#what do you mean the hitbox is inaccurate?

[rocketbirdie]

go ahead. dodge the hipcheck.

[tbogost]

REVIEW: 7 Days to Die

Published July 1, 2016, on ICXM.net

I was fairly optimistic going into 7 Days to Die, a survival sandbox game created by The Fun Pimps and developed on Xbox One by Iron Galaxy. I knew that the graphics were not beautiful and that I couldn’t possibly expect a stellar experience from a misleading port of game still in alpha on Steam, but I had my hopes. Gathering supplies, crafting gear, and building forts to protect myself from hordes of zombies sounded like fun, especially in a style similar to Minecraft yet designed for more mature audiences. Unfortunately, 7 Days to Die is thoroughly disappointing. Although the visuals are indeed terrible, they are the least of this game’s problems. I was wrong to be optimistic; I’ve played plenty of dreadful games on Xbox One, but this is one of the worst ones yet.

The basics of 7 Days to Die are simple and what anyone who has played similar games can expect. Survival mode has you fending for supplies and slowly building and upgrading fortifications over time to protect yourself from ordinary dangers such as starvation or dehydration as well as more unusual dangers like death-by-zombie. Creative mode takes on a separate tone, allowing you to fly around the map while spawning any item in the game without the need to craft it first.

On the one hand, I appreciate the wide range of settings that, for example, let you adjust the hours in a day or the amount of zombies that spawn; I appreciate how you can play in a handcrafted open world called Navezgane or in a fresh, randomly generated world; I appreciate the option to play either alone or in a local split-screen game with a friend, although the online multiplayer seems to be broken at the moment, at least in my experience. On the other hand, none of these alternate possibilities matter when missing sounds, bland graphics, faulty combat, and performance issues all make the core game utterly miserable to play.

The worst problem with 7 Days to Die is the broken audio. Most sound effects are a moment tardy and others are absent completely. Sometimes a gunshot is a whisper, other times it is a powerful blast. Since you cannot hear your own footsteps until just after moving, there’s a constant illusion that you’re being followed, which is by no means a stylistic approach meant to create a more genuine horror experience. It's just plain clunky instead. Whenever you land from a jump - after the obligatory delay - a horrible noise like a dump truck running over a cat signifies your landing on soft grass. But the peculiarities don’t stop there. Attacking enemies and interacting with objects suffer from the same disingenuous clamors; while beating a zombie with a club returns a muddled plonk, hitting a rock with bare hands is reflected by a flesh-on-flesh punch effect like that from a cheesy action flick.

As far as graphics go, 7 Days to Die seems to suffer from a lack of distinct direction. It's unsure whether it wants to be a simple voxel game like Minecraft or an aesthetically complex game like ARK: Survival Evolved. The result is not a unique hybrid of the two styles, but an ugly mutant that doesn’t know where it fits in. Three-dimensional flowers are formed by intersecting two-dimensional splotches, and the ground is completely flat, with extras like old Dixie cups, newspapers, and cardboard boxes (at least I think that’s what those were. With these designs, who knows?) melded into it like street art. These objects, which I'm assuming are meant to add detail, are so flat and so bland that it is nearly impossible to understand what they are meant to be.

Although this may seem like just a bizarre choice of style, it has a major impact on actually playing the game as well. During one of the quite vague tutorials, for example, I was told to find feathers from a bird’s nest, which are key ingredients required for crafting arrows. I spent almost an hour looking among trees, abandoned houses, and grassy areas before finally giving up. While doing something completely unrelated much later, I became distracted by a small brown splotch – clearly a cow pie – in the middle of a street. Just a few moments later I couldn’t help but laugh at its descriptor, “birdnest,” smiling up at me.

Being a zombie game, 7 Days to Die wouldn’t be complete without its fair share of clubs, swords, handguns, and shotguns. It’s too bad then that the fundamentals of melee combat seem to have been left out of the development process completely. Dreadful hitboxes make it hard enough to successfully land hits on zombies and their spastic limbs, and an inaccurate and unnatural reticle makes this even more challenging both up close and from far away. If you do get lucky enough to inflict damage, your weapons disappear for a split-second at the moment they come close to enemies’ bodies. There’s no sense of solid contact between the two, and, as previously mentioned, missing sound effects further impact this feeling. Once a zombie gets knocked to the ground, he is temporarily stunned and takes increased damage. He will then screech every time you hit him, but will not move an inch, even if physics should allow it.

Attacking animals for food has its own similar yet equally frustrating issue. In grassy areas – areas where animals are most commonly found – your weapon converges with each individual block of grass rather than with the animal itself, even when aiming directly at your prey. This is no stand against killing innocent animals, this is just a broken mechanic.

Even if you can stand all of the core issues that 7 Days to Die has to offer along with the mediocre gamepad controls that make it challenging to pick up items and aim your reticle anywhere, you’ll still come across a consistently wobbly frame rate and a brief freeze that occurs every three to four minutes no matter what you’re doing in-game.

Summary

7 Days to Die is advertised as a finished game on Xbox One, a statement which is in reality a complete lie. Alpha 14.7 was released on Steam on June 20th, 2016, and it’s likely that the console version is actually running an older build. The game has been in early access on Steam for more than two years now, and its plentiful issues, both there and on console, are evidence that it deserves to remain in alpha for many more months. Although my experience with 7 Days to Die on Xbox One was a horrific one, I think that the game could have had more potential if consumers weren’t being forced to compare it to other, more polished, more complete games that also cost $29.99.

If 7 Days to Die had launched in the Xbox Game Preview program, which welcomes evolving survival games like The Long Dark and ARK: Survival Evolved, I may have been willing to forego many of its issues. However, as it is, it seems to me that there was a push to launch this game simultaneously on PS4 (which does not currently feature an early access program) and Xbox One during the Summer, and ultimately that decision was a bad one. Just because the PS4 does not yet accommodate for early access titles does not mean that a company can lie to consumers about the state of their unfinished game. Although I enjoy the concept of the features 7 Days to Die offers, the simple truth is that other games of the same genre – games that actually promise future content updates to console gamers – provide much more refined experiences, and dismiss any chance of me recommending "7 Days to Lie."

[dannysdevblog]

For this period I created a small prototype for a game called Headspace (you can play it here) in Unity (a game engine), which attempts to simulate online interactions and their effect on ones mental health. Ideally, I had wanted this game to reflect toxic gaming communities impact on women and minority groups, and was planning on using real life examples of comments that have been archived (here, for instance), but I ran into some difficulty mapping the text onto the comment blocks. Currently, the game itself consists of a hollow circle, representing ones mind, a stress meter, and one button with with you can post online. As the player generates more content, more and more comments are allowed into the headspace. Currently, negative comments are much larger and impact your stress negatively, while positive comments are small, reduce your stress levels marginally, and are sometimes impossible to read. This is meant to represent a negative or harassing comment’s ability to dominant ones thoughts, and a common belief that the negative comments must be the most true or accurate ones. If the player’s stress gets too high, the game ends and the person they were playing as gives up. Currently, there is no way to manage your stress levels, and the end result is that online harassment is relentless and posting online is futile. However, this is only because I couldn’t get any of the stress reducing techniques (talking to friends, manually picking up and throwing out negative comments from the headspace, or seeing a therapist) to work yet. Ideally, I’d like the game to give the player options to safeguard themselves from online harassment and allow for productive ways to manage ones mental health during those encounters, and generate a safe online community of peers for themselves.

A glitch where stress didn’t increase :)

Successes/failures for this project largely came from a lack of development time (I did about 6-8 hours on this probably) and a large amount of ambition. Much of the code failed on the first try, which led to me having to research alternatives. For instance, I had wanted to the player to manually toss out negative comments, but the motion tracking with the mouse appeared sputtery, and the hitboxes (edges of objects that prevent other objects from going through them) glitched out the comments. The game also currently suffers from a lack of agency on part of the player, only having one option. I do like the slight feeling of helplessness this creates, though as I mentioned there are many techniques one can use to foster a safe online community (though until many social media sites fix their harassment and hate speech polices, this is rather difficult). I mostly wanted to experiment with spawning an enoumous amount of objects in a small, confined space, and seeing what kind of emotions that elicited, as well finding a visual representation of sorting and working through ones thoughts. Being confronted with incredibly hurtful words in a vaccuum was also an interesting experience, and I was so uncomfortable I censored and dilluted much of language I found online. In the full version, I’ll probably reintroduce that. Aesthetically, I enjoy the blur and grain effects I used for the pixel art to represent a space for general thoughts, as it conveys a sense of openness and vagueness. I created a color changer, and I want to map it to all the objects in the game so I can change color based on mood and stress, as I feel confining mood to a meter or integer is vastly reductive of human emotion. I used a meter this time just because implementing color required more time and planning. Pixel art was only used for this as a means for easy prototyping, but it could end up being effective, though I may also want to use screencaps of real comments and create a more collage aesthetic. I think I would just need to put in another 6 hours of work on this to fix all the bugs, so hopefully I can do that and something new for next bi-weekly period.

Academically, this game relates to the book I’m reading Crash Override by Zöe Quinn, who was one of the main figures in the Gamergate movement in 2014, and the target of the major harassment by Gamergate supporters, including doxing, threats of rape, and death threats. The Gamergate movement stemmed from a defamatory, and largely inaccurate, post Quinn’s ex-boyfriend wrote about her, claiming she had an unethical romantic relationship with another games journalist, which led to the skewing of review scores and other ethical problems. Proponents of the movement then used these false claims as a guise under which they could use to harass women and minority groups online, coming out of sites like Reddit and 4Chan. These individuals thought games were becoming too politically correct by needing to include women, PoC, and diverse storytelling, and attempted to use anonymity and horrible threats to bully these people out of their community and the video game industry. In the book she tells her side of the story unfiltered, and explains how she went on to found the Crash Override Network, an crisis organization for those experiencing online harassment and abuse. Though Gamergate is three years behind us now, toxic gaming communities still continue to exist, as is see by PewDiePie, the most subscribed person on Youtube and prominent Let’s Player (a person who records and commentates over playthroughs of games), calling another player the n-word unapologetically on a Twitch stream upon missing a shot at them. Droves of fans continued to support him afterwards, claiming it was a “heated gaming moment” and “everyone says that”, and “words are just words”, so clearly there is still work left to be done in the community.

I’ll also continue to gather information on this subject via my Women’s Studies class, as one of our main projects involves a research topic with similar areas of focus. I hope to develop this game more as the weeks progress, I might even work on it more tonight.

Quinn, Zöe. Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight against Online Hate. PublicAffairs, 2017.