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