>>261712
you are mising the point, its the whole design of the game (no lategame content or mechanic beyond scavenging and maybe bulding up a base) and the ideology behind it (Self-deprecating nihilism), that makes me want to butcher the dev team with an icepick, and the fact that this is more or less and industry wide thing going on in the whole "Indie" scene just makes it even more fun
i know its a sandbox game i remember skipping the "default" settings back in 2014 and i am still ignoring them now, to build up on what >>261698 said you can literally play without zombies and just play a clunky version of harvest moon, or turn off respawn and be able to actually clear zones and eventually genocide all zombies, there´s mods for almost every missing feature of the game including NPC´s, its sandbox nature does not excuse how retarded it is in concept and how retarded it is in its execution, it would be on the same level as excusing Bethesda being what it is because you can just mod the ever living shit out of Starfield/Skyrim/Oblivion, its lazy on the dev side and it gets a free pass because muh mods and muh sandbox
To further illustrate my point, look at "Tactical Shooters" like Ground branch or Ready or not, fancy graphics, autistic ballistics with all the tacticool optics and the 1462301 variants of every single gun and attachment so you can LARP your balls off, but then fail at basic level shit like having a Functional AI or proper Levels beyond big landscapes full of nothing with a Enemy AI that has the Aimbot cranked to 900 to compensate for the fact that they can´t even do basic manouvering because all the dev time was spent on reshading the 9th variant of the AS-VAL or whatever niche snowflake weapon kids like to LARP with these days
Meanwhile SWAT 4 had an AI that can clean rooms back in 2004, and Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising had movement by bounds and hierarchical platoons (you can have a company of multiple platoons that in themselves contain multiple squads, and this is literally how the AI does it in the campaign, something that Arma hasn´t been able to do yet, they do have you getting parkinson after running for 5 seconds though, so realistic am i rite?) all the way back in 2009
in Project Zomboid this is the same, there is no difference between hour 1 and hour 500, the only difference is that by hour 500 you no longer have to scavenge for shit because you either have enough loot to last you the whole game untill you do something dumb and die or you are already self sufficient with rain collectors and blah blah blah, you have a hundred trillion junk items that do nothing and all of these autistic temperature panels but the devs are apparently too dumb to implement basic game progression or simply having things to look forward to beyond having a self-sufficient base and quitting the game after you last for a month because there is nothing else to do, you CAN fix this by installing mods or using the sandbox mode but by default the point of the game is, you die, the end, you covering up for the Devs retardation does not mean they are not ostensibly pretentious enough to release this tech demo of a "Game", the only saving grace is that it is worth less than 20$ unlike other meme indie games like rimworld or factorio wich refuse to go on sale or sell for less than 30$ (RIP Aussies)