system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
Right but a lot of it didn't really need to be done. I won't rag on the QoL, stability, pathing, etc but a lot of the 'balancing' updates were just Joel being a baby about his game having a meta like ANY survival game does. It feels like he just keeps shifting stuff around to keep things difficult when it's only natural that the game becomes much easier when you've played hundreds of hours like a lot of 7 Days/open world survivor players do.  

It's a mixed bag of "labor of love" and "wtf joel"
gpt
They really don't want you to have fun by playing it like a sandbox. One of the worst game devs I think.