PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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Ok so Joel clearly isn't interested in discussing a Trader / Bandit switch but what about that shoe? Could we at least get a Red Whittled Shoe clothing item to wear? :)
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What the hell is that?

 
That's just the thing. To be a survival game, food shouldn't be easy to get. It also shouldn't be so difficult that the player does nothing but try to get enough food to survive but making food trivial takes away from the gameplay.
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If its so trivial, how come everyone was crying about it when we release A17? It wasn't trivial when you first started playing either. Its something you learn. We can't balance the game around your 2000 hours experience archtypes.

 
Yeah, don't delay it. It's only a relatively minor system. A bit of extra immersion and challenge, but that's it.
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I'm looking forward to it, but we don't want to half ass it, we want it to be good.

 
It wasn't to crap on them. It was just a part of a bigger balance pass that would need to be done. Food spoilage is off the table and we need a food sink/way to make it mean something. If you went with the crops randomly dying like you suggested then we'd have the same exact problems you just outlined. Too easy to get meat/food in every other way.
My suggestion was just a cog in the bigger machine.

Also, one of my favorite things to do in game and irl is to make a farm. I didn't feel I was taking away from the experience but enhancing it. Finding seeds would be exciting then i could build my garden so zombies couldn't destroy them. I'd work a little harder protecting my few plants like they were a pet or something.
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Thats fair enough. I'd rather work on balance than write new systems. Its just hard to make the right judgement call because I distinctly remember people starving when they first got A17 because they were unaware that knives were best, and it got even better with the harvest perks.

 
The potentially depressing thing is: the player may have gone through all those struggles for seven days to die.
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Dying in this game is good. To me it forces you to think about what went wrong, what you can do better, and you come up with a plan for the next time, and pisses me off so I want to keep going, build a better base, take extra meds, be extra cautious. That caution makes you feel alive. Pulling off risky things is rewarding. Its engaging.

 
If you want to give more importance to food, you should start with food and not by punishing farmers. It would be easy to change the recipes so that you need more ingredients to get enough food.
Many players don't even bother to create a garden because they can find food everywhere. That's where you should start. You should also give the type of food more importance. At the moment it doesn't matter if I eat bacon and eggs or a vegetable stew.

And what should not be forgotten is that gardens are also wonderful as decorative elements their own. Check out the latest videos from ZNation on Youtube. He built a gigantic multi-storey garden with a tree farm.
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My original idea was a food spoilage/preservation system I posted in general like a year ago. Madmole said no and then said maybe a system that kills your crops randomly. So what would be worse for aesthetics? Imagine ZNation made his garden then the crops randomly died all the time.

Others and myself had many ideas that started with food but madmole kinda shot them all down. What's left is the source of food. Which will just delay the inevitable of food becoming a non issue. At least with the idea I proposed it would feel like an accomplishment and not just an afterthought.

Edit: I admit my idea was drastic, but I just hate how boring it is to find and cultivate food. To me it should be exciting to find it and an accomplishment to self-sustain.

 
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My original idea was a food spoilage/preservation system I posted in general like a year ago. Madmole said no and then said maybe a system that kills your crops randomly. So what would be worse for aesthetics? Imagine ZNation made his garden then the crops randomly died all the time.
Others and myself had many ideas that started with food but madmole kinda shot them all down. What's left is the source of food. Which will just delay the inevitable of food becoming a non issue. At least with the idea I proposed it would feel like an accomplishment and not just an afterthought.

Edit: I admit my idea was drastic, but I just hate how boring it is to find and cultivate food. To me it should be exciting to find it and an accomplishment to self-sustain.
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I think some balance would help. I don't think its too easy to get a farm, unless you luck into a POI with 80 corn.

Nitrate is a fertilizer. We could make seed crafting require 200 nitrate, then its seeping into your gunpowder making ability significantly. Do you want to eat easily, or have ammo to kill these brain eaters that keep moaning outside? Choices are always good.

 
Well I might have said we'll never have diamond pickaxes, but this is as close as it gets :)

+Added: Diamond blade tip modification that doubles tool durability that can be crafted when reading one of the Art of Mining books.

 
Personally I wish this game would go back to how hard it was to manage food/water/stamina when A17 first came out. That and some more level gating would be brought back. As it is I haven't played since A17.1 cause the game just seems to me like it's being made easier and easier and rwg is getting worse. Right now it also seems way to easy to have most end game content by day 21 to 30 (and that's taking your time) then you're left with the choice to be bored or start over. Hopefully these things improve in the future but for now I think I'll just keep waiting and hoping for a better version.

 
Dying in this game is good. To me it forces you to think about what went wrong, what you can do better, and you come up with a plan for the next time, and pisses me off so I want to keep going, build a better base, take extra meds, be extra cautious. That caution makes you feel alive. Pulling off risky things is rewarding. Its engaging.
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This ^

 
Right now it also seems way to easy to have most end game content by day 21 to 30 (and that's taking your time) then you're left with the choice to be bored or start over.
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I'm on day 150 and I'm not bored at all. I have more than enough to do. My only problem is that there are only a few flat areas on Navezgane that allow you to build larger bases.

 
I think some balance would help. I don't think its too easy to get a farm, unless you luck into a POI with 80 corn.
Nitrate is a fertilizer. We could make seed crafting require 200 nitrate, then its seeping into your gunpowder making ability significantly. Do you want to eat easily, or have ammo to kill these brain eaters that keep moaning outside? Choices are always good.
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Getting a garden going is pretty well balanced in my opinion. It's not super simple but can be done given a little time and intent. The problem is that once you've done that, you never have to worry about food again. It's not the getting of the garden people are trying to offer solutions to. It's the infinite food source for no effort that results after you establish a garden.

I think we're hoping for some mechanism to make food always something the player has to be concerned with, rather than something that is only part of the very early game. As pointed out upstream, it's an issue with meat and eggs, too, because there's currently no food sink to absorb surplus over time. The amount of meat and eggs is appropriate for the early game but leads to massive stockpiles once you progress past the first few weeks, as you pointed out.

I hope that clarifies the point I was trying to make. I don't want new players to starve, or for the early game food gathering to become more difficult. I do hope that some mechanism can be introduced that prevents food from becoming trivial later in the game.

 
I'm on day 150 and I'm not bored at all. I have more than enough to do. My only problem is that there are only a few flat areas on Navezgane that allow you to build larger bases.
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This is great if you like building large bases but for players like me it's quite the snooze fest after about day 21 to 30. I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be just a base building game so I still hold out hope for slower progression and more end game content.

 
If its so trivial, how come everyone was crying about it when we release A17? It wasn't trivial when you first started playing either. Its something you learn. We can't balance the game around your 2000 hours experience archtypes.
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Long post, I know, but my 2c... You don't need 2k hours to learn the game well enough, even if it's one of the most intricate games out there, you need more like 20 hours tops. And the hours played, new or old player, won't make a difference to someone who genuinely enjoys survival elements.

The answer to why some people were crying at the start of A17 is that you will, as a general rule, attract the crowds you target. All these years there were zero real consequences you couldn't circumvent in one way or another. In A17 you added a direct way of your hunger levels affecting you - of course people would spontaneously complain. But, as far as I know at least, even then, most complains were about people not understanding the system well enough and very few complained for food compared to e.g. stamina. Not to mention that most people always react strongly to short-term changes and are unable to see long-term benefits. Just don't take anything at face value imo.

Most people tend to be like a friend of mine - rather excitable. When I introduced 7DTD to him, we often argued about our server settings. One example was me wanting low loot settings and him wanting high ones. It was a fact that he enjoyed high loot settings in the short-term, but very quickly got bored at every single of our playthroughs. After I was finally able to convince him to play on low loot settings (which he would never do by himself), it dawned on him that, even if he didn't enjoy struggling to get something, his overall experience improved tenfold and his interest didn't die out. It was then that "he decided to like" the game and it's that kind of player who will spread the word and leave a positive review on Steam in the end, not the ephemerally excitable player with the knee-jerk reaction to change who complains without understanding what he complains about.

 
This is great if you like building large bases but for players like me it's quite the snooze fest after about day 21 to 30. I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be just a base building game so I still hold out hope for slower progression and more end game content.
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I don't just build bases. If I need a change from building I also do quests. And with the amount of radioactive zombies in every POI, it's anything but boring.

 
Dying in this game is good. To me it forces you to think about what went wrong, what you can do better, and you come up with a plan for the next time, and pisses me off so I want to keep going, build a better base, take extra meds, be extra cautious. That caution makes you feel alive. Pulling off risky things is rewarding. Its engaging.
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Hopefully we will get to see a DP severity option in A18 for those of us who want a more punishing DP.

 
Getting a garden going is pretty well balanced in my opinion. It's not super simple but can be done given a little time and intent. The problem is that once you've done that, you never have to worry about food again. It's not the getting of the garden people are trying to offer solutions to. It's the infinite food source for no effort that results after you establish a garden.
I think we're hoping for some mechanism to make food always something the player has to be concerned with, rather than something that is only part of the very early game. As pointed out upstream, it's an issue with meat and eggs, too, because there's currently no food sink to absorb surplus over time. The amount of meat and eggs is appropriate for the early game but leads to massive stockpiles once you progress past the first few weeks, as you pointed out.

I hope that clarifies the point I was trying to make. I don't want new players to starve, or for the early game food gathering to become more difficult. I do hope that some mechanism can be introduced that prevents food from becoming trivial later in the game.
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Is it not possible to lower the ability of finding food/animals according to the gamestage? The more days you survive, the tougher the zombies get, the tougher it get to find food/animals? So at some point you have to really plan out what you're going to do.

I tought this was a thing a few alpha's back in some mod if i'm not mistaken.

 
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