeti.
This game is realistic enough to have gravity collapse buildings when they don't have proper support, and now you basically have to fight Bigfoot? Its very... thematically inconsistent. It isn't just normal for your character, or anyone in the game world, its weird. Its like if they added a song from Rent to the soundtrack of Fallout, it doesn't fit in at all.
The mummies and yetis don't particularly fit and seem unusual I will give you that, but I don't think it's so egregious that it's a primary concern.
First off, the skimpy zombies. I'm glad they got rid of the topless zombies (I think), cool, there are still lady zombies with tattered clothing doing all but flash their honkers at the camera (I believe jiggle physics are included). That's nasty. It's one thing to have sexualized living player characters, but I don't wanna see a literal corpse with a gaping hole in it running around wearing skimpy, tattered clothing, that's disgusting and The Fun Pimps should feel ashamed. Its not even logical, obviously there would be tons of naked zombies who got turned while doing the dirty in real life, because humans can hardly think of anything but shagging, but this isn't a fucked-up adult game. How did the zombie's clothes even get tattered like that?
You just went on a tangent for it being a M-rated game then complain about some jiggle physics? I feel like this whole argument is reductive as there are plenty of scenarios where clothing would get torn. I encourage everyone to voice their opinions on things, but it feels more like a child's rant than anything constructive.
Normally, I can handle gore - a regular amount of average gore.
The crawlers literally have their entrails spilling out, and it is absolutely, positively disgusting. For the first little bit after seeing the model, I wanted to throw up. What, uhh, the 🤬🤬🤬🤬? Did the person who designed the model get exiled into the forgotten realm for doing so but then they were out of time so they just had to put it in? Why would they add something which is so much more gross than the entire rest of the game combined? Did it not occur to them that they could have crippled zombies which aren't missing their entire bottom half? It'd even make sense if someone tried to cut off their legs after they turned into a zombie to keep them from spreading the infection with hopes of curing them, but it makes less sense that so 🤬🤬🤬🤬 many people were involved in freak accidents where they were sliced in half right around the time they got turned into zombies.
It is a zombie apocalypse game, not Hello Kitty Island Adventure. I think your issues go beyond critique and more into the "you shouldn't play this game" category. It's like going to watch Friday the 13th and complaining that teens are shagging in a horror movie. Go watch something else.
 
skimpy zombies
I gather the game used to be much more on the, shall we say, raunchy side and every time party girl falls down I'm thinking, "Yeah, that's more than we need to see, dear." I got flashbacks when I first played it to a time when games were more about "boys and their toys" than a going concern. That's no doubt where I come by the impression that 7DTD is "old school" and countrified. As theFlu said, though, "it's the society it is based on" that's sick. As a woman, I know human trafficking and sex trafficking and all other varieties of pathologies are still plaguing us and, as strip clubs exist in real life, I don't bat an eye to come across "Big Buns" or some other "gentlemen's club" or what have you. Those used to be mainstays in video games due to that immature "boys and their toys" kind of mentality.

I don't concern myself much with the objectification of women in particular in video games or otherwise because we've all been objectified by the society we live in due to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm I've mentioned before. We're essentially being compared to atoms when we're spoken of as "the masses" and atoms as billiard balls bouncing against one another analogy itself has yet to be completely routed from the field of astrophysics despite the advent of quantum physics. The "social sciences," which used to be called social studies, took their cues from the "hard sciences" as authors such as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy woefully lamented and, in their zeal to be thought of as "pure sciences," have become just as objectifying of the world, psychology for example examining the supposed "contents" of a mind.

We're only now beginning to see ourselves and to be seen as the human beings and intricately interconnected life forms otherwise we actually are. Indigenous wisdom is in the lead on this front in philosophical circles concerned with a burgeoning "ecological (human) consciousness."
 
I gather the game used to be much more on the, shall we say, raunchy side and every time party girl falls down I'm thinking, "Yeah, that's more than we need to see, dear." I got flashbacks when I first played it to a time when games were more about "boys and their toys" than a going concern. That's no doubt where I come by the impression that 7DTD is "old school" and countrified. As theFlu said, though, "it's the society it is based on" that's sick. As a woman, I know human trafficking and sex trafficking and all other varieties of pathologies are still plaguing us and, as strip clubs exist in real life, I don't bat an eye to come across "Big Buns" or some other "gentlemen's club" or what have you. Those used to be mainstays in video games due to that immature "boys and their toys" kind of mentality.

I don't concern myself much with the objectification of women in particular in video games or otherwise because we've all been objectified by the society we live in due to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm I've mentioned before. We're essentially being compared to atoms when we're spoken of as "the masses" and atoms as billiard balls bouncing against one another analogy itself has yet to be completely routed from the field of astrophysics despite the advent of quantum physics. The "social sciences," which used to be called social studies, took their cues from the "hard sciences" as authors such as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy woefully lamented and, in their zeal to be thought of as "pure sciences," have become just as objectifying of the world, psychology for example examining the supposed "contents" of a mind.

We're only now beginning to see ourselves and to be seen as the human beings and intricately interconnected life forms otherwise we actually are. Indigenous wisdom is in the lead on this front in philosophical circles concerned with a burgeoning "ecological (human) consciousness."
So to summarize, there are a lot of men that make games and men like boobs.
 
The mummies and yetis don't particularly fit and seem unusual I will give you that, but I don't think it's so egregious that it's a primary concern.
I'm far past worrying about what they should and shouldn't logically prioritize in terms of game design. Not only would it take minimal effort to remove most things from the game in comparison to adding them, but the fact that they felt it necessary to add mummies and yetis to begin with shows that they need to get their priorities straight anyway. This is the same problem I have with entirely unrelated games like Minecraft, which I learned from time spent modding. If you add a feature which nobody is going to enjoy for more than 5 minutes, its going to draw time, effort and money to create and then draw performance (and potentially inventory space) when its finished, and nobody even wants it. Its just worse for everyone, so why add it at all?

You just went on a tangent for it being a M-rated game then complain about some jiggle physics? I feel like this whole argument is reductive as there are plenty of scenarios where clothing would get torn. I encourage everyone to voice their opinions on things, but it feels more like a child's rant than anything constructive.
I gather the game used to be much more on the, shall we say, raunchy side and every time party girl falls down I'm thinking, "Yeah, that's more than we need to see, dear." I got flashbacks when I first played it to a time when games were more about "boys and their toys" than a going concern. That's no doubt where I come by the impression that 7DTD is "old school" and countrified. As theFlu said, though, "it's the society it is based on" that's sick. As a woman, I know human trafficking and sex trafficking and all other varieties of pathologies are still plaguing us and, as strip clubs exist in real life, I don't bat an eye to come across "Big Buns" or some other "gentlemen's club" or what have you. Those used to be mainstays in video games due to that immature "boys and their toys" kind of mentality.

I don't concern myself much with the objectification of women in particular in video games or otherwise because we've all been objectified by the society we live in due to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm I've mentioned before. We're essentially being compared to atoms when we're spoken of as "the masses" and atoms as billiard balls bouncing against one another analogy itself has yet to be completely routed from the field of astrophysics despite the advent of quantum physics. The "social sciences," which used to be called social studies, took their cues from the "hard sciences" as authors such as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy woefully lamented and, in their zeal to be thought of as "pure sciences," have become just as objectifying of the world, psychology for example examining the supposed "contents" of a mind.

We're only now beginning to see ourselves and to be seen as the human beings and intricately interconnected life forms otherwise we actually are. Indigenous wisdom is in the lead on this front in philosophical circles concerned with a burgeoning "ecological (human) consciousness."
I .. respect the opinion, but I do disagree. The party girl is used for many contexts here, some are bona fide strippers, some are in essentially night gowns, and some are just typical bar hoppers. It's not the game that's messed up, it's the society it is based on - our reality. Imo, they fit right in.

As for the skimpy zombies, I don't know how many scenarios in which exclusively the 🤬🤬🤬 part of the zombie's dress would be ripped, apart from one particularly awful situation. It'd make sense if her dress was ripped overall, but just the 🤬🤬🤬? It shows the clear motivation for adding a zombie which, as the wiki put it, "was one of the first zombies to have 'jiggle tech' added."
And, once again, I'm not complaining about having anything sexual in the game at all, I'm complaining about how gross it is that there is a sexualized corpse in the game. I'd be complaining about pretty much every single female character design if I were complaining about the game having skimpy clothing overall.
If they were trying to commentate on how obsessed society is with sex or something, which hardly seems necessary, there would've been way more skimpy zombies, its evidently just "Hurr-Durr, zombie have big booba" which is vile and wretched because that's a bleeding corpse which, as the wiki also put it, "died and turned long ago, evident from [it's] highly decomposed bod[y]."

(Also, you call one sentence a tangent, Kyoji?)

Now, I'm an old fart; the last "gore" I remember having an effect on me was the early Saw movies, about two decades ago. The game world is full of corpses, walking. Some have their eyeballs hanging out, some their spleens. Take a closer look at the soldiers.. or don't ;) The POIs are full of grim stories, like car accidents pinning corpses to walls and obvious suicide scenes. It's Not a happy game. The half-a-man zeds could imo use some more variance to the damage, just for the morbid; but I don't see it being out of place in this game.

Don't get me wrong, your opinion is just as valid as mine. I just wanted to throw mine in as food for thought; if you don't want to end up a jaded old fart like me, stop playing gory games ... ;)
It is a zombie apocalypse game, not Hello Kitty Island Adventure. I think your issues go beyond critique and more into the "you shouldn't play this game" category. It's like going to watch Friday the 13th and complaining that teens are shagging in a horror movie. Go watch something else.

Again, my problem with the gore of the crawler zombie's entrails literally hanging out isn't just that its disgusting, its also that it serves no purpose and doesn't even make sense. I don't particularly like gore, even gore I can handle just fine, because I'm not a redditor. My problem isn't how morbid or grim it is, I can handle that just fine, its that the actual sight of it turns my stomach and its counter-intuitive to even have it there in the first place.
As I said, it doesn't even make sense that so many people were torn in half in freak accidents right around the time of being turned into zombies. You can tell that this either happened to them after being turned into a zombie, because they wouldn't survive like that for long as a regular person, or right before being turned into a zombie (and they reanimated), because morticians would've fixed up their bodies for their funerals rather than leaving their internals literally hanging out. So not only are the chances of that happening to even one person incredibly slim, but they already had a better option.
There are no people in this game who couldn't walk before becoming zombies, and they could even just have regular zombies who had their legs knocked off recently. Because of paralyzed people existing, they might not even have to remove the legs, they might just have to change the animations. There are so many options which would've been better for everyone - less effort for the developers because they don't have to create an entirely new model and less nasty for the players, but they went with a zombie which drags it's guts behind it like a snake's tail. They defaulted to a horribly mutilated zombie over someone with a physical handicap, the more logical choice in almost every way, becaauuuse... Uhhhh... They didn't think about what they were doing and just did it, I guess?
 
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