We’re approaching our major revision to one of the mechanics introduced in Season 5 and wanted to take this week’s devblog to lay out its full design and our plan for it. As it happens with large overhauls like this, the full update will require a few more days in the oven, so we’ll be rolling out parts throughout the week, with the final bit scheduled for early next week. Meanwhile, we’ll continue this week with some balance changes and further iteration, as well.
Overview
From watching your community videos and various streamers, and reading your feedback, we quickly realized that the rarity implementation wasn’t resulting in the gameplay we had hoped that it would and quickly set to work redesigning how the system functioned and how we wanted players to interact with it. We’ve written a few devblogs with some of our ideas to gauge reception and receive feedback, and we’ve settled on an iteration we’re now comfortable implementing. Throughout this devblog we’ll lay out the full design and plan for the coming week.
First and foremost, a reminder of the current plan. Maps are currently set to burn on the 7th of September - we will keep that date, burn the maps as scheduled, and then set all maps to common. In addition, we’ll be setting some cradles to start burning today, which will burn on Monday, as we’ve spawned a lot of them on release and now they’re being unused with everyone moving out to Canyons. Tiles will keep their current clan cap as is, but will only have common resources and mobs. To answer a common question - we will also be wiping all rarity, including equipment, resources, Walkers, and so on. We understand this is frustrating for those players who have continued playing and grinding rarity, but it’s important to test these changes with everyone starting on even footing. Then, early next week, we will patch and rarity event maps will start spawning.
To clarify: Rarity wiping will happen by changing all the items into common, not by deleting them!
Event Maps
At that time, rare maps will start spawning similar to event maps in previous seasons, with a few major differences. We’ll be implementing traveling to these maps in a much different way. You will be able to craft a portal anywhere on a map that instantly takes you straight to these maps and then brings you back to the edge of the map you traveled from when coming back. We understand that not everyone has hours every day to spend traveling around hoping to run into other players and, hopefully, this will help avoid having to spend so much time to get that gameplay. We believe that the current implementation of travel is healthy for the open world, but we understand that many of you want to be able to play the game in either a more casual way or by going straight into action, and this is one step in that direction.
Once you’re on the map, rarity will be similar to what it is now (with the exception of fixing some obvious issues like creature rarity, rupu vines, and tools not harvesting R+1). Another important change is that every map will have a random distribution of all rarities for both mobs and resources. We hope that it creates an entirely new gameplay around rarity - "What are the schematics and resources I was able to get during the event and how do I most efficiently use them?". Our intention isn’t for everyone to have everything Legendary - it will be much more rare than that. Rather, you’ll have to decide what are the most important things to invest your Legendary schematics and resources in, and settle for the next best rarity for the rest, depending on your ability to find and farm it. In addition, we’ll be implementing a wandering merchant that allows you to spend flots to instantly upgrade the rarity of your resources in exchange for Flots.
On the difficulty front - we understand that the current implementation of rare mobs (primarily increases in health and damage) isn’t all that exciting, but further than that we understand in general PvE isn’t as fun as we want it to be. One of our major focuses right now is improving current and future encounters to make them more than crafting and spamming darts, and we’ll be able to ultimately leverage some of those changes to improve rarity camps. On a case by case basis we’ll be addressing some mobs (looking at you, legendary Papak) that verge on impossible without some heavy doses of cheese. We’re also working on implementing different weapons actually having different functions, making encounters more dynamic, as you’ll need to think what to use against the weapons, Rupu, their structures, and so on, and switch between your weapons during the fight or even pre-fitting your Walker with specific weapons depending on the encounter you’re preparing for.
PvE Rarity
Originally, when rarity was meant to be more of an iterative progression mechanic, we said that we intended to have PvE rarity maps. However, the design of rarity has changed in a way that we believe makes it a progression loop that would be less rewarding to PvE players and more rewarding to risk-taking PvP players. For that reason, at least in their first implementation, rarity maps will be PvP-only. PvE-only players will still be able to engage in the rarity loop, but, primarily, through the marketplace and the quality upgrader merchant. Also, if we see enough demand, there is a good chance we will consider expanding the rarity resource upgrading mechanic to include the ability to upgrade schematics as well. Let us know below how you feel PvP and PvE should work in Last Oasis:
https://strawpoll.com/polls/kogjva5D8g6
Base Raiding
In short, we agree with SkyKevin and recommend to watch his video on this topic (and thank him for his contribution):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwFNojO0SB4
We’ll also be enabling base raiding this week as a part of one of the planned patches. We’ll be talking more about our plans for PvP over the coming days and weeks, but essentially, we’ll be rolling out some systems to make base raiding a more interesting and fundamental mechanic for the game. In the meantime, as we’ve mentioned, we agree with SkyKevin’s assessment on how it could impact the game (and also, overall about his impressions on the gameplay we’re aiming for).
Schematics
It is our impression that schematics are probably the most controversial system implemented in Season 5. Feedback on schematics seems all over the place, to say the least. Some of you think it’s a great improvement over tablets and fragments, some absolutely hate it, and all the possible things in between. So, as promised in one of the previous posts, we’re running a survey that will stay open through the week, asking a few questions about schematics and your thoughts on them. We'd really appreciate if you took part in it, as it will greatly help us improve the system:
https://take.supersurvey.com/Q652VC1Y4
Sleeping Giants
And finally, we’re continuing to work on Sleeping Giants - the next map in progression. We know that everyone is pretty tired of Canyons, but as we said at the beginning of the season, we will continue iterating until we believe it’s appropriate to move on. With the current state of rarity, it would simply be backwards and pretty much irresponsible to introduce a whole new set of technology before figuring out the existing one, so the focus of our coders has been on improving rarity while our game designers have taken that time to continue iterating on Sleeping Giants, which will introduce a whole new set of challenges for players to face, including the War Okkam, many new types of camps, including special ones like melee-only, and other dangers and rewards that we’ll talk about in a future post.