PC A17 experimental - What the hell, is with this difficulty?

I tried A17 at default level, and found I had to drop it down to an easier level. The Zeds are tougher by a lot, POI's seem to have a minimum 5-6 zeds in them. At lower level it is more playable for me, but have had random hordes every game day if I am in a POI for any length of time. Random hordes are brutal, but for me it is the framerate hit I am seeing. Was at 50fps A16, now I am in the 30's and when hordes hit can be in the single digits.

 
I promise you that if you keep at it - it's not that difficult AT ALL. I think a big part of the problem with people perceiving this build so much more difficult is just due to the character stats curve. You start off a lot slower and weaker, but there is quite a arching point to where you actually become even stronger in A17 than you ever were in A16.

The current perk balance is analogous to the older ES game Morrowind. For those who have had the pleasure of playing it, you'll remember in that game - you start off incredibly slow, weak and clunky and can barely kill a rat - but by the end of the game - you can literally fly across the map and wipe out an entire town without even thinking.

Now - the actual problem - the real problem is - that this game is NOT Morrowind - it doesn't have a strong quest line - it doesn't have a narrative purpose. It's a sandbox game - and a curve that aggressive doesn't work on a game like this for most people.

In this game - you're too slow to have a desire to do much in the beginning - and you're too OP to want to continue playing later on. The arch needs to be adjusted (in my opinion). The game is truly not much harder than before. The only exception is possibly the blood moon - if you're used to cheesing the AI - then you might have a hard time getting used to the actual tower defense part. Once you do though - gravy..

 
Or you finally figure out how to stop dog/wolvepacks, wich you can´t always predict early enough to get away, from spawning on day 1-5. No one would miss those.
Also they do sometimes just appear from behind you, come up a hill or from behind a house,without making a freaking sound before they are in reach. Don´t tell me i have to 360 all the time to be aware every single second.
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I've had a similar issue myself. My problem though is the spawning is whack. I was in my base, all the doors closed, and three wolves spawned right on top of me in the same room I was.

This has been an issue out looting as well, but that has more to do with sleepers, or maybe non-sleepers. It seems there's some delay to them spawning or something, and so the zombies don't spawn until I'm inside the building for a bit, then I have a handful of them just on top of me.

Really, I find the spawning is making this version more difficult than it needs to be. Of course, iirc, this was a problem in the previous version as well.

As for overall difficulty, I haven't played it much, but I feel like a retired granny in the beginning. Once you get some perks invested, it seems to get better. I'll have to play more and try out different strategies before saying the difficulty is unreasonable, but I definitely got screwed over in my first game.

 
I wouldn't consider myself a particularly good gamer but I am an experienced one (considerably so) and I find 7DtD very easy. From the normal zombies, wandering hordes, ferals and blood moon hordes.

Yet 7DtD is very hard. "Why is that?", you ask, "You just said the opposite."

What does absolutely completely and utterly make the game hard is the dreadful frame rate. I have to play it as low as 1368x768 on the lowest quality just to get a stable 60+ fps in the wild, but hit a PoI or worse a "dungeon house" where you triggered all the zombies and you'll be lucky not to be getting massive 10fps lag spikes. What's more, that aforementioned 60+ fps is never a "smooth 60"; it always feels clunky.

Now don't get me wrong, I have a lot of sympathy for any developer trying to hit the moving target of public opinion, system specs and general expectation but ultimately A17, experimental or not, is pretty unplayable and not just for me but for dozens of streamers who have considerably better kit than both I and the majority of the 7DtD player base.

There is so much to like about A17, there really is, but it's locked behind a very harsh performance firewall.

 
standard difficulty, 2nd time trying A17. First POI had 8 zombies in it. each zombie took 4 or more arrow headshots plus some wooden club shots. survived but took 1 or 2 hits so my stamina dropped. had to spend the majority of the rest of day 1 making more arrows! day 2, was just out trying to get wood and stone when i saw a black wolf running at me. stamina was low, so there was no getting away. It seems almost impossible to try and gather any materials early game without always being very low on stamina. Which is fine, thats a part of the game.
Only thing that really bums me out about A17 is how they have made base building so much harder. I love end game 72d2. I want to be able to build crazy things. Horde bases, or just random giant bridges or pyramids. In order to do that, you need massive forge rooms with tons of forges burning all the time. Best way to do that was at bedrock, you could create and store supplies safely. in A17 that isnt possible, which just makes me sad. I'm not going to spend dozens of hours mining, looting, crafting, if at any point zombies can destroy my forge room, theres no point, and that makes me sad for my future playing this game.
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The main problem here is the zombies are way to good at detecting you, if your below 20-30 blocks of soil/rock they should have 0 chance to find you (other than horde night anyway as they gps), I've said it before but i've seen a zombie from 100 blocks out literally beeline it right to me on the 2nd floor of a poi when I was crouched, I made some sound by stepping on something. Zombie beelined it and stopped right where I was standing last.

 
So judging by some people's opinions, it's not an issue that dogpacks and wandering hordes spawn quite literally on top of the player? :p I fail to see sense in that really, as it is kinda an issue, the only thing you can really pray for is that you get lucky as hell and the pack spawns on you when you're inside a house and they spawn outside it. Apart from that I'd say it needs a serious overhaul.

And please, let's not turn this topic into a fight, let's have a muddle through the opinions and debate things.

 
Regarding zombies, I gotta admit it's poorly scaled right now. With a friend of mine that just bought the game (literally his first playthrough), we were absolutely going easy mode during day time (so much that I upped the zombie's daytime approach speed from 0.2 to 0.35, to make it feel a bit more challenging).

Yet, on our 3rd night, we were surprised by a horde of about 12 zombies that came in... at 21:45. Needless to say our 4x4 wooden "base" on which we planned spending the night didn't last long and there was virtually nothing we could do. This echoes the people saying dogs by day 2 is a bad idea. The overall zombie game is decently balanced, daytime is really easy and you "only" need to prepare for blood moon hordes. It actually gets quite harder when you waste a good chunk of a day retrieving your dead body, not even mentionning how frustrating it is to feel that helpless because of a random horde coming by at the wrong time this early in the game.

 
Yet, on our 3rd night, we were surprised by a horde of about 12 zombies that came in... at 21:45. Needless to say our 4x4 wooden "base" on which we planned spending the night didn't last long and there was virtually nothing we could do. This echoes the people saying dogs by day 2 is a bad idea. The overall zombie game is decently balanced, daytime is really easy and you "only" need to prepare for blood moon hordes. It actually gets quite harder when you waste a good chunk of a day retrieving your dead body, not even mentionning how frustrating it is to feel that helpless because of a random horde coming by at the wrong time this early in the game.
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I get the impression that building with anything less than reinforced concrete is a noob trap. You're a lot better off just camping on the roof of a POI for the night. Sad really because base building used to be the most fun part of 7D2D - if I wanted to loot dungeons I'd just play Fallout 4.

 
So judging by some people's opinions, it's not an issue that dogpacks and wandering hordes spawn quite literally on top of the player? :p I fail to see sense in that really, as it is kinda an issue, the only thing you can really pray for is that you get lucky as hell and the pack spawns on you when you're inside a house and they spawn outside it. Apart from that I'd say it needs a serious overhaul.
And please, let's not turn this topic into a fight, let's have a muddle through the opinions and debate things.
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They could definitely do with an audio cue for dog packs. I went out looting and out of nowhere, from complete silence, a dog attacks me from behind. Almost before I could react I was down to half health and was bleeding out. I didn't even bother trying to attack it - I just ran as fast as I could until my stamina completely drained.

 
...the only thing you can really pray for is that you get lucky as hell...
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Welcome to the Zompocalypse? Honestly, I think that would be true if this was real: pray that you are lucky. After all, "the best-laid plans of mice and men..."

 
There always has been a 1/50 chance that your twice daily wandering horde will be 6 to 12 dogs. This was also in A16 etc.
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And to be honest, kind of a cheap "got you" death that shouldn't be. Maybe sound of thunder like when about to receive the 7 day horde so you can at least know something is wrong.

Other thing is, zombies and dogs in this game have stealth. No sound whatsoever, 0.

Maybe they have the sneaking perk in their skill tree maxed? /s

 
I get the impression that building with anything less than reinforced concrete is a noob trap. You're a lot better off just camping on the roof of a POI for the night. Sad really because base building used to be the most fun part of 7D2D - if I wanted to loot dungeons I'd just play Fallout 4.
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Yeah, it´s really sad that building your own base is beeing kinda punished. POI´s seem easy to defend. I had no problems with the old remove stairs or anything that leads to you, scatter some spikes and make sure you can hit them from above, strategy. Had only one horde so far tough, too many restarts. :p

They also don´t seem to realize how many people went on after day 40 (of whenever you had everything) just for building cool stuff.

 
Seems to be the game's difficulty has gone to the realms of damn insane. Day 2, wandering amongst the wilderness, picking up cotton and such, then. Out of nowhere comes a pack of 5 rabid dogs, with no way of fighting back, I get insta killed with no fair way of fighting them off, and I guess the game has a sick sense of humour and just doesn't want me to enjoy it anymore, so it beautifully disposes of my bed, so upon respawn, all my backpack items drop despawned, I get spawned into a random location due to the bed missing. At that point, Alt+F4 was the only solution.
=Seriously though, the difficult is just stupidly off in this "build". Day 2 rabid pack of dogs, and aswell as that I gave it another shot afterwards and even though running was turned off, a horde of 10 running military zombies on day 3, at that point I just hit uninstall and said "Yup, that's enough of that".
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You just gave me a wonderful idea. I'm going to dispose of my bed so that when I die I'll be dropped in a random location. I've already modded out the death penalty but that will be a good replacement. As far as difficulty goes, it's about time.

 
While I get that dying is frustrating when you're not expecting it and more so when there is little you can do to fight back. I still feel though that many players are essentially complaining because they aren't safe. Which I'm sure I don't need to explain why that's silly in a survival zombie game.

It does take a bit of adjustment from A16. The idea that you really shouldn't be attacking every zombie, entering every building and being ok with running away is the opposite of how you could approach the previous version. I personally love the risk and fear that comes with this new build.

Also just so you are prepared for the shock, later roving hordes might just include a mix of zombears and dogs. I've also had screamers call up irradiated ferals. That particular instance was ironic. Having survived my 2nd horde night, I was feeling great. Repairing damage outside then hear the scream. Feral cops and irradiated spider chase me down and kill me. Really popped my bubble... I love moments like that.

 
I love the unpredictability of A17. Will a dog horde spawn on day 2? Maybe. Will a feral zombie burst out of that closet? Maybe. Will the floor collapse in the bedroom and spill you into a zombie infested cellar? Maybe.

A17 makes me afraid of this game again, and I haven't been afraid of this game for about 900+ hours.

 
I think the gamestage needs some looking at. With a gamestage of only 60 (1 death in that) I had spitting cops on the day 7 horde. That seems just a bit OTT to me

 
My 3rd horse night, say 21 I was getting cops, vultures, irritated ghouls. Good thing I had back plans. Base was totaled and spent alot of time.

 
I love the unpredictability of A17. Will a dog horde spawn on day 2? Maybe. Will a feral zombie burst out of that closet? Maybe. Will the floor collapse in the bedroom and spill you into a zombie infested cellar? Maybe.
A17 makes me afraid of this game again, and I haven't been afraid of this game for about 900+ hours.
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Those early dog packs need to go. I can assure you, a lot of people who have interest in this game do not buy it due to such a cheap and stupid "challenges". At least the people i know. Especially as you can´t hear them until it´s too late most of the time.

Finally put early dogpacks for higher difficulty only. Can´t be that hard.

 
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Those early dog packs need to go. I can assure you, a lot of people who have interest in this game do not buy it due to such a cheap and stupid "challenges". At least the people i know. Especially as you can´t hear them until it´s too late most of the time.
Finally put early dogpacks for higher difficulty only. Can´t be that hard.
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People have been complaining about the dogs and the dog hordes for half a dozen alphas now. I've always enjoyed the challenges they pose and I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've been killed by a dog or wolf. The key is to be aware of your surroundings and always have an escape plan.

 
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