I still hope the whole leveled loot thing is something they scrapped in the meantime... the last time I read about it through the official channels was in early january. That really is a stupid idea, and maybe they realized that too.
Leveled crafting on the other hand... that's something I want to try before I judge it, I'm not completely opposed to the idea. I can imagine that that would put a min-maxer like myself in the position where you would craft the same stuff every time you level, over and over again, instead of repairing it, which requires many times more resources, which I actually like to see. Part of me also likes the idea of being able to make better equipment over time, although I would probably like it being tied to perks and not tied to some generic level. Especcially coop would propably benefit from some kind of perk system, ether something like magicite where you pick your perks at the beginning, or something like fallout, where you pick a perk every other level. If it fits in the game I can't say until I tried it. I think the game certanly
can be balanced around this leveled crafting system, and that in turn
could make it a better experience.
On the plus side,
they claim they changed melee and animations and whatnot so that combat itself is more dangerous, and it's not as easy or even impossible to stunlock enemies like we're all used to. So maybe it will all work out in the end. Maybe in the case of 7DTD we got the end game before we got the early game, in that everybody is used to be able to kill everything from the beginning. Maybe throu the new item system and the new combat, you have to work to get as powerful as you are now right from the beginning.
They even gated the crossbow now. Now if they would make the hundreds of firearms in the game rarer by a factor of about 50.... One can hope...
The most fun I had this year in gaming was definitely Dying Light. You start out as a guy that barely can handle more than a small handful of zombies at a time, and at the end of the game you are a zombie killing machine. I think I'd love this kind of character progression. This would make all the POIs really really hard at the beginning, and exponentially more dangerous the bigger the POI is. What you wish for with the different difficulty in different biomes would be automatically achieved throu zombies that are somewhat capable in killing you and are more than loot dispensers.
If the updated and polished new engine improves the performance as much as they claim, they could, in theory, up the zombie spawn rate by a lot. The number of zombies Dying Light throws at you is
quite ridiculous, I'd love to see something like that. Funnily enough, this would even somewhat "fix" the op crossbow, since you need many more arrows and the reloading would add up to annoying levels. Maybe.
I think they have a somewhat confused development. They put the cart before the horse, the development is all over the place, and, more often than not, seems to be motivated by "I/the players want this" and not "this has to be done". The development of codependent systems is not done at the same time, but in some cases months apart, and in the time inbetween, the game is somewhat broken or at least doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a game design standpoint. Maybe everything will fall in place at the end, I not yet doubt their vision for the game. Alpha is alpha and all that jazz. Or maybe I'm way to optimistic...
There were horses and a guy on fire and I stabbed a guy with a trident.