A long time coming after initially going live back in December 2013, developer The Fun Pimps has now announced that 7 Days to Die is going to be leaving Early Access.
Its kind of crazy they will actually raise the price for this. Last I played it was janky as hell, looks over 10 years old, and at this point it’s been mostly forgotten about. If you haven’t bought it by now I don’t think a price increase is going to grab a lot of new customers.
And a lot of the work over the last 10 years has been repeatedly reworking the same core systems. So it’s just different rather than significantly better. They have made improvements, but it’s somewhat diluted by the side grades
How much of an improvement has there been in the last 3-4 years?
4 of us would play while talking on a voice chat before the pandemic. We stopped after we could easily survive the craziest night time attacks without needing to rebuild. We had all the plans and vehicles.
Is it worth getting the gang back together or are things pretty much the same with a slightly nicer graphical experience?
One of the more recent updates added in a lot of new Points of Interest and helped make the random maps less "WTF" and more reasonable. Though the replayability is down to personal preference. My wife and I will spin up a new world, play until we reach a point of "well, we've basically done everything" and then move on to a different game. And then come back to 7d2d when we want to scratch that "crafting, zombie survival, base defense" itch.
In a lot of ways, 7d2d is like a comfy sweater. It's not going to ever be radically different; but, it's nice to wear for a bit. Personally, I'd be all for getting the gang back together. Unless you are all so saturated in other games to play, why not relive the fun? I'm also a sucker for survival/crafting games and have a Steam library full of them. There are only a couple which I keep going back to, Valheim and 7d2d being the top two. So, YMMV, but I'd say it's a fun enough game and the official release is a good excuse to kill some zombies together again.