Last Oasis News

Last week’s PVE maps and lobby removal announcement stirred a lot of discussions, so we want to answer some of the concerns we noticed before we get into the travel rework details.

For starters, private realms will have the ability to enable and disable these changes at the preference of the server admin/s.
This means they can choose whether or not there’s any PVE tiles on their realm (which may function differently from the current implementation of PVE tiles for private realms, which works through additional settings per-tile), they can choose whether or not they want the old or the new travel system, and they can also have the lobby functionality enabled realm-wide.

When it comes to the feedback we’ve received from you guys about the PVE maps, so far we are very happy to see that they are mostly well received. Some of the biggest points of interest are lobby functionality not being a thing anymore (which we fully expected, it’s been a core feature of the game for very long, but is a very needed step for the overhaul), environmental hazards eating through all your stuff while on vacation, and lastly the other major concern that was brought up being the overall balance for the PVE tiles themselves.

In regard to the concerns of the lobby functionality being removed having too much of a negative impact on gameplay: We’ve been looking into the lobby feedback very closely, and we have considered the possibility of adding off-map lobby functionality for Trading Stations, with some limitations of course. This is not something that we will immediately implement during the public testing, first we want to test these systems as they were originally designed and balanced and then we’ll start working on changes based on testers’ feedback during the public testing phase.
These are systems that can be (and will be) quickly iterated upon, so we have a very big advantage here compared to other seasons - this means the first version we come up with will most likely not be what S5 releases with.

[h2]Travel Rework[/h2]

For Season 5 of Last Oasis, we’re introducing a reworked travel system that does away with lobby-based travel, and instead works within the map itself.

Reaching the map edge of an oasis will no longer allow for travel upon pressing a key - in order to travel from one oasis to another, you will need to find travel routes in the raging sandstorms at the edges of the oasis. These pathways through the storms will become available periodically, and upon crossing them, you will begin to travel to another map - no key press required at all.

In regards to UI/UX, we’re aiming for very minimal UI interactions required in order to travel, and instead make the UI much more informative - displaying destination oasis, amount of players on destination, and the danger meter. The actual travel will happen when crossing with the Walker or on foot. If players require further information, the world map is still available, but no interactions are required on the world map. It’s purely informational, displaying information on trade offers, highlighting travel routes from one oasis to another, etc.

Due to the nature of this new travel mechanic, a lot of the finer details will be iterated upon several times during our public testing phase as mentioned above, this means balance factors such as the intervals and amount of travel routes available and their destinations, the size allowance for Walker classes - some of these pathways will, for example, only allow smaller Walkers to pass through, and disallow Capital, Large and Medium class Walkers from following through the sandstorm. A lot of these balance factors will be changed several times to accommodate different iterations of the system that take into account how it's received by players during our play-testing, and mainly how it actually feels in comparison to the old system.

Travel routes are meant to be the only method of travel available, unless we deem it necessary to eventually add some other possible ways of travel. This means that many things are changing in regards to travel, not just the mechanic itself, such as resource requirements and teleporting around the world.
Travel will no longer cost water from the Walker storage - this is something that will also help us a lot with re-balancing the water costs for respawning, which heavily impacts Walker combat.
It will no longer be possible to respawn on another oasis unless you traveled there with a Walker, or on foot.
This means that if you want to meet up with a friend or reinforce a faraway fight, you will need to physically travel in order to get there. We will be reworking the in-oasis player spawn points so that it’s easier to rebuild a basic Walker and be more invested in the area you spawn in.

One of the issues that we constantly see with the current travel system is that it’s extremely reliant on a lot of UI and on the player figuring out a somewhat convoluted and outdated method of travel.
We saw this during S1 of the game, where players would very often struggle to understand how the system even worked, and would sometimes simply quit the game at that very early stage. We hoped to mostly remedy it by increasing the duration of the oases so they would take longer to burn, but that was yet another one of the band-aids that we’re ripping off for Season 5, because it’s a band-aid, not a proper solution.

The system that we’re introducing as a replacement for current lobby-based travel is meant to do many things, among them is what I mentioned earlier, which is to get rid of convoluted and confusing UI interactions, but that is a small thing compared to the two major goals we want to achieve with it, and some of the other benefits that we see from this change.

Firstly, we want to have finer control over the spread of players across the world. This is hugely important to us for many reasons, the main one being that we are placing a bigger emphasis on players and clans living and playing from individual oases and clusters of oases within the larger world, rather than having the ability (and in some cases the necessity) to teleport from one region to another in literally a few minutes.

Added up, a lot of the changes we have planned for Season 5 have the requirement of travel to be a much more important part of the game experience, and we needed to have a much more robust travel mechanic that has the ability to have a much bigger impact on the progression of players across the different tiers and map difficulties. Slowing down travel is completely intentional here. We want to give much clearer danger zones, so that players have the ability to scout and recognize places and other players and clans they can interact with, either peacefully or through Sawtooth diplomacy.

Finally, one of the most important things we will be tackling with this rework is the dreaded issue of queues, more specifically getting stuck in them for hours on end.
One of the biggest flaws from the old travel system was the issue of allowing travel to oases even though they were full, or very crowded with players.
We want to avoid this completely by implementing our travel routes in a way they cannot lead players into completely full maps, ever. We have already foreseen some of the potential exploits that could come out of this, and we have some solutions for them, but we know our players are far better at finding those, so some major testing will be required to ensure we don’t end up with worse bugs.
Generally speaking, though, few bugs can be worse than not being able to play the game at all, so we’re pretty happy with what the system can do already.

[h2]Roaming Sandstorms & Weather System[/h2]

With the removal of lobby, performance is a big topic that’s been brought up very often recently. Game balance can only do so much here, eventually players and clans will build up large fleets of Walkers and create massive structures everywhere. One of the answers we have for this (in conjunction with the balance changes and reworked progression) is our improved weather system, and our first proper weather event - roaming sandstorms.

The first implementation of the sandstorms and our primary intention for them is really to be cleansing mechanics, both for PVP and PVE maps. The idea is sandstorms come from various directions all over the oasis, and the only way to protect against them is to have any kind of barriers - both player-built and natural barriers like hills, mountains, etc.

The way they are currently implemented, these storms roam the map systematically, all areas within an oasis will roughly be hit every one to two hours by a sandstorm on average - so, for example, if you stayed somewhere in the map for two hours without moving at all, on average you’d be hit by a sandstorm at least once.

Regardless of whether it’s in a PVE or a PVP map, any player-built objects will require some sort of protection in order to survive the storms, anything out in the open will be periodically taking damage over time when hit by the storms, both for performance and balance reasons, so that we ensure most things have a cost associated with having them protected.

Over time, any Walkers and unprotected buildables (weapons and structures built on the ground without base walls to protect them) will eventually be destroyed by taking damage over time.
This initial sandstorm weather even will not be harmful for most structures, as bases are actually intended to protect Walkers and players from them in the first place, but we also have concepts (no implementation yet, but it could be very easy to work on if it’s something that you’d like to see in the game) for far more dangerous events that would not necessarily be wind-based like the storms, and instead be similar to our small meteor events, as an example. There’s a lot of ideas for these - many of which would be easy to implement - and now that we’ve put this new mechanic out in the open, we’d actually love to hear yours as well!

With the way this weather system is implemented, it’s very easy for us to work on new storms and events, all kinds of weather effects should be possible with it, now that we have almost finished the groundwork needed.
When it comes to additional effects that could be implemented through this weather system, we’ve many concepts and ideas already, but we’ll be starting with the first one already mentioned, the roaming sandstorms.

The sandstorms will have several effects when going through the map. Firstly its going to be able to damage players themselves, not excessive amounts, it does a little bit of damage to them (with some interesting situations where you can also look away from where its coming from to take less damage, for players only specifically). We won’t initially but in the future we have planned to add more protective armor to make it easier for nomads to endure a sandstorm, and future weather effects as well.

The second effect it will have is all about physics. Anything that’s physical will be blown away by storms, and it will also cause damage on things like Walkers, as well as a pushing effect that will move things around.
We also want to see how players use this in-game during our testing, the pushing effect is something that we’re very interested in, since it could eventually inspire more wind-based effects, not harmful ones but utility based (there’s always been this idea of wind-based effects for structures like torque windmills, Walker speed modifiers, etc. which we think is very cool, and would love to see how it’d play out in-game).

For next week’s devblog, we’ll be delving deeper into the reworked progression system and how it works with rarity items - no fragments and tablets anymore, we’re trying something new that, we expect, once again, might get emotions up there :)

— Neon

Hi Nomads!

We’re adding PVE maps and removing the lobby system from the game. Let’s get into it.

As core features go, the lobby is probably one of the most “core” there is for Last Oasis, so I understand this change will spark some controversy - still, last month we started this series of devblogs by promising we’d be much more transparent and announce things a lot earlier, to give you, the community, the chance to give us much needed feedback on our new approach. This is something we are fully committed to, we want to bring forward our vision for you to let us know if you believe as we do that this is the best for the future of the game.

First I want to get into why we are scrapping the lobby idea entirely, what are our intentions with the PVE maps (especially in terms of balance and design, so very specific questions and answers), and what are the goals we want to achieve by introducing them in the first place.

After we talk about this in here, we’ll be in our official Discord and available to answer pretty much any questions you have for us, so I’ll see you there :)

[h2]Lobby Removal[/h2]

When the game first released, it had the lobby mechanic, which was designed to allow for something that not many survival, PVP-focused games offer: The possibility of going away from the game for a while, and then come back still having some Walkers, packed bases within them, resources and items you left there, etc. While this worked very well initially (except some of the bugs it had, unrelated to the design issues), we quickly started to realize it wasn’t doing the job it needed to do.

While the lobby system was first and foremost meant to protect new players and allow them time outside of the game without needing to have friends online at all times, it didn’t end up working that way - eventually, the lobby made average clans invulnerable at times, and for actual zergs it ultimately enabled them to be almost invincible, making our risk vs. reward design for other parts of the game not work very well either.

With the new season focusing a lot more on PVE dangers and an improved risk vs. reward balance, the lobby is something that simply can’t be aligned to work with the new approach for the game, and thus we are removing it completely.

As with many things that are coming with this new season, this is also a change that can be reverted at any point in time, and something that we want to discuss heavily with you, the community - but we are fully committed to testing this for an extended period of time both during and after the beta branch for S5.

[h2]PVE Maps[/h2]

First thing to get out of the way when it comes to PVE oases: They are not at all “just another lobby system”, our intention for them is much broader than that, and hopefully, with time, a lot better balanced than the lobby was.
Having someplace to come back to has always been a big part of the overall design of Last Oasis, and something that we know attracted many of you to our game in the first place, so it’s not something that we want to get rid of completely by removing the lobby mechanic, rather, we are doing this because we believe that PVE maps will create that without the issues the lobby system had.

We don’t really see PVE oases as a place where players would want to constantly farm and live in at all times, but rather as safe staging grounds for players so they can get to the point where they can experience the fun of the game without having to learn the game under constant attacks from other players and bigger, more dangerous fauna.
One of the basic overarching principles for PVE maps is that we want players to be able to hang out in PVE maps, and progress at their own comfortable pace up to the point they feel ready to head on out to the wider, far more dangerous world.

In more practical speak: Next season, after you create your character you will have the option to begin your journey in a PVE Cradle (a map that, before, you used to not be able to travel back to, something which is also getting changed). There, you will be able to spend as much time as you need learning the ropes - this involves familiarizing with the progression systems, rarity, new PVE threats, and many other aspects of the game.
From there, you can choose to take a risk and travel to a PVP oasis, or continue learning the game in a more relaxed environment in another PVE oasis.

I do want to make sure this is absolutely clear: From the moment you launch the game and create your character, you will always have the possibility of going straight into a PVP map, instead of starting in a PVE one, it’s all up to your own preference.

The primary intention we have for PVE maps is to become safe spaces where players can have temporary settlements safeguarding their Walkers while they are away from the game (this is similar to our lobby mechanic, but it more heavily involves players needing to maintain and protect their bases from creatures and weather events), where they can gather most basic resources and rebuild after heavy losses, and essentially as big social spaces - Trading Stations will only spawn on PVE tiles for the new season, so we are also hoping that this change and the progression changes to come will also boost trading gameplay further (as well as making sure the only safe zones that exist in PVP oases are created and enforced by players).

When it comes to the balance aspect of PVE oases, there are a lot of considerations we’ve already made ourselves, some of them also brought up by the community (both last week and in the past) and many that are sure to come up during testing.

In the Q&A down below, we’ll get into some of those concerns and explain how we will be tackling the biggest issues.

Can any oasis type be a PVE tile?

We’ll start off with Cradle and Canyons having PVE variations during beta branch and S5 - if in the future we reach a greater variety of maps and biomes available, we’ll consider having PVE variations for them, but for now we want to avoid creating a system where players have access to end-game resources without great risks involved, which is why for the time being we will stick to Cradle and Canyons.

How do PVP tiles differ from PVE tiles?

The rarity system is one of the biggest things that will help us balance and differentiate PVE tiles from PVP tiles, in conjunction with the new progression systems. PVE maps will only have Common rarity resources, and very rarely they will have some Uncommon resources and loot drops, whereas PVP maps will have essentially any rarity up to the maximum possible, as well as having far more Uncommon rarity drops at the lowest map tiers (such as PVP variations of Cradle and Canyons oases).

How will resource scarcity change depending on whether the map is PVE or PVP?

PVP maps will generally be much more resource-rich, since PVE maps will have lower respawn rate for resource nodes and POI across the board. Here we follow the same design as with how rarity will work depending on whether the map is PVE or PVP.

What about griefing in PVE maps?

This one is pretty straightforward - while we will work towards having systems in PVE tiles that prevent most common forms of griefing, we’ll make sure that if there are issues with those systems at first, we’ll punish griefers with temporary and permanent (in extreme cases, or due to repeated offenses) bans from the game.

With PVE maps being a thing, will there still be water caps for tiles?

Soft clan cap (also known as water caps) will continue to be a thing, and they will be implemented for PVE maps as well - we will, however, be looking at improving how capped tiles spawn and make sure there isn’t a lot of situations where there isn’t enough 5 cap, or 30 cap, etc. since we know right now it’s a little too random instead of a nice spread of differently capped tiles for different clan sizes.

Are there any performance considerations for PVE tiles?

Base decay/maintenance and weather events will be some of the most important factors at play when it comes to keeping players and clans in check as they acquire more resources and expand their building capabilities. Massive fortresses in PVE tiles wouldn’t make a lot of sense, whereas Walker garages and smaller banks are perfectly acceptable as a means of rebuilding when losing too many assets in-game.
During the testing phase for this change, we’ll be iterating through several balance revisions to deal with any abuse of the mechanic.

As you can tell, last week’s devblog being focused on the rarity system was no coincidence, without that information being already available it would be a lot more difficult to properly showcase the differences between PVP and PVE tiles - very soon we will get into the changes to progression (fragments and tablets system changes), which will provide more insight on those differences.

It was very nice to see a lot of you guessed at this week’s topic correctly in the many discussions sparked last week - this time, however, I’ll tell you that the next devblog is focused on our travel rework, which is another major topic to get into.
I know you will have a lot of things to say about that (and certainly about this one), so like we mentioned last week, pretty soon we will be opening a new space in our Discord for more organized discussions about Last Oasis ideas, suggestions, etc. away from the more off-topic channels. Hope to see you all there!

— Neon

Hi Nomads!

Before we start this week’s devblog, I’d like to acknowledge the absolutely massive amount of feedback we got for the previous one and the follow-up post we did on it. It has been great to see the response from the community to both posts and be able to gather very valuable, very early feedback on (even if just) one of the reworked systems for S5.

As we’ve done before, we’ll be splitting the devblog into sections, the first one dedicated to the design and specifics of this new system, and the second dedicated to putting forward our reasoning for why reworking this specific feature, what are our intentions with the changes, and some technical considerations on it.

You can rest assured that it won’t be the last controversial topic we get into - keep an eye out for the end of this post, we’ll be talking a little bit about the next two future devblog topics - but for now, let’s get into the quality rework.

[h2]Design[/h2]

Our first step for this rework is to completely get rid of the old system, and start fresh with a new one with a different approach from design perspective, and a different implementation from technical perspective. The replacement is to be a Rarity system, which is essentially Common-Uncommon-Rare-Epic-Legendary kind of tiers, with the possibility of adding more in the future (one of our considerations, and actually a community suggestion, is to implement any future additions to the system through extremely rare drops, which we think is a very cool idea).

At the moment, the rarity system is very much a work in progress, with only the crucial parts implemented into our internal version of the game - for the beta branch, it will be in a very early iteration design and balance wise, we don’t expect it to have the full functionality described below, we hope to discuss with you and work with your feedback when it comes to some of the more radical changes coming with the system, especially when it comes to the balance aspect of it.

One of the primary design goals for this system is to remove a lot of the unnecessary complexity and create more discrete jumps in tangible value of Walkers, items, structures, etc. - right now it’s not very clear in-game whenever something has clearly improved thanks to having a higher quality level than default, and that’s something we will be focusing on fixing with changes.

Although we’ll be keeping some of the core functionalities from the old quality system, our number one priority is that it works properly with, and reinforces the changes we’ve done to the progression system - changes we will reveal more about in a future devblog.

The actual effect we intend rarity to have on S5 gameplay is very far reaching - the system is designed to interact with a lot of things in the game, and we’ll have a much more detailed look into it down below.

Speaking of core functionalities, Tools are a very important part of the game’s progression system, and have always been a core requirement to get into the old quality grind - for next season, we’re adding more tools to the game (as well as performing a rebalancing pass on existing ones) that were missing before across the different tiers. For example, right now there’s only Sickle and Scythe, which require bone and ceramic, but it does not go further than that, and also caused issues with the old quality system due to tool tiers being very far apart for both tools. We’re changing that in order to make it so the tools follow the same resource / tier that weapons do. We’ll be taking a look into the entire rebalance across the board pretty soon, though, this is a small part of that process, and more related to how tools interact with rarity system and harvesting rare materials from creatures and resource nodes.

[h2]Rarity System Effects & Intention[/h2]

Our intention with this rework is two-fold, there’s both technical and gameplay / design reasons why we needed to change the way quality worked in the game.

For the technical side of things, the old quality system wasn’t meant to work with some of the things we want the new system to interact with - some examples for this are the creatures, both Mobs and Rupu, the POI around the maps, and even smaller things such as quests from the Trading Station.

The rarity system is built with these effects already in mind. We want our POI system to take advantage of this feature, we want the mobs and Rupu that spawn on POI and around the world to have different stats and behaviors based on their rarity, and of course, the loot tables for them and any interactable loot coming from sources of higher rarity.

While with the old quality system it was not possible to easily determine a creature’s quality level, it will now be possible to easily tell, from a distance with a rangefinder or up close by looking at the mob, whether or not it’s a higher rarity creature. This is rather important for us because of how the mob difficulty scaling across maps and rarity will be balanced, and we want to make sure that players aren’t charging head-on toward enemies that at default rarity they can easily defeat, but at higher they become a lot more dangerous.

This is not to say the only new effects this system will have are dedicated to mobs. There are many other things in the game that the quality system was not interacting with (or it had a very poor interaction that improved very little), some examples are Walker hulls, as well as Walker parts - in the case of hulls, it only ever provided more module slots, which was in all honesty a very small reward for a (at times) pretty big grind. In the case of Walker Legs and Wings, it never did anything at all. That’s something that will be changing in the next season, higher rarity Walker hulls and Walker parts should provide improvements to HP and armor, bonuses to acceleration, on top of module slots.
With our focus on having oases with scarcer materials and renewed dangers, we want to make sure that the rewards are on point with the difficulty of getting them.

Secondly, and this time related to gameplay / design: our old quality system was not very intuitive at all. From the moment the game launched, the vast majority of players needed to use guides outside of the game in order to understand how to progress using quality resources, how to craft quality items, and generally how the system itself worked - and that wasn’t all, we also had these weird workarounds in-game that players came up with, in order to achieve specific quality levels for resources (like the craft-disassemble method that was used to get specific high quality resources using low-end resources).

We’d like to avoid that completely, and instead focus on a more straightforward system that is easier for players to understand and play with (in-game, we want to keep away from implementing features and mechanics that require you to pause what you’re doing in the game, and go look it up on a wiki), while also retaining and improving the gameplay centered around hunting for high quality resources, and actually making that a bigger part of the game.

As mentioned in the beginning of this devblog Hardpoints system would not be the last controversial S5 feature we showcase, so here’s a headsup: Our next two devblogs might be the most controversial changes we have decided upon so far - as chadz mentioned last week, we consider Season 5 practically an entirely new experience, and with that come completely re-designed core features of the game

— Neon

Oh boy, looks like we hit a controversial vein with that last devblog - at the time of this post, it has:

• Comments: 263
  
• Up Votes: 226
  
• Down Votes: 243
  

That's certainly something. Feedback on discord and reddit paints a slightly more optimistic, but similar picture.

[h2]Transparency and Communication[/h2]

We made a promise a few weeks ago that we'll do a better job with being more transparent, announcing changes early, and listening closer to feedback. We absolutely meant that.

I first want to go a bit more in detail about our intentions for this direction. In the end of this post, you'll find a poll where we ask you to give your opinion on which option you think is best moving forward - in case you wanna skip the wordy parts.

I already mentioned that I [chadz] - as a sandbox player - enjoy the ability to freely place structures wherever I want. It gives me the ability to outsmart other players and come up with solutions that maybe no one else thought of before.

Therefore, even internally in our team, the decision to introduce hardpoints was controversial. So why did we think this was a good way forward?

To answer this, I need to expand a bit on the vision for Season 5. S5 of Last Oasis is not S4 with changes sprinkled on top. It is practically an entirely new experience, guided by a new vision - because the old vision clearly didn't work. The most honest and direct proof of that is that player numbers dropped from originally 30k to below 1k. Big changes are needed.

Therefore, we tried to look at the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that each season of LO added bandaids on top of bandaids to fix game design flaws of the previous seasons, all the way back to the first public beta test. And we decided it's time to rip all of the bandaids off for S5.

One of our guiding ideas was "If we were to make LO from scratch, with the knowledge we have today, what would we do differently?". And this led us to a few principles we considered important.

For those of you that have already been reading between the lines of the recent devblogs, you've already realized that S5 is more or less entirely focused on PVE.

[h2]Pillar #1: PVE[/h2]

One of the very basic principles for S5 is this: If I want to, I should be able to boot up LO alone (or with a few friends) on an empty private server, and have a great experience. That does not mean we're abandoning PVP, not at all, but it does mean that we're admitting that the initial premise of LO was wrong (we tried to focus on PVP, with only rudimentary PVE elements).

Instead, great PVP comes from great PVE. The PVE gives the reason for the PVP.

So what does that mean practically?

It means that everything about progression is about to change - drastically. It means that advancing through different types of Walkers and Rigs will be a major gameplay element. It means that equipping your walker with the right tools/weapons for the right job is a necessity, that finding and looting those tools is now part of that gameplay. And that hard decisions will have to be faced by players. Because with PVE comes, necessarily, environmental dangers and challenges that need to be overcome.

[h3]A story of S5[/h3]

Let me walk you through a scenario in S5.

You've progressed to the stage where you have a basic Dinghy. It's a dedicated combat walker for you, equipped with two stingers for the pilot, a repeater and a ballista for your two friends.

There’s still one spot left to build a small weapon or additional storage, but the Dinghy reached its hardpoint limits. Your crew figures it’s time for an upgrade, and you know, through experience (or wikis) where you’re likely to find it.

You decided to go up against a group of Nurr Raiders (that's Rupu riding Nurr, equipped with ranged weapons), and by knowing the lay of the land you’re on, you found them rather soon:


It was a fierce battle, your crew prevailed, but your walker took some heavy damage. It will take considerable resources to repair. Furthermore, you lost the repeater on deck, which will be painful to replace.


However, on the upside: The raider loot was exceptionally good. Going through the spoils of combat, you've found the ability to construct either a Hammerhead Rig for the Dinghy, or a Stiletto.

You now have a tough decision to make. Stick with the Dinghy? Or go for the Stiletto?

The hammerhead Rig looks like a good upgrade - it has more medium spots, allowing you to equip an additional weapon and woodworking station so you can craft ammo on the go, making you more mobile.


Alternatively, you can consider the Dinghy a full loss with all the damage it has sustained. Spending all the resources to repair it is a big sunk cost.

Instead, you also consider going for a full upgrade, straight for the Stiletto. It costs considerably more resources, but even with the default Rig, it has many more spots available, making it possible for you to take on bigger mobs.

This is just one crude example of many, many more choices that you will face in S5. The difficulty in those choices is what we consider good gameplay.

This little story also shows another new major pillar of S5 that we haven't revealed too much yet, but will soon: Scarcity.

[h2]Pillar #2: Scarcity[/h2]

I don't want to reveal too much about this part yet. In a nutshell: nearly all gameplay elements in S5 will be tied to the abstract concept of scarcity. Resources, Tech, Travel, Walkers, Weapons... and Hardpoints.

The idea is that players will be facing lots of choices about committing to decisions, investing resources, using what you have available right now, and striving for the things you want.

There's more pillars that guided our design throughout this LOverhaul which we'll reveal soon, but I hope this gives you a little bit of a better insight.

With this little exercise in storytelling and vision sharing done, let's get back to the topic at hand: Hardpoints vs Freebuilding.

[h2]Hardpoints vs Freebuilding[/h2]

What we aim for in S5 is well balanced progression. What works against that is cramming your walker full of structures.

Look at these examples of previous seasons:



They are amazing feats of meticulous placement by players.

But they are also the very opposite of scarcity.

I understand that some of you think it's necessary to protect against zergs, but we have another major feature lined up that addresses that directly, rather than this bandaid.

The current system is awful for performance, it's horrible for movement on deck, and it completely evaporates our design decisions for S5. I think they are perfectly fine for private realms, I just see it going strongly against our vision for LOverhaul.

[h2]Feedback[/h2]

However: We truly don't want to force anything on you that you don't want. Therefore, at the very least, the option for either freebuilding or rigs will be a setting players can decide on private realms.

But that's not a perfect solution, because most of you are probably excited to play on the main realm and want a default and vanilla version of S5 that's good and enjoyable.

This is where we get to the beta branch. Before we will launch S5, we will test all these options on the beta branch, open for everyone to join and to give feedback. There are many degrees of possibilities between full Freebuilding and strict Hardpoints:

• Hardpoint Locations and Rotations: Rigs define the exact location and rotation for exactly one structure. Some Rigs are better suited for broadsides, others are better for frontal attacks
  
• Hardpoint Locations: Rigs define the exact location for exactly one structure. Players are free to rotate as they see fit
  
• Free Placement on Walker, no structure amount cap: Maximum freedom, but Walkers have no specific role, their design matters very little, it's bad for performance, and the gameplay surrounding rigs is eliminated
  
• Free Placement on Walker, amount of structures capped by Walker: sacrificing some freedom, Walkers matter slightly more, it fixes some performance issues, rig gameplay is gone
  
• Free Placement on Walker, amount of structures capped by Rig: Rigs don't define the position of structures, but their amount. Similar as the option above, except the rig gameplay is back in a limited way
  
• Free Placement inside Hardpoints: Rigs define the allowed areas of structures, but players are free to place the structure anywhere within. Each Hardpoint can only contain one structure.
  

Those are the various degrees of options I see possible right now.

I have no doubt that there are many more, possibly better options than those listed above. If you have suggestions, let us know. Again - we do not want to act against you, our very playerbase. We’re on the same team.

We want you to give feedback, but for that feedback to be valid, it's important that you understand the full picture of LOverhaul, which we're trying to paint throughout these devblogs.

To help with the decision finding for a good building system, I've added a preliminary poll here so you can leave your opinion:

https://strawpoll.com/polls/DwyoqvopegA


Once the beta branch is available, we will test various options that sound promising, gather feedback, probably run another poll, and figure out a good solution that works for the majority.

I hope I managed to give some insight into out intentions and thoughts and am curious what you all think.

-c

Hi Nomads!

This week’s devblog will be dedicated to our rework of the building system for Walkers.
One of the major changes coming to S5 is the removal of free placement of structures on Walkers, and introduction of the Walker Hardpoints system.

While this might sound controversial at first, with free placement having been a thing for so long, for us it quickly became a very logical step when we started working on rebalancing Walkers for the next season and looking at the options we had for a replacement - some of the options still allowed for more creative freedom for making crazy Walker builds, but they just didn’t solve the issues we identified when we began this overhaul of the game, for example, melee combat on Walkers.

Melee combat is a massive feature of the game, the same as Walkers, yet both things don’t usually go hand in hand or work together very well. This is one of the factors that we were looking at when deciding the best option to go with. Boarding enemy Walkers, fighting swinging with grappling hooks from the wings and onto Walker decks is a lot of fun, but most of the time you’re always getting stuck with something, either someone decided to build 50 flags around their Steering Levers, or they just really love campfires, there’s always something that makes the boarding action a lot more awkward and less fun, and that’s something we wanted to tackle from the start.
By no means our biggest objective with this change, but it’s one that we think will make gameplay around Walkers a lot more fun, both for boarding and for repelling boarders.

We considered many different options before making the decision to move forward with hardpoints and removing free placement entirely - among those options there were ideas such as the balance route by essentially increasing weight of structures on Walkers across the board, having limited amounts of specific structures available to place in a per Walker basis, etc. - but ultimately we came to the conclusion that those options just didn’t have as many benefits and ended up adding more abstract restrictions without proper explanations in-game.

[h2]Walker Hardpoints System[/h2]

One of the main things we want to accomplish with this new system is to reinforce the strengths and weaknesses of different Walkers across different classes.

In our old balance, weight, speed and acceleration were the major factors contributing to making a Walker be good, meta, etc. We want to move away from this design, and try to bring the big boys like the Titan, Schmetterling, Tusker (to name a few), more into the spotlight, and encourage the use of balanced fleets, rather than a single type of war-Walker.

This emphasis on improving the gameplay around larger Walkers is not a new thing, but we think we will have much better results with this new building system and the changes we’ve mentioned on the previous devblog.
With this system, we have a much better chance at emphasizing and reinforcing the intended uses of each Walker in their respective classes. For example, the Titan Walker will have very offensively-oriented hardpoint rigs, designed to be used in sieges and to fight against large, slow moving battle mobs, whereas something like Mollusk, or its big brother the Domus, or even the Tusker, those would be all about added (and more protected) vast amounts of cargo capacity compared to other Walkers of their class.

Hardpoints are essentially spots that allow structures to be built on Walker decks. They come in different sizes or categories, which accept different buildables.
Hardpoints are pre-designed for each Walker to match their class, deck space and layout.

For now we’re looking at 5 hardpoint categories, below I’ll add a few examples of the buildables that fit on each category.

• Small - small chests, water containers, ammo boxes, etc.
  
• Medium - medium chests, ballistae, scattershot, fiberworking station, etc.
  
• Large - larger crafting stations such as furnaces, woodworking stations, larger weapons like the catapult, battle fan etc.
  
• Edge - as the name suggests, these are placed on the edge of Walker decks, and they are designed for Gun Pods, Tool Pods, Climbers, and some of our small remote weapons.
  
• Decorative - these are meant to allow cosmetic/decorative structures without sacrificing proper, functional Hardpoints on the main Walker deck for aesthetic purposes.
  

Regardless of the rig the Walker is equipped with, each hardpoint allows the placement of only one object, regardless of the size. All hardpoints are backwards-compatible, though, so this means a small structure can be built in Medium and Large hardpoints.

Although each Walker will come with a base rig installed by default, there will be ways to upgrade the rigs, change them around, etc. Rigs themselves will be part of the new loot, and a tradeable item in the game.






[h2]Specialized Rigs[/h2]

Specialized rigs are intended to provide different layouts for hardpoints on a Walker deck, with more optimized purposes, such as cargo, war, farming, etc. They become available once the Walker passes a certain upgrade threshold, at which point it’s possible to reconfigure the Walker’s hardpoint layout with a different, pre-defined layout through a specialized rig.

For example, while a base Dinghy rig will have a variety of Small and Medium hardpoints, a Dinghy equipped with the Hammerhead rig will be able to have 3 weapons on the front of the Walker, with 3 Medium hardpoints.

Right now the progression related to Walkers through any sort of upgrades is pretty limited, think for example the quality only really changing the amount of module slots available, so we’re pretty excited to work on and show you guys a new mechanic that is changing that situation.

For the first iteration that will be available during testing, we’re going with a simple implementation for the specialized rigs, taking inspiration from community builds and we also plan to update the base rigs based on the initial feedback from testers.

We fully understand that the removal of freely building structures almost anywhere on Walker decks is a rather massive change that will affect how creative players can get with their builds, but we’re confident that the specialized rigs will help a lot with that.

—Neon