I chalked TDL to a learning experience. It came at that time we were still trying to figure out Early Access and hadn't yet realized Greenlight and Steam in general were full of complete and utter shit games not even worth a bundle purchase. I mean, I got my fill wandering around that shitty game every now and then and will likely return every so often. It's one of a long list of similar unfinished messes that get sold on Steam. I keep buying them, albeit a little more cautiously. I too would like to find the perfect zombie, open-world survival game, but I've come to realize it would likely take a big budget studio and have to be like $60 or more. 7 Days to Die is pretty good though and renews my faith in the EA system.
I really had hope they would do something at least remotely decent, even after the transition to Unreal 4 and the subseqent scrapping of the procedural generation (a massive disappointment for me, considering it was one of the major features that made me so stupidly purchase the game in the first place). I managed to waste a little over 10 hours in that skeleton (if it was missing it's skull and half of it's ribs) of a game and even though around 3 of those were probably spent tweaking settings for the game to run above 10 FPS or restarting the game due to unexpected glitches, the remaining 7+ hours really felt as if the so desired post-apocalyptic (nearly) endless zombie filled singleplayer world could actually come to fruition. Hell, I even managed to immerse myself into the little content the game had and had fun for a while.
I scavanged farms, barricaded up houses, planned my daily trips, worried about food and nearby hordes. And then they cancelled it, calling it an indefinite delay. I wasn't very surprised, to be honest, just kind of angry, both at myself and the developers. I was a massive fan of hardcore survival elements before the genre came into the mainstream and the "open world survival crafting" game became the grindy MMO like experience that thousands of people seem to adore.
When I started playing Skyrim (which was around a month after it's release; quite painful for a fan of the franchise when you can only buy the game retail and the first available copies show up so late), I instantly downloaded a basic needs mod (which strangely isn't broken even though the developer abandoned it before the majority of both minor and major patches and before all DLC, leading me to "patch" the mod to include the DLC's food) as well as a hypothermia and long lasting injury mods down the line. Same deal (just the basic needs though) for when I installed my first mods for Oblivion after having played vanilla a while back, Fallout 3, which I quit the first time cause I couldn't bear the vanilla gun mechanics and combat in general, and NV, which I modded before even booting it up for the first time. Eating, sleeping and drinking brought so much immersion to every singleplayer story-driven world - the bars and inns, the rivers and forests all had a new life-like purpose that contributed to the illusion of it all being real.
All that, as well as my undying (excuse the unintended pun) love for zombies and post-apocalyptic fiction in general, boiled down to that one perfect (or at least "flawed gem" level) game that TDL could've been. I saw how much was done but I didn't fully realise how long it took do so and how much was still left to be done. I'm quite a sarcastic skeptic with a generally pessimistic (perhaps leaning towards realistic) mindset but despite all that (including the numerous challenges the developers faced) I actually believed this could be that dream game. Well, all I can say is that nowadays (even though my pessimism is around the same levels as before) I'm even more sceptical of anything I encounter.
Let's hope "We Happy Few" goes at least some way to remedy that - no zombies, but I'll sure as hell take the singplayer focused survival (once/if it actually comes out that is).
ing dumb. "Oh they need 4000 keys but I was only able to get 500, what's the problem?"
