Alpha 17
Starting this forum post I feel I should preface this: I am not a hardcore gamer, I am not a developer, nor a modder. I'm just one guy who has a sense of what he likes and what he doesn't like. I purchased 7D2D Back in April of 2014 and have played it on and off, back when the the pistol was more of a low-poly placeholder instead of the M9 render it is now. I jumped back into the current 17.4 Stable release after dropping out of the 16.8 (I think) from 2017. I've seen enough and done enough to have a solid idea of the content available in the game.
Hence my question, and while I understand it's still an Early Access game and still in Alpha: Why the sudden reduction in content?
Now, I know how it sounds, but hear me out. Back in the series-16 release, I could build a dirt bike and drive for what seemed like hours, watching buildings, trees, debris, and the local riff-raff pass me by from the fog, never really caring where I was driving to so long as I knew that there was always somewhere to go. I could see multi-story hospitals, decrepit shacks, tents in the desert, military barracks in the snow, gas stations on the deserted streets.
I could build complex lighting systems. I could tweak the options of my world to be as barren as a dying mall or as full as Walmart on Black Friday. I could know full well my gaming rig wouldn't pop a processor because the occluding fog kept the draw distance low enough to ensure at least 30 frames per second. I could do so much, and still can, but I feel that although it is an Alpha, 17 took a step back.
I mean, I still like the game, and I will continue to play it, but this, as well as the fact that the game map is now painfully small with multiple smaller biomes... well, I feel I want to hear the reason for it, if any. I mean, shouldn't there be an option (at least) to have single-biome worlds in the game? Yes, I realize it takes place in Navezgane, Arizona, and as a resident of the same state I would imagine that should a zombie apocalypse happen (heaven forbid), I could walk through my own destroyed wasteland of a city as buildings came down around me just as easily as I could walking around north of Flaggstaff or even Globe when it was snowing.