8 years (and one month) ago I reviewed the Xbox version of 7 Days To Die for GameSpot. Alas, when I pitched a follow-up review to celebrate the game finally going 1.0, GameSpot declined. Well they didn’t decline so much as not respond at all. There’s a chance the contacts I have at GameSpot no longer work there and my email went nowhere. That’s games journalism baby!

Anyway, I decided to follow it up with a review all the same, because I love reviewing games. It’s technically a re-review, but I will treat it as a review proper because, well, it’s been 8 years. Without further ado, then.

7 Days To Die

A Week Effort

It was December 2013, and Nelson Mandela had just passed away for the second time if you hail from a parallel universe. Having exhausted all their creativity in coming up with a cool idea for a voxel-based zombie survival game, a plucky young group of developers came up with the studio name “The Fun Pimps” and they released their game 7 Days To Die into Early Access.

More than 10 years and countless iterations later, 7 Days To Die launched into version 1.0. Nobody told the opening splash screen.

I haven’t played 7 Days to Die for 8 years, long enough that I can’t really remember what it was like back then. I know I wasn’t fond of the Xbox port, but most of the specifics have eluded me. So jumping in, I was more-or-less learning everything for the first time.

Like every survival game, 7 Days To Die starts with punching trees. You punch some trees, you scavenge some stones, you craft an axe. This is the simple curve of 7 Days to Die—and of most games of its ilk.

Because it’s been in the tank for so long it might be hard to remember, but 7 Days to Die was sort of a front runner in this field. It wasn’t the first, but when it first launched it took the Minecraft thing and the DayZ thing and the Fallout thing and it mashed them together. And it was successful. It wasn’t doing anything particularly new, but at the time it was doing it quite well. It understood the brief.

Survival games are about four things. Combat, Looting, Harvesting and Crafting. Each of these pillars supports another. You’d be hard pressed to describe punching trees as combat, but it is harvesting. Scavenging rocks is looting. And crafting axes is, uh, crafting. It doesn’t take long for 7 Days to Die to thrust Combat at you, as a zombie slowly lumbers your way and you’re forced to decide between fight or flight.

What’s clever in 7 Days to Die is it makes fighting inevitable. Eventually you have to participate in combat. Even if you don’t go exploring the Points of Interest dotting the game world, where zombies spawn seemingly out of nowhere, on the seventh day a horde of zombies hunts you down and tries to kill you. There’s no running from this horde. It comes from all directions, and it lasts too long to outrun.

From the outset, then, 7 Days to Die had the goods. It had a skeleton worth building upon. It understood the pillars at a time when those pillars were still being constructed. Looting and Harvesting led to Crafting, which led to better looting and harvesting, which led to better crafting, and somewhere in the midst of all that was combat.

So why did it take 10 years to go from a great skeleton to a full-fledged being?

The obvious answer is that games are difficult to make. That 7 Days to Die was an ambitious project from the outset. That The Fun Pimps is a small studio.

But the obvious answer is not the only answer. All of the above undoubtedly contributed to 7 Days to Die languishing in Early Access for longer than it should have, but what really dragged the process out was that The Fun Pimps couldn’t ever stop tinkering with what they had.

There’s a saying that gets trotted out a lot. Incorrectly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto, it goes “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

7 Days to Die, then, is the exception that proves the rule. Because 7 Days to Die got to a good place and then tinkered its way past irrelevance and into bad.

Irrelevance is what happens when all of your ideas are done elsewhere, and I hear you—there aren’t really any other ‘realistic’ voxel-based games. That’s what set 7 Days apart from Minecraft, its rounded edges and ‘realistic’ landscapes. But 10 years on, the graphics aren’t better by a large enough margin for it to matter any more. Eventually your world being made up of ugly cubic bricks instead of ugly amorphous terrain deforming bricks isn’t a significant differentiator.

And as for the other things 7 Days was doing when it first came out—that’s done too. Hordes, RPG style levels, Vehicles, Traders… none of this is unique to 7 Days. It wasn’t in 2016, when Telltale Publishing made the mistake of releasing the game on consoles.

But ‘irrelevant’ could still have been good. “Relevance” is entirely subjective, and 7 Days has a large fanbase of loyal acolytes who would happily argue the point till they were blue in the face. Had The Fun Pimps simply pulled the trigger on its release when it reached a stable(ish) state, the saying might still hold up. 7 Days might have been eventually good.

Sadly this did not happen. Because The Fun Pimps couldn’t stop tweaking their game. And not only were they tweaking the game—their game design philosophy appeared to be player antagonistic. That is, TFP weren’t just altering their game based on feedback from players—they were changing it in an effort to combat how players played the game.

The easiest example is with crafting. Originally players would level up their skills RPG style. If you wanted to be better at crafting axes, you’d craft more axes. Eventually the axes you’d be making were of the highest quality. The same went for other gear, and so (in theory) over the natural course of the game you’d craft enough of each item that you’d always have an appropriate piece of gear for your point in progression.

As anyone who set up a system to endlessly jump into a wall in Morrowind’s Seyda Neen knows, this system is exploitable. In Morrowind, it led to players who could leap tall buildings before they’d encountered the falling wizard. In 7 Days to Die, it resulted in players building hundreds of axes so that they could have a top tier tool right from the outset.

This was not the intended playstyle, so The Fun Pimps “fixed” it. Now all progression is tied to magazines, lootable materials found largely in bookshelves, mailboxes and acquired as rewards from the Traders.

This was a mistake.

This relegates progression to an RNG luck-of-the-draw system. It aggressively hinders co-operative play, as loot is acquired on a first come, first serve basis. And it actively punishes new players who are attempting to learn how to play the game without using Google every four seconds to find out why they can’t do a certain thing.

The RNG part is not entirely accurate, but it’s tied to the new player thing so we’ll address that second. The detriment this system has to co-op play cannot be overstated. Looting in 7 Days to Die is zero-sum. If I get something, you do not (except in the case of quest objectives). This element is mitigated by players being able to freely share anything they want in a variety of ways. I can drop you an item, I can store it in a chest, I can actively leave it in a loot container and tell you about it (although I can’t interact with something once it has been ’emptied’ of loot for some reason).

But when an item is used immediately, there is no sharing. I can’t eat a pretzel and then share it with you, unless you want it chocolate covered. And the magazines system is entirely single use. That means if I want to progress, you cannot. Not in the same way, at the same pace.

And because we didn’t understand this (frankly terrible) system from the outset, when I played 7 Days to Die with three mates, we actively fucked ourselves without even realising it. Because in the spirit of jolly cooperation we were sharing magazines around to keep everyone leveled together—inadvertently quadrupling our progression curve as we did.

It wasn’t until, on the dawn of Day 7, with the Blood Moon horde bearing down upon us imminently, I broke down and searched why I couldn’t make a Forge, a critical element in smelting metals and crafting pipe weapons, metal building materials and more. And I found out I needed to randomly find a magazine to do it.

I nearly quit the game on the spot. What gets me about this system is that there’s no way a new player could know it was in place. The only way to learn about it is to happen across it while the game is throwing a billion other far more pressing matters your way, or to look it up online.

Similarly, online is where I found out that if I specc’d specific ‘perks’ I’d increase my odds of finding the magazines I wanted. What we should have been doing the whole time is each player should have been specialising in building specific things by taking the appropriate perks. Note that I said ‘increase the odds’, because it doesn’t guarantee progression, it just adjusts the RNG marginally in your favour.

Players with thousands of hours in 7 Days to Die already would start each game by building 100 axes, and so every single player became an enemy to The Fun Pimps.

That’s what I mean by antagonistic tweaking. To TFP, the player really is the enemy. It’s such a bizarre game design philosophy.

The magazines situation is the worst of it, but it’s always existed in 7 Days. The Fun Pimps alter the zombie pathing AI like the player is a black hat hacker trying to start a nuclear war. And that has created an arms race out of base building. There is a cottage industry of content creators who spend all their time analysing the zombie pathing in 7 Days, because those who put thousands of hours into the game are always trying to work out how to foolproof their base designs.

But new players are left to the wayside. Casuals, who dip in and out every so often, are treated poorly, and it lays bare the truth at the heart of The Fun Pimps themselves.

Because while their name might imply that they traffic in fun, what they actually traffic in is engagement. That nebulous nothing-word used in C Suites around the gaming world, engagement is what drives everything in 7 Days to Die.

They’re not the first to fall into this trap, of course. It’s the most common pitfall of live-service games everywhere. Whenever you load a mobile game, or some new hero shooter with a lifespan shorter than a Blood Moon Cycle, and you notice they have a crisp UI where the buttons to buy new characters are so responsive and the matchmaking always gives you enough time to check your daily tasks—that game has great engagement.

It’s what World of Warcraft spent years chasing, what Fortnite brags about mastering, what Andrew Wilson is sure the next Battlefield game will be.

But make no mistake: engagement isn’t fun. It looks good on graphs, giving up great CCUs or UVs or whatever buzzword metric is your favourite, but it’s not fun. And while those games can be fun and engaging (I named one above), if done poorly, one can come at the cost of the other.

This is the fatal error of 7 Days to Die.

It was fun, at one point, but it isn’t now. And people who stuck with it for a decade, they can play it still knowing that The Fun Pimps’ antagonistic game design philosophy might one day take it back to a place where it’s fun, but those trying it out at “1.0” can’t know that. All they’ve got to go on is a game full of systems that are affronted by their presence. A game that desperately wants to drag out playtime for reasons that aren’t clear. One that kneecaps new players at every turn, with the expectation that they’ll simply start over—when most reasonable people would simply quit and never return.

There’s only one reason a person who purchased the game at 1.0 might stick around—sunk cost fallacy. Because when The Fun Pimps decided their game—still labelled Pre-Release Software as it is—was now version 1.0, that change came with a 185% price increase. The 10 year old 7 Days To Die went from $35 something Australian Dollars to $65. In the third week of April, it was $8.

I know it’s gauche to talk about pricing in reviews, but this is the bargain Early Access games make when they launch before they’re finished. Players buy in early for the privilege of helping QA test a game, and their reward for this free labour is a discount and a game that is better than when it started.

And 7 Days to Die was better, at one point. But it isn’t now.

I won’t try to tell you what monetary value I think 7 Days to Die is worth. Every person values things differently. But I will tell you I don’t think 7 Days to Die is worth double today what it was worth a month ago. I don’t think 7 Days to Die is worth any percentage more today than it was before.