I had originally bought 7 Days to Die back in 2013, but had only spent about 1 hour playing it before putting it aside until I picked it up again with A19.4 and haven't looked back since.
After having played Vanilla, throwing in a ton of mods, playing Darkness Falls, Sorcery and Undead Legacy, a few things started to bug me:
1) Doing the same damn quests over and over again became boring
2) Everybody could end up getting all of the skills over time which meant everybody was the same
3) Once you reached a certain player level, there just wasn't much of a challenge and you felt like starting over to get that initial feeling of things being a bit more difficult
4) Once you had guns, melee just wasn't a thing anymore
Obviously there were more things that bugged me but those were the main ones.
I first set out to deal with the first one and released The Trader Network - More Jobs, a server-side only mod that was initially focused on adding quests. I had searched for mods that would give more quests and I was surprised to see that they simply did not exist. There might have been one or two, but they felt very limited and not quite what I was looking for. The result was 11 new quests, each of them with 5 tiers.Over time this grew beyond the initial objective and I decided it may be time to move on to something else, something that would address the other items above.
I figured I had done server-side, stretched it all I could and given its limitations, it was time to dive into mods that required a client install. I would leverage what I had already done with the Trader Network, and would build on top of it, given it added already a ton of features.
My first objective was to get rid of the skill point system and go back to learn by doing which to many of us feels much more immersive. I wasn't sure exactly how I would set that up but I did remember enjoying the old style RPG game where you would have to put points into Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc, so I decided, why not, let's bring that to the game and find a word, ended up with Genetics.
Then I wanted to give melee a lot more room to grow in the game, and be something you could use mid to late game if you still wanted to. I set out to split the existing weapons into categories and ended up with 7 in total. From these 7 I then tried to create themes and that's when the classes were born.
The remainder was all about taking out the skill books and distributing the perks that made sense across the classes and Genetics.
The fun began and I spent a crazy amount of time adding in new melee weapons and balancing the damage across all of the weapon types and weapon tiers so that melee could be viable.
I do enjoy luck and surprise and I wanted people to have that great feeling of looting a better weapon or spending resources to try and craft a better one without it always being successful. That's when the quality system was ripped out and if you wanted to repair something you needed to have a repair kit that matched that weapon. If you were specialized in that line, you could craft them, if you weren't, you'd have to buy or loot them.
This new class/expertise system meant you would focus on the weapons meant for that class (if you wanted the special bonuses) which also meant additional replay value as you might want to start another game at some point to try out one of the other classes. A whole new line to discover.
I would play with others as multiplayer felt more fun, the cooperative aspects of it anyway... but I felt like most of the time we'd go do our own thing. This is when I came up with the concept of Auras. These auras would benefit you but mostly would benefit other players if they remained close to you. Additionally if each player picked a different class, they would benefit from each other's auras which would greatly improve their offensive abilities and hence their ability to survive.
If you had a chef in the group you'd let them harvest as they would get more resources. Players wouldn't feel like they were all the same anymore.
As for the game becoming less challenging over time once you got your hands on guns, etc, I thought of the Misery line... a way for those tier 1 zombies to grow stronger and faster as you progressed, killed them or died.
The latest is the addition of random events, where the higher level you are, the more events there will be and the tougher they will become.
So this is a small glimpse into why I decided to make REBIRTH.Needless to say, there is a lot I did not cover and a long to-do list for this mod, but I do hope you enjoy the ride!
