As much as I don’t like the “forever alpha” idea as a high level concept, I do feel that for games it’s probably a good idea. I think what hurts the most is seeing a game mechanic that I personally love (LBD and weapon/vehicle parts, player vomiting for me) get ripped out and replaced/removed and to also know it’s never coming back. I hope for this game that the “core”code/API that made those things possible remains in the code so modders can put it back (even if it is a great effort) once the game stabilizes and goes gold.
I feel TFP has always seemed to develop similar to “ok, we need a mechanic for things that can fly. Ok, let’s put in 1 vulture. Flying things...DONE) as they just want to get that 1 mechanic working well, and plan to either “flush out more models” at the final stages, or just let modders toke the wheel after gold to fill out the rest.
I feel that today the game feels pretty good “as is” even though I cry knowing what it could be, either removed mechanics and/or possibilities that seem just so close to reality (more zeds, guns, whatever)
one area that worries me (for long term survival of the game) is modding. I feel that the current and liklely suture state of modding will be sorta in forever shambles, specifically in terms of people being able to make and load mods and those mods working together seamlessly. Sure, lots of games have this issue, especially with community made mods, but I feel something like Factorios mod launcher needs to exist to really polish it for users as it will tell you what dependencies of mods are needed, or what mods are not compatible with your game version. For 7D2D I’m not sure even steam workshop will help us (even though we have an unofficial mod launcher, I’m talking about “official” things that come with the game) with mod incompatibilities, but a few “pre game start checks” and better error messages could help a lot as well as some real standardizing of the modinfo.xml file for game versions, dependencies, etc. to keep bad mods from being loaded and messing up games.
anyway, I second/third/fourth the sentiments of “hey, we’re still getting updates and support?! ” as a better alternative to being left with forever bugs and bad code. I do believe every time the game gets an update people who have moved on fire it back up and keep enjoying it to see what’s changed.
This game still sits at the top of my most played games list, unlike a lot of other games where “it’s been played out”. I kinda hope alpha goes on forever, so as I sit in a retirement home I can fire up a755 b666 and go “yay”