Last Oasis News

The fist balance patch addresses the most major issues we've identified so far. Please keep your feedback coming so we can adjust the experience as we go.

Balance

Increased Water stored on player from 10 minutes to 15 minutes
Decreased water consumption by 33%
Reduced aggro range on most mob camps unless attacked first
Increased Walker wings HP to ~2.5x
Increased Range of Grappling Hooks by 20%
increased Reel in speed for grappling hooks by 40%
Decreased Respawn timer when spawning without water on walker
Added range finder schematics to canyon to allow spotting the harder challenges from afar
Reduced Skirmisher/Javelin Thrower Aim, Projectile Speed and damage vs players
Increased drop of backpack schematics on cradle
Added medium chest schematics to canyon drops
Removed hide requirement from Dinghy Wings, using Fiberweave instead
Removed Cattail requirement from Brittle Bone Armor, added hide requirement instead
Rebalanced Rupu scattershots to have more drag, less velocity, less damage and a higher ark
Removed Rope requirement from Firefly wings, reduced the other costs
Made redwood harvestable by chitin axes and above
Reduced firefly upgrade cost
Reduced cost of Wooden walls from 18 wood, 12 fiber to 6 wood, 14 fiber
Changed Nurr armor from medium to soft

Fixes

Fixed not being able to loot people on pvp tile
Fixed Rupu throwers damaging bases
Fixed Rupu Fortress spawning in travel area
Fixed lots of server and client crashes
Fixed hoist attachments
Fixed griefing exploit of preventing travel

Season 5 has launched!

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Servers will go live in the next hour and the patch is available for download. While normally you would get patch notes, as we’ve said numerous times, S5 is a complete overhaul of the game. Nearly everything has changed. If you’re a returning player, consider that nothing you knew before is the same and keep an open mind! We’ve seen that people tend to catch on with the new mechanics much easier this way.

However, there are a few important housekeeping issues we want to touch on.

[h3]World Map and Soft Cap[/h3]

A few months ago we talked about having a static map and some of the benefits that would give us for Season 5. The way the world map is designed will have a massive impact on the way Season 5 is played.

Rather than a top to bottom world map, the world map for Season 5 will be an inward facing doughnut. This means that all regions will be equidistant from one another, as you travel around the ring. PvE maps will be on the outside, with the higher tier and rarity maps populating inwards.

Most importantly, though, is our implementation of the soft cap. Soft caps will correlate with the rarity of the map. So Common maps (which are all PvE), will be set at a soft cap of 6, and ascending from there. (6/6/15/25/50 = Common/Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary). As you can see, there are no longer any uncapped maps. This, along with blocking travel to full tiles in our new travel system, will hopefully alleviate tile cap issues.

[h3]PvP Base Raiding[/h3]

If you’ve read any of our recent devblogs, you’ve seen the new collection of remote weapons we’ve created. While we think internal testing has wrung out most of the major issues, getting the balance right with respect to raiding player structures isn’t something we want to gamble on. For that reason, at the start of the season, we’ll be disabling PvP damage to bases.

We understand the pros and cons with this decision, but we simply don’t have the data we need to get the balance right. Enabling base raiding will be one of the major focuses of the week.

[h3]In-Game Behavior[/h3]

As a result of the above change, our policy we laid out here will also apply to PvP maps until we enable player damage. This is specifically in reference to taking advantage of player damage being disabled on structures to degrade the gameplay experience of others. Spamming the server with building pieces, trying to prevent your opponents from being able to move around the map, etc. Ultimately, we don’t foresee this being an issue because of schematics, but if you have a question about what constitutes griefing, we can only say, “We know it when we see it.”

[h3]Performance[/h3]

We’ve made some changes which should ideally improve performance. To monitor those changes we will be running a build with profiling tools, which ironically could make performance worse. But it will help us identify any major issues quickly. Once everything is stable, we'll disable these profiling tools and the servers will receive a nice boost of extra performance.

[h3]Private Servers[/h3]

Hosting private servers from the technical side should be unchanged, with the exception of the ability to host an LO Classic branch, which is essentially the game as you can play it today in S4.

If you host an S5 server, you may find that you don’t have access to many of the configuration settings that apply to the new mechanics introduced in S5, and you will be limited in spawning or freebuilding to things available in the official servers. Just as we’re iterating to improve the public server throughout the season, we’ll be working with you to improve the tools available to those of you who host private servers.

[h3]Communication[/h3]

For any in-game reports (cheating, bug reporting, PvE or PvP griefing) please continue to use feedback.lastoasis.gg

For feedback about gameplay, balance, etc, the best way to have your voice heard is on Discord in our S5 Suggestions channel.

Tomorrow, Tuesday August the 2nd at 7 PM CEST / 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT marks the beginning of Season 5!

This PvE focused Season 5 aims to bring fun to the solo and small group experience. It was nearly a year of hard and passionate work with quite a few bold changes and massive amounts of new content.



All of us here hope that you enjoy it, give us plenty of feedback, and help us iterate on this Season in the coming weeks and months!



Those are some small previews of the things to come, and together with the launch we'll release a trailer showing some of the cool stuff to expect in season 5.

See you tomorrow,

-chadz

And so it begins… New season, together with the whole new direction for Last Oasis, will begin early next week.

Exact time and date will be announced on Monday, but we wanted to let you know: We’re close.

As we’ve talked about in the past, LOverhaul is a massive rethinking of the game. Many of you got to experience a taste during the Beta Branch and gave us lots of critical feedback that we used to improve the experience and more appropriately balance the challenge with the fun. With our work on this overhaul, we asked the question: What could Last Oasis be if we started entirely from scratch?

If I were to sum it up as plainly as I can: LOverhaul puts solos and small groups first. All the testing of Season 5 has been done by solo players and small groups. We balanced around that and made sure that there would be no big obstacles to enjoy the game at your own pace.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the game is easy. The main difference, though, is that you, as a player, have a lot of control over the risks you expose yourself to, at the time and the order of your choosing.



What we’ve seen the most in our tests, is that some players find the game amazingly fun. Those players had a tendency to play more carefully, take their time to properly equip themselves and their walker for an upcoming encounter. Pick a deliberate goal to complete, figure out the best approach for that goal, and execute it.

Other players were struggling a lot and had trouble finding the fun in the new direction. Somewhat ironically, those were often experienced players who played LOverhaul like the previous seasons, where PvE was merely an inconvenience, and not the primary focus. If you rush into the world with a disregard for the dangers that await, you will struggle, fail, and, probably, not have fun at all.

The biggest gameplay change, really, is how important walkers are now as “gunships”. From the very beginning you’ll be able to equip your walker with driver-controlled guns of various types, functions, and sizes, as many Rupu Fortresses and mobs in general require you to use them in combat. That was, probably, the biggest challenge for veterans - you can no longer walk up to a camp and take it out without preparation. You need to use walkers with weapons, upgrade them, prepare ammo and gear, and only then attempt a raid.



Now, while we’re really happy with how the new direction feels, it is not perfect. During the beta branch, a lot of issues were brought up by you that were invaluable to us. Not only did it help us fix problems, but it also served as a baseline for balancing harvesting vs combat, for example.

We’ve discussed internally if we should host another Beta Branch, but came to a different conclusion: Season 5 as a whole must be a massive iteration and community driven development instead.

We will launch Season 5 next week, with the maps and progression that we consider properly balanced - Cradle and Canyon. Once it’s out, we will iterate on them together, just as we did during the Beta Branch. We will watch as you play, listen to the feedback, and improve the experience until it’s rock-solid. Then, we will reveal the next map with new challenges, new walkers, and new technology, until LOverhaul is exactly what it should be: a complete experience, from beginning to end. Each map and each piece of progression will be carefully balanced and all bugs squashed.

For those of you who don’t want to play this version until it’s fully ready or experience a game going through iterations rapidly, you will be able to host private LO Classic servers, which will stay in the preserved state of Season 4 on a separate branch.

Overall - we’re excited. And we hope you’re excited, too. It is the biggest change in the history of Last Oasis by far and the beginning of a new chapter.

- chadz