Please tone down the survival aspect

N

nihilness

Refugee
Hello fun pimps and others,

I started playing the game in 2015 with a lot of friends and played every version since. As much as I like to play this game, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with every release since then. When I bought the game, I played 300 hours in a year, with friends. However, since then, I have played only a few more hours on each major release to try out the new features and to be honest, I feel cheated. I have no regrets for buying this game in 2015 and for playing it for a year, but I would never, ever buy this game in 2020, even though there's more content.

  1.  I feel the game has lost its sandbox aspect, as it has become secondary to the whole "survival aspect"; the game has tried to move from its original idea towards another game. This is no longer the game I bought, even though I know that this kind of things happen in a game that is in alpha. However, the game has been in alpha for a staggering 7 years and the changes brought have been a mix of great/awful for every release. We lost the smell mechanic which was original for a bunch of generic indicators, based off other survival games, that ruin the gameplay. I feel the game has lost its originality, even more content has been added. But it's not the added content that bothers me, but how the core features have made this game feel like a chore when playing. I think that TFP should leave to the player more room to disable certain mechanics. It's no longer a survival crafting sandbox game, but a bad SURVIVAL sim with crafting/sandbox added to the side. TFP could totally remove the crafting/sandbox aspect from it, and the game would feel only slightly different at this stage.
  2. The competence tree is broken and a hinderance on creativity. The player is restricted to play a certain way, to wait to develop certain aspects. You can't be a knife/shotgun fanatic by using those tools, but instead you have to put points in the categories, which give you the same benefits (headshots, etc.). This again attacks the foundations of "sandbox" and is a bad "rpg" mechanic badly put together and slapped on top of previously working mechanic that renders it no longer interesting. Remove the class system, it's bad and incoherent and makes single player a frustrating experience.The fact that I have to buy the points to plant objects again takes away certain features from the game. It creates a false difficulty curve that prevents soloing to be viable, and the multiplayer experience to be frustrating, as the core mechanics that make this game anything but frustrating are scattered accross multiple skill trees. So to be able to craft early, you have to dump a bunch of points into intellect, but now you can't have a bunch of stuff in your inventory. Cool! Now I have to back and forth between my base with my tiny inventory. And everyone in the teams ends up multiclassing, which makes everyone average anyway.
  3. The heat system is annoying. Nobody gets hot in the middle of a pine forest. Nobody. I don't want to have to dump a bunch of points into survival so my character doesn't get hot in the middle of a pine forest the same way he would in the middle of a desert. This is both inconsistent and a frustrating experience to encounter. 


These are what I feel like pointing out. There's a motto that I think this game has violated for the last 4 years : if it ain't broken, don't fix it. However there are things that could have been fixed : bugs. The tons of them. This game could have been way more if instead of going through feature creep and changing what made this game stand out, the dev team would have fixed those bugs. The game is badly optimized, and the graphics, though not really staggering by their beauty, makes decent pcs lag. For instance my girlfriends plays the game with a graphics card that can easily run SW: BF2, Doom 2016 or even Wolfenstein - games that have assets worth 70 gb -; yet her experience is punctuated by bugs, crashes and lags. The game was being developed in 2013, so how can this be? The Unity Store-Bought Assets are clearly not the cause.

I know this rant will come out as intense, but the only reason I'm writing this post, is that my frustration with the experience is as big as my love for what this game was and promised to be. Please, Fun Pimps, go back to the old ways, fix the damn bugs, optimize the game and release it.

EDIT: reddit post: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/k7y9do/going_back_to_the_old_ways


 
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First a bit of bad news for you, the train has left the station. Nothing we say here will have a profound influence on the finished game which is in the wet-concrete phase at the moment. It will not be changed fundamentally anymore.

Maybe there is a solution for you though, because there surely exist some modders who are fans of previous versions. My suggestion would be to wait until the finished game is out for a year and then look for polished mods that might be like the game you want.

There are also two things I want to point out:

1) The heat system. Nobody gets hot in the pine forest if he wears clothes easily found everywhere (or even crafted once you found a few needle and threads books). Are you by chance only wearing armor and nothing else?

2) The implied class system in the game is very light. If you want to roleplay a knife/shotgun fanatic, just do it. You'll lose a little bit of efficiency since you will not reach 10 in 2 trees as fast as in one, but you gain being able to pick the best stuff from both attributes. You need about as much points to go to 7 in two attributes as you need to go to 10 in one. And 7 is enough to reach the second-highest level in nearly all perks. The first look impression that you loose if you go for two attributes is wrong.

There is no single perk you absolutely need, even as a single player. There are a few perks where it is highly advantageous to take just one point, like living of the land and the perk that gives you the forge recipe.

You seem to think that you need "Pack Mule". There are pocket mods you can put into armor AND pocket mods you can put into clothes which do the same as Pack Mule. The smaller version of the clothes pocket mod can be built from day one if I remember correctly.

 
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I'm having a hard time understanding this. The survival and crafting of the game has actually slowly diminished. If the sandbox nature of the game isn't enough, I don't think the solution is to remove everything else as to give the impression that the sandbox is more.

I don't understand how the removal of smell is an argument that survival needs to be toned down. That was a survival element.

I don't get the heat problem. Firstly because I've never been hot in a forest and secondly, if for some reason some part of the forest made me hot I would probably either change clothes or simply move somewhere else before I dumped points into tolerating it. On top of that, how does this make a valid argument? You have several options here and it can't really get more sandbox than that.
 
Pretty much the only thing I can understand is the comments about the perk system. It is very limiting and only logical from one point of view. I can't say that I hate it, but I've always thought something better could be done since it was introduced in A17... something that allows players to improve their characters in ALL AREAS for survivability reasons without committing to a build and weapons set:

  • A basic "Survival" tree could enhance all aspects of survival to a point.  The survival tree might enhance cooking speed and decrease recipe requirements overall to a point. The cooking tree allows a player to further increase this and specialize into cooking. But, each of the spec trees (Agility, Strength, etc) unlock recipes for special boosted foods related to their trees.
     
  • A basic "Crafting" tree. The survival tree might enhance crafting speed and decrease recipe requirements overall, but only to a point. The crafting tree allows a player to further increase this and specialize into crafting. Each of the spec trees (Agility, Strength, etc) unlock recipes for special craftable items related to their trees.
     
  • A basic "Mining" tree. Let strength increase mining damage, but also put some block damage in the survival tree and put some block damage while mining in mining tree. Throw increased mining returns into the Mining tree. For someone to fully maximize, they would need the basic Survival tree perks, the Strength, and the Mining.
     
  • For all of the skill trees, skill percentages could be split up. For example, health. In Fortitude, divide the benefits in half. In the "Survival" tree, you can increase your max health, health regen etc... but only to a point. You go into Fortitude to enhance it further. In Agility, the speed and movement benefits could be divided in half. In the "Survival" tree, you can increase your max stamina, stamina regen etc... but only to a point. You go into Agility to specialize in it and enhance it further. Half of the backpack slots are opened up in the Survival tree, but if you want to maximize this, then you need Strength.
 
lower or remove the "survival aspect" from a survival game?

that would be like removing snakes from the snakes and ladders board game? what would be the point?!!!!

 
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