Post by WickedCrustacean on Jul 11, 2017 14:12:26 GMT -5
About seven years ago (how time flies), I discovered a game in beta that was mind-blowing in the degree of freedom that it offered the player. You could explore its massive open world, dig downward, build upward, and your imagination was the only seeming limit on your actions. That game was Minecraft. Since then, it went on to be released, sell like hotcakes made out of cocaine, and eventually net its creator a neat 2.5 billion dollars from Microsoft. However, while I saw it as a game with tons of potential for mature gameplay, its creator chose to take it in a different direction, turning it into a hodge-podge of juvenile entertainment. There was neither challenge nor point to it after a few hours of gameplay, and even the thousands of mods for it could not fix either of those issues.
Fast forward seven years, and I purchased "7 Days to Die", an open world survival game from an independent studio in Texas humorously called The Fun Pimps. A few weeks later, I have 75 hours logged into the game according to Steam, which makes it my 2nd most played game right now, after the massive Witcher 3. And most of that time has been spent on a single random map, which I am still playing right now.
The game lets you select the map on which you will play, with 2 options as of this time: the pre-made map of Navizgane, which is always the same, or the random map, which is generated on the fly. In either case, the game will take place in post-apocalyptic Arizona, following some mixture of war, disease, and a zombie outbreak. The random maps are immensely huge. I've seen estimates thrown around of 314 sq. km. I've been playing on the current map for several weeks (50 in game days), and have only uncovered an infinitesimally small part of it, even though from the in-game perspective, that area is huge. The random map contains various regions with differing climates, such as green woodlands and plains, cactus covered deserts, grand canyon style eroded cliffs, snow covered mountains and woods, rivers and lakes, and even wildfire burned areas. View distance is huge (although at far distances, object detail is lowered or hidden), and some of the vistas are breath-taking.
The game engine is voxel-based, which allowed for fully deformable and destructible terrain and objects. Unlike Minecraft, graphics are much better here, and everything is realistically shaped, not block-based. Much like in Minecraft, at the beginning of the game, you are dropped smack in the middle of the random map, with absolutely nothing in your inventory, and you naked. The very first things you do is grab some easily harvested resources (grass, wood, and small rocks) to craft some essential tools and equipment (stone axe, wooden club, primitive plant based clothes). Armed with these, you begin collecting resources in earnest, and crafting the first things you will need to survive.
The world of 7 days is like a grown-up, realistic version of Minecraft. Everything is significantly more difficult and complex, and there is a ton of stuff to think about. The game keeps track of your essential needs, such as hunger and thirst, and an overall stat of wellness. If you neglect eating or drinking for too long, these needs will increase, and eventually have significant negative impact on your character. Ignore them for too long, and you will die. In addition to that, there are also things like temperature and the elements. Work too hard in the desert, and you will get heat stroke. Stay too long in the cold without warm clothes, and you will begin freezing. Eat or drink appropriate substances, and they will heat you up or cool you down.
You think that's something? Then, there are things like infection, bleeding, diarrhea, and sprained limbs. Eat easily obtained foods like bird eggs or stale sandwiches often found throughout the world, and you have a high chance of getting food poisoning. Then you will need to find or create anti-biotics. Get bitten by a zombie and you can get infected, which will kill you if not cured within a certain period of time. Get cut in a fight, and you can bleed to death if you don't apply a bandage. Drink water obtained from a river without boiling it first and you can get the runs. Sprained limbs require splints to heal faster, or they will affect your movement.
Then, there is the main danger in the game, the ubiquitous zombie hordes. At first, you will only run into a few stragglers, but over time, as your resources and capabilities increase, the zombies will become stronger as well. There will be more of them showing up, and more often, and newer, more powerful types as well. During the day, they are mostly slow (except the dog zombies), and can be easily escaped or avoided. While they are relatively hard to bring down (shooting/hitting them in the head definitely helps), their slow speed makes them manageable. But at night, they can run as quickly as the player, and become a complete menace. And then every 7 days of game-time, a massive horde will show up at your doorstep at night, and sense you where-ever you are. They will come at you with all they've got, destroying defensive blocks, doors, climbing over obstacles, and if you choose to build vertically, taking out the supports to make your base collapse. The spectacle of watching 40-50 zombies gnawing away at your fort is something to see.
While digging and building is as limitless and free-form as in Minecraft, there are much more realistic constraints imposed on it here. Digging, especially with early, more primitive tools takes forever, and building also takes much more time and resources. On top of that, if you are not careful about placing supports, it's easy to overreach and have half your base crash down due to physics. General building involves frames, which are cheap blocks that can be placed easily anywhere and then upgraded to heavier, sturdier variants.
The sheer number of things that can be crafted and built is extreme. The crafting tree here makes Minecraft seem like a child's toy. You can craft an immense number of furniture pieces, cooking utensils, mechanical devices, traps, building blocks, and weaponry. You can also craft ammo and assemble modern guns if you find the recipes and gun parts for each. Some of the available weapons include a 9mm pistol, regular and sawed-off shotguns, hunting rifle, .44 magnum revolver, a sub-machine gun, ak-47, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher. The parts and recipes are hard to find though, and they do degrade over time, so you might still have to rely quite a bit on more easily manufactured old-school weaponry such as sledgehammers, bows, and crossbows.
Another really cool aspect of the game is exploration and scavenging. As part of random world generation, the game creates all sorts of places of interest throughout the world. An abandoned town, a military base, log cabins by the side of highways, gas stations, trader posts, and caves are just some of the ones I've seen so far in my games. These things are interesting on their own, but mostly because they contain all sorts of useful stuff you will need to scavenge and return to your base. Stores and and trailers contain safes or gun lockers with valuable gun parts. Refrigerators and stoves can be taken apart to get parts you need for crafting. Attics might contain corpses of people who hid in them, and might carry valuables as well. Bookcases contain all sorts of books and recipes needed to learn new stuff. And of course you can always turn any of these pre-made houses or buildings into a defensive base by fortifying them. Just make sure to have a safe place by nighttime and don't make a lot of noise there. The zombies have a very good sense of hearing.
Your character has RPG-like skills in every possible area, from gun-smithing and pistols to scavenging and athletics. As you gain levels (by killing zombies or crafting stuff), you get points to distribute on those skills. Eventually, you can become quite the powerhouse, although nothing that 60 zombies can't handle, should they get their paws on you. There is also a bare-bones quest system in the game, with quests ranging from treasure hunts to eliminating specific types of zombies. Tracking down a treasure mark on the map, and then digging around there is fun, and whatever you find can be quite valuable. Occasionally, airplanes from survivors (presumably) will fly by, dropping boxes with survival supplies, which you have to track down.
As you keep playing and surviving, you will eventually go from the bare basics to more sophisticated stuff. At some point, you can generate electricity, and use it to create more complex base, lighting and traps. There is already a craftable vehicle in the game, a fuel powered mini-bike, which I haven't gotten even close to making. But one of those most exciting things is that despite this already being a very playable, fun and feature filled game, it's still in early access, and there are all kinds of ideas being thrown around by the devs on their forums, from bandits to friendly NPCs, to more sophisticated zombie AI, to more vehicles. I hope they get to implement all of those things, and many more, but even without them, I am enjoying this game quite a bit.
After playing a bunch of modern games recently (since getting my new computer), I have to say most of them have disappointed me. They hold the player like a cage, tell them exactly where to go and what to do, and take all the fun out out of gaming. 7 Days to Die, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of that. It drops you down in the world, and gets out of your way, letting you do whatever you want within its vast and sophisticated sandbox. It's difficult, and free, and the mistakes that you are guaranteed to make are guaranteed to be fun. It's a hell of a game.
Fast forward seven years, and I purchased "7 Days to Die", an open world survival game from an independent studio in Texas humorously called The Fun Pimps. A few weeks later, I have 75 hours logged into the game according to Steam, which makes it my 2nd most played game right now, after the massive Witcher 3. And most of that time has been spent on a single random map, which I am still playing right now.
The game lets you select the map on which you will play, with 2 options as of this time: the pre-made map of Navizgane, which is always the same, or the random map, which is generated on the fly. In either case, the game will take place in post-apocalyptic Arizona, following some mixture of war, disease, and a zombie outbreak. The random maps are immensely huge. I've seen estimates thrown around of 314 sq. km. I've been playing on the current map for several weeks (50 in game days), and have only uncovered an infinitesimally small part of it, even though from the in-game perspective, that area is huge. The random map contains various regions with differing climates, such as green woodlands and plains, cactus covered deserts, grand canyon style eroded cliffs, snow covered mountains and woods, rivers and lakes, and even wildfire burned areas. View distance is huge (although at far distances, object detail is lowered or hidden), and some of the vistas are breath-taking.
The game engine is voxel-based, which allowed for fully deformable and destructible terrain and objects. Unlike Minecraft, graphics are much better here, and everything is realistically shaped, not block-based. Much like in Minecraft, at the beginning of the game, you are dropped smack in the middle of the random map, with absolutely nothing in your inventory, and you naked. The very first things you do is grab some easily harvested resources (grass, wood, and small rocks) to craft some essential tools and equipment (stone axe, wooden club, primitive plant based clothes). Armed with these, you begin collecting resources in earnest, and crafting the first things you will need to survive.
The world of 7 days is like a grown-up, realistic version of Minecraft. Everything is significantly more difficult and complex, and there is a ton of stuff to think about. The game keeps track of your essential needs, such as hunger and thirst, and an overall stat of wellness. If you neglect eating or drinking for too long, these needs will increase, and eventually have significant negative impact on your character. Ignore them for too long, and you will die. In addition to that, there are also things like temperature and the elements. Work too hard in the desert, and you will get heat stroke. Stay too long in the cold without warm clothes, and you will begin freezing. Eat or drink appropriate substances, and they will heat you up or cool you down.
You think that's something? Then, there are things like infection, bleeding, diarrhea, and sprained limbs. Eat easily obtained foods like bird eggs or stale sandwiches often found throughout the world, and you have a high chance of getting food poisoning. Then you will need to find or create anti-biotics. Get bitten by a zombie and you can get infected, which will kill you if not cured within a certain period of time. Get cut in a fight, and you can bleed to death if you don't apply a bandage. Drink water obtained from a river without boiling it first and you can get the runs. Sprained limbs require splints to heal faster, or they will affect your movement.
Then, there is the main danger in the game, the ubiquitous zombie hordes. At first, you will only run into a few stragglers, but over time, as your resources and capabilities increase, the zombies will become stronger as well. There will be more of them showing up, and more often, and newer, more powerful types as well. During the day, they are mostly slow (except the dog zombies), and can be easily escaped or avoided. While they are relatively hard to bring down (shooting/hitting them in the head definitely helps), their slow speed makes them manageable. But at night, they can run as quickly as the player, and become a complete menace. And then every 7 days of game-time, a massive horde will show up at your doorstep at night, and sense you where-ever you are. They will come at you with all they've got, destroying defensive blocks, doors, climbing over obstacles, and if you choose to build vertically, taking out the supports to make your base collapse. The spectacle of watching 40-50 zombies gnawing away at your fort is something to see.
While digging and building is as limitless and free-form as in Minecraft, there are much more realistic constraints imposed on it here. Digging, especially with early, more primitive tools takes forever, and building also takes much more time and resources. On top of that, if you are not careful about placing supports, it's easy to overreach and have half your base crash down due to physics. General building involves frames, which are cheap blocks that can be placed easily anywhere and then upgraded to heavier, sturdier variants.
The sheer number of things that can be crafted and built is extreme. The crafting tree here makes Minecraft seem like a child's toy. You can craft an immense number of furniture pieces, cooking utensils, mechanical devices, traps, building blocks, and weaponry. You can also craft ammo and assemble modern guns if you find the recipes and gun parts for each. Some of the available weapons include a 9mm pistol, regular and sawed-off shotguns, hunting rifle, .44 magnum revolver, a sub-machine gun, ak-47, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher. The parts and recipes are hard to find though, and they do degrade over time, so you might still have to rely quite a bit on more easily manufactured old-school weaponry such as sledgehammers, bows, and crossbows.
Another really cool aspect of the game is exploration and scavenging. As part of random world generation, the game creates all sorts of places of interest throughout the world. An abandoned town, a military base, log cabins by the side of highways, gas stations, trader posts, and caves are just some of the ones I've seen so far in my games. These things are interesting on their own, but mostly because they contain all sorts of useful stuff you will need to scavenge and return to your base. Stores and and trailers contain safes or gun lockers with valuable gun parts. Refrigerators and stoves can be taken apart to get parts you need for crafting. Attics might contain corpses of people who hid in them, and might carry valuables as well. Bookcases contain all sorts of books and recipes needed to learn new stuff. And of course you can always turn any of these pre-made houses or buildings into a defensive base by fortifying them. Just make sure to have a safe place by nighttime and don't make a lot of noise there. The zombies have a very good sense of hearing.
Your character has RPG-like skills in every possible area, from gun-smithing and pistols to scavenging and athletics. As you gain levels (by killing zombies or crafting stuff), you get points to distribute on those skills. Eventually, you can become quite the powerhouse, although nothing that 60 zombies can't handle, should they get their paws on you. There is also a bare-bones quest system in the game, with quests ranging from treasure hunts to eliminating specific types of zombies. Tracking down a treasure mark on the map, and then digging around there is fun, and whatever you find can be quite valuable. Occasionally, airplanes from survivors (presumably) will fly by, dropping boxes with survival supplies, which you have to track down.
As you keep playing and surviving, you will eventually go from the bare basics to more sophisticated stuff. At some point, you can generate electricity, and use it to create more complex base, lighting and traps. There is already a craftable vehicle in the game, a fuel powered mini-bike, which I haven't gotten even close to making. But one of those most exciting things is that despite this already being a very playable, fun and feature filled game, it's still in early access, and there are all kinds of ideas being thrown around by the devs on their forums, from bandits to friendly NPCs, to more sophisticated zombie AI, to more vehicles. I hope they get to implement all of those things, and many more, but even without them, I am enjoying this game quite a bit.
After playing a bunch of modern games recently (since getting my new computer), I have to say most of them have disappointed me. They hold the player like a cage, tell them exactly where to go and what to do, and take all the fun out out of gaming. 7 Days to Die, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of that. It drops you down in the world, and gets out of your way, letting you do whatever you want within its vast and sophisticated sandbox. It's difficult, and free, and the mistakes that you are guaranteed to make are guaranteed to be fun. It's a hell of a game.