We received an immense amount of feedback from the Beta Branch Testing - this was quite incredible for us, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to vote in the poll and post their feedback.
Overall, we were very happy to see that in general, the community enjoyed the new direction for Last Oasis. Doubling down on making the game world more interesting and challenging through PvE mechanics and encounters will improve the gameplay experience for both new and existing players - it seems 85% agree on that, and so do we.
Having said all that, over one third of you think that the water and harvesting pacing were not enjoyable and basically no one thought the preview was perfect. Luckily for you, we agree. We absolutely do not think that we stuck the landing with respect to the early S5 experience. Nor did we expect to. That’s what the test was for - to see the problems and get it right. The immediate hotfix was part of that, but additional changes are coming and the rest of the devblog will talk about some of our thoughts on major systems.
Water
Overall, we’re pretty happy with the core gameplay loop of exploring, looking for sources of water, and ultimately being encouraged to return to base - water is essentially an endurance limit. From the feedback we read, it seemed like most solo/duos found water challenging but achievable, while groups either struggled or spent lots of time standing around a campfire and chopping cactus. This is not the intention.
The early game experience will receive additional tweaks to improve the water gameplay. However, we don’t just want to buff cactus drop rates until you can bulldoze your way through it.
Instead, we want to introduce new gameplay features to allow players to solve the issues for themselves.
For example, look at this new buildable structure, which we labeled (for now) the Humidifier:
The humidifier will create humid air inside your base, allowing you to quench your thirst without consuming your precious water.
We will also introduce plenty more water sources for you to find, like springs that can be dug up.
This is the approach we want to take to nearly all problems we encounter through player feedback - instead of just removing the obstacle, we want to add gameplay elements that enrich the world and the player experience, and gives players the most interesting aspect about sandbox survival games: choice.
Schematics
The most common criticism of schematics can be broken down into a few categories: a concern for inventory space, concern about being gated by RNG, and concern about being stone aged. Let’s go through it one by one.
We agree that early schematics are too inventory consuming. While having to choose between schematics at some point is part of the design, we think that it is unnecessary in the early stages.
We want you to feel great about owning schematics - we certainly don’t want you to feel like it’s a burden or maintenance heavy. We’ll improve this in multiple ways:
First, the schematics bag will be available earlier in progression. It’s a pouch that allows you to conveniently store a larger number of schematics without occupying inventory slots. We will also introduce a base container specifically for schematics, allowing you to use them without physically having them on you - just being in the base or on the walker is enough.
Other than that, we are constantly considering when and how merging different types of schematics improves gameplay more than it hurts exploration and progression.
We looked at the drop rate of tools, and came to the conclusion that combining them is, in many cases, better for gameplay. Our idea for schematics is that their drops are serving very specific purposes. Which brings us to:
RNG
There was criticism about RNG affecting the gameplay too much, but in reality this is much more of an information issue: Randomness is much, much less prominent than people assumed, but the game didn’t do a good job of explaining it. Each enemy and each camp has a very limited range of schematics it can drop - it is far from random. Once you know that, you know exactly where to go to receive what you need. The experience is not meant to emulate an MMORPG. We don’t expect you to be grinding the same Mobs 100s of times to get the one thing you’re after.
Therefore, we are considering exposing this information to players in-game. For example, we could show you which schematics can potentially drop when looking at a defeated rupu, or a camp. On the other hand, that removes a bit of the exploration part. Let us know what you prefer - mystery or more clearly defined goals?
Getting stone-aged (all of your progression wiped out) due to PVP should not be a real issue - remember, PVE tiles are perfectly valid base locations where you can not be attacked. However, a lot of complaints are about taking longer breaks. This is something we understand is a big issue, and for that we’re looking into a kind of “vacation mode” at trade stations. We think allowing players to log off with a single walker and some schematics and come back at a later point will not change the balance of the game, but be a nice QoL feature.
Base Packing
This one was also noted often. And the more we get to play ourselves in this new version, the more we think that there is some great gameplay opportunity for introducing packable bases in S5, but in a different way. Founder walkers like the Balang, capable of packing and unpacking a base foundation - will be introduced as some later tier progression which allows for a different gameplay experience. We will take a hard look at the balance to make sure it fits in, but we think it’s a nice variety to the gameplay.
Grappling Hook
Yes, we missed the mark there on the early Grappling Hook;, it wasn’t fun any more. We’ll continue to tweak the grapple to achieve the intended design. We realize that grappling is very fun and something that lots of new players fall in love with immediately, but also a tool that can often be too strong in the hands of experienced players.
PVE Difficulty
We were happy to see that most players liked the improved difficulty of the PVE world. The 48h Beta Branch test was obviously just a small teaser of things to come. Overall, we want to make PVE not artificially difficult, but due to interesting behaviors and encounters.
This time we’ll show you a bit of some later tier Rupu, but soon we’ll go deeper into the more walker-focused PVE challenges you will encounter.
I don’t like this new direction
According to the poll and community posts, some people do not like this new direction. For you I believe I have some good news: Because of these drastic changes, we decided to preserve Season 4 as it was on a separate branch together with S5 launch. Which means you will be able to host your own server and realm as it was.
If you prefer a middle ground, remember that most of the changes we are implementing are optional features for server owners: You can choose how you want the players to play on your server, what feeling you want to go for in terms of difficulty and balance, and other things you’ll be free to edit at any time.
And many other things
There are a million other odds and ends that annoy both you and us. We read all your feedback on Discord and Steam. We promise. And while we can’t address every single issue directly, we take it into account, we try to see the bigger picture, and figure out solutions that improve your gameplay experience.
