[2022] The game really needs now is some kind of story mode, perhaps a procedural generated one?

Originally posted by Katitoff:

Originally posted by Seftak: The basic mechanics of the game are not even done yet.... Do you often paint walls before even building them up?

That statement is just a cope.
Which features are still missing?

Going to quote mysellf from a previous post that more or less touches on this; For quote-nesting purposes I won't be putting the whole thing in a quote. (steam stops letting you nest quotes after 2 or 3 deep.)
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Originally posted by Shanakar:

Originally posted by Phat_Won: I'm still waiting for the crafting grid as sold during kickstarter or was that a dishonest sell?

Everything they sold on kickstarter was a dishonest sell at this point. The big finger has been given plenty of times to all of us who backed on kickstarter. This is why companies should be held liable for misleading and not delivering after taking people's money.

Just gonna quote myself from a previous time I covered this..

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by Donnie: My personal favorite thing about this game, as someone who's been around since Alpha 9... are the ways this game offers optional experiences to players.

Originally posted by Shurenai: until the beta phases of the game when the foundation of the game wasn't being changed on the regular.

Just my opinion, but the dev team does not really seem to have a specific opinion of what they want this game to be. They keep fundamentally changing everything about it. That's why options for players are important. This game today is absolutely nowhere near the planned kickstarter game that I backed 8 or 9 years ago.

The majority of their featureset from the Kickstarter has been implemented in part or in full at this point, story aside. To quote myself from several alphas back:

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by Tux:
I do not agree that its going in the direction of the orginal kickstarter, I do agree that EA is a risk buy no doubt. with that said, I have many many many EA games and to be honest this is literally the only one I have in which actions taken by the developer I have been disapointed in since A13. but such as life and such is the risk

Well let's take a look.

• "The World - Explore a beautiful, hand crafted, voxel world with a multitude of biomes including: wastelands, forests, snowy mountains, pine forests, plains, deserts, burn forests and radiation zones." -- This would be the Navezgane map; And it is indeed what it is advertised to be.
  
  
• "Points of Interest - Discover hundreds of great Points of Interests ranging from caves, campsites to cities and skyscrapers. Each and every building can be explored inside and out." -- Definitely a check; All sorts of POI's exist ranging from caves and campsites to cities and skyscrapers..All fully explorable.
  
  
• "Dynamic Story Generation - The story unfolds through our “Dynamic Story Generation System” which guides the player to other survivors, better loot and undiscovered Points of Interests through story note quests." -- This is currently at least partially missing from the game; However the actual story is finally making its way into the game as of A18; With the duke of navezgane and the story note you start a game with.
  
  
• "Basic Survival - Scavenge the world for food and water maintaining and boosting health, food, stamina and hydration levels. Grow and harvest a variety of crops and hunt, track or domesticate a multitude of wildlife to live off the land." -- Food and water survival, check; Crops and hunting, check, Tracking, check...Domestication still missing but is planned in the future.
  
  
• "Day and Night Game Play - Spend the day looting, mining, crafting and building up your forts defenses as light slows down and weakens the zombies. Hold up somewhere safe at night as the lunar cycle speeds up and strengthens the zombies." -- Check to all of this; They've even introduced an optional setting to make the zombies not faster at night.
  
  
• "Looting, Mining and Crafting - Loot and mine a multitude of items and ingredients to create hundreds of items including melee weapons, guns, traps, generators, motorized tools, motion detectors, landmines, auto-turrets, salves, potions and more using our 5x5 grid Crafting System." -- Lot of checks here with the exception of the 5x5 crafting grid as it was deemed to be too cumbersome by both devs AND many players.
  
  
• "Relentless and Special Enemies - Enemies will claw, jump, climb and break their way through the world in order to get to you. They can see, smell and hear the player and can work in a group. And watch out for the unique special infected enemies like the Acid Puking Hulk whose acidic vomit can melt blocks." -- Currently only smell is missing from the game, and I believe it's intended to be re-introduced in the future..Don't have a source to cite though.
  
  
• "Block Physics and Stability - Our Physics System simulates real-time structural integrity, durability and mass. Blocks don’t float in the air nor can you build an unsound unsupported structure. Build it right or watch it come crumbling down. Weak blocks can even fall from the weight of the player or zombies." -- Very check.
  
  
• "Item Quality and Food & Water Purity - Every item in the game has a quality level and degrades with use and combine items to create better items. All Food and water items have a purity level the higher the purity level. The higher the health and stamina benefits. Improve crafting to make better items. Improve cooking to make purer food and water." -- This is one that has seen some trouble; Item quality degradation was pretty hated by the players, and the combining items thing..well, Let's just say it was hilariously broken as the moment you had a workbench you had Q600 items and became untouchable. Food/water purity is currently simulated by the food poisoning system; Unsure if it'll make it in...Making it in would basically necessitate food/water being unstackable as each food/water item would need to individually be tracked for it's purity.
  
  
• "Stealth and Distraction System - Crouch and sneak your way past enemies or throw objects to distract them. Find or craft sight, sound or smell deterrents and attractor recipes and items to exploit the sight, hearing or smell of the zombies to throw them off track." -- Not as fleshed out as one might like, but, you can stealth, and you can indeed throw rocks to distract zombies last I checked. Smell deterrents and attractors will prolly make it in when smell returns.
  
  
• "XP and Skill Trees - Earn XP and upgrade your skills to become the ultimate Bruiser, Gun Nut, Gadget Man, Chemist or Stealth Agent. Upgrade your melee skill learning to craft better melee weapons and swing them harder & faster and even learn special finishing moves." -- XP and skill trees confirmed. Learn by doing is/was controversial at the best of times, but, both the old system and the new fit the expectations set forth here, imo.
  
  
• "Solo, Cooperative and Multiplayer - Play solo, coop or multiplayer in our unique Zombie Nomad Mode be a human, a bandit or a zombie for a no rules experience. Watch the leader boards and fight to be the Big Clan of the Wasteland or the Duke of Navezgane." -- Solo, Co-op and Multiplayer confirmed- Zombie nomad mode is TBD; Don't know anything about it or the leaderboard stuff personally.
  
  
• "Creative User Tools - Build your own worlds and play them with friends using the Creative Mode Tools featuring hundreds of block shapes, prefabs and random generation tools. Create dedicated servers with your own unique game rules and settings." -- Creative mode and tools to make prefabs and such exist.

Then there's the stretch goals; Of which many have been met, have begun to be introduced, or are planned to be done Soon™. If you want I'll pull those descriptions here too and go over them as well. But, Out of 25(might be 26) stretch goals, 18 have been met in some way shape or form; Mostly to completion. And 7 or 8 more haven't been introduced yet but the devs have discussed openly about them and they're liable to be brought in during the beta period if nothing else (Included here is the professional soundtrack for example; Something that can wait till beta.)

So..Overall, I'd say they're fairly on track and still moving in the direction of their kickstarter. Very few things have been moved entirely away from; And most of those by popular opinion of the vocal playerbase.

Now, Back to the present. Regarding stretch goals: First thing to note is the disclaimer "All these features are planned but can be implemented earlier with a larger team) The $200,000 tier was to get part time artists and programmers to move to full time; This happened.
$250,000 tier:

• Exisitng world expanded, More locations added: Navezgane was expanded; Those assets also made available to RWG. Numerous locations also added.
  
• More items and weapons: have been added.
  
• More special infected type enemies, with more abilities: have indeed been implemented along the way since Alpha 1, Notably, the demolisher.
  
• Skill tree and exp system enhanced further: They have been *Enhanced (Subject for debate, not the purpose of this post)

$300,000 tier:

• Additional Player Characters: There is a larger range of default characters than there used to be.
  
• Seasonal Weather: TBD
  
• Temperature Based Survival Effects: Definitely in game; Not as harsh as some people might like, but this is post nerf where people thought they were too hard and too annoying. Hard to win.
  
• Oculus Rift Support: Due to some issues, implementation for VR has been planned for post-release.

$350,000 tier:

• Enhanced, Professional Soundtrack: Implemented.
  
• More Wild Animals: Mountain lions and coyotes confirmed; Also other animals.
  
• Animals can turn into zombies too: Zombie dogs, zombie vultures and zombie bears oh my.

New disclaimer: "Some items appearing below this point may appear in a Post-release update. Goal funds tied to these items would be saved to begin development on them beginning immediately after release version."

Despite the disclaimer, Many of the following have had some work if not been fully completed.
$400,000 tier:

• Character Customization Tools: Implemented, and to be further refined in coming versions.
  
• Interchangable Clothing System: Implemented with what is currently a controversial change slated to come in the near future- But even post change this would still be a complete goal.
  
• Expanded Story/Mission Programming - Story is in the works, but mission programming has been expanded considerably.
  
• NPC characters and merchants: Merchants implemented, Other characters to come with story and the implementation of bandits.
  
• NPC controlled safe houses added: Merchant zones are safe havens, granted you cannot enter them at night. There is some consideration of making it so the player can pay (in game currency, dukes) for night time protection as well. More on this may come with the addition of story, other npcs, and bandits.

$450,000 tier:

• Professional Voice Actors to record lines: Very much a thing; All the traders except Joel are professional VA's I believe; Joel iirc is actually the developer Joel.
  
• Multiplayer mode expanded with new features: Yep. Definitely a thing, still being improved.
  
• Random World Generator Expanded: The RWG generator has gone through several MASSIVE revamps and improvements.
  
• World building tools expanded- Design your own apocalypse for your friends: Has been implemented and expanded upon; We have access to the same POI editing tools as the developers, and also can modify worlds in the same way they do.

$500,000 tier: This still shows Locked on the kickstarter, but the goal was reached in time and so they have worked on this stuff and it will all be in.

• Major world terrain enhancement - Cubic terrain becomes smooth terrain, world remains fully destructible and buildable: Confirmed. TErrain is now smooth with a huge amount of effort making it able to be so despite radical changes in terrain height across the map, and the world is still fully destructible and buildable save for trader zones (and you can disable trader zones via config if you want.)
  
• Drivable and customizable vehicles added: Confirmed. Began with the minibike, but we now also have the bicycle, motorcycle, 4x4, and gyrocopter, the cusotmization is being expanded upon but currently supports basic dyes and some vehicle mods.
  
• New Additional NPC characters to discover: As the large part of initial NPCs has not yet been implemented, neither has this.
  
• Expanded Story Missions: As the story is not yet in, this isn't either. I suspect we'll get this at the same time as the rest of the story.

Then there's the blurb about the game:

Originally posted by Kickstarter Page: 7 Days to Die is an open world, voxel-based, sandbox game that is a unique mash up of First Person Shooter, Survival Horror, Tower Defense and Role Playing Games combining combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth.

In the near future where the a third world war leaves the Earth in ruins but the worst was yet to come. Nobody knows for sure if it was the radiation, the biochemical weapons or an act of god but an unknown virus soon transforms the surviving humans into an army of the animated dead, acting as a single-minded being.

You play a survivor trapped in the savage zombie infested world of Navezgane County Arizona one of the last true Eden’s on Earth. Ironically Navezgane means “Killer of Monsters” to the Apache who have inhabited the land for centuries, and that’s pretty much what you’ll do as you fight to survive and search for the truth behind what really happened.

Open world: Confirmed. Voxel based, yep, Sandbox definitely. Unique mashup of genres; yes- FPS, Survival horror, Tower Defense, RPG all confirmed. Combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration and character growth all confirmed.,

Surviving humans turned into an army of animated dead- Yep.

You play a survivor in the infested world of Navezgane County Arizona- Yep. Fight and search for the truth behind what happened- Story that isn't yet implemented..but is coming.


TL;DR: In short, It's a lot nearer to the planned kickstarter you backed 8 or 9 years ago than you might think or realize. It may not be what you personally envisioned it could be back then; And it may not be what you hoped it could be..

But it is absolutely inline with the kickstarter. Of all the goals both stretch and non they have met the large majority of planned features, many to completion, several above and beyond, and only a few not yet implemented but in the works. And of them all only one feature was stricken entirely by popular demand of the playerbase who the devs agreed with because it just didnt make a fun experience: Namely, the 5x5 crafting grid.

In light of the above, I'm afraid I can't agree that 'everything they sold on kickstarter was a dishonest sell'. They've delivered on damn near everything at this point; Only one thing has been explicitly removed (5x5 crafting grid) and that by popular demand.
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Through all this, if you bother to read it, you can see quite a lot has been nailed down or at least touched on in some capacity. But there's some pretty big things missing, or that were only lightly touched on and not fully implemented- Seasonal weather and impactful temperature based survival, Story, more NPCs, etc. Plus they need to redo water physics, something people have been begging for for ages and has been promised, and a number of other things besides.

To be frank, Just because You personally think the game was done several versions ago and they should have just left well enough alone, and that it has all the content it should have, etc, etc; This does not in fact mean the game is completed. It's still missing things that were promised. It's still not finished.

And, for good or ill, TFP are trying their hardest despite being regularly damned to keep basically every promised feature without cutting any corners just to meet some arbitrary deadlines.