7 Days to Die has a terrible problem with the devs not knowing what they want to do with the game. All they know is that the players are doing it wrong.
I especially like that, despite the fact that you’re the supposed hero, every shot of your hand shows what appears to be a scaly monster’s hand. It makes you wonder who - or what - you really are…
I think it depends on the amount of fun you have. There’s a difference between “I grinded for 30 hours to get this item, I felt pulled into doing it and now I’m 6 hours late for work” addictive fun, “I played for 30 hours on and off, it was such a relaxing experience” chill tf out fun, and “I played for 30 hours, I broke my controller from gripping it too hard and my heart was pounding the whole time” hardcore action fun. It’s tough to gauge a game just on how much time it takes to complete.
I’ve played about 150 hours of ESO. One of the big problems, IMO, is that the surface-world PvE story content is so unchallenging it’s boring. They made it so that someone with an intentionally atrocious build can solo everything that’s required for story progression, which means that anyone who puts the slightest thought into their character will steamroll the game. If I thought that’s all there was to the game, I wouldn’t have played it more than an hour.
Honestly, even the default-difficulty dungeons are lame. There’s technically a story in it, but everyone just rushes through it so fast that you have no idea what’s happening. All you know is that you and your party are sprinting from room to room, wiping out huge groups of enemies just by spamming your most efficient area attack. I play a healer character, a Templar in light armor, and when I do standard difficulty I think I pop a basic heal once the entire time if I’m lucky. Sure, the fast pace is exciting for the first few times, but you catch on at some point to the fact that you’re just mindlessly spamming AOEs every time.
If you actually want a challenging game, you need to do the world bosses, veteran dungeons, and trials. World bosses are technically group content, and there is usually a group running a schedule for the world bosses in each zone, but if you hate those people you can kill them yourself. Veteran dungeons are roughly on the same level of difficulty that WoW dungeons are. I actually have to pay attention to my positioning and resources when I’m in one, which is refreshing. Also nice is that the targeting system works seamlessly with my heals; all I need to do is point at my teammate and hit the spell key, no specific targeting required. It feels like I’m in a combat with magic I can control instead of playing with a UI. But anyway, it’s such a different experience from the default difficulty that I really recommend you try it out. You’ll be fine, I sucked my first few times and I never got vote-kicked or even flamed.
Trials are the one thing I don’t have experience with, and to my knowledge it’s the most challenging content by far. Someone else could tell you more about it, though. I also don’t have a ton of experience with PvP, other than getting ganked in Cyrodiil a few times while looking for delves and a match where I just ran around spamming heals and running away from enemies. My team didn’t win and I didn’t get so much as a single kill, but I got the highest score of anyone in the lobby. Good times.
I really don’t see why an indie dev would oppose this. If you were an artist, you wouldn’t want to watch your creation completely disappear from existence because you couldn’t keep working on it, would you?
The core problem with 7DTD is a lack of direction. The devs have spent the last however many years rebuilding the core aspects of the same over and over and over again instead of just deciding that they like what they have and refining that. I’m convinced this is what they’ll continue to do even after the “1.0” release they just did.
The only thing they’re sure of is that the players are playing the game wrong, and they will mercilessly nerf any particularly powerful strategy, trick, etc. that doesn’t fit wit their confused definition of what the game is. Really, the best thing I can say to someone interested in the game is, look at the end-game horde base builds. They follow bizarre logic that only follows around the nonsensical whims of the developers. It feels less like you’re surviving a brutal post-apocalypse and more like you’re playing a tower defense puzzle game. Something like Sanctum if it was a zombie survival game, ran like trash, and didn’t know what it wanted to be.
They’re not immaculate. They used to outright deny people the right to refund their games, but they turned that around after a massive lawsuit from a government agency. Good change! I support that. But they’re not behaving in an anti-competitive manner. What, are they supposed to intentionally make themselves worse in the hopes that other stores pop up? That’s not how any of this works.
Among a few other things, it makes leveling up twice as fast as normal UP (apparently UL doubled the XP needed to level up), you gain two perk points per level, the amount of research data you get from schematics (which you need to craft others and upgrade workstations) is doubled, and the chance to upgrade items is changed to always 100%.
My favorite mod is Undead Legacy. It lets you craft schematics for the items you need by scrapping the ones you don’t need. You can find cars in the world and repair them to full working order, including lights and sirens on police cars. The progression is much more granular with item tiers doing from H all the way up to S three stars, and that includes the item mods now. Your inventory is weight-based instead of slot-based (except for containers) and you can carry a much wider variety of gear.
If this mod sounds fun, I strongly recommend also adding the anti-bullshit sub-mod that someone made for UL.