PC Optimized
- Thread starter Kzuy
- Start date
Kubikus
New member
The only "conclusion" in my post is the remark, that 7dtd is in EA for an unsually long time. And without doubt is 7dtd in EA for an unusually long time. It's in the top ZERO-point-3 percent. Particularly when we're discussing "industry standards", it's a fun fact that deserves at least an honorable mention, eh.
Further conclusions might be that if you sell a game for seven years, some optimisation here and there feels expectable (and has been done, I guess). I'd also say that it's not unheard of for customers to wish that the devs should get it over with already. Instead of the n-th redesign, add the missing features, polish, optimize and finally release the bloody game.
Gazz
Fun Pimps Staff
That's a weird way of doing business. More like an "until money runs out" approach, I guess.
The plan for 7D is to finish it, release it, move on. Really old school...
Now players (who for the most part have no idea how any of this works =)) make up all kinds of hypotheses on what will happen and why. That doesn't mean it will affect development in any way. =P
The plan for 7D is to finish it, release it, move on. Really old school...
Now players (who for the most part have no idea how any of this works =)) make up all kinds of hypotheses on what will happen and why. That doesn't mean it will affect development in any way. =P
Kubikus
New member
They sure could get a bunch of monies from me with DLC. Additional biomes, prefab packs, weapons (same stats, just different models and sounds), vehicles, more zombies, animals, other NPCs, plants, blocks in general. Game modes. Not sure how big the market is for that, but I wouldn't hesitate for a second.
Of course it'd be a massive stinker tryna sell dlc before even releasing a final version.
@Damocles, this actually is the mindset which really harms early access reputation and indies long term.
you should aim for a release right from the beginning, regardless of state of current sales figures, and this does not mean, that you are not allowed to touch the game and extend it in the future.
You always can extend and develop it in future by providing updates, expansion packs, DLCs or something.
staying in alpha because of sales figures is just abuse of this early access system, and no, i don't say that tfp are doing this.
you should aim for a release right from the beginning, regardless of state of current sales figures, and this does not mean, that you are not allowed to touch the game and extend it in the future.
You always can extend and develop it in future by providing updates, expansion packs, DLCs or something.
staying in alpha because of sales figures is just abuse of this early access system, and no, i don't say that tfp are doing this.
While the definitions have eroded, a game in EA is at least honest about it not being finished (while released games that get patched again and again don't sound really honest). Since you mention Stellaris, wasn't there complaints recently about performance and AI ? And Stellaris released a patch just now to fix some of that ? Wouldn't it be honest then to add the years since release to get the total development time? :anonymous: . ( I'm only half serious, Stellaris has a different development model )
Now I don't really understand people who really want a finished game but then ignore the EA label. Or expect some limit to development duration just because some other games have released earlier. Sure, people can expect anything and complain about it, but is that reasonable? Finding 50 non-toxic mushrooms does not make that a law of nature, try to complain about the 51th being toxic.
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Kosmic Kerman
New member
Why though? Do they think someone is going to wave a magic wand and turn the game into exactly what they want upon release? People’s expectations about what the final polished and optimized version is will likely be disappointed. The reality is it will be like the current version but slightly better. Also, the game releasing means TFP will likely not be adding any major features to the game. The best part about EA games is that they evolve and change substantially during development and provide more replayability than they otherwise would. Keep in mind that a lot of people complaining about performance aren’t comparing 7dtd to other voxel games. Releasing the game won’t change it’s basic nature. It will always perform worse and look worse than most non-voxel games. That’s the trade-off for all of the options you have in a voxel game. Also, people can play their favorite version of 7dtd and not have to worry about the updates if they so choose.
alphaniner
New member
Given there is explicitly no guarantee that EA games will even be completed, expecting or hoping for completion in an arbitrarily "reasonable" timeframe indicates the lack of understanding is theirs. Why endeavour to understand a perspective not based in reality?
Granted, it's often necessary for producers to cater to immature or otherwise unreasonable demands from consumers, but it doesn't seem to me TFP are in that unenviable position yet.
alphaniner
New member
BobTheBard
New member
As one of the more generally critical people, let me try to summarize the position with less name-calling and insults than are typically thrown around.
I believe the fundamental difference here is progress. Are the developers making consistent, steady progress towards finishing the game? I can forgive a long development cycle as long as I'm seeing steady movement forward. So why am I critical when the game is still being routinely and regularly updated (after the long gap during A16)? That's because, not knowing the ultimate goals of the designers, I see a lot of the recent changes and updates as sideways movement rather than forward movement. The biggest example of this was, to point to a dead and well-beaten horse that we don't need to debate in this thread, the removal of LBD and addition of the stats-and-perks system. That was a huge change to the fundamental nature of the game, one that would have to be balanced, rebalanced, and re-rebalanced for a long time, and one that didn't ultimately make any progress towards getting the game any more finished.
Changing such a core element of the game this late into development, alpha or not, makes some of us nervous as we might interpret it in a number of ways:
1) The developers don't really have a set vision for what they want the game to be. A vision that isn't well-defined means that the game is prone to changing at any time and will likely never be finished because there's literally no endpoint. You can't call a game finished unless you know what it's supposed to be when it's done.
2) The developers have a strong vision, but no solid outline for how they intend to achieve it. This leads to a perpetual alpha as new systems are designed, tried out, and discarded in a seemingly-endless cycle and ultimately concludes in the game being trapped in Development Purgatory. It's like building a house without blueprints.
3) The developers spent a large amount of time making and balancing a system that was ultimately just a placeholder for a simpler, more easily-designed system. This is a troublesome sign because it's incredibly wasteful and inefficient to design such an intricate, complicated system for something you never intended to be permanent.
My personal opinion tends to sit with #2. I think the developers know what kind of game they want to make, but either aren't sure how to get there or had a collective change in design philosophy in the year-long gap between A16.3 and A17. I see a lot of new ideas being tried - the scent system of earlier alphas, the removal of LBD for skills and perks, the shift from wandering zombies to sleepers, the infamous homing architect zombie AI of A17, the segregation of playstyles, the addition, removal, and re-addition of schematics, the Behemoth and Demolishers, the dungeonization of POIs. All this speaks to me of a dev team that really cares about their game and has a solid idea what they want from it in a broad sense, but doesn't have a straight path from the current build to the final build. Whether that be because the path was never straight or because the final target moved, I can't say. That said, I think if a change did occur it happened during the gap between A16.3 and A17, since the dev team has made steady if staggered progress in a specific direction since the rocky launch of A17.
I believe the fundamental difference here is progress. Are the developers making consistent, steady progress towards finishing the game? I can forgive a long development cycle as long as I'm seeing steady movement forward. So why am I critical when the game is still being routinely and regularly updated (after the long gap during A16)? That's because, not knowing the ultimate goals of the designers, I see a lot of the recent changes and updates as sideways movement rather than forward movement. The biggest example of this was, to point to a dead and well-beaten horse that we don't need to debate in this thread, the removal of LBD and addition of the stats-and-perks system. That was a huge change to the fundamental nature of the game, one that would have to be balanced, rebalanced, and re-rebalanced for a long time, and one that didn't ultimately make any progress towards getting the game any more finished.
Changing such a core element of the game this late into development, alpha or not, makes some of us nervous as we might interpret it in a number of ways:
1) The developers don't really have a set vision for what they want the game to be. A vision that isn't well-defined means that the game is prone to changing at any time and will likely never be finished because there's literally no endpoint. You can't call a game finished unless you know what it's supposed to be when it's done.
2) The developers have a strong vision, but no solid outline for how they intend to achieve it. This leads to a perpetual alpha as new systems are designed, tried out, and discarded in a seemingly-endless cycle and ultimately concludes in the game being trapped in Development Purgatory. It's like building a house without blueprints.
3) The developers spent a large amount of time making and balancing a system that was ultimately just a placeholder for a simpler, more easily-designed system. This is a troublesome sign because it's incredibly wasteful and inefficient to design such an intricate, complicated system for something you never intended to be permanent.
My personal opinion tends to sit with #2. I think the developers know what kind of game they want to make, but either aren't sure how to get there or had a collective change in design philosophy in the year-long gap between A16.3 and A17. I see a lot of new ideas being tried - the scent system of earlier alphas, the removal of LBD for skills and perks, the shift from wandering zombies to sleepers, the infamous homing architect zombie AI of A17, the segregation of playstyles, the addition, removal, and re-addition of schematics, the Behemoth and Demolishers, the dungeonization of POIs. All this speaks to me of a dev team that really cares about their game and has a solid idea what they want from it in a broad sense, but doesn't have a straight path from the current build to the final build. Whether that be because the path was never straight or because the final target moved, I can't say. That said, I think if a change did occur it happened during the gap between A16.3 and A17, since the dev team has made steady if staggered progress in a specific direction since the rocky launch of A17.
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OzHawkeye
Community Moderator
You forgot to include one more reason.
4) The developers tried a mechanic out and upon implementation and community play testing decided they didn't like it and dumped it for a mechanic more in line with their preferences.
Since none of us can know the mind of TFP, none of us can say whether any or all of the reasons are wholly or even partly correct, or that the list of reasons itself is accurate and/or complete.
I agree with your distinction on the difference between sideways progress and forward progress, but assuming just for arguments sake that the changes to the games skills systems was due to reason 4 (and an assumption is all we could do), then what is a developer supposed to do when they find themselves in that situation? Should they keep a mechanic in the game that isn't working to their satisfaction? Should they drop it for an alternative mechanic? Should they be so gun-shy/omnisciently perfect as to not even ever implement a mechanic that turns out to not work well?
Quite apart from the concept of iterative development (which would largely invalidate many of the arguments against the some mechanics in the game being done and re-done), I'm personally glad that TFP have been willing to try out systems, even when such attempts had some chance of not working out. I'm even more glad that when TFP found something not working to their satisfaction that they were willing to admit it, and try again, rather than stubbornly say "that bits done, we're not re-doing it".
While some of the progress can be viewed as sideways rather than forward, overall the game has progressed forward with each Alpha (even my least favourite Alpha, number 17, has some advances over its immediate predecessor), so holistically the game is making forward progress (overall), and so long as it continues to do that, I frankly don't give a damn how long Alpha takes just personally.
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This implies 7 years not being reasonable if that argument is put against 7d2d, right?
I'm confident that the author of the sentence "I feel like saying that the game is in "Alpha" Is just a lazy cop out at this point, it's been in "Alpha" for years." does think that 7 years in EA is not reasonable. Maybe I'm assuming too much if I think he got the reasonable time frame by looking at other EA games and concluding anything above what he is used to is not reasonable but a cop out. (I feel I had to give at least one example in case you are implying the "people of yours" don't exist. But if they really don't exist and I'm wrong about this poster, even better)
We could ask him for giving us his heuristic for determining "reasonable" if you are interested. Or if you have an opinion about that, you could give your opinion on determining the reasonable time frame of early access.
I actually like BobtheBards argumentation, he is not bringing up years and simply saying 7 years is too much. Instead he is analyzing the progress and is bringing up indications that could point to 7D2D development not being ideal independent of the time frame. I disagree, but I understand his reasons.
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alphaniner
New member
Certainly not. The only remotely 'stupid' behaviour here is in how some folks - when confronted with the fact that their wishes don't seem to be influential - try to cast their wishes as being objectively-founded, or otherwise somehow more valid than the wishes of folks who aren't unhappy with development.
Vampirenostra
New member
You're absolutely right, Minecraft was a completely Java application which is a memory abuser, I can confirm that as a java developer. 7D2D is a mix of C# and a Unity Engine which does some heavy job. While the languages are really alike, the output and performance would be very different due to usage of Unity for 7D2D which was initially made for game development assuming all heavy load processes, where as Java was never meant to be a game dev language and possess no good Frameworks for such stuff as graphics and etc.
Roland
Moderator
Your perspective comes from your opinion that LBD, itself, was "such a core element of the game". I can tell you that the developers never shared that perspective about LBD itself. What they consider a core element of the game is player progression. LBD was just one possible means to that end. It was always "player progression" listed on the road map and never "learn by doing" other than in proposed documents for how to accomplish player progression. Knowing that it is player progression that is the core element it is more plain that the development has been moving forward experimenting with different designs and implementations
Also, there is a clear and steady decline of the use of LBD after it's height in Alpha 14 and a growing use of perks and points. People like to talk about the hybrid system of A16 but it wasn't always that way. It was much more pure LBD before that. If A17 had been a much shorter development cycle it would have been more apparent than it was. So if the use of perks and points was becoming more and more prevalent with each update that really does show a forward movement towards a goal rather than a floundering sideways shuffle because of no idea of what was wanted.
Now, of course, every individual will feel that some part of the game is core for them and there is no arguing against that since we all love what we love and hate what we hate. But from a pure development perspective from the developers themselves they never held LBD up on such a pedestal.