On the topic of loot rooms - what purpose do they really serve? I know one of the aspects is RPG, but I don't think an aspect is meant to be dungeon crawling.
7DTD is meant to be a survival game, right? Doesn't it make more sense to scavenge buildings, rather than go in expecting a loot room? I know some locations might have a main storage area, like a gun factory, or a bank, etc. But how many houses do you see in real life with every important item in a single room? Who's putting those Shotgun Messiah and Shamway crates in every house?
Consider it this way... if people are trying to survive after everything happens and they are barricading themselves in buildings and gathering whatever resources they can find, where would they put what they gathered? Spread out throughout the entire building? Or placed in one location where it's easy to access? What do you do in your base? Place crates all over the place, or mostly in one location (yes, you might place a few crates in other locations - gas in a garage, seeds by a roof farm, etc.)? If you look at most POI, it appears that people were barricading themselves into a location, so it would make sense (and be realistic) to have a main loot (storage) room.
Now, let's say this is real life. If you go to scavenge a location, some might hurry to find where the main storage is and gather what you can as quickly as you can. This just makes things faster so you're not out in a dangerous area for longer than necessary. Others might want to take more time to look through everything in order to grab as much as they can and are less concerned about the risk. I think the game design and how people play both ways actually fits reality.
If you want to instead not talk about realism and instead talk about gameplay... well, then you can definitely say that a single loot room in a single location at each POI makes it too easy to cheese the game. I do not think we should remove loot rooms and spread everything around the entire POI, though. A lot of players (maybe most, maybe not, but I'd guess it to be most) like having a feeling of having earned something worthwhile by completing a POI. A main loot room offers that. You already see people saying that T5 POI aren't worth doing other than just because you enjoy them. The rewards aren't worth the time. And yet, if a person were to scrap every single thing in a T5 POI, it would definitely be worth far more than a smaller POI. If they consider all of the loot they find throughout the POI, it would be worth far more than a smaller POI. But people often just care about what the main loot is and the quest reward. If they think it's not enough, then they feel that doing the POI isn't worth the effort, even if it actually is worth it. Removing the main loot room and spreading stuff throughout the POI has a
very good chance of making a lot of people who are willing to do T5 POI no longer do those. That's not a good thing.
So what are the other options? Random loot room locations is a common suggestion, and I like that idea. However, you are basically limited to having all the random locations near the top or bottom of a POI (depending whether you go up or down to reach the furthest location) or else you make it so someone going through a POI might be able to loot the main room without finishing the POI even if they follow the intended path. That means that even if it's random, it's still in a predictable location. And if you aren't using a purely random location, but instead random from a set of specific locations, people will just learn those locations and check each until they find the loot room if that's how they play. You might slow them down a bit from having to check more than one location, but they still aren't completing the POI, so it doesn't really improve anything unless you're just trying to cause those players trouble rather than trying to improve the game.
All main loot at the trader after a quest is completed is another option, but that removes the main reason to scavenge a POI without having a quest, so that's a bad idea. Especially for people who don't do the quests at all.
And as far as making POI into a more open format without a dungeon style... I like having some like that because it provides variety, and those can be fun if designed well. However, you quickly start to feel like it's the exact same thing every time or you feel it's even less worth completing clearing the POI than it already is. At least I do. There are a couple main kinds of open area POI. You have the POI that doesn't have any (or many) locked doors or blocked paths and you can just go anywhere easily. And you have the POI that has a lot of separate buildings that you can go through in any order you want. In the first option, you have to backtrack a lot. Consider an open format hotel or apartment building. Go into one room (that might include multiple rooms - bedroom, bathroom, etc.) and clear it out, then go back to the hall and go on to the next and repeat over and over. Instead of a path that moves you through balconies and floors or ceilings or walls, you're just backtracking. If they did add a lot of holes in walls and other things as they have now but without any specific path, you're still stuck backtracking because you're going to easily miss areas and then have to hunt down the room(s) you missed in order to kill the rest of the zombies without knowing where those rooms are unless it's the last group of zombies remaining. That's a lot of wasted time. I have done some of these open concept POI, and the large tier 5 ones can become very frustrating trying to clear everything because you can so easily miss rooms and then have no idea what you missed. I've had to practically re-clear the entire POI just to find some missed zombies. Acceptable occasionally with some POI set up that way, but quickly being not much fun if it's all you have.
Next, take the second option. If you have a lot of smaller buildings and you can just go through them in any order you want, it makes it far easier to find the main loot room and then there's not much reason to keep doing the POI. It might take you until the last building to find it if you're unlucky, but in most cases (assuming it's not only 2 buildings), you'll find it before finishing all of the buildings. There is a custom POI that I am using that is basically a small town with around 8 buildings, including a gas station. It is an interesting POI for the wilderness. But there is no path and I found the main loot room when I was only around halfway through going through all of the buildings because of how I happened to go through it. I did finish it because I wanted to see the entire POI, and I think a lot of people would on their first run through a POI. But if I were to come across this POI for the 10th time (or even the 5th), I might not bother finishing it once I found the main loot room because there's little reason to worry about it. In the end, it isn't much different from many tier 1 POI and I can do those all over the place and each one has a main loot room, making it worth more than finishing all of the individual buildings after finding the main loot.
Now, I'm not saying you can't have a lot of good and interesting open concept POI in the game. As I said, I like having them for the variety. But if you replaced most dungeon style POI with open concept POI, I don't think it improves the game. I think it just makes the game more grindy or cheesy... you either spend a lot of time backtracking and trying to find what you missed ("grindy") or you can easily stop without completing the POI once you go into the correct building to find the main loot, even if that location is randomized (cheesy). I think the best option is to have a mix of kinds of POI, but to still have most be the current dungeon style.
They could also make it so that every quest no matter the type is also a clear quest and the final loot doesn't spawn in until that final yellow dot marking the last area full of enemies appears and the loot spawns in with those zombies. They already have the functionality to spawn specialized loot that isn't always there for the infestation crate.
This would also "solve" double dipping for those who are bothered by it but can't resist doing it. The loot room treasure wouldn't exist until after the quest had started and all but the last area of zombie had been cleared. The other positive from their perspective is that they wouldn't have to go in and redesign hundreds of POIs.
If that spawns in your current room, it would look really weird and I think a lot of people would complain since they already complain when zombies spawn into a location that was cleared. If the entire room spawns in, then where does it spawn? Right in front of you, or in a specific location. If it's a specific location, why is it there then and not before? If you broke through into where it will spawn and it wasn't there but then it is after you complete a quest, it also feels really weird. I'm not sure that either option would appeal to most players. It might make certain people who hate the main loot room setup happy, but I think more would not like the immersion breaking element of this.
It also means there's no real reason to scavenge a POI without a quest, and those who don't do quests would never get the main loot. There might not be a lot who play without any quests, but they mentioned adding a game option to remove quests, so that might increase and making it so you miss out on the main loot entirely if you choose that option would not make sense.
I'm fine with using the random spawn functionality to place the main loot in a random location, but as I mentioned above, that has its own problems.
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