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Different

To be honest, it's been a long time since I really liked an open world survival and construction (SOC) game.

The reason is not complicated. After playing the most outstanding masterpieces in this category, such as 7 Days to Die, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Corrosion, I found that the SOC category, like many open world canned games that are complained by players every day, has long been trapped in a dilemma of formulaic development. Although there have always been popular new works in this genre, the ones that can really retain players for a long time are always rare.

I think there are only two reasons why they failed. First, players have long been aesthetically fatigued by the stereotyped zombie and wasteland apocalypse themes of this type of game. Second, most players today are accustomed to fast-paced gameplay, and almost every game of this type likes to strip players naked at the beginning, and then through a long growth design, let players spend dozens of hours repeating the process of chopping trees, mining and building basic living facilities. After playing for a long time, they will naturally feel bored.

Therefore, if SOC games want to regain the attention of players, they must not only make changes in the subject matter and come up with more settings that players have never seen before, but also keep up with the times and use various methods to allow players to get sufficient positive and negative feedback in the game at a lower time cost.

"Seven Days World" produced by NetEase is a SOC game that meets the standards of this new era. It not only has a character growth curve that makes players feel extremely comfortable, emphasizing the experience of doomsday challenges rather than selling numbers, but the game also cleverly combines the "new weird talk"-style weird and mysterious world view background with SOC's survival and construction gameplay, bringing players an unprecedented novel experience.

What attracts me most about "Seven Days World" is its unique world view setting. It is not a wasteland apocalypse in the traditional sense, but an unknown world full of weirdness and mystery composed of many unique science fiction settings including stardust, anomalies, aberrations, and evolvers. Here, you can really feel what is called "unspeakable fear of familiar things", for example, you can see the aberration enemies with searchlights on their heads at night in the game. The first BOSS you need to face in the novice tutorial is a huge humanoid communication tower with a machine gun drilled out of the ground. Even when exploring the map to advance the plot later, you can also see long-legged buses and spiders with gas tanks on their bodies, etc., monsters that have mutated from various familiar things in our daily life. These abnormal things are not only scary, but they are also endowed with various unique abilities. They are both obstacles to your exploration of all the bizarre events and the source of your interaction with this unique world.

The reason for this is that "Seven Days World" has added a special gameplay called "Anomaly Containment" based on the traditional SOC game survival and construction gameplay. When players explore the game's open world map and advance the plot, they can encounter various anomalies. After recovering them and bringing them back to their base, players can use the special effects of these anomalies to enhance their combat capabilities or speed up the construction of the base.

This solves the problem of slow character growth and insufficient equipment strength when exploring maps in many previous SOC games. In "Seven Days World", players can really get enough weapons and equipment within an hour of entering the game, and build a fast-paced construction and survival experience with a hiding place including various infrastructures in another hour. When you contain enough anomalies, you can even let them help you cut trees, mine, and make supplies, which greatly reduces the boredom caused by repetitive labor in previous games of the same type.

You can even build a house on your car to create a mobile base

Not only that, these strange anomalies also bring a lot of new fun to the open world exploration experience of "Seven Days World". For example, you can pick up the searchlight head of the aberration mentioned earlier and use it as a weapon, using the abnormal light it emits to quickly eliminate the enemy and save ammunition for yourself. You can also deliberately not hit the head but only the limbs when encountering an enemy, so that you can see a disabled aberration trying to crawl towards you on the ground.

However, my favorite open-world feature of this game is the exploration tips left by countless players on the map. It is a bit similar to the asynchronous online in Death Stranding. Players can leave tips anywhere on the map. The content can be a simple greeting or a reminder to other players about collectibles or difficult enemies around. Although the design is not very novel, in the actual game, their existence can indeed save players a lot of trouble in exploration and combat, and can also make players like me who are temporarily alone on the road less likely to feel lonely during the survival adventure.

Of course, the above does not mean that "Seven Days World" as a SOC game is not challenging at all. The game also has a self-contained character health system and skill level system. The former includes five basic character survival information: satiety, drinking water, health system, endurance, and health. Once the value of any of these indicators is too low, it will directly affect the upper limit of the player's life and reduce his ability to move. The latter will be gradually opened to players to improve their ability to survive in this bizarre world for a long time according to the player's plot progress and the degree of open world exploration. But at the beginning, all players still have to go through the complete survival process from collection to forging to equipment making and then to maintenance. In addition, "Seven Days World" is not a game that sells values, and a few in-app purchase functions only provide players with better-looking decorations and skins. Therefore, in the core gameplay of survival construction, "Seven Days World" is not as casual and lacking in depth as players imagine.

But one difference is that compared to many SOC games that have worked hard on PVP gameplay, "Seven Days World" actually pays more attention to encouraging players to communicate and cooperate with each other frequently. Although the game also has a dedicated PVP server and gameplay, in PVE mode, the game gives team players a high degree of freedom. In addition to being able to play monsters with friends and travel the open world together, the game also allows players to share materials and technology without barriers when in a team. In other words, when you play "Seven Days World" with your friends, you are actually building a dormitory together, where you can share the resources, equipment, and even skill points produced. In this way, the work and progress that lone wolf players used to take a month to complete can be achieved by team players in just one week or even less, and the division of labor is clear and each takes what they need, which greatly reduces the liver of the game and increases the fun of team play.

It takes a lot of time to max out these skills by yourself.

This almost unlimited way of playing is also what I think is the most attractive part of "Seven Days World" besides its unique story theme. After all, traditional SOC games require players to play in teams to maximize the fun of the game. On this basis, "Seven Days World" allows players to play freely, presenting all growth feedback quickly and accurately to players, and with the seasonal update mode, it is easy to attract a group of cooperative players who are willing to take root for a long time. With them, the game naturally does not have to worry about the lack of fresh blood in the player group in the future-after all, in this era, the biggest demand of players is the social attributes of the game in addition to the quality of the game. "Seven Days World" is a game with a special theme and interesting gameplay. It is easy to spread from one person to ten, from ten to a hundred, forming an exaggerated chain effect. Otherwise, how do you explain that the game has received 15 million reservations at the Steam New Product Festival before the public beta, becoming a popular star among many domestic games second only to "Black Myth: Wukong".

However, these glorious pasts are definitely no longer important for "Seven Days World", which has officially entered public beta. Now, it should pay more attention to players' feedback on the game and do a good job in the long-term operation of the game, striving to become the next evergreen in the SOC category.

Although this goal seems big and far away...but it is gratifying that "Seven Days World" has already taken a solid step on this road.