7 Days to Die is a great game, but any recommendation I could give it is inherently a bit double-edged because I genuinely think it was a better game last year. Just about everything I like about its foundation is still there; it's a survival crafting game that manages to be fully voxel-based and destructible without looking the part, with an emphasis less on exploring randomly generated terrain and more on exploring structures that are randomly placed but hand-made, with each one feeling like a fun mini-dungeon hiding its own little surprises. There's plenty of content, plenty to build, and it lasts a long time before getting old. I spent a long time playing it via gamepass before coming back to put 50 more hours into it with my usual group for 1.0, and we had a good time doing it. But by the end of it, we all had our own complaints as well. The problem with the 1.0 changes aren't that they ruined the game, so much as that they change it ever so slightly into a different type of game than the one we came to it for; it's like right at the end of development someone on the team played an ARPG and had an epiphany.

Most of the changes feel like they were made for people who have been playing the game for thousands of hours and just want to grind efficiently, rather than new players just wanting to explore and play the game with fresh eyes. A minor example of this is the trader system; in the previous versions, any of the game's different vendors could show up anywhere, and it was possible to get lucky and find towns with two different ones in the area. In 1.0 we eventually moved into a town that had three traders, which was pretty exciting until I realized they were all Trader Hugh (sorry, Hugh) because of them being made biome-specific. You can obviously guess why they did this. For people who already know the game and just want to get going, it takes a lot of the guess work out of finding a trader of a certain type they might need to start optimally instead of having to wander for ages looking for one with a bit of bad luck. But for normal people, those sorts of experiences are practically a cornerstone of the genre; survival crafting games are all about generating funny stories caused by the randomness, and I feel like probably everyone that's ever played one has at least one memory of searching for ages for something and how good it felt when they finally stumbled across it or finding something they didn't even know was in the game after finishing it multiple times. Yeah, it can be frustrating in the moment, but that's why it's called "survival" crafting, not vacation crafting. Get real, man.

The last time I played this game, there was a clothing system that, while not necessarily robust, had a nice amount of variety, as well as minor gameplay elements. You could loot funny hats and put together outfits, customize your character's looks without worrying about stats, and dress for the weather. This has all been replaced with various sets of armor and a promise of re-adding it about a year later. You can still mix and match pieces of armor, and in some ways it can even be preferable with their individual effects, but each set also has a set bonus that encourages you to just wear a full set instead of dressing up the way you want to. Some of the funny items like cigars are still in the game, but only as accessories you equip to your gear with no visual change. And that's adequate -- at least there are still options, and while I wish there were more armor sets they at least look pretty unique -- but it just feels arbitrary, even mechanically. If you went into a snow biome from the start before, your character would end up freezing pretty quickly if you didn't have warm clothes to layer up with, and my first memory of such a thing was spending a night huddled by a campfire in a house surrounded by bears. Which is fun! I love having moments like those in these games. I went there in 1.0 fairly early on expecting to relive the memory, and found that because I had crafted basically any armor set at all I was already above the threshold of the weather doing anything more than a very minor stamina debuff. Why even bother?

But the thing that pisses me off the most is that despite its stat focus, the last time I played the game it did a good job of keeping the progression separate from the gameplay, so that you could comfortably specialize no matter what you chose to do as long as you were killing zombies and generally doing something. There were books you could find that gave unique and fun bonus traits, which are still there, but for the most part you were free to do whatever you wanted without feeling like you were lagging behind anyone you were playing with. In the current build, the entire system has been changed so that nothing really matters except the magazines you've read. Want to make better guns? Read 100 handgun magazines. Want to make better clothes? Without reading 100 issues of Fashion Weekly? C'mon, let's be serious! Nearly every crafting skill in the game now has 100 arbitrary points you have to raise by reading that many magazines (yes, yes, give or take 20 or so if you wear the nerd outfit, sue me geeksquad), and it's as tiring as you'd expect. Unless, of course, you do quests -- which are now basically the only viable way to progress even remotely smoothly, because of how often they reward you with loot boxes full of an assortment of magazines that are usually guided to what you're trying to level. And this, hundreds of words later, is my core problem with the new update. It doesn't matter if you want to loot, if you want to farm, if you just want to kill zombies; if you're not doing quests, you will burn out of the game long before you finish any crafting tree, to the point that it feels actively detrimental to just go out and explore on your own. Even the vendors themselves have been heavily nerfed to the point that most of their inventory is completely arbitrary in favor of the things you can craft at a given time, with their only lingering purpose being selling junk and occasionally buying things you're just too lazy to go find. Which would be fine, if the trader didn't still constantly get hung up on sending you to the same three or four buildings per quest tier or try to send you to Tilted Towers 6,000 meters away if your towns don't generate just right.

I'm sure some poindexter with 10,000 hours in the game is going to come into my comments like "erm, ackshually, the changes added a sense of balance that was greatly desired for the pvp experience", to which I say come at me because I am simply morally superior and way cooler. And despite my complaints, I do still maintain that it is still fun. But the reason behind my great american novel is to give context for the bottom line: is it worth $45? No. I mean, I don't even have to think about it, honestly. When I bought it the game was $25, and I thought that was a fair price then and it's still a fair price now. $45 is frankly a crack pipe price for it in its current state, especially given that it rocketed up that $20 with no meaningful changes from the previous build. But they have a lengthy roadmap listing out things that should have been in anything called "1.0", like bringing back the wardrobe system, adding in bandits, and even story content and new quests, which all sound like excellent ideas. If those end up coming to pass and don't get stripped down after 10 more years of rebalancing then I think the current price tag would be more justified. For now, just wait for a sale and don't be afraid to look into a few mods.

I love this game. I have been playing it for nearly a decade and the evolution has been wild. Honestly a bit surprised I don't have more hours than I have. Love you devs. Thank you for giving me fun times

Крутая игра