Apologies for being long-winded and pedantic here, but I get that way sometimes. You have been warned.
Right, so, I know I said I wasn't gonna post again, but we all know how that goes. I've had some time to calm down, and I'm going to try something different. I'm going to elaborate a bit on the reason why the specific idea of 'It's an alpha, you should expect it to change' annoys me. This has nothing to do specifically with 7 Days to Die, but is more a general trend I've noticed over the past 9-10 years.
When it comes to video games, the terms 'Alpha,' 'Beta,' and 'Early Access' have become basically meaningless. The only thing that determines whether a game is in alpha, beta, early-access, or launch is what the developer says. I've seen clearly-finished games stay in 'beta' for years because the developer realized the 'beta' tag was a great way to deflect criticism despite the game having launched for all practical intents and purposes. I've seen times where a 'beta' was obviously completely finished and they were just letting people play it a few days early (which I would call early access). I've seen games progress from alpha to beta to launch with no real significant difference between all three versions; heck, most of the mods even still worked. And I've seen the opposite, I've seen launched games that are clearly still in beta, or even launched games that are perfectly fine but get completely overhauled every few months as the developers can't seem to make up their minds what they want the game to be.
With all that firmly in mind, I've had to come up with my own definitions for what is an alpha, a beta, an early-access title, and a launched game, because otherwise the inconsistency with which the industry as a whole applies the terms makes them meaningless. Would I call 7D2D an alpha? No, it's too finished to be an alpha. Alpha builds aren't typically playable, or if they are, tend to be glitchy as heck. Is it early access? Not in its current state, but I'd argue that both A16.3 and A17.4 could have launched as-is and been respectable titles in their own right (though I didn't personally care for A17.4) and would have been early-access. Instead, I'd say the game is in a beta state. Not just a beta though, but a perpetual beta. It's the 'perpetual' part that drives a lot of my frustration here. From my standpoint as an average customer, having played through Alphas 15, 16, 17, and now 18, it feels like, to go back to the title of the post, the developers don't know what they want the game to be. Over the course of four alpha builds the game's whole tone, pace, and feel have changed to the point it's moved from one side of the open-world sandbox genre to the other.
I'm not upset at the developers for making the game they want to make. I'm not upset at having spent money on the game, because it's more than paid for itself. What I'm upset at are the dismissive replies I get from people who consider any argument I make invalid because 'it's just an alpha, you should expect it to change.' Because while I do expect it to change, I also expect those changes to be iterative. I expect it to move along a steady, well-defined path to launch, refining and improving its design through subsequent builds and alphas rather than change its identity every year. But I don't feel that it's not doing that. Instead it really seems, like several other games I've played and am equally frustrated with (some in beta, some launched), that there is no roadmap, there is no iteration, there is no plan. That may very well be because I don't have access to that information, or I don't know where to find it, or I never knew what the plan was from the beginning. But that's also why the 'it's in alpha' logic annoys me so much. Because the way the game is being developed right now, from my perspective, makes that look like an excuse more than a rational argument.
Hope that's cleared some stuff up.
