SinCynical
Refugee
Allow zombie health bars to be seen, with a toggle. Right now, I believe you either have to mod this into "survival" or what I do edit the XML yourself. I would be fine with this being added as a skill though.
Allow inventory manipulation during minor actions like reloading, which currently cancels the action.
Many POIs introduce early mechanics well, but are often remote, low-detail, and feel empty due to sparse buildings and foliage, reducing immersion. Rather than giving an apocalyptic feel, leaves the player lacking direction and questioning the game quality. This can be easily remedied by increasing the density of points of interest, adding more signage, and introducing new types of foliage.
Many decorations are not collectible but should be, like paintings, furniture, or lights. Collectability would enhance survival gameplay. However, there are other problems with the current "good" implementation of decoration blocks, such as certain plants being grabbable and fully customizable, which one might think is a good thing. However, I find this implementation of decoration blocks decreases the satisfaction of finding specific plants, as with just one, you could create any plant you really want/need. It eliminates the hunt for cool decorations to some degree and isn't preferable as a method for a survival mode. This is fine for Creative mode/Poi building; however, it would be preferable if you had to pick up and find specific decorations in Survival, with the only customization being related to minor color changes, such as on the bedroll. This could greatly increase the satisfaction of stumbling upon a decoration that seems perfect for your base.
Currently, the game uses weapon types similar to an RPG class, like a fire mage or something. However, unlike an RPG, this game really lacks progression in these "classes". If, for example, you're a pistol user, you only have 4 weapons that you will upgrade through. For a game whose main loop is horde-based survival, it can be quite boring that you finish strengthening your "class" in under 100 days. For good players, likely less than 60. This is more pronounced when some classes are objectively better than others, like sledgehammer being meta over all others in the early game, further decreasing weapon diversity, as of the four weapons per class, the earliest versions, such as with the pipe pistol, are so bad that you are likely not to want to use or spec into them. Lastly, with the current system, some guns do not look or feel like objective upgrades, even the maxed-out final versions still keep a damaged, scrappy look like the M60. You would figure the final weapons in these classes' upgrade paths would be some military-grade, nearly pristine weapon. Overall, each class needs more weapons, the classes need to be balanced, and current models or sounds may need to change to increase the feeling of satisfaction and growth.
Zombies lack variety in type, attire, and appearance, making early encounters repetitive. Additionally, for the zombies already in the game, more variety in their alternate materials would be beneficial. Another good feature for adding variety to existing zombies would be to have them spawn with already damaged parts such as missing arms, hands, or feet, damaged skulls, exposed ribs, and so on. I like that they are adding new "specials," like the Chuck Zombies. I would like for this to be a focus for zombies going further. Expand special zombie types and behaviors for more variety and challenge. Let a zombie wield a door as a shield and such.
When playing games that share the genre of 7 Days to Die, such as the previously mentioned Zomboid, two thoughts form regarding the two games. Zomboid is a fantastic simulation, but it lacks a good core gameplay loop. On the other hand, 7 Days to Die features an amazing core gameplay loop, where a horde comes after you every 7 days, growing stronger with each cycle. However, it is a drastically inferior simulation. This can really be felt in 7 Days to Die, as it affects many of the game's aspects. Often making it feel empty and unresponsive. There are no hotwirable cars or cars with keys that can be found. Nearly zero makeshift weapons that can be looted, especially in the early game, where they would be most useful. As an example, in Zomboid, you will likely spawn inside a house and hunt for useful makeshift weapons, such as bats, hammers, kitchen knives, an instrument, or, if you're unlucky, a metal pipe. Compared to early 7 Days to Die, where looting can be pretty uneventful, mostly consisting of crumby metals and seeds, with the occasional luck of finding food, but not much that would give you any wow factor. Due to the 7 days to die, loot stages, and zombie difficulty, you lose some of the enjoyable risk and reward that can be found in Zomboid. Raiding a police station for an early-game gun carries significant risk in Zomboid.
Zombies are infinitely more lethal and densely populated compared to those in 7 Days to Die. 7 Days to Die should offer a similar experience. With makeshift weapons often being found in houses, such as metal pipes and bats, I suggest making them more easily accessible in the early game, not craftable (at least initially), and having lower durability. Repairable through rare consumables like duct tape. Weapon tiered progression should be tied more closely to the map than to arbitrary numbers, such as loot stages. Local gun stores offering only small arms, such as low-tier pistols, shotguns, crossbows, and bolt-action rifles, mainly being empty, loot being hard to find but not impossible, due to the loot stage of that part of the map. Police departments offering semi-automatic rifles, large-tubed shotguns, and higher-damage pistols. In addition to military camps and bases providing the best or highest quality loot, they also present the hardest challenge. Having really tough, high HP, armored zombies that are practically impossible to cheese in the early game with map knowledge. Effectively, loot is tied to location, and loot quality is tied to the difficulty of the area. Both of which are systems already in the game that could be adapted to fit my system. It would be tough to rush a military base for strong early game loot day one if it already had rads, charged, or infernal zombies within.
Taking from Zomboid to create a system that combines Learn-By-Doing and magazines to integrate both comfortably. Skills are leveled by doing, killing, crafting, and such, with magazines providing experience multipliers for specific milestones and crafting recipes for advanced items. For, example there could be 5 magazines for each class such as pistols. Magazine 1 for the class gives an XP buff for pistol levels 1-20 assuming the system goes to level 100 for each skill. Magazine 2 could then give an XP buff for skills 21-40 and so on.
Many interactions lack an animation and this makes the game feel very stiff. This especially noticeable with your hand on screen with little idle animations or sway when your not implicitly taking an action.
I’d like to see gun parts reintroduced. If parts were extremely rare in normal loot and primarily intended for crafting, they could become an enjoyable progression system. Players could replace low-quality weapon parts by crafting new ones, with part quality determined by crafting skill. This would also help extend class progression beyond the limited number of weapons per class, encouraging players to engage with multiple systems such as crafting to create a “perfect” weapon.
The core loop of 7 Days to Die is the Blood Moon every seven days, yet in the current system it’s possible to play for hours without experiencing a horde night on default up to seven hours or longer. With 70 hours of play, this can result in only around 10 Blood Moons. I think there need to be meaningful changes to day length or Blood Moon frequency ideally shortening the day cycle to around 30 minutes. While these values can be adjusted in the settings, it’s unrealistic for a small development team to balance around countless custom configurations, so the default or “intended” experience should feel more tightly refined.
Players can fire weapons repeatedly in a small town without attracting zombies, or walk through neighborhoods or see down blocks of road without encountering any zombies. The naturally occurring zombie population likely needs adjustment potentially even a 3× increase. Daytime especially feels underpopulated, which can make exploration feel boring. This should also extend to larger and more frequent wandering hordes.
More world building especially on roads. Seeing, cars slammed into trees, power lines, or wiping out fences, and so on would be nice. Like an area with a huge amount of traffic swell where people abandoned there cars or died like seen in Zombiod. More military and police check points, or where there was clear civilian resistance and so on to help with the world feeling empty. Overall, the whole game seems to lack clear indication of actions of pre-apocalypse individuals outside specific POIs.
Due to the 10k character limit this a severely cut-down and imperfect version of my original draft. Losing roughly 4000k characters of examples and details.
Allow inventory manipulation during minor actions like reloading, which currently cancels the action.
Many POIs introduce early mechanics well, but are often remote, low-detail, and feel empty due to sparse buildings and foliage, reducing immersion. Rather than giving an apocalyptic feel, leaves the player lacking direction and questioning the game quality. This can be easily remedied by increasing the density of points of interest, adding more signage, and introducing new types of foliage.
Many decorations are not collectible but should be, like paintings, furniture, or lights. Collectability would enhance survival gameplay. However, there are other problems with the current "good" implementation of decoration blocks, such as certain plants being grabbable and fully customizable, which one might think is a good thing. However, I find this implementation of decoration blocks decreases the satisfaction of finding specific plants, as with just one, you could create any plant you really want/need. It eliminates the hunt for cool decorations to some degree and isn't preferable as a method for a survival mode. This is fine for Creative mode/Poi building; however, it would be preferable if you had to pick up and find specific decorations in Survival, with the only customization being related to minor color changes, such as on the bedroll. This could greatly increase the satisfaction of stumbling upon a decoration that seems perfect for your base.
Currently, the game uses weapon types similar to an RPG class, like a fire mage or something. However, unlike an RPG, this game really lacks progression in these "classes". If, for example, you're a pistol user, you only have 4 weapons that you will upgrade through. For a game whose main loop is horde-based survival, it can be quite boring that you finish strengthening your "class" in under 100 days. For good players, likely less than 60. This is more pronounced when some classes are objectively better than others, like sledgehammer being meta over all others in the early game, further decreasing weapon diversity, as of the four weapons per class, the earliest versions, such as with the pipe pistol, are so bad that you are likely not to want to use or spec into them. Lastly, with the current system, some guns do not look or feel like objective upgrades, even the maxed-out final versions still keep a damaged, scrappy look like the M60. You would figure the final weapons in these classes' upgrade paths would be some military-grade, nearly pristine weapon. Overall, each class needs more weapons, the classes need to be balanced, and current models or sounds may need to change to increase the feeling of satisfaction and growth.
Zombies lack variety in type, attire, and appearance, making early encounters repetitive. Additionally, for the zombies already in the game, more variety in their alternate materials would be beneficial. Another good feature for adding variety to existing zombies would be to have them spawn with already damaged parts such as missing arms, hands, or feet, damaged skulls, exposed ribs, and so on. I like that they are adding new "specials," like the Chuck Zombies. I would like for this to be a focus for zombies going further. Expand special zombie types and behaviors for more variety and challenge. Let a zombie wield a door as a shield and such.
When playing games that share the genre of 7 Days to Die, such as the previously mentioned Zomboid, two thoughts form regarding the two games. Zomboid is a fantastic simulation, but it lacks a good core gameplay loop. On the other hand, 7 Days to Die features an amazing core gameplay loop, where a horde comes after you every 7 days, growing stronger with each cycle. However, it is a drastically inferior simulation. This can really be felt in 7 Days to Die, as it affects many of the game's aspects. Often making it feel empty and unresponsive. There are no hotwirable cars or cars with keys that can be found. Nearly zero makeshift weapons that can be looted, especially in the early game, where they would be most useful. As an example, in Zomboid, you will likely spawn inside a house and hunt for useful makeshift weapons, such as bats, hammers, kitchen knives, an instrument, or, if you're unlucky, a metal pipe. Compared to early 7 Days to Die, where looting can be pretty uneventful, mostly consisting of crumby metals and seeds, with the occasional luck of finding food, but not much that would give you any wow factor. Due to the 7 days to die, loot stages, and zombie difficulty, you lose some of the enjoyable risk and reward that can be found in Zomboid. Raiding a police station for an early-game gun carries significant risk in Zomboid.
Zombies are infinitely more lethal and densely populated compared to those in 7 Days to Die. 7 Days to Die should offer a similar experience. With makeshift weapons often being found in houses, such as metal pipes and bats, I suggest making them more easily accessible in the early game, not craftable (at least initially), and having lower durability. Repairable through rare consumables like duct tape. Weapon tiered progression should be tied more closely to the map than to arbitrary numbers, such as loot stages. Local gun stores offering only small arms, such as low-tier pistols, shotguns, crossbows, and bolt-action rifles, mainly being empty, loot being hard to find but not impossible, due to the loot stage of that part of the map. Police departments offering semi-automatic rifles, large-tubed shotguns, and higher-damage pistols. In addition to military camps and bases providing the best or highest quality loot, they also present the hardest challenge. Having really tough, high HP, armored zombies that are practically impossible to cheese in the early game with map knowledge. Effectively, loot is tied to location, and loot quality is tied to the difficulty of the area. Both of which are systems already in the game that could be adapted to fit my system. It would be tough to rush a military base for strong early game loot day one if it already had rads, charged, or infernal zombies within.
Taking from Zomboid to create a system that combines Learn-By-Doing and magazines to integrate both comfortably. Skills are leveled by doing, killing, crafting, and such, with magazines providing experience multipliers for specific milestones and crafting recipes for advanced items. For, example there could be 5 magazines for each class such as pistols. Magazine 1 for the class gives an XP buff for pistol levels 1-20 assuming the system goes to level 100 for each skill. Magazine 2 could then give an XP buff for skills 21-40 and so on.
Many interactions lack an animation and this makes the game feel very stiff. This especially noticeable with your hand on screen with little idle animations or sway when your not implicitly taking an action.
I’d like to see gun parts reintroduced. If parts were extremely rare in normal loot and primarily intended for crafting, they could become an enjoyable progression system. Players could replace low-quality weapon parts by crafting new ones, with part quality determined by crafting skill. This would also help extend class progression beyond the limited number of weapons per class, encouraging players to engage with multiple systems such as crafting to create a “perfect” weapon.
The core loop of 7 Days to Die is the Blood Moon every seven days, yet in the current system it’s possible to play for hours without experiencing a horde night on default up to seven hours or longer. With 70 hours of play, this can result in only around 10 Blood Moons. I think there need to be meaningful changes to day length or Blood Moon frequency ideally shortening the day cycle to around 30 minutes. While these values can be adjusted in the settings, it’s unrealistic for a small development team to balance around countless custom configurations, so the default or “intended” experience should feel more tightly refined.
Players can fire weapons repeatedly in a small town without attracting zombies, or walk through neighborhoods or see down blocks of road without encountering any zombies. The naturally occurring zombie population likely needs adjustment potentially even a 3× increase. Daytime especially feels underpopulated, which can make exploration feel boring. This should also extend to larger and more frequent wandering hordes.
More world building especially on roads. Seeing, cars slammed into trees, power lines, or wiping out fences, and so on would be nice. Like an area with a huge amount of traffic swell where people abandoned there cars or died like seen in Zombiod. More military and police check points, or where there was clear civilian resistance and so on to help with the world feeling empty. Overall, the whole game seems to lack clear indication of actions of pre-apocalypse individuals outside specific POIs.
Post automatically merged:
Due to the 10k character limit this a severely cut-down and imperfect version of my original draft. Losing roughly 4000k characters of examples and details.