To start, we wanted to make it clear that communicating with our community is a top priority for us. We know that we haven’t been as vocal as we were at launch, and we apologize for that. The purpose of this devlog is to bring you more insight as to what has been happening behind the scenes at Donkey Crew since we released Last Oasis in Early Access.
Producer Lucas Stannis touches on some of the key points discussed in this post:
First, a little explanation about the development process: the content that we’re releasing has been in production for a while. It may not be what you are all wishing for at this very moment, but this patch has been planned for some time. Moving forward, you will see more community input within the additions and changes we make to Last Oasis. The team doesn’t stop to focus on one specific component at a time, there are tons of tasks and projects being worked on simultaneously.
We know that some of the marketing posts have not sat well with you, and we want to make it clear that marketing beats and the development process are separate things that often work in tandem. Social media posts, devlogs, and participation in events are just as planned out in advance as development. So, don’t worry, development is still happening and will always be our focus, even if there’s an ongoing marketing beat.
Due to the situation we dealt with during the weeks surrounding the game’s launch, on top of the global pandemic and the team shifting to a remote work environment, there has been a lot of transitions and adaptations happening. Until recently, we were in what you could call “crisis management mode” to recover from technical issues, both visible and invisible to the players. We’ve been dealing with resolving internal communication problems, plus giving our team much deserved and needed breaks after working long hours for many weeks in a row after the launch. This has culminated in some unplanned silence from us to the community. We’ve been figuring out what we want to share, how we want to share it, when we want to share it, and those plans have continued to change while we’ve watched the reactions to the things we put out.
We want this devlog to mark the beginning of a new push for better and more consistent communication moving forward. Our current plan is to do one of these community devlogs at least once a month, and there will be more ways for you to participate that will be introduced over time.
Like we mentioned above, this patch has been in progress for some time. It will be released next week, and we will give a far more in-depth write up about the content and decisions made in the upcoming days. We will also provide in-depth patch notes, explaining the reasons behind some of the changes and providing details on the purpose of the balance tweaks.
There’s one thing we know you’ve all been asking for: a Roadmap. We’ve been working on making it available to you all, and promise that it’s almost ready to be revealed. The technical issues we needed to deal with made a lot of changes to plans we had, so revealing a roadmap and promising something concrete wasn’t exactly feasible, but we do have some exciting plans for what’s to come after this Volcanic update. For a bit of a teaser: upcoming content patches will be centered around specific themes. The next theme is Commerce! And we can’t wait to share more of what we have in store!
There’s the point to touch on: the future of the game. There are so many plans and discussions and ideas that we can’t wait to develop, so be assured that Last Oasis isn’t going anywhere, we’ll keep improving this game to make it the best it can be!
Additionally, we wanted to touch on some questions we see asked frequently. There are more flushed out answers that may have only been glossed over in the above post. We know these won’t answer every question you might have, but we hope that it will provide you all with more insight.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q: Why did you stop communicating with the community like you were doing in the beginning?
A: We were overwhelmed with technical issues and the community response to the game (both good and bad). It was, and still is, a difficult time for us, but we think that we’ve reached a more manageable situation. In this next phase, we promise to be more vocal about the future steps and decisions we are making. We will also be more focused on the voice of you - our players. Moving forward, we will be doing two things (to start) to make sure you know we are listening: We will have an open Q&A available (soon) - where you will be able to ask questions and vote for the ones you want the developers to answer. All of these questions and responses will live in one place that everyone can reference. Our plan is to also include troubleshooting steps for some common support issues. Questions will be replied to weekly. On top of that, we will release a community devlog at least once a month - discussing things important to the game and to you.
Q: What’s the roadmap for the game?
A: We are almost ready to show you the roadmap for Last Oasis. It’s important to remember that any roadmap is dynamic — changes will have to be made and the ideas presented on it are not set in stone. It will give you a general look at where we’re planning to take the game and, of course, our players. We will prepare a separate post dedicated only to the roadmap in the coming weeks. What we can tease right now is that, beyond the Volcanic update (releasing next week!), we’re working on the Commerce update, which will greatly boost and expand the in-game economy and add loads of ways players will be able to interact with each other. The plan is to provide additional customization options, clan management features, and much more.
Q: What is your plan for the zerg problem/making the game more solo friendly?
A: While the thirst modifier had some effect on the way clans organize on certain tiles in the world, it clearly wasn’t enough to “fix” the issues regarding zerging and solo experience. These issues are currently our top gameplay priority, so we want to take our time and ensure we get it right, instead of going with the first ideas that pop into our heads. This will involve thinking through multiple angles and scenarios, discussing various ideas, and then mocking up a few of those for testing before implementing a good solution. We hear all the suggestions to add hard caps to servers, but with the information, feedback, and data we have, we strongly believe that one of the main causes of these issues is that there’s not enough variety in the gameplay experience within the game yet. Large clans enjoy fighting each other or hunting solos, while solos are bored and end up either joining those clans or getting hunted until they quit. What we think is lacking in this equation is diversity in other activities for all kinds of players and clans in the game, which would make the current (and only) type of gameplay one of many. We’re working on designing all kinds of new gameplay loops and entirely new experiences, like unique mechanics on event maps, arenas, exploration-based dungeons, and many more.
We are, of course, also working on more direct responses to the issue. With the Volcanic update, for example, defenders of their claim will always have slots reserved for their clan members, ensuring no server capping by attacking clans. We’re also considering mechanics like the use of Flots to reserve slots on specific tiles, harsher clan cap punishments, and more.
Q: When will you add in clan perms/logs/alliance systems/other QOL things that the community has been asking for?
A: We’re continuously working on improving various aspects of the game and introducing Quality of Life features. The difficulty with those types of improvements comes from having to iterate over time to make sure the changes actually make a difference and provide a benefit to all players equally. The next planned improvement regarding clans specifically, which will come with the second Volcanic update, some weeks from now, will be an introduction of detailed clan logs that can be directly integrated into a clan’s Discord server. This will allow clans and their leaders to monitor their clan’s activity even while not playing. We’re also working towards a more expansive permission system for clans, but that will come after the logging feature, as it requires much more planning and iteration.
Q: Future Walkers: Will they be geared towards solo/small groups or larger clans?
A: Our plan is to continue adding new types of Walkers throughout the entire development process that are geared towards a variety of playstyles. There will be Walkers better suited for solo players, Walkers that focus on attack or defense, specialized Walkers that excel at one thing over others, and many more. The latest addition to the fleet was a small Walker geared towards escaping combat with increased defenses. Next one, called Domus, will be larger and provide the best protection out of all the current Walkers. It has multiple levels behind locked doors and will be useful to clans that bet on defense over direct combat.
Q: Why aren’t you doing more about cheaters/reported players or clans?
A: We’re continuing to actively address cheating issues, both with the help of our anti-cheat protection and your reports. By the time we did the last announcement, we had many new and reliable systems to detect and automatically ban almost any cheater in the game. By now there are over 1000 active bans and while new cheats occasionally pop up, they rarely survive more than a day (the last one was 11 days ago, which got around a hundred cheaters banned). We also routinely go through all your reports and take actions daily.
Q: When can we expect updates for private servers?
A: The feature to delete tiles will be coming with the Volcanic update next week. We’ll be also continuing to work on improving the entire private server system over time, prioritizing your requests first. Going forward, we’ll be looking into providing an experience that’s as close to official servers as possible, but also adding features to customize your experience, potentially also expanding the ability to host your private servers with other providers and self-host too.
Q: Will you be taking community feedback into consideration more frequently moving forward?
A: We’re working on the best way to collect and analyze all the suggestions and feedback that you give us. The passion and enthusiasm we see from you is amazing, but can also be overwhelming. We want to make this right, with your help. Keep an eye out for ways to participate!
Q: Will you start doing live Q&As again?
A: Yes, we have plans to do both pre-selected and live Q&As in the near future, on top of having the “living” FAQ page that we mentioned in the first question.
Q: What work is being done to reduce server crashes?
A: There is no single cause for occasional server crashes, but we’re including fixes for them in almost every patch. With the new public test version in place, the number of crashes introduced by new features should drastically drop by the time a patch is live, so we’re hoping to eliminate the last frequent offenders at some point soon.
Q: Wipes?
A: While we’re not excluding the possibility of wipes in the future, we’ve designed the burning system to function as a soft-wipe mechanic, getting rid of old structures and preventing stale clan-owned lands. We’re planning to continuously improve and polish the features that fortify that design ideology. We’re listening to your suggestions and concerns to adjust it to the way you play. Potentially, there could be some additional soft-wipe mechanics in the future that clear the persistent world on a deeper level rather than just destroying old maps, but we’d like to investigate more globally how any of those changes would affect the global map.
Q: Are you working on resolving insiding issues?
A: Extensive clan logs and upcoming overhauls of the clan permission system will most likely make it much more difficult to do serious damage to clans through insiding. We’ll keep looking for more ways to prevent unfair gameplay caused by game mechanics and consider your feedback on those features.
A note: We will be opening our Player Test Realm tonight ahead of our patch releasing next week. We know this isn’t the patch that will fix everything, but we’re looking forward to it being a step in our continued effort in improving Last Oasis.