7 days to die... Yet another Zombie survival game

[Der Helm]

Just bought this sine I am on a zombie apocalypse game binge these last few days This one is probably gonna pop up on steam in a few days/weeks. 35$ for early access (Very early alpha).

So far it plays a lot like Minecraft. With Zombies everywhere. Which is like vanilla Minecraft I guess. Gameplay is sandboxish at the moment, you are just dumped into a postapocalyptic scenario and start to fight for your life. So far I have not managed to survive more than two nights in a row. Game is hard on noobs. Multiplayer is said to be a lot of fun, there are coop and PvP servers, have not dug into that yet.

Ok. Differences from minecraft.

Graphics: The game goes for a more realistic look.It does not look very impressive (animations are bad, textures are not great either) at the moment, this might improve when they leave the alpha stage.
Mechanics: A few things that are improve/differ from minecraft.
- Cave-ins are possible, depending on what you are digging in / working with. Different materials have different structural integrity. Not sure if players/zombies have weight that add to this, probably not at the moment. This makes for interesting situations. On my second try I barricaded myself in on the second floor of a farm house and during the night, the zombie hord decided to tear down the outer walls of walls of the hous which made the ledge I was standing on fall down into  a group of zombies who quickly dispatched me. That was really scary, because I could see it happen and do nothing about it.

[Der Helm]

Is there a character limit or something, my browser was spazzing out so I just clicked post without proof reading, sorry for that.

-Zombies behave a bit differently. They are always active and presumably spawn around buildings. During the day they are very slow, easy to avoid and most of them are easy to kill by just puncing them in the face. They will chase you and if you make to much noise they will decide to check you out from  a greater distance (At least I think noise detection is iimplemented atm). But, once daylight fades, they become murderous killing machines who move at least as fast as the player and a single zombie can make quick work of you if he catches you by suprise. And there will almost always be more that one zombie. Not sure if it is a bug, but sometimes this frenzy kicks in when zombies are underground or in houses. I got brutally maimed and murdered quite a few times scavenging for foor in a few cellars or attics.

-Crafting is similar to minecraft but different. You collect resources and but them in a crafting grid just like in minecraft, but the game looks at your inventory (not your toolbar) and tells you in a list what items you can craft at the moment and if you click it it at least tells you the shape of the item you want to craft, you only have to figure out what resource goes where.  And it saves a discovered recipe, so you can just click the item and it fills the grid automatically. I assume there are minecraft mods that do the same or better.

Anyway. I would be up for some coop fun and I promise I will not activly try to get us killed. 

[calapine]

You dual-posting goes awfully well with your Avatar. 

[Der Helm]

Great. Now I am creeping myself out, thanks for making me notice. 

[Cyrrex]

So, I bought this.  I have farted around for less than an hour in it so far, but it has a couple of things going for it so far compared to its competitors.  The first being that the shooter controls actually work and are satisfying (including the melee).  They feel right.  The second being that you actually are surrounded by zombies, and during the day they aren't super dangerous because they are so slow, but don't let them surround you.  Walking Dead type of feel.  I guess they get fast and murderous at night (though smartly, there are tons of options for the behavior and number of your zombie spawns, as well as how much relative damage you inflict and take).  Thirdly, the client runs nicely.  It isn't exactly beautiful to look at, but I can even pull out 40 to 60 frames on my laptop and is totally playable.  Things like Dayz and Rust I have to tweak and accept poor performance.

Kinda plays so far more of the type of "you will find weapons and equipment galore, but that's because you are going to have to kill tons of zombies", as opposed to the sparse empty environments where you are thankful just to find an empty water bottle.  Here you will loot tons of shit, but the danger will be more or less constant.

I have nothing more to say about it at this point.  The crafting may or may not be any good.  No idea about the multiplayer either.   

[Cyrrex]

Okay, a little more to say:  Found one of the little towns, and decided to buckle down in one of the houses during the night.  Had no ability to make light of any kind, but had lots of ammo and a few different weapons.  The house I decided to camp in had a ladder leading to an attic, and so it looked like a perfect place to spend the night, as I would only have to guard the hole in the floor leading up to where I was.  

I made it through the night, but I will admit that the game did manage to creep me the fuck out a little bit.  I tried to be quiet for the most part, but couldn't resist tempting fate a little.  At one point I even busted out the attic window during a lulll in the action just to see what would happen.  Well, it drew the zombies back to me.  The basically surround the whole house for the entire evening and just try to murder the shit out of you.  If you are good at getting into a game like I am, it is fairly intense.  I ended up totally running out of bullets just around the time the sun was coming up, and then had to run out of there like a bitch.  They are really on to something with this part of the game, and it seems so damn obvious that I have to wonder why the other games in this genre aren't trying to do the same.  I have the zombies set to "never run", because that is how I prefer them, but it doesn't stop them from being dangerous when they have numbers on you.

Despite being one of the least talked about of the zombie/survival/apocalypse games in alpha, I'd say this one may have the most potential.  It is pretty raw, but I think it may have a better foundation to build on.  I like the world in Dayz better, but their client looks and performs like dogshit and the zombie implementation is terrible.  The only thing Rust has going for it is that it is prettier, but the world itself is terrible and uninspiring, and again the client runs like shit for the most part.

Still, a big part of whether or not this thing will be successful is the crafting and building experience, which I simply haven't gotten into enough.  The shooting/zombie part right now is fun, but it will wear off quickly if I can't get into the crafting.  I want to take over (or build) a house and fortify the shit out of it, but at this point I am not really sure how to do that.  Will come back with more later.

[Fabricated]

It doesn't help that the original dev of DAYZ and the new DAYZ standalone ditched the company already to go do other things.

[Falconeer]

What are you talking about Fabricated? That's not true at all.

[Fabricated]

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/dayz-creator-dean-rocket-hall-will-leave-developer-bohemia-this-year/1100-6417925/

DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall has said that he plans to step down as the head of the popular open-world survival game before the end of this year, and will start a new studio in New Zealand.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Hall called himself a grenade with a specific use. "I'm really good at risk-taking and making other people take risks," he said. "I've always been good at that in my life. Like you say, maybe I've got the gift of the gab, so I can talk, I can explain something, I can talk people up to the ledge and get them to jump off it."

"But eventually, that's the bad person to have. Eventually, you don't want the guy telling you to go over the top and get through. So at some point I'll be a disaster for the project, at least in a leadership role."

"And also, I never intended to be here," continued Hall, who originally intended to spend a few months working at Bohemia as a break from the New Zealand army: he's now been at the developer for over two years. "It's kind of like cooking in someone else's kitchen: I don't want to be constantly telling Bohemia that this is how I do it and this is the way we do it," he said.

Hall said that his original plan was to leave Bohemia before 2014, but said that doing so would have been unfair to the community--the game has now been played by more than 1.5 million people. "I have to be on the project as long as it's important to," he said. "Whether that role is as the leader, whether that role is in a more creative sense... But at a certain point there will be diminishing returns."

"The thing is, if I'm involved in the project, I'll be fighting anybody on the project to make sure it's good, so for the rest of the year, I'm there. And I don't just sit around; it doesn't matter if I'm the cleaner or the leader or whatever, I will be making sure--I will be in Marek's [Spanel, CEO] office yelling at him. I'm notorious for it."

When Hall leaves, then, development of the popular survival title will pass to the rest of the team at Bohemia. For his new studio in New Zealand, Hall says that he's already cooking up some ideas--he has three ideas ready, and is working on two more.

So maybe not quite yet?

[Falconeer]

Yeah, not yet. He's been trying to explain his stance for weeks now, over Reddit and Twitter and the forums. He plans on stepping down around the end of the year when, he says, design will be pretty much over and someone else will be able to take over the wheel and keep up with updates, expansions and all. As of now, he is 100% on the project as testified by his constant very detailed updates on all the usual social outlets.

[Margalis]

It's still extremely shitty to take a bunch of alpha funding for a game then announce that you plan on leaving potentially before the game is officially released.

[Cyrrex]

Time for more stuff.  According to Steam, I now have about 12 hours of game time...probably more like 10 in reality.

My impression that the game is viscerally more fun than DayZ still holds true.  It is simply a better FPS in most ways that matter.  The controls are responsive and make sense, and the engine runs well enough to respond to the input you give.  Furthermore, where DayZ does a good job of putting you in a vast apocalyptic world were you are trying to survive in an empty, resource-poor environment, 7D2D kinda puts that on its head an offers more immediate fun.  This is not a vast, empty landscape where the loot and zombies are few and far between.  The loot is everywhere, and so are the zombies.  Where DayZ zombies are dangerous because of unpredictable aggro rules and sloppy FPS controls, 7D2D makes them dangerous in the more traditional sense...they are simply everywhere, and they are out to get your shit.  They will surround your dwelling and attempt to smash through the walls.  They suddenly appear in hordes.  Their blood suddenly runs hot at night, and you often have no choice but to buckle down in some dark corner somewhere and listen to all the creepy sounds, hoping they won't find you if you are quiet enough.  Your first day after creating a new world in 7D2D is often a panic filled scramble to gear yourself up enough to survive your first few hours and night.

Once that happens, then the dynamic changes a bit.  The crafting element starts to come into play at this point, as you figure out that you are going to need to be less reliant on the resources you find (as of now, loot does not respawn).  You begin to plan things out.  Need to make sure you have ample food and water.  You can hunt deer and rabbit, for example, but you can't eat that shit raw.  You can find dirty water, but you probably want to clean it first, and you definitely need something to carry it in.  These are not new ideas.  7D2D copies much of its crafting concept from Minecraft, and that is not a bad thing.  The difference here is that nothing is terribly easy like it often is in Minecraft.  You'll need to craft an axe and pickaxe relatively soon, and unlike minecraft, it is going to take you more than 30 seconds of time.  I won't go into specifics, but you can be assured that there are a few more layers to the process and that gathering the required materials is more difficult.  Getting your first forge made, for example, actually feels like a pretty sweet accomplishment (that is, until you realize that you have no molds to use with it), whereas something like that can be done super fast in minecraft.  What I am saying is that it feels more appropriate for a survival setting like this, and so far I am very impressed by it.  I should mention that I generally HATE crafting in video games.  I never do it in MMOs, I never do it in RPGs, etc.  I don't even really like doing it in minecraft a whole lot, but at least I can deal with it because it is so fast and easy.  

I have deeper yet to go in the crafting game, for sure.  My next focus is probably trying to figure out how to craft my own ammunition (because the supply is finite), and also figuring out ways to better fortify the house I have taken over.  There is a nice sense of urgency for everything if you have the difficulty set correctly, because you always feel that you need to get shit done before the sun goes down.

Still have not tried multiplayer yet.  I can envision that turning the difficulty up to about near maximum could make for a really fun co-op experience.

[Falconeer]

You got me really interested in this. I always was, but I heard from different people that it was very very raw and not worth paying for yet. Glad to hear it's improving fast, now I am considering to throw some money at it. The only thing I feel like saying about your comparison with Day Z is that it's not completely fair as, no matter how it is marketed, Day Z is mostly a survival/PvP game where zombies are part of the environmental hazards, like hunger, thirst and fractures, and the real threat and content is other people. This one totally sounds much more like the 3D version of Project Zomboid -which is great- than a direct competitor to Day Z.

[Cyrrex]

Yeah, I didn't intend to slight DayZ, because I like that game as well.  Rather, I wanted to show the contrast between the two.  7D2D is better at the FPS part, the zombie horde apocalypse part, and the crafting part.  DayZ has a much better sandboxy world and probably better PvP (where I imagine 7D2D is better as co-op).  And to flesh out that point a little more, DayZ's world feels more real...I remember being lost like a motherfucker, and spying some major power lines off in the distance.  Thought to myself, "hey, I bet if I follow those I will find a power station and a major town before I fucking starve to death".  And that works in DayZ.  Draw distance is amazing in that game, and also super important. 

7D2D is more of a random generated world like Minecraft with different biomes.  And it is raw.  It needs more variety for one thing, the graphics needs sprucing up (but the engine scales well, which is really promising, and also something DayZ reeeeeeaaaallllly needs to work on).  There are literally lines on the ground where you can see that the forest biome ends, and the radioactive biome begines, for example.  They also keep going back and forth between smooth terrain, and more blocky terrain like minecraft.  Not sure where that will end up.

So, apples and oranges.  I still think we should compare the two, because there is a good chance that the potential audience for both are overlapping.  And we should compare Rust as well.  Problem with that is that Rust doesn't seem to really stand out above either of these other two on any point.  It might technically be the prettiest, but it runs like shit and the world absolutely blows.

[Cyrrex]

This now costs about 25 bucks on Steam.  I consider that to be more than worth it even at this early point, but I should mention that I will get more than average mileage on these early alphas because one or both of my boys will play it as well.

Still, I'd totally buy this for 25 bucks.  I am probably going to buy another copy just to co-op with my kids.  That may be the saddest sentence I ever wrote, by the way.

[WayAbvPar]

Necro!

Picked this up at Entropy's urging with about 10 minutes to go in the Steam Summer Sale today. Played a few hours so far...it is damned hard, but very interesting. Would be fun to play on a small-ish server with several people I think. I don't know enough about it yet to venture out into PvP land.

[WayAbvPar]

8.7 now live


Nice to see they are working on the griefing/cheating. I imagine that the lack of a suicide button (to facilitate quick respawns until you find a preferred option) is also part of that, but it does make it annoying for everyone.

[WayAbvPar]

Massive patch for this today, including procedurally-generated random worlds! These guys really seem to be on the right track to making this a good game. It certainly has its warts still, but it is also a lot of fun.

[Cyrrex]

That might make it worth a re-visit.  The map needed some variety.  I also wouldn't mind a map that had to be discoverable as you play, but I doubt that's in the cards.  Or is it like that with this patch?

[WayAbvPar]

I haven't played it yet, but the in game map is supposed to include fog of war, so I am assuming exploration is part of it.