Early Access Review

This is a hard review to write because I do enjoy elements of this game and the overall concept was fun and exciting when it was first released in early-access (way back in 2013). I've owned and played this game since December, 2014. I've been playing since A10 of the game. Just to put this into perspective so that my review makes sense, this game (which is still in alpha) is almost 7 years old in a few months.For 6 of those 7 years, I have been a fan of the potential of this game. In the early years, the formula was simple. start with nothing, craft tools, build bases, survive zombie encounters. The game had bugs, glitches, and other issues, but I'll leave those alone as that's expected. What ruins this game for me are the following in no particular order:1) The leveling, RPG element of the game has been constantly fiddled with, to the point in A19 that it has progressively turned into a chore. It's not fun. It excludes players who do not have hours per day to invest in playing the game. Through each update, the devs seem to have made it a priority to piss off players with ridiculous skill tree grinds.2) The schematics. Skills in the game can be advanced purely by grinding them out through XP or reading books and schematics. These are generally fine, but the developers can't seem the leave this feature alone without ever addressing a major issue that's been with the game forever: You can burn books and schematics by reading the same ones repeatedly. This literally does nothing for your character, save for a few XP points. What's most obnoxious about it is constantly having to check your player stats to see which ones you have read or haven't read. For schematics, you can't even check this. You have to simply look up recipes in your personal inventory, or the work stations, and see which ones are locked. It's a mess. It's never been fixed. It's only been messed with, to the point where it got so bad (the devs made them expire at one point, to force you to keep finding and reading the same ones until you leveled up high enough to just "know" them) that players essentially forced the devs to go back to the original mechanism.3) Optimization. It needs to be stated again that this game is almost 7 years old. I run an i9-9900K paired with an RTX 2080 Super, playing on a 1920x1080 display. Maxed out, I'm lucky if the game runs at 80fps. During horde nights (which increase in scale as the player levels up), the frame drops are easily in the low 20's. It essentially becomes unplayable. They've chosen to focus 7 years of development on assets, content tweaks, bug fixes (which is acceptable) and constant gameplay meddling where stuff isn't broken, instead of optimizing the game. The graphics aren't at all anything special, not even by 2013 standards. There's no reason for this game to run like ♥♥♥♥ other than laziness and/or lack of interest in optimization.4) Stability. This game runs rampant with instability issues. Every patch seems to fix some issues, or not fix listed issues that say "fixed", or introduce entirely new issues that we must wait patiently to be patched in order to "enjoy" the next update. Again, 7 years in alpha. 7 years of community testing and feedback. The "early-access" excuse isn't acceptable at this point.5) Gameplay meddling. It used to be fun and interesting building bases and creating ways to survive horde night. Throughout that last four or five updates, it's just gotten worse. Bases are utterly pointless, as the time and resources it takes to build anything by day 7 and the horde nights that follow, result in structures that might as well be made out of paper. Most annoying is that I've always seen the traders in the game as examples of what a truly 'fortified' position should look like. While I understand that horde night is intended to keep the game intense and interesting and give the player a true sense of purpose and survival, what the prevailing emotion is for me is that the devs are sitting back like, "No matter what they build, let's ♥♥♥♥ with them. Let's destroy their bases with impossibly vicious AI that tears through concrete with flesh and bone, like it's cardboard." It's not fun. It's just plain stupid, and removes the fun and satisfaction of building what would truly be a survivable compound in real life. It makes the player's efforts worthless and rewards them with nothing for taking the time to think out and build a defensible position. The only way I have found to make horde night manageable and entertaining is to turn on creative mode and lay turrets with 360 degrees of coverage, cheating the ammo in to keep them fed. Without them, your base is pointless.6) Structural integrity. I'm a mechanical engineer, so physics and structural mechanics are like second nature to me. This game has had very fundamentally flawed structural physics from the beginning and it continues to this day. I commend the effort to add it to a game like this, but if you can't do it right, or at least well enough to be believable, it's best not to do it at all. Gussets (angled supports between a vertical pillar and horizontal beam) are particularly broken. You can build a pillar, extend out horizontally with blocks until collapse, then rebuild with a single wedge block as a gusset and get a longer horizontal beam. Great! Now, logically, the physical laws that govern a gusset should dictate that if you expand that diagonal structure between your column and beam, you should be able to also expand your horizontal support. Not in this game. A 10-block long gusset has the exact same effect as a single wedge in the corner of your column and beam. Worse, you also have to account for caves or voids under ground, even in areas where no actual support is needed. The way the physics in this game functions is that any void directly impacts the structural stability of ALL the blocks above it, even if they are adequately laterally supported. It doesn't make any sense.7) Lastly is time. In the beginning, time wasn't an issue, as TFP was small, consisting of three guys with day jobs that had a fun idea and plan to make a game. Now they've have over 25 full and part-time employees since 2018 and still have not released a final product. The game isn't even in Beta yet people...The problem that plagues these early-access games, and why I can't recommend them in good consciousness, is because these indie developers have grown accustomed to taking people's money up front, delivering spoon fulls of sub-par product under the guise of "early-access" and the player base has become complacent and accepting of this practice. This game has sold over 2.5 million copies as of 2018. At $25 a copy, that's 62.5 million USD. As of 2020, it's nearly 10 million copies. That's 250 million USD. Where is all of this money going? "The average 7 Days to Die Team member has over 14 years of experience in Game and Software Development working with or for many AAA Video Game Companies." This comes from their original kickstarter... Why am I expected to accept a 7 year old alpha as a fair exchange for my money with AAA "experts" spending 7 years on an alpha? Why am I expected to accept waiting for a final product that I will have long gotten bored of and moved on from in a 7 year time frame, before ever seeing a finished release?The "promise" of a good game to me was worth $25.00 back in 2014. Today, the guarantee of a never finished, poorly optimized, constantly messed with, glitchy, old-looking mess for new players, is not worth $25.00.Yes, I have fun in the game, for what it is. Yes, I still find general entertainment value in it. No, I cannot recommend spending money on it today. These guys have a quarter billion dollars from people buying an alpha. I'll recommend this title when it's finished.