[2021] Exit from Early Access Alpha?

Games take a long time to develop 5-6 years is the industry average set by monolithic giants like EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Etc. TFP by contrast started as a fairly small development team, and even now is only up to maybe 25-50 people.

Alpha takes, on average, 90~% of the development time. If Alpha is 8 years, Beta is maybe 6-8 months.

And 7DTD began it's early access period with the literal first working version of the game that even the developers had access to; Alpha 1, Build 1. Most other companies wont even let you hear of their game until it's within a year, maybe two of completion; And the ones that do early access tend to do so with a very late-alpha stage version of the game after most of the work is done; If not in the beta stages of development.

Combine these things, And you've got a game a long time in early access.

There's a lot more to it, of course; But this covers some of the main points.

Originally posted by Nebgama: well if they spend less time changing the color black to new black and back to black again each revision i am sure we would be a lot closer by now. Literally there is only one shade of black guys and that is black. The other shades are grey not black.

Seriously the textures and assets have changed a gazillion times we have had a gazillion music scores added and changed the zombies have changed a gazillion times. Gore blocks been a thing then removed then a thing again then removed again.

Its like they have adhd or something and the game needs to change drastically each patch.

Uhm.. While I get what you're trying to say, I gotta correct a few things. Gore blocks were a thing, then removed. They never got readded to my knowledge. Some mods readd them; But they've never been back intot he main game.

Likewise to texture changes. They're doing one sweeping overhaul of everything; But most things havent changed more than once prior to this, and only to try and unify the direction of the temporary assets.

The zombies have changed precisely one time. We've had the same nurse since Alpha what, 3? When she was first introduced? And now we've got a new re-texture of her. Same with the others.

I can't speak as well to the music; But iirc the same music i remember hearing a number of alphas ago is still in the game now. Theres new stuff too; But that is not the same as the allegation that they took score A, replaced it with B, replaced that with C, then went back to A, then decided they liked C, and so on.

Another serious point of contention is the skill system- Which has had several major changes; But if you really look at the changes that were made, There have been 2 that altered things significantly, and the first of the two was the lead-up step to the actual major overhaul. They didnt re-do the same skills a dozen times. They put in a temporary placeholder, Later overhauled that to bring it closer to the vision as an intermediary step, and then took that and moved it the rest of the way.


And lastly.. Even if they HAD done, redone, and re-redone everything in the game....
Welcome to designing literally anything.
It is exceedingly rare, if not downright impossible for the first iteration to be the ultimate perfect iteration.

In reality, Things get tried, tweaked, thrown out for something new, again and again as the whole vision is unified into one. No game, program, art piece, poem, song, show, etc is free from this. But almost all game developers never let you see this side of development because many end users simply wouldn't understand that the game you so love now was not perfect on the first iteration. It did not spring forth fully formed from the developers mind as a flawless product.

Originally posted by Herald Rejn: yep, development of this game is a trash. It's not AAA game with ultra new graphic and a lot of mechanics, so why do you compare 7days to AAA games xD to make game like this you need half of time or even less, just look at rust or the forest or even subnautica. Soon we will get the forest 2 and 7days is not even close to the release.

Subnautica hit steam as early access in mid December 2014, And was fully released in late January of 2018; For a total of about 3 years 1 month of availability in early access. However, The version which was released in early access was not the first working version of the game. In fact, They had announced the game a year earlier in mid december of 2013, And had already been working on the game for several years prior at the time of that announcement, For a total of around 6-7~ years of active development.

Rust went through something similar. Released to early access in december 2013; Officially released in February 2018 for a total of 4 years and 2 months; But again, It had actually begun awhile earlier as a clone of DayZ. In total it took around, again, somewhere around 6~ or more years.

I don't know as much about the development of The Forest so I'll leave that be, but... Given we have an industry average of 5-6 years, that's about right for the other two. But there are always outliers to that average; There's games that get finished in a year, There's games that take 10-15 years. There's simply no perfect magical formula to produce a game in precisely perfectly without flaws or hiccups or dry periods, etc. An average is an average because it is an average of the highs, lows, and middles.

The end message here, Is development takes a lot longer than people think it does; Largely due to developers simply hiding half to three quarters of the development process behind closed doors because laymen simply don't 'get it'.