Veteran zombie survival game 7 Days to Die has released out of Early Access after more than 11.5 years of availability on Steam. It's from, you know, back when Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball was a charting hit and Barack Obama was the US president. The now "finished" game adds new high definition character models, a new system of player armor and clothing, new animal models, a new challenge system to replace tutorials and quests, new models for vehicles, a spate of improvements for randomly generated worlds, over 75 new points of interest to explore, new zombie model variants, tweaks to character progression, a lighting update, and many, many optimizations to game code.
7 Days to Die is a first-person zombie survival crafting game in a sandbox world designed to be destructible, seamless, and to give you the ability to build anywhere. Its core tenets may sound almost dated now, but were at the forefront of what was thought possible when it first released in 2013. Whether it's still good is up to the individual, but the fans are rating it at about 83% positive in recent Steam reviews.
7 Days to Die hit Steam early access in December 2013—if I've got my dates right, that's about 11 years, 7 months, and 13 days in early access. Of the megahit games from the first waves still in early access, and still in active development, perhaps only Project Zomboid remains.
7 Days to Die was in early access so long that it was released by a defunct game publisher, Telltale, on a console generation that's no longer current, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. To their credit, the developers have gotten legacy owners on those consoles a discount to re-buy it on the current console generation.
You can find 7 Days to Die on Steam, where it has an app id of 251570—more recent games have pushed well past 3 million.
Early access as a model has evolved a lot from when it was first proposed—almost as much as game development has evolved. Regardless of what critiques one has of it for games like 7 Days to Die it became a way to fund long-term open development after the initial buzz of a release may have died off. A game like 7 Days to Die may once have been far smaller in scope, or lost funding after a few years in development, but the early access model has given it development time on par with some of the most well-established MMOs.
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Jonathan Bolding
Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.
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