100% respawn, It hurts exploration. Without it, you’d eventually use up the close-by POIs, forcing you to venture further, take risks, and really explore. But as it stands, I can just go to a POI, loot it, reset it, loot it again, and cash in my quest reward. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it’s totally predictable.
You can try to turn off loot respawn. It may respawn during a quest but outside of that it would give you a reason to move around when combined with quest-caps.
And in the Pine Forest, where’s the sense of wonder? There are no interesting buildings that make me say, “Wow, I want to check that out.” It’s just the same T1 houses, post office, saloon, gun shop—over and over. Everything blurs together. So I grind quests just to unlock the next trader, or out of boredom. Even if I walk or cycle across the map, even though I know the biomes are locked down to keep me on the set path.
Why does endgame loot and the big cities have to be gated behind the wasteland? Why not have cities and towns of all sizes, scattered everywhere?
Why can’t a Dishong Tower pop up in the forest, daring me to try it at level 5? Let me bleed, let me fail, let me suffer and die and—eventually when I win ragged bleeding with no bandages or medkits, infected, broken bones, Standing on the roof. The sun coming up, wind in my blood soak hair, the fun the joy is immense and liberating.
I agree that the new changes have push the forest and burnt forest into simple staging grounds with nothing but small towns.
I think it would be good to have at least one city per biome or at least add more towns because there is far too much empty space currently and it doubles down on removing player agency by heavily discouraging players from building in those biomes.
The biggest cities being in the wasteland doesn't bother me as I can understand having some reasons to visit the other biomes and larger cities is a way to do it without preventing others from playing in other biomes.
Now some may ask that if someone is just going to turn off the option then why was it developed in the first place? And the answer to that is a resounding, "Because not everyone is you". While I'm definitely up for a more involved and thematically pleasing way to overcome the biome hazards, I can't any longer accept the biomes without their hazards. It would feel like enabling creative mode or something. So I won't be toggling them off even if you do. And for every 1 person who does toggle them off there will be anywhere from 0.1 to 10.0 people who will keep them on and so the optional feature is worth having.
I think generally you want to release new things that resonate with the public. If only 0.1 players utilize the update then I think it's safe to say it didn't reach the target audience. The idea is that by working with the community and listening to feedback you find ways to improve upon the systems you have in place while maintaining your vision over the game. I can fully imagine the biome badge system and smoothies being reworked as an example as it's fairly easy to do and is still within the vision of the game and is generally agreed upon by the community.
Leaving game balance up to player self-regulation/restraint is terrible because that ignores the golden rule of game theory: that the typical player will always seek out the path of least resistance, even if not consciously, and even if doing so ultimately ruins their experience.
Largely agree. While I think that the optional settings are good, I think the statement in general is true. This is also why I dislike the changes to the forest and burnt forest biomes that offer little to nothing to the player thereby discouraging them from playing there after they get the badges. At least the desert and snow biomes get a city, but even still loot cap needs to be looked at seriously otherwise it takes more from the sandbox than it receives from the RPG side of things and it's not even close.
I know for a fact from many conversations that the Hueninks value the aspect of the sandbox that allows players to do things in the game in different ways. Players can choose to play how they want. They can use the trader to purchase loot, or scavenge it themselves, or craft it themselves. They can double dip POIs or not. They can build POIs that exploit the AI weaknesses or not. They can walk along the border of the forest and the burnt forest dipping in and out until they've made their badge and never make a burnt smoothie or they can make a burnt smoothie. Maybe TFP will add actual options but I doubt it. They enjoy the story telling aspect of the game and taking a nice long and slow progression route and aren't tempted to play in a way to be at endgame by Day 30. They've made the xmls available for the community to create the options and make the game more sim-like and less arcade-like.
I think valuing sandbox elements is different than what has transpired. A lot of decisions lately have been antithetical to sandbox gameplay whether it be quests vastly outperforming scavenging, constant patching out AI loopholes, the skill book system, the progression toggle, etc. Now I won't pretend that I don't agree or like many of the new additions because I do, but I think actions speak louder than words and I think doubling dipping is more of a product of whether it's worth taking the time to find a solution and code it in without destroying the ability to scavenge at all. I don't think that is a product of saving sandbox gameplay, but one that would fundamentally make 7D2D a lobby game where you go from one quest to another in an open world of empty buildings otherwise.
The developers as far as I can remember have always had their vision. Sometimes that vison changes as time goes on and that is fine, but let's not pretend that sandbox love is at play with recent development cycles.
That being said I am not against the addition of RPG elements in a sandbox game and think that they offer a lot of good things to the gameplay loop. For example, skill books were a necessary evil to fix people bypassing large portions of the game and quests and dungeon-like gameplay offered a more challenging experience than breaking a side wall and taking out a sleeping zombie or three. I agree that the scavenging aspect could use a little love in that regard, but overall I think the change was a net positive. Patching out AI exploitation is also good as an easy and trivial game would be less interesting and we already discussed how players tend to go path of least resistance in their gameplay whether they know it actively harms their fun or not.
The progression change may very well be a positive change in the future once it gets tweaked a bit more, but I think currently it doesn't act as a positive support structure to the game for a lot of reasons already mentioned. Of course that could all likely change in future iterations of the progression system where they tweak and fine-tune the system. I personally think having the progression system is a good thing (especially since you can toggle it), but only if done properly.
