And I should know - I designed it. And more than that, I played it - extensively.

When I say it sucks, I mean I’m not having fun for long when playing it. Not as long as other survival games I enjoy. And I’m not alone with that opinion.

We could argue back and forth why Last Oasis is objectively not fun and what needs to be changed to make it a great experience. We did, actually - for 4 Seasons, to be precise.

And while each season got rid of tons of problems, there was always that one fundamental issue remaining:

I, personally, am not having fun when playing Last Oasis for long.

After Season 4 it finally hit me. I’ve been on a wild goose chase. I’ve been trying to chase down the reason why players don’t have fun in LO. This is a fruitless exercise until I can answer why I am not having fun.

Suddenly, the question was no longer “what can I do to fix LO”. The question became “If I were to make LO from scratch, what would I do”.

And the answer to that question is Season 5 - LOverhaul.


First, the (slightly egotistic) good news: I’m having a blast playing it. In fact, I never, ever, had so much fun in LO by myself. It’s challenging, it’s surprising, it’s rewarding, and I want to keep playing.

Now, for the (slightly) bad news: A lot of you will not like it. The most common feedback was nearly verbatim: “I love it the way it is, but this is way too difficult for the average players”.

For the next few days, we shall put that theory to the test.

LOverhaul has a strong focus on PVE. And the PVE is brutal. The world is in every way trying to actively kill you. The sun will make you constantly struggle for survival. Water is precious. Massive, deadly sandstorms can catch you off guard. Aggressive Rupu are roaming the lands, not only attacking you, but also your structures and your walker - should you even get that far. And if you think those are hard to deal with, wait until you encounter the ones in camps or those manning siege equipment.



The difficulty in Last Oasis used to be non-existent - until you encountered another player, who could destroy everything you owned in under 3 minutes. Now, players will have to make a conscious decision to join PVP when they are ready for it, and the PVE teaches you, through trial and error, how to stay safe.

You will find tools to help you survive this harsh environment, but often you’ll have to make due with situational circumstances. Your tube spade will help you build a small base to keep you safe, but the moment you’re stepping outside - all bets are off.

For some players, this is great. You will have to carve out victory after victory, and each defeat will be a lesson in what you can do better. Every time you manage to come back to your base with some precious loot you feel glorious. Every time your greed gets the better of you, and you bite off a bit more than you can chew, the lesson will be painful but deserved. The game has a lot to explore, and many options become available as you learn the mechanics better.

For others, the experience will be awful. The game no longer holds your hands - at all. No protected slots, no tutorial, no linear missions that gently guide you through progression. Just you and a sandbox full of tools and deadly dangers, and if you don’t think ahead, the world will absolutely punish you.

I don’t want to sugarcoat that. LOverhaul is not a game for everyone. And that’s ok.

However, it’s important to establish a good baseline for those who like the general direction. There’s fun difficulty, there’s challenging difficulty, and there’s ridiculous ragequit difficulty.

I absolutely need your help to establish a good middle ground. Which finally brings us to:


Today we start a small beta test to establish a good baseline for the difficulty. It will be cradle maps in PVE mode and available for about 48 hours. The beta is available to download on a separate branch of your Steam app (right click app - Properties - Betas - betabranch) and the realm will open up about 8 pm CET / 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT. For the next 2 days we’ll be keeping servers up to gather data about the experience, then turn it off again so we can evaluate the result in peace. This will help us establish a baseline of difficulty that we want to see.

We absolutely need your feedback:

• Does it feel rewarding?
  
• Is it tough?
  
• Is it too tough?
  
• Is it fair?
  
• And most of all, are you having fun?

A word of advice - if you play it like you used to play LO, you will fail. Ironically, new players seem to fare better than the seasoned ones initially, because the experience is so vastly different. Have an open mind, enjoy, and let me know what you think of this direction.

- chadz

Hey everyone!

We’re very excited to announce we’ll be kicking off S5’s beta branch on July 5th. Let’s get into the details.

For anyone unfamiliar with these kind of testing phases, a beta branch is a separate branch of the game that has many of the changes intended to go in the game for the next season. It will be available through the betas tab in Steam, and will be open for everyone to join by simply switching to the proper branch.

Our intention with this beta branch is to have a proper stress test where we can gather as much feedback as possible on the early game experience in the first two maps available, find any performance issues (or worse, crashes), and get these things ironed out before we move into Season 5 release.

As mentioned before, we already have internal playtesting going, though for the most part it’s us developers, and the staging testers in our Discord. So far the biggest focus has been on the bad crashes that could cause an awful experience for the beta branch, and coming up with a better balanced early game experience. We feel we’re pretty much ready to move into public testing now.

With so many changes comes a pretty big possibility of many of them ruining what we expect to be a pretty good impression of this update and what’s to come, so getting those out of the way early is what this internal testing has been for. Many of the new features and changed mechanics need a much larger amount of players for us to get proper feedback on how they add to the game, what kind of tweaks we need to make, etc.

As for Season 5 release, we’ll be sharing more details as we get nearer to its release, but as you probably already gathered from our previous devblogs, our development focus in S5 will shift toward a much more fitting Early Access style of development, something which we are fully committed to. We will be quickly iterating, changing and adding things as the season progresses, similar to the beta branch but at a much larger scale.

Keep an eye on our Discord and Twitter. More information about the beta test will be shared there next week

—Neon

This week’s devblog will be a lot shorter than usual, as we’re getting into a mechanic that is almost self-explanatory (and by popular demand), and the reasons we’re considering some changes to it are rather self-explanatory as well. Nevertheless, this is another major feature update that will be working together with the PVE maps and the travel changes, so we want to talk about it and to hear what you think of it.

For anyone not familiar with LO slang, “The Burn” is the mechanic where Oases decay and completely disappear from the world map. Any bases built on them are gone, any unprotected Walkers are destroyed, and pretty much the only thing that gets carried along is the contents of the Trading Stations.
As one of the major features of the game, the Burn is something that has received both much praise and much hate from players of the game, so it’s a sensitive subject to approach.

In addition to the travel changes and PVE maps, we’ve been looking into the Burn mechanic, and what it adds to the game (as well as what it takes away, especially now that travel has changed so much).

Season 5 is - very intentionally - a much more static experience. You will have a permanent main base from which you go on adventures with your crew on Walkers, and eventually have to return to it. With this approach, the Burn does very little to aid this experience - quite the opposite, we believe it would mostly just be frustrating.

Therefore, we’ve decided it’s best to disable the Burn mechanic, and use a mostly static world map. You get to know your neighbours on PVE tiles and enemies on PVP tiles. We think this is an important social aspect of Season 5. This is an aspect of the game that we enjoyed during S1, and now we have the possibility of bringing it back together with the travel changes and PVE Oases in a way that will enhance this new experience we’re going for.

In S5, the layout and spread of Oases across the world matters a lot more than before.
As we talked before, we want to have clear jumps in difficulty, from very peaceful Cradle Oases, to slightly more dangerous Canyons biome, to harder maps, eventually into hardcore event tiles.

This is another change that is meant to help us achieve a better pace of gameplay working alongside the travel changes. Travel is a very important part of the game, and having a balanced spread of Oases and a layout that makes sense design and balance wise is equally important. Having full manual control over the spread of Oases allows us to get exactly the gameplay we’re aiming for.

We may have to remove Oases every now and then for population reasons. It’s important to note that if we needed to remove any tiles from the world, there’d be many warnings before it burns and is removed, if it has a Trading Station all its contents would be transferred to the nearest one, etc. but Walkers and bases would burn when the map does. The same applies to when we add new tiles to the world, they would have an activation timer of a few hours as usual.

I want to make sure it’s pointed out that this is something that’s very much in the same category as packing and the walker hardpoints system: we want to be in the same page with our players before making very radical changes to how it works, and we want to also make sure that these changes are in line with the approach for the new season.

Next week, we’ll be going over our approach for the public testing phase of LOverhaul and showcasing some of our ideas for map layouts and the different possible static map iterations that we can try. I’m sure there’ll be lots of ideas for a variety of possible world map layouts, and we’d love to hear what you think about it.

— Neon

Hi Nomads!

Now that many of the new features and changes have been revealed (though as you will soon see, it’s not quite the last of it), we feel much more confident talking more about and giving you more insight into this new direction for the game.

This week’s devblog will be all about the upcoming Base Building & Packing changes, and also an extension of our very first post back in early April. Now that there’s so much more information about the next season out, we feel like it’s a really good time to get into some of the more drastic changes and making sure we are keeping you in the loop in regard to our vision for the game, the approach we’ve chosen for this new season and generally the direction the game will be taking for the future.

As we talked about before, some of these changes come from a very simple place: many previous systems clash with our vision for Season 5, and that can mean we either disable them temporarily, or rework them entirely if they don’t work with this new direction.

Season 5 in many ways is intended to have very lean gameplay experiences, no unnecessary stuff, even if they are things that back in the day took us massive amounts of effort to implement - if they don’t work with the new season, they shouldn’t be in the game at all. Everything has defined intentions and purposes and in many cases, is re-designed from the ground up when needed.

This also means that for our S5 testing phase and release, we won’t be immediately releasing everything, every map, with every new POI and mobs, etc. we’re gonna start with the content we feel the most comfortable about, and see how it plays out in real scenarios with real players.
We’re players too, but there’s obviously not enough devs for playtesting to be at the scale the game is designed to be played, so seeing how you play with it in the public tests is still something we’re looking forward to and something that will provide us with massive amounts of invaluable feedback.
Afterwards, the plan is to rapidly drop more and more content through Season 5, as well as rapidly iterating and balancing whenever we see it’s not working how we want it to work.

With all that said, let’s get into the main topic of this devblog - Base Building, PVP balance for bases, and how these base building changes play into the removal of lobby mechanic.


First thing we talked about when it came to PVE oases was quite simple: they are not meant to be a lobby, because we don’t think the lobby mechanic fit the game at all anymore.
PVE oases come with many threats, constant sandstorms roam the map and destroy unsupported structures and abandoned Walkers and stations over the oasis. Bases are more than convenience, they are a big requirement for safekeeping Walkers and other belongings from the weather, hostile creatures and hostile players. Everything not built on properly supported structures is going to decay naturally, if it’s not first destroyed by these roaming sandstorms and other weather events.

The base building changes we’re getting into are not only implemented to counteract the weather balance and generally clean up maps now that everything is something physical in the world, but rather they are now a much bigger part of the new Last Oasis, mainly because there’s always been a major issue with the pace of gameplay in LO.

In most survival games, there’s a sort of natural pace; there are moments of intensity, and moments of peace where you can relax and do things normally in your base or collect common resources in peaceful areas.
In Last Oasis, you don’t have that most of the time, there is a weird contrast in that regard. Most of the time you can even be chilling on your Walker, but somewhere in the screen there is a timer ticking down letting you know that maybe the oasis is about to burn, or that it will be gone soon and you need to be very prepared and careful, or decaying structures, or just straight up a player ganking you already because you got distracted for a minute or two.

That last example is very much part of playing a PVP game, but we don’t think it should happen 100% of the time, at any time, anywhere.
We think some places in the world should be safe, that you should be able to have moments of peace and quiet that aren’t immediately interrupted. Initially, the lobby was meant to be that, but it clearly didn’t work out for a myriad of reasons we already explored - among them and related to our changes to base building, there’s just no homely feeling about a bunch of UI, a lot of icons for Walkers and maps, etc.

Ever since our first days developing and playing Last Oasis, and even more now that we’ve changed so much of it and we get to playtest it internally, we always felt there was this “homely” feeling missing from LO, and that can’t be replaced by abstract, intangible things like the lobby (even if they look like amazing ideas in theory, which is one of the reasons we stuck with it for so long). There is very little fun in that, very little interactions you can have (even simple stuff like managing inventory of Walkers, or checking packed bases, that kind of thing). There is no fun in escaping from great dangers, for example, and suddenly getting thrown into some UI where you just see some Walker icons, other map icons, and it’s all interactions with a bunch of buttons.
That’s not fun.

And that is why one of the main goals for bases - whether they be very large, semi-permanent places you can call “home”, or temporary, nomadic settlements - to be somewhere you can build up to create peaceful areas to have that contrast in pacing that’s so important for us. Having this gameplay be just some UI is something that’s so far away from what we consider a good experience - for example, I (Neon), can say it’s so much more fun to have pretty much the same experience, but instead of dealing with all the UI stuff, it’s all happening entirely in the game world. And it’s not just very specific situations like getting away from danger into the safety of your base, it’s also something as simple as logging off for the night. When playtesting this myself, it felt so much better that the place I call “home” in-game is somewhere I can physically go to when logging off the game, instead of getting into this UI screen that was the lobby, I find it a lot of fun and full of more interactions to travel to my base, opening the gates that lead to where I keep my Dinghy, it just feels so much more real and fun compared to old LO.


While our current vision for Last Oasis is very much PVE focused, the PVP continues to be a major part of the game, but our approach is quite different from last time in this regard.

PVP is a core part of Last Oasis, and it will never stop being a core part of the game, but PVP is no longer meant to be the core gameplay of Last Oasis (meaning, the only thing “worth doing”, or the thing that everything leads to eventually).

We want combat with other players to be part of the emergent gameplay aspect of the game, and base building changes are one major step towards achieving a better balanced pace of gameplay for PVP and PVE.

Last Oasis always struggled trying to keep a balance where it remained a full loot PvP game, but it was also not extremely harsh, and that’s a compromise that was very difficult to maintain with some of our mechanics, especially things like the lobby.
PVE oases not only allow us to make the safe parts safer - they paradoxically also allow us to make the PVP parts more ruthless. Bases in PVE regions for quick recovery from defeats. On the other hand, PVP oases are providing the player a choice on whether they want to expose themselves to usually pretty brutal PVP, or not. We expect that eventually most players will base off near PVE oases, but for the most part will play around and from PVP oases - that is how it’s balanced to be, and how we’ll continue to iterate to improve it to achieve a properly balanced pace of exciting PVP situations, and moments of tranquility.

We want these moments of intensity, whether you’re fighting difficult PVE threats, or more emergent situations like facing off against other players, to be very intense and always a fun experience, but we also want there to be moments of peace and quiet that aren’t immediately interrupted.

Practically speaking, what this means is that for the early stages of PVP battles you need mid-tier structures to really get that protection against attacks from hostile players, whereas low-tier bases are mostly meant to protect against PVE threats and weather events.

To allow storing walkers inside of bases, many new basebuilding pieces will be introduced in Season 5, in particular hangar walls, ceilings, and gates, allowing you to build comfy little places for your Walkers. Furthermore, the base building system has been overhauled to finally allow much more freedom in vertical building.

Since we’re on the topic of bases, we’d also like to address a point of confusion regarding last devblog and schematics balance - and that’s related to balance and quality of life.
Many schematics in the game are meant to be very rare, and very valuable.
What this means is that building a giant clay or cement fortress will take much longer than it used to, now that it’s not simply unlocking the technology and then pouring resources into it.
What it doesn’t mean is that the majority of essential schematics will be dropping as a single consumable, but rather as several per loot drop.

Most schematics that are practically impossible to live without will be available in moderate quantities and at common POI, but as you progress and advance to higher tier buildables, Walkers, base parts, etc. more advanced versions of those schematics will become rarer and more valuable. For example, it will be moderately easy to arrive at an oasis and construct early wood and sand-based structures as temporary refuge, but much more difficult to achieve the same using clay and cement structures.


For our first version of the public test, we have been heavily considering the removal of the packing mechanic. There are many reasons why we think that’s a good idea, but before I get into that, I want to say once again that the promise me made back in May is still very much in our minds when we talk about these changes internally: There is undoubtedly other solutions that are far less drastic than complete removal of the mechanic, and we want to hear these. We want to know more points of view on how packing benefits the game overall, so, if you have suggestions, let us know.

With that said, right now we see the possibility of removing the packing mechanic as a good thing, because it fits the balance and approach of the new season perfectly. Right now, we see the game heading in a much more roguelite direction, blended with the survival and open world mmo aspects that it already has, and we really like an experience like that.

Surviving needs you to invest in an area, you can’t bring everything with you and be completely self-sufficient. You go out in what’s essentially an expedition out of the comforts of your base - whether it’s in a PVE tile or a PVP map doesn’t matter - and you bring with you what you need, water, weapons and tools, extra armor sets, some materials for either a temporary base to protect against the weather or some small initial production stations for crafting ammo and other necessities.
You can stay there for as long as you can, or rather for as long as you survive there, and if you feel like you’ve accomplished what you went to do, you find a path through the sandstorms, and return home with your loot.
There are no certainties that you will return with more than you brought, or that you will return at all, and that is very much where this rogueliteness aspect comes from.

With that kind of gameplay in mind, packing comes into heavy scrutiny from us, both in terms of balance, and what it brings to the new design.
Whereas before it felt very nomadic to have the ability to travel somewhere new and basically plop down a whole massive base wherever you wanted to settle, right now we’re not very happy with that concept. From our point of view of the new season, to have the necessity of building temporary settlements (that eventually need to be abandoned if you don’t stay in that area for long) fits the nomadic aspect of the game a lot more, while also helping the balance and design stay in check.

There’s lots of small changes, and many larger changes that are all meant to work together to transform the game into an entirely new version of itself. We know that for many, this means some things that were once considered core parts of LO, those things not being in the game anymore or being completely changed to fit this new approach, it may not sound great, and that’s okay.
We have no doubt that for some (especially our oldest, veteran players of the game, the ones who participated during the alpha, the beta waves, and also including the Early Access peeps), when they launch Season 5 public testing and they start their journey in a new oasis, they will not feel like they are playing Last Oasis anymore. And we can very confidently say if you feel that way, that is a good thing, that’s perfectly okay, the game is changing completely, and if when playing it you could do the same things as you did during Season 4 or earlier seasons, and have the same results, then we wouldn’t be doing a good job.

For us, now that we are getting to the point where we can see these changes realized and can playtest them internally as a full game, instead of testing individual parts of the update, we think it looks amazing, and we can’t wait to have more people playing it, testing the new version of the game, and most importantly letting us know whether we’re achieving a much better Last Oasis, with the fresh, fun, completely new experience that we ourselves see when we boot up the internal testing client.

A final decision will be made during the beta test and, regardless of which option we end up deciding for the official realm, private realms will have the option to turn these individual features on and off as wanted. As mentioned before, for us, Season 5 is a massive change in direction - if you want “LO Classic”, private realms have the ability to turn off most of these changes.

— Neon

For the past few weeks we’ve done a great deal of references to a reworked progression system that would enhance and be deeply connected with other features and changes we’re introducing to the game in Season 5 - features such as PVE maps, rarity system, siege weapon changes, the new creatures and their Rupu War Howdah variations (also known as Battle Mobs internally), and last but definitely not least, Walkers. It’s time to finally get into all the juicy details.

To get this out straight away so we focus entirely on the new system, we are completely removing fragments and tablets from the game and the associated progression. Our replacement system is to be schematics.

I will also touch some of the points that I failed to explain properly in our Rarity System devblog, such as for example, how an epic rarity Point of Interest differs from a common rarity POI, or what kind of bonuses would an item like a simple Bandage get from being crafted at a higher rarity, and most importantly for the good old “quality grind”, how it affects tools.


For Season 5, advancing through different types and tiers of Walkers, siege weapons, base parts, melee weapons and armor, etc. is going to be a major gameplay element of the game, and the vast majority of that will be done through battling Rupu tribes in their camps, hunting wild, dangerous creatures, raiding new POIs, and facing off against fearsome Rupu combat platforms on top of tamed beasts.

One of the biggest reasons we decided to completely remove fragments/tablets progression is the issue of such a core gameplay element of the game becoming very irrelevant, very quickly. After one player in a clan learned anything, everyone in that clan would have access to it. Both for PVP and trade aspects, it quickly removed value from fragments and tablets, and stopped that major part of game progression extremely early on, if it was a big clan, and rather quickly for an average sized group.

In a lot of cases, this made it so technology progression wasn’t even a part of the gameplay for most players, which from our point of view is a design issue in and of itself.

Whereas before it was possible to simply “feed” all the fragments and all the tablets to one player in the group, and thus unlock a vast amount of technology very early on if you had many players in that group that were grinding for it, that won’t be possible with this new system.
With all the major rebalance and redesign that LO is undergoing across the board, having a system where you can essentially get to end-game technology by visiting merely the first three maps and just farming for a few days, that’s something that is completely incompatible with our approach for the game, and would completely invalidate the impact of the rarity system and the introduction of scarcity to the game.

I want to start by describing how you will first interact with the system, what schematics are in practice, and how many other features and gameplay are changed through them - for example our Wandering Merchants, or the acquisition methods for valuable raid ammo such as Hellfire, and even smaller things such as building a simple wood base. Everything in the game is connected to, and interacts with this new system, paired with the scarcity changes we’ve finally introduced to the game, and the rarity system we talked about two weeks ago.

Schematics are essentially items, loot drops like any other, but they are at the center of almost every recipe in the game, and can greatly benefit from rarity bonuses. In our initial implementation, some items will be the exception to that rule, there is player equipment that will drop as a crafted item, rather than as a schematic.
For example, our first iteration will have farming tools of tier higher than Bone not be craftable, but rather be findable in the world as a low drop rate loot (by tier here we are talking about Stone, Bone, Ceramic, etc.).

Some examples of what this means: to build a Walker, you will first need to find a schematic for that specific Walker. In order to upgrade the Wings and the Walker Legs, you will need schematics for that as well. To switch Walker Rigs to a higher rarity variation, you will both need to have crafted a Walker of that rarity, and to find a Rig schematic of the same rarity (or lower).

If you want to build large clan bases wherever, be it PVE or PVP maps, you will need to find structural schematics - if you want to have large factories producing ceramics, or cooking iron into ingots, or weaving massive amounts of cloth, you will need to find schematics to build them in the first place.


In order to showcase how rarity and schematics interact with each other, I’ll first get into how rarity changes things like Points of Interest and creatures.

Rarity is going to affect how POIs are spawned. Depending on the map, POIs such as Rupu Camps, pyramid, abandoned trading stations, ancient crafting site (fabricator), rupu fortresses, and creature lairs, these will have different rarity, and thus different loot tables with more exciting rewards based on the difficulty of the map. Do keep in mind that a rarer POI also implies higher difficulty. Some POI will not be clearable by melee, for example, and will require Walkers armed with siege weapons to take them out, or weapon platforms nearby.

As it applies to resources and other general loot in a higher difficulty map, this also applies to schematics. When looting Nurr camps in an Easy/Medium difficulty oasis you will very rarely have an uncommon or a rare Stiletto, or Mollusk schematic drop - but if you head on out to higher difficulty oases such as Sleeping Giants, or Ancient City event maps, you will face off against rarer mobs which have increased chances of dropping higher rarity schematics.

While early on you will start off your journey riding a common Firefly and will eventually reach the point you find a Dinghy schematic, you will most likely still be in these early game, low difficulty maps, so unless you get lucky or raid a high rarity, high difficulty POI, or fight rare creatures in that map, you will find yourself riding a common Dinghy.
But that’s just the start of the adventure. Once you advance onto larger Walkers and more advanced gear, you will be ready to cross the sandstorms toward higher difficulty oases where many creatures, Rupu fortresses and various POI await you.

It is at this point that after overcoming these new challenges, uncommon, rare, and sometimes epic rarity schematics will be up for the taking. PVE threats won’t be the only challenges you will face in these higher difficulty maps, there will be other players and clans just like you, seeking to advance and progress toward larger Walkers, more powerful siege weapons, and sturdier bases to protect them.


It’s not news that both the rarity and the schematics systems are massive balance tools for us, but I still find it difficult to properly emphasize how much greater their impact is compared to our old systems.

When it comes to balancing different types, PVP and PVE tiles for example, schematics are the main tool for us. Our intention with PVE maps has been laid out already, but I think it’s okay to get into it once again with the added context of schematics that wasn’t available before.
Hanging out and farming early game up to essentially bone tier tech is perfectly okay, but staying beyond that is simply not worth it.

PVE tiles will always be there as safe havens for social interactions, for dedicated trading, and in a lot of cases, for bringing your banged up Walkers, garage them up, repair, refit, rebuild, and go back out into the dangerous areas of the world. As we said before, they’re not meant to be somewhere to live off of, farm and build up, resources respawn slower and are scarcer, schematics are limited to very low rarity, it’s - and with your help we will achieve a good balance where weather events, increased maintenance costs and PVE threats dissuade players and clans from creating banks and bases far too large for the intention we have.

While many schematics are considered very special loot with either low drop rates or requiring you to defeat large, dangerous PVE threats across different biomes, in the other extreme we have some of the very early schematics, which are required to progress through the early game at a decent pace and have a good experience in the first maps, so a few of them will always be unlocked or very easily accessible.
We don’t want situations where you can never get to water purification tech because there’s no campfire schematics to be found, or not having any bandages to heal at any point, etc. We also don’t really want a constant overflow of useless schematics, so this will be a very delicate balance to work on.

We don’t usually talk about numbers and balance a whole lot, other than to say that it’s up in the air, because that’s usually the case with new features and fresh changes in need of proper testing.
This continues to apply here, as we’ll need to carefully balance what drops from where, what are the chances for it to drop, etc. This is something that we will work together with you, the players, during our public testing phase of the overhaul.

A major focus for overall balance of schematics is to avoid excessive amounts of prayers directed at RNGesus. After hunting for Nurr and getting a Stiletto drop, you would probably expect similar results in the future, instead of having a Stiletto dropped from a random Rupu Forerunner in the middle of the desert.
I’ll give you some examples below on how you can expect specific items and buildables to come from similar sources.

• Walkers: The vast majority of our battle mobs (Rupu-tamed creatures) will be the main sources of Walker related schematics. For example, untamed Nurr will have chances to drop Stiletto, while Rupu Nurr Raiders will drop Mollusk Walkers. Larger Walkers like the Falco and the Buffalo come from more dangerous sources, in this case variations of the Papak creature.
  
• Raiding the Rupu in their villages is a great way to make better use of the ammo they store for their defenses.
  
• Exploring and looting Ancient POIs can earn you rarer and useful items such as Automata, Wingsuits and Exosuits.

On the topic of quality of life: since our rarity system devblog, we’ve seen a lot of concerns regarding item clutter, and with schematics being unique items that also go in player inventory, that is still a concern we have. The much more simplified rarity (1-5, instead of 1-100) items replacing old quality items has had a great impact on reducing the amount of clutter items in the inventory, and we want to keep it that way.

For that reason, many schematics will be “group schematics” - what this means is that we'll be grouping some schematics under a single one, so for example, finding a single schematic for Baskwood Armor will allow you to craft 1 piece of either gloves, chest, legs - instead of having to find Baskwood Bracers, Boots and Chest separately. Another example would be structural pieces. Finding a Clay Structure schematic will let you build any Clay base piece, as long as you have the necessary resources and the schematic itself.

Similarly, ammo schematics will have big stacks so as to not fill your chests too quickly when the resources needed to craft the ammo aren’t available to you.
We’ve considered items such as schematic bags and backpacks (similar to our fiber bags), but it remains to be seen whether it will be necessary. Testing will give us more information on this.

In regards to cheating and exploits such as dupes: We fully understand that some of these things will not work at all if there’s things like dupe exploits going rampant at any point during the season, or if cheaters are allowed to get away with essentially robbing the grind off other players.

Our stance for this has not changed, and will be heavily enforced at the start of Season 5. Whereas in the past we focused a lot more on fixing the exploits as soon as possible, than banning the exploiters straight away (even temporarily), this time our approach is much more of a middle ground. While we are focused on fixing the exploits, our support team will be focused on handing out punishments to anyone found in violation of our Code of Conduct, be it a lone player or a large clan, that is found to be greatly benefiting from exploits and cheaters in their group.

— Neon

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.


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.


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 :)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.







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