PC Why I find A17 tedious and bland compared to A16 (very long)

NO NO AND NO.

No mans sky was a disaster and got flamed to hell and back.

Result = DEVS LISTENED TO THEIR PAYING CUSTOMERS AND WORKED THEIR ASSES OFF TO DELIVER 100% ON PROMISES. Not only that but they're adding new features and content and the game is actually really good now.

Saying that "If only we said things more politely and we'd be listened to" is utter bull♥♥♥♥.

Mad Mole - get yer head out of yer ass, stop abusing the money we gave YOU and LISTEN to your paying customers.

Get a LONG TERM PLAN together and stop waking up and just deciding to change things on a whim based on what colour of cheese you had for supper the night before.
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No Man's Sky still isn't very good. I bought into the new hype of them "restoring" it and it's just still a mess. Quests are buggy as F. I had to go into their cheat system to reset quests.

And I think comparing 7 Days to No Man's sky is kind of moot. No Man's Sky was a complete and utter mess in the beginning. So the contempt people had for it is fair NOT just based on the technical mess of the game, but based on promises not kept. I have been playing 7 Days since the zombies were practically cardboard cutouts. Yes some alphas made things better; some made elements worse, but it isn't anything near the mess that is No Man's Sky.

Have you played it recently? It's still bad. I know bad is subjective, but when I have quest lines where I have to unlock blueprints and my damn scientist sits there twiddling his thumbs--I mean come on. Quests are basic to implement! The base building is horrible in No Man's Sky. It's very artificial and you can't even do proper slopes. My *(&)#$ base sat on a mountain like a box sits on a ball. It looked ridiculous.

What about the multiplayer aspect? When you find a paradise world and a friend joins you and it suddenly is infected with super-heated rain. Sometimes two players will be in one spot and one experiences hot rain, while the other has a beautiful sky. You're going to convince me this is a good game? Just because something was resurrected from the ashes to be a little better, doesn't make it good to me.

And gamers are extremely whiny. Why not a constructive approach? That's how I handle life. Seems to work just fine for me. Do you just scream about everything at your job and life?

 
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No Man's Sky still isn't very good. I bought into the new hype of them "restoring" it and it's just still a mess. Quests are buggy as F. I had to go into their cheat system to reset quests.
And I think comparing 7 Days to No Man's sky is kind of moot. No Man's Sky was a complete and utter mess in the beginning. So the contempt people had for it is fair NOT based on the technical mess of the game, but based on promises not kept. I have been playing 7 Days since the zombies were practically cardboard cutouts. Yes some alphas made things better; some made elements worse, but it isn't anything near the mess that is No Man's Sky.

Have you played it recently? It's still bad. I know bad is subjective, but when I have quest lines where I have to unlock blueprints and my damn scientist sits there twiddling his thumbs--I mean come on. Quests are basic to implement! The base building is horrible in No Man's Sky. It's very artificial and you can't even do proper slopes. My *(&)#$ base sat on a mountain like a box sits on a ball. It looked ridiculous.

What about the multiplayer aspect? When you find a paradise world and a friend joins you and it suddenly has superheated rain. Sometimes two players will be in one spot and one experiences superheated rain, while the other has a beautiful sky. Just because something was resurrected from the ashes to be a little better, doesn't make it good to me.

And gamers are extremely whiny. Why not a constructive approach? That's how I handle life. Seems to work just fine for me. Do you just scream about everything at your job and life?
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I think the point still stands though: NMS's devs were very humble and listened to their playerbase. TFP are the exact opposite: arrogant as hell. One of them straight up told a customer to "get educated" in response to a criticism.

 
Arrogance because in this society gamers get to scream and whine about everything, while devs have to bow and apologize. I see people always try to pull this off in life. They come at someone and then when that person reacts, they put the spotlight on the reacting person as always the bad guy.

Gamers get to have this weird unrealistic view of devs accomplishing anything and everything, or said devs are arrogant and lazy. Or don't care.

Yeah, I like my truthful people. If I see someone whine, and TFP push back and call him/her out. I love it. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I am the same way in life. If someone decides to come at me a jerk, I'll treat them like a jerk.

Attitude is EVERYTHING in life.

 
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Perks.

Everything is about the Perks. You want your Axe to farm more wood? Don't craft or find a better axe, spend skill points instead! Not doing enough damage with a Shotgun? No point crafting a level 6, as it does the exact same damage as a level 1 (!!!), spend points instead. Not only does this remove any joy the player had from actually finding decent guns or parts, but it also means every single copy of an item you find is useless, uness it is higher level than what you already have. Every single item. And there are only 6 levels. So on day 1 I found a level 2 Shotgun. This means every single Shotgun that is level 1 or 2 I ever find is now trader fodder. The joy of looting / crafting better items (i.e the entire mid-game of 7DtD) just got removed. Gun safes never looks so pointless and uninteresting as they do now.

Level Gating.

All the skills you want are gated behind a level cap, and guarenteed available once you hit that level. All of us will get our pushbike / mini-bike / hog / jeep at exactly the same level. Gone is the joy of looting the blueprint, or dealing with the interesting challenge when you haven't found a certain blueprint. The BP model made every run in the game a competely new adventure. Now it is going to be the SAME THING every single time. God that's bland.

Enemy Challenge.

40 years after the birth of video games and there are some people who still think that making enemies into bullet sponges increases challenge?!? No, all it does is increase the tedium of fighting those enemies.

No Forge Till Level 20

TFP, you have NOT made the first 19 levels more challenging. You have made them more tedious!! Now I need to use Stone tools for the first 19 levels instead of the first 3. Yay! This also means that the absolute VITAL item to find early is the Cooking Pot. If you are so unlucky that RNG doesn't give you one, then your first 20 levels in this game are going to be very very frustrating and PAINFUL (and tedious).
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Totaly aggree whit op here!

removing the fun whit looting blueprint and making it perk's is terrible.

recipe-blueprint should be books only. so we got a REAL reason to go searching. cant say it is so fun unlucking a perk vs finding the book i have been looking for.

also lvl loot is not good ether. why could my friend who have played more on the server find better stuff then me in the same spot? thats stupid and make it less fun joining new servers.

 
Seems to me that this thread shows once again people can't handle change.
Oh, a game is now more difficult you say? Boo-hoo.

I've been playing since A8-ish, and this is the first time the game is difficult. Period.

Do you guys still remember A16.4, where you played maybe 1-2 weeks, and then quitted the game, because there was nothing to do?
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Yes I remember A16.4 where I played about 2 weeks and then stopped. But I started a new one right away because it was FUN. A17 will be remembered as the game a lot of people don't play because they don't want to go through the tedium of hitting a piece of dirt and waiting, hitting a zombie and waiting, and killing pigs because you cant kill zombies without eating every 2 minutes.

 
I like that TFP don't automatically bow down as some of the posters are saying. It's good that a company actually stands up for their design. But what I don't understand is why stand up for yourselves and then turn 7d2d into every other game out there (I'm refering to making everyone choose a cookie cutter design, aka everything is gated behind perks), especially when it use to be so unique and allow the player to choice how they wanted to play.

 
Agreed. I just booted up A17 and immediately noticed the 1/2 second pause after every time I strike something. Punch a piece of grass to get some - wait a half second. Cut a tree with a stone axe - wait a half second after every swing. Did this for about 5 minutes and then quit after thinking about how much of my finite gaming time would be absorbed waiting a half second every time I take an action. Is there any way to alter some .ini files or something to stop that lag (or whatever it is - probably intentional). If not, I think there might be a way in Steam to go back to A16 but honestly, I'll probably just stop playing it until there's a way to fix that new feature, or whatever you would call it. If not, I guess it will be another year and we'll have A18 with a whole new set of good and bad things to deal with.

 
The way you might be able to go back to A16 is to stop opting in to A17e. It wasn’t an auto update. All you have to do is undo what you did to get A17e. Do you remember those steps you voluntarily followed?

 
we dont need back to A16 or A15 or A14 or....... we need 7 days to die back
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You can’t have it back yet. It’s under construction at the moment. It will be back soon. We don’t force anyone to remain at the construction site.

 
I agree with OP

Possible solutions:

- Gating....drop everything by 10....forge at 10 is tolerable, forge at 20 is beyond annoying.

- perks and item levels...I don't completely agree, though the issue is compounded by the lack of gun scarcity. Mods HELP but don't fix it. Possible fix might be to make the perks a bit more interesting (no one goes nuts over a 5% damage bonus, however required it may be for a playstyle), and to make more varied mods available at a lot more levels (level 40 to start making ANY mods? I can't figure out paint, or how to make my hammer a tiny bit heavier til then?)

- Magazines. make em longer...like 2 or 3 hours. Or make them a placeable world item that you can click to gain a 30 minute buff...1 from each stat, and allow them to go past our current level. I'd make the effort to hit my base's cardio book if it let me get better stamina usage without consuming an item for a day, even if i was maxed for my level...it wouldn't appeal to everyone, but it'd be a damn sight better than it is now.

- Enemy Challenge. I wouldn't mind this so much if the weapon hitboxes werent so garbage, and the zombies didn't walk in patterns specifically designed to troll you (spasm zombie, 4 stage head bob lumberjack, and mr. tan shirt and military man that take the widest possible steps, i'm looking at you). Biggest things would have to be to boost bullet damage, especially for the heavier hitting guns, and for god's sake if i swing my sledge in an arc, it doesn't hit only a tiny point!!! make the damned weapon swing and HIT a whole arc! Missing a horizontal swing with a sledge on a feral because the head shifted a TINY bit to the left is BS, and lethal in the game...its a garbage death that makes people turn off the game.

- POI mini dungeons. Yeah, make them make sense. Make them rarer. Walking into a normal, average looking 2 story house and going up and down stairs 5 times to 4 different floors through the most ridiculous layouts of rooms possible utterly breaks the immersion. Dungeon buildings should be a LOT more obvious...skyscrapers, worksites, the occasional house with a basement hole-turned-cave, maybe a few interesting commercial sites (video arcade?)....but not every damned house. Too many, too troll-y

- Death penalty....total garbage. You've already lost all your stuff and have to run to go get it. Now the game decides to punish you MORE, in a way that makes the game way worse to TRY to play....for a RL hour. Not to mention the excellent point of literally being unable to craft things that you already learned, or carry things you could before. F1 "Debuff buffNearDeathTrauma" was one of the first things i learned to do this alpha...Death happens (like the BS of missing a horizontal swing to the side because melee targeting is a pinpoint, or literally dying of unlimited falling damage because my guy glitched onto a knocked down zombie then fell off and died and gave me the "top of the world" achievement), and i just type that in. Without modding it out or console removing that debuff, any death makes me want to turn off the game and play something else. And often I end up doing just that. This just has to go...no fix, just remove.

- Stamina use...overland travel is ridiculously slow now, and with most trader quests being ~1km away, its in-game HOURS of running to and from a place...its garbage boring...speed up the player or drastically reduce stamina usage...for running and swinging gathering tools.

- Max stamina making good foods obsolete. Easy fix...add satiety. You keep your beloved mechanic, and we get to eat quality foods that KEEP our max stamina at 100% for a long time. The cooking perks and recipes LITERALLY say they "feed you for days" - just make that happen! Add a satiety value to each food that adds a delay before hunger starts degrading again.

- encumbrance. I get the encumbrance thing, and inventory management is a feature of MOST survival games, but the encumbrance penalty is pretty brutal, especially with the crazy number of tools a player is expected to bring with them everywhere...I carry 1 item too many and suddenly my already SLOW overland movement is even more monotonous...fun fact, almost every time I've turned off the game other than having to go (as in, I could have played longer if i'd wanted), was because i was bored by the incredible overland travel tedium. Reduce the movement speed penalty or reduce the number of items we need to carry around to feel even marginally prepared. I won;t lie, this isn't an easy fix, but something's gotta give, and It feels like it's gotta be the movement speed.

- Mining surface boulders. Actually, I think this is for any resource gathering...I think mining or chopping or breaking anything in this game is pretty tedious already, but I play on 50% block durability to alleviate it. The fix is already there, but it makes the already dubious prospect of defending a base even more absurd.

 
I agree with OP
- Enemy Challenge. ... make the damned weapon swing and HIT a whole arc! Missing a horizontal swing with a sledge on a feral because the head shifted a TINY bit to the left is BS, and lethal in the game....

- POI mini dungeons. Yeah, make them make sense. Make them rarer. Walking into a normal, average looking 2 story house and going up and down stairs 5 times to 4 different floors through the most ridiculous layouts of rooms possible utterly breaks the immersion. Dungeon buildings should be a LOT more obvious...skyscrapers, worksites, the occasional house with a basement hole-turned-cave, maybe a few interesting commercial sites (video arcade?)....but not every damned house. Too many, too troll-y
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These two points are very good. If you face to face with a stupid feral zombie and swinging a HUGE arc with your sledge you shouldn't be missing! Even if it you aimed for the head and they moved a bit you'd still hit the other parts of the body with that huge swing. Idk now many items in a17 I've had one or more ferals in my face, wailing on me, and I'm standing there unable to hit them because my giant horizontal arc missed a tiny little dot because their head swayed as the zombie swung.

The large sky scrappers were a great idea for the mini dungeons. Aside from those and the multi-building businesses, every building being a mini dungeon is just too much. It's interesting at first but it gets boring and tedious extremely quickly.

 
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The large sky scrappers were a great idea for the mini dungeons. Aside from those and the multi-building businesses, every building being a mini dungeon is just too much. It's interesting at first but it gets boring and tedious extremely quickly.
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Yep, pretty much just avoid the mini dungeons now, seen em, was fun for a bit. Now I just get to the roof, grab the cache and move on. Maybe will bang on wall outside to get the zombies to pour out because I have to kill x amount to be able progress through the game lol.

All joking aside, what was the development reason for moving away from natural progression? Has the player base been informed why, aside from the "we have a vision" statement? If not, that's ok. Just curious.

 
+1 to the OP on all counts.

The biggest issues for me concern the way you improve yourself. In a16 there were lots of different ways you could improve yourself -- developing skills, perks, finding schematics, fighting zombies, scavenging, etc. Most of those--except fighting zombies--are obsolete now for reasons that have been described, making the play experience much more uni-dimensional. I find it a little ironic because the new perk system is advertised as creating more options for pseudo-classes or whatever. But I felt like in a16 I could much more radically steer the character's development in a direction and divide up key skills among a party. For example, some people liked to rush quality joe, burning points in the scavenging skill (which helps in early game but costs you in late game). This was, or could be, very different from a crafting-centered strategy.

And while fighting zombies was definitely an avenue to improvement, it wasn't necessarily more helpful than building/upgrading or mining or scavenging. Now, in order to level up you need to kill zombies and that's it. (I guess the other option, after you can start crafting bicycles+, is to sell them for 200K to traders and level up like 5 levels at once, but I mean lol. Or I guess run around looting hundreds of birds nests, or my personal favorite, wait for your tree farm to glitch and then chainsaw your way to 300). I get that killing zombies is a key part of the game, but why make them the only serious non-glitched route to experience? There are lots of other ways to force you to fight zombies, and indeed a17 is good at forcing you to fight zombies. But why does killing zombies with a bow and arrow provide more help in learning how to build stuff better than, say, building stuff?

It isn't just the multiple routes to improvement, either, it's the more incremental routes to improvement. The OP has a great point about the midgame search for better and better quality items to workbench craft. When I upgrade my shotgun from 240 to 265, I feel like I've made progress. When I raise my mining skill from 47 to 51, I feel like I've made progress. Etc. Now, if I find a new shotgun, it's like I didn't even find anything bc the trader will only buy so many and there is literally no way I can meaningfully use that shotgun to do anything if I already have one.

So the level gating is whatever, annoying I suppose because it takes a lot of the strategy away and makes the game more grindy, but the real issue for me is how grindy and bland the actual avenues for self-improvement are. And every possible way to permanently improve your character outside of leveling up have been systematically removed, leading to the absolutely absurd temporary magazine buff.

I enjoy a lot about a17 but this issue seems like a deep structural problem. It also seems to contradict the things publicly said about the philosophy animating the changes. If nothing else I'd like a more detailed explanation of why they've done this--I think if they better express their goals, they might find suggestions that would better help them realize those goals without making the game blander or grindier.

 
+1 to the OP on all counts.
The biggest issues for me concern the way you improve yourself. In a16 there were lots of different ways you could improve yourself -- developing skills, perks, finding schematics, fighting zombies, scavenging, etc. Most of those--except fighting zombies--are obsolete now for reasons that have been described, making the play experience much more uni-dimensional. I find it a little ironic because the new perk system is advertised as creating more options for pseudo-classes or whatever. But I felt like in a16 I could much more radically steer the character's development in a direction and divide up key skills among a party. For example, some people liked to rush quality joe, burning points in the scavenging skill (which helps in early game but costs you in late game). This was, or could be, very different from a crafting-centered strategy.

And while fighting zombies was definitely an avenue to improvement, it wasn't necessarily more helpful than building/upgrading or mining or scavenging. Now, in order to level up you need to kill zombies and that's it. (I guess the other option, after you can start crafting bicycles+, is to sell them for 200K to traders and level up like 5 levels at once, but I mean lol. Or I guess run around looting hundreds of birds nests, or my personal favorite, wait for your tree farm to glitch and then chainsaw your way to 300). I get that killing zombies is a key part of the game, but why make them the only serious non-glitched route to experience? There are lots of other ways to force you to fight zombies, and indeed a17 is good at forcing you to fight zombies. But why does killing zombies with a bow and arrow provide more help in learning how to build stuff better than, say, building stuff?

It isn't just the multiple routes to improvement, either, it's the more incremental routes to improvement. The OP has a great point about the midgame search for better and better quality items to workbench craft. When I upgrade my shotgun from 240 to 265, I feel like I've made progress. When I raise my mining skill from 47 to 51, I feel like I've made progress. Etc. Now, if I find a new shotgun, it's like I didn't even find anything bc the trader will only buy so many and there is literally no way I can meaningfully use that shotgun to do anything if I already have one.

So the level gating is whatever, annoying I suppose because it takes a lot of the strategy away and makes the game more grindy, but the real issue for me is how grindy and bland the actual avenues for self-improvement are. And every possible way to permanently improve your character outside of leveling up have been systematically removed, leading to the absolutely absurd temporary magazine buff.

I enjoy a lot about a17 but this issue seems like a deep structural problem. It also seems to contradict the things publicly said about the philosophy animating the changes. If nothing else I'd like a more detailed explanation of why they've done this--I think if they better express their goals, they might find suggestions that would better help them realize those goals without making the game blander or grindier.
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I think it's an accident. Gazz didn't account for the burst XP you would get by doing all those activities on each level from 1-100, and simply copy/pasted the xp per block/item from one system to the other.

This is about the time (hundreds of posts over two weeks) when he comes in and goes "oh yea, that is a problem".

 
It's a game, different people enjoy different stuff. The prior builds were boring to me after a while. I'm loving the changes, the new POIs and the new challenges. I never starved or really got close. I don't want to spend all my time crafting, that's why I'm in a zombie survival game. Dealing with the zombies.

So I have none of the issues the OP does and I love the new changes and am having way more fun than I ever had before. Suddenly I can either do a stealth build or a range build or a melee build. POIs are interesting and useful and zombies are dangerous again. I'm not spending 90% of my time swinging a pickaxe in a dimly lit hole.

So who's fun is more important?

I'd say it's all the same and a good solution is some difficulty options to scale hunger/thirst way back and disable zombie digging and jumping and detection range and scale player damage up and such. Conan Exiles and ARK have systems like that and it allows players to balance the game to their liking and it's done wonders for their appeal.

 
It's a game, different people enjoy different stuff. The prior builds were boring to me after a while. I'm loving the changes, the new POIs and the new challenges. I never starved or really got close. I don't want to spend all my time crafting, that's why I'm in a zombie survival game. Dealing with the zombies.
So I have none of the issues the OP does and I love the new changes and am having way more fun than I ever had before. Suddenly I can either do a stealth build or a range build or a melee build. POIs are interesting and useful and zombies are dangerous again. I'm not spending 90% of my time swinging a pickaxe in a dimly lit hole.

So who's fun is more important?

I'd say it's all the same and a good solution is some difficulty options to scale hunger/thirst way back and disable zombie digging and jumping and detection range and scale player damage up and such. Conan Exiles and ARK have systems like that and it allows players to balance the game to their liking and it's done wonders for their appeal.
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You liked killing zombies before. Well guess what, they only buffed the XP for killing zombies. They seriously nerfed the xp for mining/crafting/doing anything other than killing zombies. You wouldn't know what everyone is moaning about, because it didn't affect your playstyle.

 
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