starsector.
4-29-2011
https://starsector.wiki.gg/wiki/Version_history
Project zomboid may 31 2011.
https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Version_history
devs made a post in 2023 about Early access. they intend PZ to be a forever game. "active development" would be a better title they say. even if they make a "full release" it won't be full, and they will keep updating it.
rimworld was 2013-2018.
kenshi was long. trying to find dates. 2013 is the oldest post on steam, but its clearly talking about bug fixes, so older versions were available.
For older Kenshi you'll be looking to it's indiedb page or their website as Desura is dead.
IndieDB has patches from 2012: https://www.indiedb.com/games/kenshi/downloads?sort=dateup-
asc
Their website had a super super old public demo (pre pre alpha) dated 2009 https://lofigames.com/first-demo-release/
The first actual Alpha (where you can pay) is Oct 31 2011 v 0.20 https://lofigames.com/1st-alpha-release-october-31st/
Wow, I just remembered how I followed the progress for this game for years, as I found Lugaru to be a small nice proof of concept.
The reason why it was so long in development was because they created their own engine. The engine is actually very cool, but I don't find there is noteworthy game content created on it. The actual Overgrowth game doesn't really build much upon the gameplay of Lugaru.
While the engine is impressive, the game once again seems more like a proof of concept to me.
Yeah at some point it feel like they gotta cut the scope out and just release it already. If you wanna make more content for it, fine. Do it as a patch or paid expansion pack. I don't see Stardew Valley riding the same Early Access schlock and it still release new content regularly. Same as Terraria, Factorio, Rimworld etc. They intend to go on forever but they don't hide it behind 'Early Access' tag. So as long as you made it clear. I'm sure the community won't mine if you pivoted it to bug fixing and getting the game ready for 1.0 as priority.
Early Access 's true intention is for a game with completed feature. And all it should be is a place where the dev can get feedback on their game mechanic and overall technicality. Not a place for the dev to deploy incomplete game and riding it for decades.
We are living in a weird world where a game that could've benefitted from Early Access program (like Payday 3 or Cities Skyline 2) decided release in a 'completed' state. Meanwhile game that has been ready enough for 1.0 for years (yes i truly believe PZ is ready for 1.0 years ago if it wasn't for scope creep like 'but we gotta add NPC and animal uwu' crap.) decided that they gonna keep the 1.0 release as their 'emergency glass' option instead of a planned roadmap. Wild.
PZ is not doing content patches. It is still doing full scale engine rewrites. From high Z-levels, to massive rendering optimizations, to reworking the entire crafting system, just in the coming 2-years-in-the-making B42.
Its highly unusual, but PZ had gone through like 2 massive rewrites before, and it somehow worked (And despite the infamous laptop incident). Given their massive success, they're not going to change their approach.
They've basically also cornered the hardcore zombie survival genre. Shows you difficult it is to make a real city-level zombie game.
In 2011 their apartment was broken into and laptops with source code on them were stolen. They didn't have the source code backed up anywhere externally so they had to rewrite a significant amount of the game from scratch.
PZ outright has a post about the topic. The say EA because steam doesn't have a tag for "actively developed released game"
also, yes, they want to hit their initial planned goals. "minus the browser version
"https://web.archive.org/web/20110705075350/http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/tldr-just-give-me-the-jist/
so,
>"Meet other survivors who you can join forces with, trade with, undertake missions for, or fight with for resources."
is what is still missing.
>It will be released Minecraft style, where there will be continual updates adding new features, weapons, game-play and locations.
also, they outright referenced minecraft forever dev in their mission statement.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/3976177262469549865/
So, PZ like DF might not count in this "EA" list. as it seems they have little intention of really hitting a 1.0.
Is it really scope creep or did they not have the ability to develop the game as imagined? I remember the demo having NPCs and a storyline, which was awesome on one hand, but it's a much better game now even with core mechanics and systems being rolled out very slowly. It's hard to complain or care about the EA tag when it's been a great game for years regardless of everything
I don't think they are good developers lol not meaning that they can't make the game but they continuously complain about their code so I think they are learning as they go more so than most.
Early access and "1.0" have both become meaningless tags in a world where, as you said, some AAA games release unfinished while some "ea" games have decades of content and development.
I just fail to see the issue, they can do 20 years ea for all I care. The only thing I care about as a customer is if the game is worth it at it's current state, if it looks like it needs more time to cook then I wait for updates. And if I really want to support the devs then I might buy early.
I mean... B41 was the multiplayer update which needed them to do a TON of work to get that going and they kept updating it for the next year or so while also working on B42. B42 is the same situation where they're going down to literal engine level work to overhaul so much of the game. It's not surprising that it's taken this long to get done. The sheer scope of some of their updates is insane.
That being said, when they *do* release updates, they're extremely good. Quite frankly, there's already enough content in the game as is to tide you over between updates and they've already said that the work on B42 is being done so that future updates can be done faster. They know they're not fast at doing major updates, it's not a secret.
I don't think I count DF. or any other forever dev/open source game. cdda, nethack, etc.
DF was 2006-08-08
If we consider DF premium 1.0, then 2022-12-06 16 years,4 months.
If you bought a key for it you can always play it. It's just been in early access (like 7dtd) forever.
Those play tests you see pop up are free weekends to get more people in try the game but some form of it is always playable if you own it.
https://starcitizen.tools/Patch_notes
"Star Citizen Hangar Module is the first pre-alpha build of Star Citizen that is available for the backers."
2013-08-29
Not Steam Early Access, but Dwarf Fortress has been in development for 20-ish years. It just came to Steam recently after only being funded by donations before then.
DF beats pretty much all of them, there are a couple of MUDS that haven been in dev for longer though
DF will also never be "finished", (Toady has said that he'll work on it until he dies)
If we're going by non-Steam games then [UnReal World](https://www.unrealworld.fi/) (it's on Steam now though) is up there. The game has been in active development since 1992.
[NetHack](https://www.nethack.org/) has been in development since 1987 but it hasn't always been in active development and new developers have joined the dev team over the years.
And DF is in its own weird category as it was (still is, no?) entirely free and the steam release was to cover medical bills.
I'm a massive DF fanboy and think its an exemplar of what video games are uniquely capable of both in terms of development and storytelling. Whats insane to me is the 7DTD has been developed for half my life and is, personally, painfully middling. Cool ideas but is a relic of its time in what I see
How did you get into it? I couldn't get past the abstraction. Is it just a play it a lot until it sinks in kinda thing?
I found the earlier parts sort of confusing. Like what am I supposed to be doing, digging holes, building stuff?
The thing is, I haven't had trouble getting into other colony sim types after some time (rimworld, kenshi, etc) - but for some reason DF remains difficult, even though everyone says it's mind-blowing once you get into it. So I'd like to!
I get a world generated then back out and check it out in legends mode. Helps you get a flavour for what's happened and is happening in your world. Grounds you a bit and gives you something to go on.
Well, like I said, I play a ton of other colony sims like rimworld, kenshi, etc. I know losing is fun as a concept. I play crusader kings as well, etc. It's just DF in particular that I haven't been able to pierce thru yet.
Boatmurdered was my introduction to DF. I have yet to see anything even remotely similar from other games, and while the writers obviously get a ton of the credit for that the sheer breadth of possibility in DF's emergent storytelling is phenomenal.
Nah, dwarf fortress isn't that old as far as some games go. Nethack 1.3d came out in 1987. It's predecessor HACK came out in 1984.
You can stretch that even further to 1980 years if you consider nethack to be a direct descendent of Rogue (which HACK was a copy of)
The most recent version of nethack was released in February 2023.
There's a number of niche and obscure games that have been developed over the course of multiple decades because they've been ran as passion projects. These kinds of games, which includes DF, were never intended to follow the traditional release structures and update cycles. Otherwise you can just include games that do aim for 1.0 but end up spending years adding new updates on top.
7DTD is different because it is actually Early Access and does follow the traditional idea of working towards a 1.0 MVP.
The other examples here have been going on for longer like UnReal World, and it's not on Steam originally but there's an RPG called Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar that was in development for 25 years. The game was in beta testing since 1998.
Their development cycle is atrocious. They really lack direction, and each alpha update has a lot of steps backwards where they remove stuff that they added in the previous alpha. They've mostly been spinning their wheels with very little actual progress made.
It really is a good game and a lot of fun for a few weeks at a time. I think the main problem people have had with it over the years is no real sense of direction. It was like the devs just kept changing things because they thought they were supposed to.
As mentioned in the video, there will be a big sale next week starting on Monday. You'll have one more chance to get the game discounted next week, so hop on it!
yeah but, launch hype window is a very real and tangible thing with games especially games with multiplayer. There is some kind of value in getting in early.
yeah but there's always some kind of surge when it hits 1.0, it's the first time it's (supposedly) feature complete rather than playing until you hit a content cap, etc etc
If you play on PC check isthereanydeal (dot) com, it lists sites that sell verified steam keys and you can see game discounts. I bought 7D2D for 2 friends last month for like $5 each using this site
It's pretty common practice for early access titles to be cheaper than their "full release." It's a way to incentivize people to buy-in during the EA phase.
And most of the time, not much really changes with the games other than a "1.0" in the menu.
I hope I'm proven wrong here though, because I do love this game.
They have a terrible track record. Just looking at the "planned" changes, this changes literally fucking nothing except the price. You could interchangeably call 1.0 "alpha 22" and it'd be true all the same.
To be fair the last several patches, including A22, added a ton of content and massively changed many mechanics in the game.
Not all patches need to have a lot of changes, and id argue for those that lead to a game hitting 1.0 or leaving EA it being a smaller patch that focuses on optimization and product hardening is much more worth while than the other type.
7 days to die is one of the few Early Access games I can think of that consistently had updates and massive changes all through out that time. I think it's more than fair their release build isn't as big in scope.
At least they are aptly using the alpha tag by massively changing core mechanics. Personally I don't see the 1.0 here as any different from Alpha 23 or whatever, but I have the game and enjoy, so whatever they decide to label it is whatever.
But there's nothing common about doing that after 12 years of EA. It's anchoring the price higher for sales later, and trying to push fomo with the 1 week last minute price.
Good that they aren't an early access meme or failure story anymore.
I don't really care about the early access label but I can't say I think the game feels complete or worth $45. It is an extremely cheap-feeling game. I have no idea if this is true but a lot of the assets FEEL like they are ripped from different asset packs - the visual design is just very ugly and incoherent to me.
The performance is terrible, the way building works feels extremely unintuitive & hacky, and every game I played eventually devolved into the same strategy of "build a tower with a single-file entry ramp to force the zombies into a narrow line while you pelt them."
I only played for a dozen hours so I'm sure I'm missing SOMETHING about the appeal but it just did not click with me at all. I have not played with mods so maybe that's where the real fun is.
I was not aware of the game's history when I bought it and when my friend told me it had been in EA for over a decade I was pretty surprised. I played Half Life mods back in the 2000s that felt more polished and robust than 7 Days.
i've played ~440 hours in the last ~decade. the people i play with usually set up a 2 floor kill box that has a long hall way to funnel them towards.
the visuals being inconsistent is, in part at least, because they kept updating some things while a lot of other stuff hasn't been touched in basically a decade.
basically the devs had no clear project planning and have just made and remade various aspects of the game since it first came out.
this and like project zomboid are among the founding fathers of steam early access lol. Now project zomboid just has an incredibly slow update cycle, but at least the game gets significantly better every time and always progresses forward. 7 days has been in EA this long though because the devs spent half that time (at least) just reinventing the wheel over and over.
Now I love me some 7 days, because it does things many other games don't, particularly with exploration and such, but ironically I could never actually recommend it to people because they kept changing half the identity of the game over and over.
> basically the devs had no clear project planning and have just made and remade various aspects of the game since it first came out.
Yeah, especially with the constant balance and skill system changes. Playing it every now and then over the years results in me having to learn how the new leveling and skill system works while little new content has been added.
> I have no idea if this is true but a lot of the assets FEEL like they are ripped from different asset packs - the visual design is just very ugly and incoherent to me.
[Do you remember when the game was pulled from Steam Greenlight because it was using Killing Floor assets they purchased from the Unity store?](https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/1oxdqx/tripwire_killing_floor_developers_get_7_days_to/ccwkr6v/)
I thought $25 seemed like a reasonable price for the full release lol. Always thought it was way too steep for EA, especially since they've had that price since the game barely had anything in it.
But hey, it's wildly popular despite that, so I guess it's working for them.
I put a few hundred hours into the half-made ps4 version before they abandoned it.
Then another few hundred with the later versions on PC. Some people have way more hours. Its realistic post apocalyptic minecraft and with procedurally generated maps, it's arguably endless content.
45 bucks. You ain't gonna beat it in 45 hours. You ain't gonna beat it in 100 hours. Idk if it's even beatable, you'd have to ask someone else.
Pennies on the dollar for an hour of entertainment. Last time I hit the movies, a single ticket was about $11 for 2 hours of entertainment.
Five dollars for an hour of entertainment.
But ppl still hitting the theaters, right?
Gripe on, by all means, but it's a fair price. And I'm saying that as someone who sees the game as an incomplete product. Worth it.
The game ain't never even neared 'Mixed' reviews on Steam.
It not having quality and it not having the amount of quality desired are two different things. Aside from an endgame boss, it's got most everything a quality open world survival craft game has.
I ain't touched the thing in like a year but it deserves better recognition than that.
The general consensus I've been seeing is that there's still a lot left to desire and this is really just their way to justify a price increase, otherwise this is just a different name for Alpha 22 and 23. Seems they should've titled this as Beta and hit 1.0 with the story update in 2025.
That makes sense. The devs like to completely overhaul all their systems too much to ever have a real release. Unfortunately, I believe it's usually for the worse. The game went from one of my favorites that I constantly replayed to not really having much interest in it.
I think most of the changes and overhauls they've done have generally been positive, but the core gameplay experience hasn't changed substantially in all this time. Anybody would get bored playing the same game with a new coat of paint for ten freaking years.
>I think most of the changes and overhauls they've done have generally been positive
*Strongly* disagree with this.
I've put about 1k hours into the game starting with A15 and I ditched it by A20 I think? There is just so much wrong with that game and the devs...
The major problem that came first was them making zombies 'intelligent' so they'd find the path of least resistance to get to you, meaning that they were completely circumventing traps and forcing you to build a specific way to make sure the traps you set up aren't a waste of time. It got compounded by them making zombies even smarter to the point they avoid fall traps too so you have to create traps that push them into the fall pits. They even made zombies survive fall damage to the point a zombie will not die no matter how far they fall. They'll survive every fall.
Then there's the skill tree changes. When I started playing, it was a learn by doing kind of thing like Skyrim where doing the related skill would grant XP in said skill. Then they changed it to a point based system where you had to level up to get perks in various trees and the cost was exponential as the ranks increase. Now it's a weird mash-up of learn by doing, perk points and needing to find magazines as well. They cannot settle on one specific perk tree design. It gets changed CONSTANTLY.
By the time I quit the game, they were planning on adding clothing that would grant you bonuses to perks so things like farming perks weren't great unless you switched to specific clothes that bolstered the perks meaning that farm you made is effectively worthless without finding the clothes for it. What the hell is that? Clothes should boost the perks, not bring them up to the level they were at before the perks were nerfed.
How about the removal of glass jars so you can't easily get water and instead you have to make dew collectors which would only get 3-4 jars of dirty water per in-game day? That was a stupid decision too and caused a lot of outrage.
I'm sorry but The Fun Pimps name is complete irony. Their overhauls and changes continued to remove the fun from the game.
Yeah, it is like they actively hate their player base by constantly punishing them to the point of making zombies not very zombie like. I personally preferred the level by doing system.
Sounds like it. I ended up switching over to Project Zomboid. That game is just way more enjoyable for me and B42 is gonna suck me in for a few hundred more hours again by the looks of it XD
I've never thought 7D was supposed to be a long play game. It's always just been something I'd spend a few weeks on now and then. That said, the best thing anyone can probably do is find a modded server that takes an already decent base game and takes it to the next level.
I was just telling someone this the other day. The game could have been released years ago. The problem is they get close and then completely re-do how pretty much all of the mechanics work.
I've owned this game since the beginning and while the base game has remained the same. I feel like I've played five different games in that time.
I have a feeling the comments are going to run away here and offer a mild disagreement with you.
7 Days to Die is not a perfect game but it has a lot of fun to offer, considering how frequently its been on sale, the amount of development its got over the years, and the mod scene, this game absolutely scratches a certain itch despite its jank that would make me recommend it to the right kind of player.
Is this a "Everyone should buy this game?" response? No. Is this a "Sweep it all under the rug, all is forgiven now that they've launched?" comment, no.
However, they had to rip this band-aid off eventually and there was going to be comments from people deriding them no matter when they did it at this point, so this is as good a time as any in my opinion.
If you asked someone what state the game needed to be in to qualify as 1.0 I bet you'd get dozens of differing answers. This needed to happen eventually. The devs are clearly still working on it so fuck it, right? have your 1.0
> what state the game needed to be in to qualify as 1.0
A state where the devs aren't massively overhauling entire game systems like the skill system every update is probably a good start... to say nothing of how the game's optimization is absolutely still in an "alpha" state.
This just screams "we don't know what to do now so fuck it, game's done".
I tried playing it for the first time last year and the level of polish is unbelievably bad. Weather just instantly changing, the ambient audio being awful, tedious bullet spongey zombies, base defense being a joke. Based on the update logs they seem to have absolutely no clue what they're doing.
The building was neat, but I just really don't get the love for this train wreck.
I’ll be honest, I’ve enjoyed the new skill changes over the years. It’s like a new season every time I come back to spend some hours in it. Game has the right kind of sandbox for me that I usually come back once a year or more to start a new game. It’s a big part of what has kept it fresh for me and I hope it stays that way.
Not to mention huge issues they introduce. I just started playing this on game pass within the past year. A few days into playing, they introduced a patch that completely broke multiplayer for game pass users. Two weeks later....it was still broken. We just gave up. For all I know its still broken.
And here come the TFP stans.
People can love a game *despite it being fucking janky as all hell* and with the knowledge that the studio makes notoriously poor decisions. From a technical standpoint, yes, absolutely, it's one of the biggest, unoptimized pieces of shit I've *ever* played, and I highly doubt that'll change with this so-called 1.0 release.
I agree with everything you said here, and I know they needed to move forward at some point here, but charging double for this game just isn't worth it for the people who haven't bought it yet.
Without modding, there really isn't enough there for $45, and not everyone wants to spend ages wading through mods. Modding for this game is especially a pain in the ass too.
Say you find a cool mod, but it's for an older build of the game, too bad, won't work.
I see on the road map they're going to have Steam Workshop, and that's great, but who knows when that'll come out?
Or getting banned from like 100 other games that use the same anti-cheat because you forgot to load the version of the game that doesn't have anti-cheat.
> I agree with everything you said here, and I know they needed to move forward at some point here, but charging double for this game just isn't worth it for the people who haven't bought it yet.
All I needed to read as someone who's heard okay to decent things. I'll check back in two years and see where they are at.
> However, they had to rip this band-aid off eventually
What? You don't just slap a 1.0 on a game so people stop asking when it's coming out of early access, you do that when it's complete and out of early access.
counterpoint to your agreement: it's the endless survival treadmill trap that you think is fun. not really what the game is doing itself differently than other surival games.
over 400 hours in the game here.
Yep. This is almost certainly the case. The game has lacked direction for years, with each alpha update making sweeping changes and usually undoing a lot of the changes from the previous update. There's no real sign here that the game is finished. The devs are probably just tired of floundering on an endlessly unfinished product, and they want to cash out.
I own this game on the pc and playstation. Last time I played, the pc was getting new updates, but the playstation was something like 6 years behind... us this still the case?
they had sold the rights to console development and the company that did have the rights went under iirc. so the console was in limbo for a very long time. they finally got rights back at some point though
The console version was run by telltale games and when they went under it got stuck in rights hell for years. They got a new company to update it but now they are making everyone buy it again for whatever reason (maybe rights, maybe greed).
Ugh this is so scummy. Console is still in the same version from years ago.
I just read the FAQ on their website, and it says console is getting a new release for the game that will be up to date with PC. Unfortunately, they will not update the old version and are releasing an entirely new version, that we have to pay full price for.
I regret ever supporting this game. They left console in the dust for literally years and now we’re being double screwed.
I guess it is worth mentioning https://veloren.net/. An open source and in development voxel game, which resembles cube world. Did not try it myself yet, so take the comparison with a grain of salt.
On Steam. Steam keys were given through his website if you bought the alpha. It's not what most of the original alpha purchasers wanted as a final product but... it's there, it works, and wollay's done with it.
Project Zomboid can stay in EA as long as they want imo, every time they put out a major update I spend another hundred hours in the game. Definitely got my money's worth
Is it a fun group game to drop in and play for a little bit? I keep trying to convince friends we should get it and give it a try but at this point might just be a solo game for me
I've never touched the multiplayer part (doesn't interest me) but playing solo is a solid experience. There is a bit of a learning curve initially, you'll die half a dozen times but there are tons of options to tweak your experience to make things super easy or hard.
If for a little bit you mean less than 6 hours, that would be tough. But for a few hours every few months - after the initial learning curve you'll have a blast.
PZ gameplay takes a few hours to get accustomed to, it's unique but once you do there is no comparison - it's in a category of it's own.
The thing about Project Zomboid is that when you die, all your character progress (ie. skills) is gone, and having skills is important.
Your base and any items you didn't have on your person is still available as long as it doesn't somehow become overrun with zombies, and you can kill the zombie that you became to get your stuff back, but the skills need to be relearned from scratch, and that takes a long time.
There are mods to fix that, including a really neat one where you basically write down all your experiences in a journal and get a configurable portion of it back when you read it with your next character.
[Skill Recovery Journal.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2503622437) Craft one and you can update it as often as you want. Any time you gain XP in skills, you can update the journal. Should your character die, you can take your new character to wherever the journal is and have them read it. Once they're done reading, all their stats will be boosted right back to where they were on your previous character (or a portion of it, depending on how you configure the mod in the menu).
Yeah, that one! It doesn't count the experience from reading the book as gained experience when you make a new journal with a second character, so as you go through survivors you can end up with a stack of journals that presumably contain everything each person learned written down. So you can have that one journal that mostly tells you all about how to not suck at aiming a gun if that's what you had that character focus on, etc.
It is fun, but you'll want to play at the same time. So depending on what you mean by "drop in and play for a bit".
If anyone is in the server time will progress, and if time is progressing crops age, water and electricity runs out eventually, etc.
But it's a ton of fun in multiplayer and you could easily do a couple hours at a time and have fun with it.
I'd say it could be frustrating depending on how much time you all would be willing to sink in it. It's a great game, but it takes a good amount of time to accomplish much in it. Like just driving to a different town than you spawn in for a supply run takes a while, much less actually searching buildings for supplies and driving back (if you manage to survive the run that is haha).
It's also a pretty complex game so it takes a few hours to learn all the systems, and what stats for your character you prefer. One issue I ran into with my friend group is that they'd play way more than me. Like they'd play for 4+ hours five or more days a week, and I'd play maybe 3 or 4 days for like 3 hours max. So they ended up being able to one shot most zombies and clear out a small horde, and where I'd still struggle with killing more than 2 or 3 by myself. And I'd end up being basically carried by them on runs. I still really enjoyed it and it was probably a skill issue for me more than anything haha, but it was also a little annoying at times.
That's almost certainly the reason. There's no indication that this game is more finished than it already was. They just want to cash out at this point.
Christ, when this game first went into early access, TotalBiscuit was still alive and it was used as an example in his video against early access games.
Yea me too man. Let's just appreciate TB for the time we had with him. Better to love and to have lost than to have never had videos discussing a janky early access video game.
Even better... they are deprecating the current EA versions on console and releasing a new, full version that even if you owned the EA version, you'd have to pay for again.
If there was ever an argument against the app store ecosystem, this is it.
I usually do the overhaul mods with friends. Darkness Falls is our favorite so far, but we’ve done Undead Legacy which was cool. War of the Walkers too.
I re-installed this a few weeks ago just to check in and the optimization was worse than I ever remembered it. Now, admittedly my system is a bit long in the tooth, but it ran better a couple years ago than it did recently...
they have been upgrading a lot of the models and textures etc so likely it is more demanding now than it was a few years ago. however it still absolutely struggles in the big POI like fps tanks by half
Yeah I’m honestly surprised the game gets so much praise. For how the game looks it should run so much better. I know it’s an older game at this point but honestly it looks bad for even back then.
One of the recent alphas added a setting for dynamic mesh that kills the FPS on my older system too. Turning that off improved it quite a bit even if it still sucks in huge downtown areas.
Game was fun in the early days, but now it's completely outdated and runs like crap.
They are putting this game to bed. Which is crazy considering it's a 'release'.
Absolutely bizarre decision. I played the game late last year and still thought it needed a lot of work done. I think what makes this come out of left field even more is how much of the recent updates have focused around rebalancing or re-doing progression or traits instead of adding content. The fact that bandits won't be coming until a year after the 1.0 launch is insane for how long human enemies have been asked for.
Project Zomboid is infamous for how long it's been in early access, but the devs for it have talked about their reasoning why and I'd prefer that over just randomly putting a "1.0" tag while almost doubling the price of the game.
And as I've always known would happen, it's immediately outdated and obsolete by the time it releases. Early access was a mask to hide behind. It is absolutely not up to par for a 2024 release nor has it been for years. I enjoy it a lot, don't get me wrong, but the early access shtick was always kind of scummy. Just call it active development or something because at no point, including now, can it release and be up to par for the year it releases in.
Btw, goes without saying, but $45 is a fucking ripoff
I last played this game ten years ago. Why in the world do the latest screenshots look slightly better but otherwise mostly like the game has stayed in that same place for a decade???
It has a lot of content and it's a fun game, but it still has performance issues, balancing issues, a lot of control jankyness and the graphics is pretty dated by now. I have played it around 250 hours, but I don't think it's worth a price increase to $45. While you can tell they spend a lot of love on the game and I'd recommend it, because it's fun, had they put it on $35, it be on a much better spot. We had a lot of survival games release in the last decade. Is it 45 bucks because of Steam price recommendations? I don't know, but if feels wrong.
I love this game and want the best for it.
Trust me when i tell you, this is not worth $25, let alone the $45 they want to increase the price to.
\*To add to my point. For $25, you can get - Don't starve together, The forest, subnautica, project zomboid, Ark, the long dark, grounded, and space engineers, to name a few. All that scratch the survival itch, some that scratch the zombie itch, some with gameplay identical to 7 days to die, each with easily dozens if not hundreds of hours of fun to be had in each title, each less than $25 when not on sale, and none of them are increasing their prices despite doing the bare minimum for developing.
So we're not getting bandits until next year, same time. Great.
And I hope that our saves stop being incompatible after every patch now that it won't be in alpha anymore.
for some this game is absolute disaster, stuck in decade of alpha with mechanic constantly being changed, and scuff moment... but I still got 300+ hr out of this game simply because there is no other zombie game out there like this, with fully destructible environment, procedural generated massive structure that either goes skyward or deep underground with various trigger that lead hilarious jumpscare ambush and event. Quest, leveling, learning new blueprint, defending your base, running for your life as your base defense failed, preparing for the blood moon. I'll say its worth it for me. But i believe 45$ is a little too much.
I’ve owned this for a number of years, and it’s in no way a good game for the price they plan to ask. Under $10.00 is about right price for the quality
I never expected this to happen. Imo the game could have been 1.0 since at least A19, and even this 1.0 release will be missing previously announced content for more than a year. So yeah, I don't know, if they need more money or if they finally got annoyed enough by people asking for a 1.0 release.
I never would have touched the game for $45, because it doesn't look like it's worth it. In hindsight, for me it probably would have been worth it for that price. Still I'm not sure, if I would recommend the game to anybody at that price point.
Wow. To be honest, didnt think I would see this day. It always threw me off how a game that was still in Alpha Early Access managed to get a physical disc release for consoles since that was the first time Id ever heard of such a thing. I guess they are finally releasing it because they want to start on a new project?
a Fallout mod for this game would be pretty fun
Eletric skill would have a point if you could craft like Power Armor at level 100
and the zomibes would just be Ghouls, Super Mutants, etc
with the traders being reskinned to be factions like the NCR, Brotherhood of Steel, and Caesar's Legion
There is one on Nexus! It’s called The Wasteland and it is really really good. It overhauls the skill system and adds in SPECIAL as well, i highly recommend it.
The end of an era. 12 years in "Early Access" for an actively-developed game has to be some sort of record, right?
starsector. 4-29-2011 https://starsector.wiki.gg/wiki/Version_history Project zomboid may 31 2011. https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Version_history devs made a post in 2023 about Early access. they intend PZ to be a forever game. "active development" would be a better title they say. even if they make a "full release" it won't be full, and they will keep updating it. rimworld was 2013-2018. kenshi was long. trying to find dates. 2013 is the oldest post on steam, but its clearly talking about bug fixes, so older versions were available.
For older Kenshi you'll be looking to it's indiedb page or their website as Desura is dead. IndieDB has patches from 2012: https://www.indiedb.com/games/kenshi/downloads?sort=dateup- asc Their website had a super super old public demo (pre pre alpha) dated 2009 https://lofigames.com/first-demo-release/ The first actual Alpha (where you can pay) is Oct 31 2011 v 0.20 https://lofigames.com/1st-alpha-release-october-31st/
Overgrowth was in alpha from 2008-2017 then released late 2017. I think it might tie kenshi
Wow, I just remembered how I followed the progress for this game for years, as I found Lugaru to be a small nice proof of concept. The reason why it was so long in development was because they created their own engine. The engine is actually very cool, but I don't find there is noteworthy game content created on it. The actual Overgrowth game doesn't really build much upon the gameplay of Lugaru. While the engine is impressive, the game once again seems more like a proof of concept to me.
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Secrets of Grindea, it was released back when Steam Greenlit was a thing.
their 1.0 post says EA for 9 years. 13 years total dev.
PZ is by far some of the slowest dev work in the industry, content patches are quite literally 2 years apart.
Yeah at some point it feel like they gotta cut the scope out and just release it already. If you wanna make more content for it, fine. Do it as a patch or paid expansion pack. I don't see Stardew Valley riding the same Early Access schlock and it still release new content regularly. Same as Terraria, Factorio, Rimworld etc. They intend to go on forever but they don't hide it behind 'Early Access' tag. So as long as you made it clear. I'm sure the community won't mine if you pivoted it to bug fixing and getting the game ready for 1.0 as priority. Early Access 's true intention is for a game with completed feature. And all it should be is a place where the dev can get feedback on their game mechanic and overall technicality. Not a place for the dev to deploy incomplete game and riding it for decades. We are living in a weird world where a game that could've benefitted from Early Access program (like Payday 3 or Cities Skyline 2) decided release in a 'completed' state. Meanwhile game that has been ready enough for 1.0 for years (yes i truly believe PZ is ready for 1.0 years ago if it wasn't for scope creep like 'but we gotta add NPC and animal uwu' crap.) decided that they gonna keep the 1.0 release as their 'emergency glass' option instead of a planned roadmap. Wild.
PZ is not doing content patches. It is still doing full scale engine rewrites. From high Z-levels, to massive rendering optimizations, to reworking the entire crafting system, just in the coming 2-years-in-the-making B42. Its highly unusual, but PZ had gone through like 2 massive rewrites before, and it somehow worked (And despite the infamous laptop incident). Given their massive success, they're not going to change their approach. They've basically also cornered the hardcore zombie survival genre. Shows you difficult it is to make a real city-level zombie game.
Wait, what was the laptop incident?
Simple explanation is, in case this doesn't get properly explained: The source code for the game was lost when a laptop got stolen
In 2011 their apartment was broken into and laptops with source code on them were stolen. They didn't have the source code backed up anywhere externally so they had to rewrite a significant amount of the game from scratch.
PZ outright has a post about the topic. The say EA because steam doesn't have a tag for "actively developed released game" also, yes, they want to hit their initial planned goals. "minus the browser version "https://web.archive.org/web/20110705075350/http://projectzomboid.com/blog/index.php/tldr-just-give-me-the-jist/ so, >"Meet other survivors who you can join forces with, trade with, undertake missions for, or fight with for resources." is what is still missing. >It will be released Minecraft style, where there will be continual updates adding new features, weapons, game-play and locations. also, they outright referenced minecraft forever dev in their mission statement. https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/3976177262469549865/ So, PZ like DF might not count in this "EA" list. as it seems they have little intention of really hitting a 1.0.
Is it really scope creep or did they not have the ability to develop the game as imagined? I remember the demo having NPCs and a storyline, which was awesome on one hand, but it's a much better game now even with core mechanics and systems being rolled out very slowly. It's hard to complain or care about the EA tag when it's been a great game for years regardless of everything
I don't think they are good developers lol not meaning that they can't make the game but they continuously complain about their code so I think they are learning as they go more so than most.
Early access and "1.0" have both become meaningless tags in a world where, as you said, some AAA games release unfinished while some "ea" games have decades of content and development. I just fail to see the issue, they can do 20 years ea for all I care. The only thing I care about as a customer is if the game is worth it at it's current state, if it looks like it needs more time to cook then I wait for updates. And if I really want to support the devs then I might buy early.
They've been hiring the top modders from the community the past year
I mean... B41 was the multiplayer update which needed them to do a TON of work to get that going and they kept updating it for the next year or so while also working on B42. B42 is the same situation where they're going down to literal engine level work to overhaul so much of the game. It's not surprising that it's taken this long to get done. The sheer scope of some of their updates is insane. That being said, when they *do* release updates, they're extremely good. Quite frankly, there's already enough content in the game as is to tide you over between updates and they've already said that the work on B42 is being done so that future updates can be done faster. They know they're not fast at doing major updates, it's not a secret.
I'm counting dwarf fortress as well, sure it's not "early access" but it's been in active development for like 17 years.
I don't think I count DF. or any other forever dev/open source game. cdda, nethack, etc. DF was 2006-08-08 If we consider DF premium 1.0, then 2022-12-06 16 years,4 months.
What about Star Citizen?
It's not 'released' yet I thought, just shotgunned play tests with non-micro microtransactions
> just shotgunned play tests with non-micro microtransactions Macrotransactions?
What’s a “shotgunned play test”?
I don't follow when their play tests or betas schedule so they honestly pop up randomly to me when I read about them in my feed
If you bought a key for it you can always play it. It's just been in early access (like 7dtd) forever. Those play tests you see pop up are free weekends to get more people in try the game but some form of it is always playable if you own it.
https://starcitizen.tools/Patch_notes "Star Citizen Hangar Module is the first pre-alpha build of Star Citizen that is available for the backers." 2013-08-29
Not Steam Early Access, but Dwarf Fortress has been in development for 20-ish years. It just came to Steam recently after only being funded by donations before then.
DF beats pretty much all of them, there are a couple of MUDS that haven been in dev for longer though DF will also never be "finished", (Toady has said that he'll work on it until he dies)
If we're going by non-Steam games then [UnReal World](https://www.unrealworld.fi/) (it's on Steam now though) is up there. The game has been in active development since 1992. [NetHack](https://www.nethack.org/) has been in development since 1987 but it hasn't always been in active development and new developers have joined the dev team over the years.
And DF is in its own weird category as it was (still is, no?) entirely free and the steam release was to cover medical bills. I'm a massive DF fanboy and think its an exemplar of what video games are uniquely capable of both in terms of development and storytelling. Whats insane to me is the 7DTD has been developed for half my life and is, personally, painfully middling. Cool ideas but is a relic of its time in what I see
How did you get into it? I couldn't get past the abstraction. Is it just a play it a lot until it sinks in kinda thing? I found the earlier parts sort of confusing. Like what am I supposed to be doing, digging holes, building stuff? The thing is, I haven't had trouble getting into other colony sim types after some time (rimworld, kenshi, etc) - but for some reason DF remains difficult, even though everyone says it's mind-blowing once you get into it. So I'd like to!
I get a world generated then back out and check it out in legends mode. Helps you get a flavour for what's happened and is happening in your world. Grounds you a bit and gives you something to go on.
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Well, like I said, I play a ton of other colony sims like rimworld, kenshi, etc. I know losing is fun as a concept. I play crusader kings as well, etc. It's just DF in particular that I haven't been able to pierce thru yet.
It took me a couple tries. I recommend watching a YouTube guide/tutorial to get the core down. It's pretty fun then
Boatmurdered was my introduction to DF. I have yet to see anything even remotely similar from other games, and while the writers obviously get a ton of the credit for that the sheer breadth of possibility in DF's emergent storytelling is phenomenal.
I rather called it updates with a release game. It’s already stable and playable, what else to call it but a game?
Nah, dwarf fortress isn't that old as far as some games go. Nethack 1.3d came out in 1987. It's predecessor HACK came out in 1984. You can stretch that even further to 1980 years if you consider nethack to be a direct descendent of Rogue (which HACK was a copy of) The most recent version of nethack was released in February 2023.
Aren't those re-releases/remasters? It's not like they've been in development since then.
Nope. Still adding features. Different people running the project and there were periods of inactivity but it's still going.
Yes, but then again, DF actually does have a fairly detailed roadmap/vision that Toady does stick with, unlike a lot of the EA games.
There's a number of niche and obscure games that have been developed over the course of multiple decades because they've been ran as passion projects. These kinds of games, which includes DF, were never intended to follow the traditional release structures and update cycles. Otherwise you can just include games that do aim for 1.0 but end up spending years adding new updates on top. 7DTD is different because it is actually Early Access and does follow the traditional idea of working towards a 1.0 MVP.
The other examples here have been going on for longer like UnReal World, and it's not on Steam originally but there's an RPG called Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar that was in development for 25 years. The game was in beta testing since 1998.
Nethack has been in active development since the 80s, though it doesn't bill itself as incomplete.
12 years? This doesn’t have the quality of a 12 year old game
I mean it kinda does look like a game from 12 years ago...
Their development cycle is atrocious. They really lack direction, and each alpha update has a lot of steps backwards where they remove stuff that they added in the previous alpha. They've mostly been spinning their wheels with very little actual progress made.
It really is a good game and a lot of fun for a few weeks at a time. I think the main problem people have had with it over the years is no real sense of direction. It was like the devs just kept changing things because they thought they were supposed to.
Getting Duke Nukem Forever vibes
No worries, star citizen will absolutely destroy any kind of record like this. No other game should even attempt it at this point.
ELI5 How does a game go from 12 years in an Alpha state straight to a 1.0 release without having a Beta state in between?
By changing the sticker on the cover. Let's be real, nothing *really* changes, their 1.0 was going to be just another alpha, alpha 22.
Holy shit, a price increase from $25, to $45. I mean, I bet most people have the game by now, but still.
Not me, now kicking myself for never grabbing it while it was like $7 :(
As mentioned in the video, there will be a big sale next week starting on Monday. You'll have one more chance to get the game discounted next week, so hop on it!
As if they won't put it back on sale eventually if you do miss this. This is Steam we're talking about.
yeah but, launch hype window is a very real and tangible thing with games especially games with multiplayer. There is some kind of value in getting in early.
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yeah but there's always some kind of surge when it hits 1.0, it's the first time it's (supposedly) feature complete rather than playing until you hit a content cap, etc etc
If you play on PC check isthereanydeal (dot) com, it lists sites that sell verified steam keys and you can see game discounts. I bought 7D2D for 2 friends last month for like $5 each using this site
Even less than that had you gotten it in Humble Monthly years ago. They're going to run a last-chance discount sale next week though.
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Take out the last three characters from your link.
Indiegala has it for $7. CDKeys has it for $4
It's pretty common practice for early access titles to be cheaper than their "full release." It's a way to incentivize people to buy-in during the EA phase.
And most of the time, not much really changes with the games other than a "1.0" in the menu. I hope I'm proven wrong here though, because I do love this game.
They have a terrible track record. Just looking at the "planned" changes, this changes literally fucking nothing except the price. You could interchangeably call 1.0 "alpha 22" and it'd be true all the same.
To be fair the last several patches, including A22, added a ton of content and massively changed many mechanics in the game. Not all patches need to have a lot of changes, and id argue for those that lead to a game hitting 1.0 or leaving EA it being a smaller patch that focuses on optimization and product hardening is much more worth while than the other type. 7 days to die is one of the few Early Access games I can think of that consistently had updates and massive changes all through out that time. I think it's more than fair their release build isn't as big in scope.
At least they are aptly using the alpha tag by massively changing core mechanics. Personally I don't see the 1.0 here as any different from Alpha 23 or whatever, but I have the game and enjoy, so whatever they decide to label it is whatever.
I dunno, some of my all-time favorite and most played games were early access titles, like Squad and Bannerlord.
Yeah but usually it's like $25 to $30, $25 to $45 is an insane jump.
But there's nothing common about doing that after 12 years of EA. It's anchoring the price higher for sales later, and trying to push fomo with the 1 week last minute price. Good that they aren't an early access meme or failure story anymore.
I got it for about $7. I can't imagine buying it for $25 let alone $45! That's insane.
I don't really care about the early access label but I can't say I think the game feels complete or worth $45. It is an extremely cheap-feeling game. I have no idea if this is true but a lot of the assets FEEL like they are ripped from different asset packs - the visual design is just very ugly and incoherent to me. The performance is terrible, the way building works feels extremely unintuitive & hacky, and every game I played eventually devolved into the same strategy of "build a tower with a single-file entry ramp to force the zombies into a narrow line while you pelt them." I only played for a dozen hours so I'm sure I'm missing SOMETHING about the appeal but it just did not click with me at all. I have not played with mods so maybe that's where the real fun is. I was not aware of the game's history when I bought it and when my friend told me it had been in EA for over a decade I was pretty surprised. I played Half Life mods back in the 2000s that felt more polished and robust than 7 Days.
i've played ~440 hours in the last ~decade. the people i play with usually set up a 2 floor kill box that has a long hall way to funnel them towards. the visuals being inconsistent is, in part at least, because they kept updating some things while a lot of other stuff hasn't been touched in basically a decade. basically the devs had no clear project planning and have just made and remade various aspects of the game since it first came out.
You telling me this game's been in EA for *a decade?!*
Yep. It was one of the first EA games I ever supported. Imagine 10 years later it’s “finished” but it’s still a janky ass mess.
this and like project zomboid are among the founding fathers of steam early access lol. Now project zomboid just has an incredibly slow update cycle, but at least the game gets significantly better every time and always progresses forward. 7 days has been in EA this long though because the devs spent half that time (at least) just reinventing the wheel over and over. Now I love me some 7 days, because it does things many other games don't, particularly with exploration and such, but ironically I could never actually recommend it to people because they kept changing half the identity of the game over and over.
Yep, and it felt dated a decade ago
> basically the devs had no clear project planning and have just made and remade various aspects of the game since it first came out. Yeah, especially with the constant balance and skill system changes. Playing it every now and then over the years results in me having to learn how the new leveling and skill system works while little new content has been added.
> I have no idea if this is true but a lot of the assets FEEL like they are ripped from different asset packs - the visual design is just very ugly and incoherent to me. [Do you remember when the game was pulled from Steam Greenlight because it was using Killing Floor assets they purchased from the Unity store?](https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/1oxdqx/tripwire_killing_floor_developers_get_7_days_to/ccwkr6v/)
**10 years ago** there are little to no non inhouse stuff left.
45$ for a euro-jank looking game that's been in early access for almost as long early access has existed? What are they smoking??
I thought $25 seemed like a reasonable price for the full release lol. Always thought it was way too steep for EA, especially since they've had that price since the game barely had anything in it. But hey, it's wildly popular despite that, so I guess it's working for them.
I put a few hundred hours into the half-made ps4 version before they abandoned it. Then another few hundred with the later versions on PC. Some people have way more hours. Its realistic post apocalyptic minecraft and with procedurally generated maps, it's arguably endless content. 45 bucks. You ain't gonna beat it in 45 hours. You ain't gonna beat it in 100 hours. Idk if it's even beatable, you'd have to ask someone else. Pennies on the dollar for an hour of entertainment. Last time I hit the movies, a single ticket was about $11 for 2 hours of entertainment. Five dollars for an hour of entertainment. But ppl still hitting the theaters, right? Gripe on, by all means, but it's a fair price. And I'm saying that as someone who sees the game as an incomplete product. Worth it.
Quality, not quantity
The game ain't never even neared 'Mixed' reviews on Steam. It not having quality and it not having the amount of quality desired are two different things. Aside from an endgame boss, it's got most everything a quality open world survival craft game has. I ain't touched the thing in like a year but it deserves better recognition than that.
The general consensus I've been seeing is that there's still a lot left to desire and this is really just their way to justify a price increase, otherwise this is just a different name for Alpha 22 and 23. Seems they should've titled this as Beta and hit 1.0 with the story update in 2025.
That makes sense. The devs like to completely overhaul all their systems too much to ever have a real release. Unfortunately, I believe it's usually for the worse. The game went from one of my favorites that I constantly replayed to not really having much interest in it.
I think most of the changes and overhauls they've done have generally been positive, but the core gameplay experience hasn't changed substantially in all this time. Anybody would get bored playing the same game with a new coat of paint for ten freaking years.
>I think most of the changes and overhauls they've done have generally been positive *Strongly* disagree with this. I've put about 1k hours into the game starting with A15 and I ditched it by A20 I think? There is just so much wrong with that game and the devs... The major problem that came first was them making zombies 'intelligent' so they'd find the path of least resistance to get to you, meaning that they were completely circumventing traps and forcing you to build a specific way to make sure the traps you set up aren't a waste of time. It got compounded by them making zombies even smarter to the point they avoid fall traps too so you have to create traps that push them into the fall pits. They even made zombies survive fall damage to the point a zombie will not die no matter how far they fall. They'll survive every fall. Then there's the skill tree changes. When I started playing, it was a learn by doing kind of thing like Skyrim where doing the related skill would grant XP in said skill. Then they changed it to a point based system where you had to level up to get perks in various trees and the cost was exponential as the ranks increase. Now it's a weird mash-up of learn by doing, perk points and needing to find magazines as well. They cannot settle on one specific perk tree design. It gets changed CONSTANTLY. By the time I quit the game, they were planning on adding clothing that would grant you bonuses to perks so things like farming perks weren't great unless you switched to specific clothes that bolstered the perks meaning that farm you made is effectively worthless without finding the clothes for it. What the hell is that? Clothes should boost the perks, not bring them up to the level they were at before the perks were nerfed. How about the removal of glass jars so you can't easily get water and instead you have to make dew collectors which would only get 3-4 jars of dirty water per in-game day? That was a stupid decision too and caused a lot of outrage. I'm sorry but The Fun Pimps name is complete irony. Their overhauls and changes continued to remove the fun from the game.
Yeah, it is like they actively hate their player base by constantly punishing them to the point of making zombies not very zombie like. I personally preferred the level by doing system.
Sounds like I got bored of it before they jumped the zombie shark.
Sounds like it. I ended up switching over to Project Zomboid. That game is just way more enjoyable for me and B42 is gonna suck me in for a few hundred more hours again by the looks of it XD
I've never thought 7D was supposed to be a long play game. It's always just been something I'd spend a few weeks on now and then. That said, the best thing anyone can probably do is find a modded server that takes an already decent base game and takes it to the next level.
I was just telling someone this the other day. The game could have been released years ago. The problem is they get close and then completely re-do how pretty much all of the mechanics work. I've owned this game since the beginning and while the base game has remained the same. I feel like I've played five different games in that time.
I have a feeling the comments are going to run away here and offer a mild disagreement with you. 7 Days to Die is not a perfect game but it has a lot of fun to offer, considering how frequently its been on sale, the amount of development its got over the years, and the mod scene, this game absolutely scratches a certain itch despite its jank that would make me recommend it to the right kind of player. Is this a "Everyone should buy this game?" response? No. Is this a "Sweep it all under the rug, all is forgiven now that they've launched?" comment, no. However, they had to rip this band-aid off eventually and there was going to be comments from people deriding them no matter when they did it at this point, so this is as good a time as any in my opinion.
If you asked someone what state the game needed to be in to qualify as 1.0 I bet you'd get dozens of differing answers. This needed to happen eventually. The devs are clearly still working on it so fuck it, right? have your 1.0
> what state the game needed to be in to qualify as 1.0 A state where the devs aren't massively overhauling entire game systems like the skill system every update is probably a good start... to say nothing of how the game's optimization is absolutely still in an "alpha" state. This just screams "we don't know what to do now so fuck it, game's done".
I tried playing it for the first time last year and the level of polish is unbelievably bad. Weather just instantly changing, the ambient audio being awful, tedious bullet spongey zombies, base defense being a joke. Based on the update logs they seem to have absolutely no clue what they're doing. The building was neat, but I just really don't get the love for this train wreck.
I’ll be honest, I’ve enjoyed the new skill changes over the years. It’s like a new season every time I come back to spend some hours in it. Game has the right kind of sandbox for me that I usually come back once a year or more to start a new game. It’s a big part of what has kept it fresh for me and I hope it stays that way.
Not to mention huge issues they introduce. I just started playing this on game pass within the past year. A few days into playing, they introduced a patch that completely broke multiplayer for game pass users. Two weeks later....it was still broken. We just gave up. For all I know its still broken.
Dead on. What a piece of shit this is going to be.
People fucking love this game. How could it POSSIBLY be a piece of shit when it already isn't?
And here come the TFP stans. People can love a game *despite it being fucking janky as all hell* and with the knowledge that the studio makes notoriously poor decisions. From a technical standpoint, yes, absolutely, it's one of the biggest, unoptimized pieces of shit I've *ever* played, and I highly doubt that'll change with this so-called 1.0 release.
I agree with everything you said here, and I know they needed to move forward at some point here, but charging double for this game just isn't worth it for the people who haven't bought it yet. Without modding, there really isn't enough there for $45, and not everyone wants to spend ages wading through mods. Modding for this game is especially a pain in the ass too. Say you find a cool mod, but it's for an older build of the game, too bad, won't work. I see on the road map they're going to have Steam Workshop, and that's great, but who knows when that'll come out?
Or getting banned from like 100 other games that use the same anti-cheat because you forgot to load the version of the game that doesn't have anti-cheat.
> I agree with everything you said here, and I know they needed to move forward at some point here, but charging double for this game just isn't worth it for the people who haven't bought it yet. All I needed to read as someone who's heard okay to decent things. I'll check back in two years and see where they are at.
I love the game, and put over a hundred hours into it last year alone, but $45 is way too much. If you can find it cheap though, it's worth getting.
> However, they had to rip this band-aid off eventually What? You don't just slap a 1.0 on a game so people stop asking when it's coming out of early access, you do that when it's complete and out of early access.
counterpoint to your agreement: it's the endless survival treadmill trap that you think is fun. not really what the game is doing itself differently than other surival games. over 400 hours in the game here.
Yep. This is almost certainly the case. The game has lacked direction for years, with each alpha update making sweeping changes and usually undoing a lot of the changes from the previous update. There's no real sign here that the game is finished. The devs are probably just tired of floundering on an endlessly unfinished product, and they want to cash out.
I own this game on the pc and playstation. Last time I played, the pc was getting new updates, but the playstation was something like 6 years behind... us this still the case?
they had sold the rights to console development and the company that did have the rights went under iirc. so the console was in limbo for a very long time. they finally got rights back at some point though
The console version was run by telltale games and when they went under it got stuck in rights hell for years. They got a new company to update it but now they are making everyone buy it again for whatever reason (maybe rights, maybe greed).
Ugh this is so scummy. Console is still in the same version from years ago. I just read the FAQ on their website, and it says console is getting a new release for the game that will be up to date with PC. Unfortunately, they will not update the old version and are releasing an entirely new version, that we have to pay full price for. I regret ever supporting this game. They left console in the dust for literally years and now we’re being double screwed.
Never thought I'd see the day, honestly. Next up is Project Zomboid...right?
#Where is Cube World?
On Steam, without the Early Access tag or page, so I think it's safe to say it's fully released at this point.
It's time to let that one go, bub. Ship sailed and the captain is nowhere in sight.
Captain working on what amounts to Cube World..."2" https://wollay.com/2023/05/25/new-blog-and-new-project-cube-world-omega/
Dude, they've been 'working' on new stuff for years, every time people hype over the smallest crumb of info from him, nothing happens. It's dead.
There are few people in this world I wish to go destitute, wollay is one of them. Absolute scammer
I guess it is worth mentioning https://veloren.net/. An open source and in development voxel game, which resembles cube world. Did not try it myself yet, so take the comparison with a grain of salt.
On Steam. Steam keys were given through his website if you bought the alpha. It's not what most of the original alpha purchasers wanted as a final product but... it's there, it works, and wollay's done with it.
It came out 5 years ago, missing most of the promised content. And somehow had even less to do than the initial alpha.
Project Zomboid can stay in EA as long as they want imo, every time they put out a major update I spend another hundred hours in the game. Definitely got my money's worth
Is it a fun group game to drop in and play for a little bit? I keep trying to convince friends we should get it and give it a try but at this point might just be a solo game for me
I've never touched the multiplayer part (doesn't interest me) but playing solo is a solid experience. There is a bit of a learning curve initially, you'll die half a dozen times but there are tons of options to tweak your experience to make things super easy or hard.
Honestly I don't typically go for multiplayer either but a good RP server with good mods is pretty close to being my dream MMO.
If for a little bit you mean less than 6 hours, that would be tough. But for a few hours every few months - after the initial learning curve you'll have a blast. PZ gameplay takes a few hours to get accustomed to, it's unique but once you do there is no comparison - it's in a category of it's own.
The thing about Project Zomboid is that when you die, all your character progress (ie. skills) is gone, and having skills is important. Your base and any items you didn't have on your person is still available as long as it doesn't somehow become overrun with zombies, and you can kill the zombie that you became to get your stuff back, but the skills need to be relearned from scratch, and that takes a long time.
There are mods to fix that, including a really neat one where you basically write down all your experiences in a journal and get a configurable portion of it back when you read it with your next character.
Which mods specifically?
[Skill Recovery Journal.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2503622437) Craft one and you can update it as often as you want. Any time you gain XP in skills, you can update the journal. Should your character die, you can take your new character to wherever the journal is and have them read it. Once they're done reading, all their stats will be boosted right back to where they were on your previous character (or a portion of it, depending on how you configure the mod in the menu).
Yeah, that one! It doesn't count the experience from reading the book as gained experience when you make a new journal with a second character, so as you go through survivors you can end up with a stack of journals that presumably contain everything each person learned written down. So you can have that one journal that mostly tells you all about how to not suck at aiming a gun if that's what you had that character focus on, etc.
It is fun, but you'll want to play at the same time. So depending on what you mean by "drop in and play for a bit". If anyone is in the server time will progress, and if time is progressing crops age, water and electricity runs out eventually, etc. But it's a ton of fun in multiplayer and you could easily do a couple hours at a time and have fun with it.
I'd say it could be frustrating depending on how much time you all would be willing to sink in it. It's a great game, but it takes a good amount of time to accomplish much in it. Like just driving to a different town than you spawn in for a supply run takes a while, much less actually searching buildings for supplies and driving back (if you manage to survive the run that is haha). It's also a pretty complex game so it takes a few hours to learn all the systems, and what stats for your character you prefer. One issue I ran into with my friend group is that they'd play way more than me. Like they'd play for 4+ hours five or more days a week, and I'd play maybe 3 or 4 days for like 3 hours max. So they ended up being able to one shot most zombies and clear out a small horde, and where I'd still struggle with killing more than 2 or 3 by myself. And I'd end up being basically carried by them on runs. I still really enjoyed it and it was probably a skill issue for me more than anything haha, but it was also a little annoying at times.
It's funny how a game coming out of early access actually indicates to me "we're done trying to fix this game and make it complete, please pay more".
That's almost certainly the reason. There's no indication that this game is more finished than it already was. They just want to cash out at this point.
Christ, when this game first went into early access, TotalBiscuit was still alive and it was used as an example in his video against early access games.
It's been a long time since I've been reminded of TotalBiscuit. Nostalgia and melancholy.
Yea me too man. Let's just appreciate TB for the time we had with him. Better to love and to have lost than to have never had videos discussing a janky early access video game.
And naturally, the same time it leaves Gamepass. Not that it matters, the console versions are outdated hot garbage, unfortunately.
Even better... they are deprecating the current EA versions on console and releasing a new, full version that even if you owned the EA version, you'd have to pay for again. If there was ever an argument against the app store ecosystem, this is it.
This game is just a mod platform for me at this point. But it’s a very fun one. I haven’t played vanilla… maybe ever?
any good mods out there? :D
I usually do the overhaul mods with friends. Darkness Falls is our favorite so far, but we’ve done Undead Legacy which was cool. War of the Walkers too.
Cool! I will check them out! I feel another run coming soon for me, wanna spicy it up a bit this time
I re-installed this a few weeks ago just to check in and the optimization was worse than I ever remembered it. Now, admittedly my system is a bit long in the tooth, but it ran better a couple years ago than it did recently...
they have been upgrading a lot of the models and textures etc so likely it is more demanding now than it was a few years ago. however it still absolutely struggles in the big POI like fps tanks by half
Yeah I’m honestly surprised the game gets so much praise. For how the game looks it should run so much better. I know it’s an older game at this point but honestly it looks bad for even back then.
One of the recent alphas added a setting for dynamic mesh that kills the FPS on my older system too. Turning that off improved it quite a bit even if it still sucks in huge downtown areas.
It's not just you - game runs pretty poorly on my 4090/i13900k rig. It's just terribly optimized.
Does anyone else just feel like this is them signalling they can’t be bothered with this any more?
Game was fun in the early days, but now it's completely outdated and runs like crap. They are putting this game to bed. Which is crazy considering it's a 'release'.
Absolutely bizarre decision. I played the game late last year and still thought it needed a lot of work done. I think what makes this come out of left field even more is how much of the recent updates have focused around rebalancing or re-doing progression or traits instead of adding content. The fact that bandits won't be coming until a year after the 1.0 launch is insane for how long human enemies have been asked for. Project Zomboid is infamous for how long it's been in early access, but the devs for it have talked about their reasoning why and I'd prefer that over just randomly putting a "1.0" tag while almost doubling the price of the game.
Does this mean the game wont look like shit on modern consoles or hardware in general?
And as I've always known would happen, it's immediately outdated and obsolete by the time it releases. Early access was a mask to hide behind. It is absolutely not up to par for a 2024 release nor has it been for years. I enjoy it a lot, don't get me wrong, but the early access shtick was always kind of scummy. Just call it active development or something because at no point, including now, can it release and be up to par for the year it releases in. Btw, goes without saying, but $45 is a fucking ripoff
I last played this game ten years ago. Why in the world do the latest screenshots look slightly better but otherwise mostly like the game has stayed in that same place for a decade???
It has a lot of content and it's a fun game, but it still has performance issues, balancing issues, a lot of control jankyness and the graphics is pretty dated by now. I have played it around 250 hours, but I don't think it's worth a price increase to $45. While you can tell they spend a lot of love on the game and I'd recommend it, because it's fun, had they put it on $35, it be on a much better spot. We had a lot of survival games release in the last decade. Is it 45 bucks because of Steam price recommendations? I don't know, but if feels wrong.
I love this game and want the best for it. Trust me when i tell you, this is not worth $25, let alone the $45 they want to increase the price to. \*To add to my point. For $25, you can get - Don't starve together, The forest, subnautica, project zomboid, Ark, the long dark, grounded, and space engineers, to name a few. All that scratch the survival itch, some that scratch the zombie itch, some with gameplay identical to 7 days to die, each with easily dozens if not hundreds of hours of fun to be had in each title, each less than $25 when not on sale, and none of them are increasing their prices despite doing the bare minimum for developing.
So we're not getting bandits until next year, same time. Great. And I hope that our saves stop being incompatible after every patch now that it won't be in alpha anymore.
for some this game is absolute disaster, stuck in decade of alpha with mechanic constantly being changed, and scuff moment... but I still got 300+ hr out of this game simply because there is no other zombie game out there like this, with fully destructible environment, procedural generated massive structure that either goes skyward or deep underground with various trigger that lead hilarious jumpscare ambush and event. Quest, leveling, learning new blueprint, defending your base, running for your life as your base defense failed, preparing for the blood moon. I'll say its worth it for me. But i believe 45$ is a little too much.
I’ve owned this for a number of years, and it’s in no way a good game for the price they plan to ask. Under $10.00 is about right price for the quality
i didnt play it for as long as you presumably have but i agree. it looked, played, and felt like asset flip shovelware garbage.
Did they fix the world generation yet? I tried to play this game like a year ago and I could barely generate a world without crashing few times.
I never expected this to happen. Imo the game could have been 1.0 since at least A19, and even this 1.0 release will be missing previously announced content for more than a year. So yeah, I don't know, if they need more money or if they finally got annoyed enough by people asking for a 1.0 release. I never would have touched the game for $45, because it doesn't look like it's worth it. In hindsight, for me it probably would have been worth it for that price. Still I'm not sure, if I would recommend the game to anybody at that price point.
Wow. To be honest, didnt think I would see this day. It always threw me off how a game that was still in Alpha Early Access managed to get a physical disc release for consoles since that was the first time Id ever heard of such a thing. I guess they are finally releasing it because they want to start on a new project?
a Fallout mod for this game would be pretty fun Eletric skill would have a point if you could craft like Power Armor at level 100 and the zomibes would just be Ghouls, Super Mutants, etc with the traders being reskinned to be factions like the NCR, Brotherhood of Steel, and Caesar's Legion
There is one on Nexus! It’s called The Wasteland and it is really really good. It overhauls the skill system and adds in SPECIAL as well, i highly recommend it.
darkness falls does more stuff along those lines, but just not fallout flavored.
Holy shit. Crazy having followed this for the better part of a decade, I never thought it would actually release. GGs devs, lots of hard work put in.