PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

You are right. And the fact this is ok with you shows exactly how out of touch you have become with what sold your game in the first place.
There are a LOT if people who enjoyed mining. It was actually one of the main reason some of them enjoyed it so much. The fact it can be casually ignored now is for a lack of a better term sad. Traders replacing ACTUAL gameplay?

If its true the team changed between 16 and 17 Im going to have to go with A16 being 7 Days to Die 1 and A17 and Beyond being the game you guys wanted to make after 7 days. 1 Alpha too many I guess. Sorry brother, but I loved the ever loving hell put of your game, it inspired me to learn more about the industry and the work that goes into it, but I think Im officially off the hype train.

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Who are these players demanding Alpha be over with? Facebook? Better get to work on the console then if you are listening to them now.

I think everyone here would rather 5 more Alphas then watch the game they loved be ripped apart and become a former shell of itself. Maybe its not the players who just want to go gold already?

Its hilarious how you like to spin everything I say into a doomsday statement. I'm glad you are off the hype train because expectations are a setup for disappointment. So if you happen to like A18, at least it will be a pleasant surprise because you expect it to be garbage.

 

[madmole]

If you spend all of your time looting just to get items for traders, then you're not spending any time building and preparing for the larger horde nights. And yeh, whether you're mining above or below surface, if you're whacking something to get materials, you're mining. =)

By your definition its probably more like 30% then. I don't consider busting surface rocks or gathering wood to be hardcore mining. I'm talking about full on tunnels to bedrock with doors, supply chests, forges and 1000's of materials gathered is hardcore mining, and that might be 10%. I forgot what we were talking about though lol.

 

[madmole]

The emphasis put ontraders in the game, is what killed A17 for me, among other things. All you did was setup camp next to a trader along with everyone else. There was no need to explore..maybe thats why the maps were smaller..except to see a few POIs. I NEVER used traders in the game before A17. Now you had no choice. The choice in the game was removed and the player was handcuffed by the skill system. It became a constant grind which got boring quick. A huge letdown after playing all these years. The gameplay went off a cliff and has yet to recover...if ever.The game was great and fun. It just needed several existing systems to be finished, more content added and the Ai fixed.

Everything changed in A17...things that worked were removed and new systems were put in that took away choices and the ability to play your own game. It became too scripted and to me it became the same as all the others out there.

Maybe its time to move on..no other game has given me this amount of play time. More than Ultima Online and Everquest II combined.

But all good things do come to an end ...and to simplify a game to finish it and then call for the modders to fix it....even more of a reason to move on... the excitement isnt there anymore on both sides i guess.

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More doom and gloom. You and Jax should get a room.

 

[Minandreas]

So what was everyone up in arms over in 16 then? Just dont build pillar bases or use iron bar floors. Problem solved. Yet everyone lamented how BAD the AI was in 16. 17 is by far better yes, but I am hopeful that no one thinks the AI is complete and perfect because it isnt.

In A16 I lamented on how bad the AI was because zombies had trouble simply following me up a flight of stairs... Zombies are supposed to be dumb. I totally understAand that. But I'd like to see them as being basically animals. They want food. They will go after their food. And less intelligent than that is just boring to me... They couldn't even impart that fear of being chased/followed because you could lose them so easily.

And the whole using hatches to make an underground base bit... it felt incredibly stupid that a zombie could literally be on your tail, you could open a hatch and go down it, and then it would just be at a total loss for how to handle it. Even my cat would stick its paws under my door after I close it because it knows I'm on the other side.

 

[madmole]

As for mining and item quality.In A17 I rarely mine any more.

Why?

Now that there is no combining in the workbench, I have no use for all these tools I find while out exploring in the mid/later game so I melt them all down. I have no need to make new tools because without repair decay they effectively last forever.

Sure saves a lot of space in my chests compared to A16, because I am not keeping them to combine/repair old tools.

Now I have a virtually unlimited supply of ore, so long as I keep melting down my loot and as a result I have never had to dig a mine for ore.

Simple is not always better.

I would personally rather see the game be in alpha/beta for another 5 years than to see it rushed out the door half-baked.

Worse still, development seems to be regressing as mature features get stripped out and replaced with "easier to implement" in the name of "simplicity" to check boxes so that it can be rushed out the door.

By all means, balance and streamline the game, but do not piss on our feet and try to tell us it is raining.

I have worked as a Project Manager long enough to recognize last-minute feature/backlog pruning to meet a deadline when I see it.

None of the stakeholders end up happy with the results.

Being project manager doesn't make you clairvoyant. We're being responsible and looking at many old systems and trying to polish them up to something we can ship. Gold is probably at least 1 year away so nobody is rushing anything. We have a monster team now and are smashing things like crazy. Nobody is pressuring us we don't even have a publisher now that telltell is dead, and going gold doesn't mean updates will stop. It means the game is optimized and bug free and feature complete, but we can always add more updates.

 

[madmole]

If you were going to put in work on the appearances of existing items, I'd rather you put that time towards making the dyes look a little better. More hand crafted, not just shading the entire object.
But ultimately, I'm WAY more hyped for new toys than how the existing ones look. I am so hyped to C4 some zombies. I'd rather new cool stuff than tweaking the looks of the old.

Finally some excitement instead of grumbling. I might have the energy to read a few more posts....

 

[madmole]

Dying light does something like that and it sucks. You have X number of repairs based on the quality of the item, then you have to either scrap it or do a mission to reset the repair number. You end up with piles of "broken, but too good to be scrapped" items cluttering your inventory waiting to be repaired.
How about this:

What exactly was wrong with the way we had it in A16?

Repair the item in your backpack and it damages the item quality a little.

Or

Combine items in the workbench to fix/avoid the quality damage, but it is more resource intensive because it uses a whole item instead of just a few bars of iron/steel.

That already did exactly what you are trying to do.

It makes the workbench special again instead of just being a extra crafting queue.

Combine items directly and you can skip the step of scrapping for parts and then using the parts to repair.

And there is no need to invent a whole new class of "parts" for each item to repair it with, less stuff cluttering up my chests.

It was already balanced and working just fine.

You sure are making things more complicated in the name of simplicity.

Seriously, why did you change it in the first place?

Because crafting a blue rifle out of 25 rifles seems weird. Crafting it from 25 parts seems reasonable. Parts are the economy, parts can probably be the repair. We're still talking about it though.

 

[madmole]

Because we don't want to move on, we're trying to have an impact so that the game we love gets better instead of worse. You're comparing apples to oranges, I wouldn't ever have these kind of debates on a AAA forum because I'd feel it's a lost cause anyways. TFP have a history of listening to the community to some extent so we're trying to make a difference here.

Yet I say we're doing all these things to make the A16 folks happy but they fall on deaf ears and are blinded by losing one of 20 steps in the repair kit.

 

[madmole]

Please don't confuse, "want the game to be finished" with "want the alpha to be other with", those are two very different things.

No plans on stopping after alpha.

 

[youmaylose]

I don't get how some people have hundreds or even thousands of hours into a game they paid $30 tops for years ago can still complain so hard. I get if your not a fan of Alpha 17 dropping in and and throwing a complaint since the dev's are here and reply back. What I don't get is complaint after complaint from the same dozen people whom all probably have gotten more than there money's worth years ago.

I was an xbox player (not a great version but got my monies worth) and upgraded my pc specifically to play A17 & I enjoy it. If you play it correct it can get pretty difficult and even a few jump scares here & there. If you manipulate the AI or take the easy path to the loot area's in the poi's then of course its easy & boring to you. But it took you how many hours to learn those easy paths? I'm the guy that follows the dev lighted path and likes falling into those zombie traps to finally make it to the wonderful loot at the end & because of this wonderful loot the old school Working stiffs/Shot gun store ect.. are no longer needed.

To end with... I can't wait for alpha 17.3...18...19.. & gold it'll be fun for me, sorry to those whom lost hope (or as I like to say burned out after 2,000+ hours).

 

[madmole]

No matter where you land on it probably would be nice if all modification slots of a weapon were accessible independent of quality, but inactive slots being ignored and having a red background color (plus tooltip saying "Not working").
It would allow quality changes to a weapon (temporary or perm. degradation or upgrade) to occur and solve the problem of filled slots in a degraded weapon.

Even if not used in vanilla then at least a lot of different systems could be implemented by modders simply in xml.

I don't think I would want to lower the quality to the next tier and lock mods out. Seems like a bunch of work. I would rather see damage with weapon quality return and just have a fixed amount of mods, like 3 or 4. Then there would be some mod choice not just more is always better.

 

[madmole]

Will vehicle building still be a perk in A18, that one just feels off to me, maybe modding them should be a perk instead.

Crafting parts is an int perk, assembly is not gated by anything. Quality is removed.

 

[madmole]

What if these summer children can't figure out how to use a forge? Will scrap iron be the new repair material?

Then they live without smelting.. or perhaps die?

 

[madmole]

Any update to the Cotton , Chrysanthemum , goldenrod models coming soon?They just stand out so much now!

And you want us to dumb them down? Whats wrong with you players, you've lost touch with your roots !

 

[madmole]

Why do you keep pretending like none were removed? I don't understand it's a plain simple fact there are textures in A16 that are no longer there in a17 without even a substitute. Where's the ashhalt Texture? The metal pipe textures in A16 were just removed all together. There's 2 off the top of my head and there's more like some terrain textures and bookcase texture. The reason people are upset is these are basic textures that are commonly used and when you take them away with no alternative what are you supposed to do you can't make flat roads with blocks anymore for example. The other reason people aren't happy is most of the new textures are all the same bland dull mucky dirty brown textures that makes sence in the apocalypse to have lots of options in that category but there is no variety they're all very similar what's the point of the painting system if you have no choice but brown. I get there are more important things on the todo list but you could at least acknowledge it instead of denying there is even a problem. People just get frustrated with the little things those of us that care about things like this kindly ask you to please just have a look before dismissing the issue that is all. Thank you

So we removed 2 textures and added 50, and you feel robbed? We figured out a way to make all asphalt from terrain blocks so we deleted that, and made room for another useful texture.

 

[madmole]

My family and I (and I mean three generations) absolutely love this game. We particularly love to build bases! I would love to ask if the developers would consider adding more paint colors (maybe even just some base primary options) for more customization. I hope you don't change too much because of the overall game play because this is by far the best game ever. I am always telling my friends that they have to buy this game.
Thank you so much for everything.

I hope to get some more pristine textures for base builders to paint with so our forts don't feel like there is mold growing in there. If not a mod can do it I'm sure once we get to workshop.

 

[madmole]

I wont be changing minds here - jax put out a better argument than I ever could so this is his dead horse BUT I did think it was rather amusing that they stated they wanted simplicity and they got complex suggestions. My statment was a joke after all if that was not utterly clear. I don't think they are cutting things like this for gold as much as these were things they always planned on changing before going to gold and, based on the rest of the game, I cant really say that I think they are going to ruin the game. The crying from 16 to 17 just is not warranted even if some of the multitude of changes are not what some are looking for. The game is still a damn good game and most of the worst complaints are being addressed - the perk system, looting, craft everything etc. Some of these systems have become MORE complex over time.
I agree that some things are getting over simplified but before damming the ideas of the dev team I actually want to see it in place. Assuming that the replacement for repair kits was (because they realized it is to much work to change) going to be worse is silly without even knowing what they are going to do with it.

Finally, TFP are not idiots or a terrible dev team and as such they are not going to skip an entire phase of development. Of course they are not talking about beta - beta is not fun or interesting to the player base. Once that rolls around, most changes are going to stop entirely. What would you like to hear from them about beta? What type of statements would be of any interest at all about the coming beta process? Personally I like that they are not talking about beta at all - not only because it will not have much interesting to talk about but because I am still hoping that they are not going there any time soon. For my utterly selfish self, I don't want the game in beta because I want to see it change and grow. The talk about A19 when they were stating A18 was going to be the final alpha is good news to me

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New recipe for the final cure - 1000 steel, 100 electrical parts and the new uranium:

LOL thanks for the kind words and LOL on the cure.

 

[madmole]

I think that if people are paying attention they will see that from A18 and onwards the phase of development is actually a hybrid of Alpha and Beta. They are primarily bug fixing and optimizing and polishing and filling out existing features.
Is the "new" perk and book system something brand new? Not really. Just a re-organizing and fine tuning of the already existing system. With the amount of localization work he's done on it I can tell you he considers it the finalized product... I would say that Madmole's work on this for A18 could be at least as much considered beta as it is alpha. Even things like water and bandits already exist in the code and just need some polishing. Modders have been polishing bandits as best they can and including them for a couple of years now. When the devs turn their attention to it would it be considered a beta task or an alpha task since its not technically a new feature?

Maybe Madmole wasn't really telling stories when he said A17 would be the last Alpha. The last pure Alpha, anyway....

The perk books are a brand new thing and going to be really awesome. They bring in a bit of lore, teaching, humor and sense of progression that the game has never had before. Perks do too now, they have nice descriptions and catchy rank names.

 

[madmole]

Joel, have a small question: are new electricity awaited in Alpha 18?- remote control of doors, hatches and bridges

- remote start generator

- degradation of a generator, bank of batteries or solar panels with time or from bad weather

- random stop of the generator (if it has a small margin of safety)

- remote explosion of dynamite

- parallel connection of generators to increase power

- switch of the direction of current movement between two, three or more directions

- fuel sensors in the generator

- dependence of the power level of solar cells on the weather

- tasks related to the repair of generators or battery banks

- the effect of weather on the electrical network (lightning can disable the generator or solar panel, a strong wind can break the wires outside ...)

- may be something else... )))

Thank you)

You'll get nothing and like it!!!!!

 

[madmole]

So you were attracted to the game because of mining, crafting, and building but are now bored that you feel invulnerable? Seems to me that you are at the level now where you can mine with ease, craft the interesting recipes, and build with plenty of resources at your fingertips. If those three things are what you like to do then what’s stopping you? Not zombies. If one wanders down into your mine or your building area you can dispatch them with your invulnerability. There is nothing to stop you from doing what you say attracted you to the game.

Roland, the one who enjoys stirring the pot lol.