Several years ago a colleague at work who is a PC gamer started mentioning a new game he was playing. Knowing my affinity for zombies, he thought it was something that I would be interested in. He knew my OCD riddled brain loved Minecraft and its addictive nature and my zombie obsession matched the theme and play-style of the game and began to tell me of his humorous feats of PVP. He had countless stories of his boobie-trap massacres and skyline levels of player kills. Well let me rephrase that to “Revenge induced player suicides in attempt to track him down, invade his bases, and kill his face, kills.”
I really liked the sound of the game but was stalled by two important issues. One being it was in Alpha and most servers you would play on were regularly upgraded and reset to keep up with the new bug fixes and releases. The other was the poor Mac/Linux version support. Although the engine the game was built on was multi-platform and Steam (who distributes the game) is the core reason we have more Linux based games today, he said their versions were generally more buggy and slower to update. I understood of course considering all of the modern gaming on PC’s has always been on PC’s. I decided to wait mostly because, at the time, I was only really using Mac and Linux at home. A year later, much of the same continued both in his humorous adventures as well as the lesser support for Linux/Mac.
Finally in the Fall of 2016, due to some life changes, time availability, and the need for distractions, I had a GameFly account again for a few months and noticed there was a console version! Since I could “try before you buy” in this manner, I went ahead and rented it. It took all of about 10 minutes and I was hooked. This game WAS Minecraft with pretty damned good graphics and real survival situations. Zombies, houses and cars to loot, and realistic dangers such as overheating, hypothermia, thirst and starvation pretty much put the nail in the coffin of my ability to hold out.
I decided “What the hell?” and decided to buy into it. Due to a Steam deal at the time, I bought a 2-pack for pretty much what a single would cost and gave a copy to a friend to join me. The game was still in Alpha however, after many years of this I just assumed this is one of those terminal “Alpha” games that companies do a lot more often these days to bypass the critics of bugs and balance issues. Actually come to think of it, it may have been the fact that the game company was just as noncommittal as I am. 😉
After playing a few days locally on the PC and/or Peer-Peer I decided: “Screw this, I’ll just get my own server to make it easier for multiplayer.” I found a good deal on Gameservers.com and for the most part as they say “The rest is history.”
I will continue later with my point of view regarding game play, server stuff, fun and lunacies regarding 7 Days To Die.
And now for your moment of zen…
– Jason