BUT games like ARK (yes totally different game and coding and stuff but I want the overall message) released steady patches without any savefile issues. Only time they wiped was when new areas came. And after 1-2 years they released a full game.
Ark, the game that developed a DLC while still in Early Access? Other games obviously have also some customs that are surprising to the players :cocksure: Is that better or worse than long release cycles?
I assume Ark entered EA when it was already developed much farther than 7days, to what degree I don't know. But it is nearly impossible that they could put out Ark from zero in only 2 years. If the lower layers are fixed (and it sounds like ark already did that before ever going into EA) you probably can avoid wipes much better. It may also be possible that the Ark developers took more of their development time to please the players, who knows?
One thing that really differentiates Ark and 7days is the voxel part. Ark's only innovation is on the highest layer, the dinosaurs could have been horses with nearly zero difference in development time. Ark is from a programmers perspective a very conventional game (AFAIK, I don't own or play it). They could practically take one of the available graphics engines and use that (and other middleware) in default mode so to speak. You could compare it to a house where the ground floor is already 80% finished and you just need to add the top floor.
7days innovation is bigger and on the lower layers. And that means that they have to develop their own solutions where other games just take what the graphics engine offers and they loose much more time experimenting how this and that works with voxels. It's like a house where they have to not only change the 80% finished ground floor but then also create custom windows because the usual ones don't fit.
This is my take on it. I could be way off. Maybe they really are slow and (probably) they really are somewhat unorganised developers. BUT arguably they are the ones who made this fantastic game, not the ark developers. It is like asking George R.R. Martin to write faster because Erle Stanley Gardner wrote whole novels in a few days and Stephen King writes 2000 words each day. So if it takes THIS development model for TFP to have their optimal output, then so be it.
If they really had listened to our complaints and for example made the buff rework only half as good or not at all they probably could have released A17 much earlier, but then we would be stuck with buff/2. And if you should see mods doing awe-inspiring stuff in the next months, remember that some of that might have not been possible with it.
