A Nice Cup of Tea
Refugee
I play 7DTD exclusively with my wife and a friend of ours in peer-to-peer games, rather than single player or multiplayer on a public server.
I've mentioned before how we're pretty casual gamers and not exactly FPS experts. In that thread I talked about how we initially struggled with horde nights, but better horde base design made them easy.
However, horde nights being easy doesn't necessarily equate to horde nights being fun. So after having to re-start (my wife hosts the game and a hardware issue made her have to rebuild her PC and we lost the save game) I was able to persuade the others that we should play with horde nights switched off this time to see what it was like.
And I can't speak for the others, but I'm enjoying the game far more without horde nights. I'd recommend it to anyone who finds horde nights a chore rather than a pleasure.
The biggest change is that we're no longer having to "waste" half of our time gathering the resources to build and repair the horde night base. The base that we live in is a converted POI, but it's only a wooden house. With the right anti-zombie measures you can happily defend a wooden base from wandering hordes and screamers - especially in the early days - without needing to upgrade it to concrete.
We are slowly turning it to concrete just to be on the safe side, of course, spending nights swapping wood blocks for their flagstone equivalents then upgrading them, but only from the cobblestone and concrete we scavenge in our looting. We've not needed to go mining or make our own. I know that for some people mining is a fun part of the game, but we've never enjoyed it, so again the lack of a horde night means that there's a time consuming chore we don't have to do.
So what do we do?
Well, the time we save means that we can be doing quests almost every day and doing lots of scavenging. From an immersion point of view I was against the quest system when it was introduced, but from a gameplay point of view doing them is more interesting than just plain looting. And of course our gamestage progresses even though we're not doing horde nights, so we still need to be improving our skills and equipment as the quests and the zombies we face in them get harder. So we still have a sense of progression and we still have multiple short term goals to keep us interested.
In fact, having mentioned immersion, going without horde night definitely improves it. You're living from day to day in the same environment with zombies behaving in a consistent manner. You don't have this artificial change of game mode every few game days where you change from the exploring/looting/scavenging game to a tower-defense game where the zombies suddenly stop behaving as normal and instead have this super sense that always knows where you are.
So to sum up, playing without horde night is a tremendously freeing experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who is a bit more of a casual player rather than a hardcore player who struggles with horde nights or someone who finds horde nights easy but doesn't get excited by them. It radically changes the feel of the game.
It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's certainly something I prefer.
I've mentioned before how we're pretty casual gamers and not exactly FPS experts. In that thread I talked about how we initially struggled with horde nights, but better horde base design made them easy.
However, horde nights being easy doesn't necessarily equate to horde nights being fun. So after having to re-start (my wife hosts the game and a hardware issue made her have to rebuild her PC and we lost the save game) I was able to persuade the others that we should play with horde nights switched off this time to see what it was like.
And I can't speak for the others, but I'm enjoying the game far more without horde nights. I'd recommend it to anyone who finds horde nights a chore rather than a pleasure.
The biggest change is that we're no longer having to "waste" half of our time gathering the resources to build and repair the horde night base. The base that we live in is a converted POI, but it's only a wooden house. With the right anti-zombie measures you can happily defend a wooden base from wandering hordes and screamers - especially in the early days - without needing to upgrade it to concrete.
We are slowly turning it to concrete just to be on the safe side, of course, spending nights swapping wood blocks for their flagstone equivalents then upgrading them, but only from the cobblestone and concrete we scavenge in our looting. We've not needed to go mining or make our own. I know that for some people mining is a fun part of the game, but we've never enjoyed it, so again the lack of a horde night means that there's a time consuming chore we don't have to do.
So what do we do?
Well, the time we save means that we can be doing quests almost every day and doing lots of scavenging. From an immersion point of view I was against the quest system when it was introduced, but from a gameplay point of view doing them is more interesting than just plain looting. And of course our gamestage progresses even though we're not doing horde nights, so we still need to be improving our skills and equipment as the quests and the zombies we face in them get harder. So we still have a sense of progression and we still have multiple short term goals to keep us interested.
In fact, having mentioned immersion, going without horde night definitely improves it. You're living from day to day in the same environment with zombies behaving in a consistent manner. You don't have this artificial change of game mode every few game days where you change from the exploring/looting/scavenging game to a tower-defense game where the zombies suddenly stop behaving as normal and instead have this super sense that always knows where you are.
So to sum up, playing without horde night is a tremendously freeing experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who is a bit more of a casual player rather than a hardcore player who struggles with horde nights or someone who finds horde nights easy but doesn't get excited by them. It radically changes the feel of the game.
It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's certainly something I prefer.
