[2022] Secrets of the Ancient City

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

A little later than we planned, due to some final touches that we wanted to do in order to bring this update to a properly final state and try to avoid multiple hotfixes, learning from the previous experience with the packing update. You can consider this few days delay as a better reassurance that we won't need them (or, hopefully, not that many, at least).

Get ready to enter the mysterious city of the forgotten civilization!

Welcome to the Ancient City!
The Ancient City is an oasis that contains the decaying remains of an ancient civilization. Little is known about who or what lived here, or, even, how long ago, but clues litter the landscape for Nomads to find. It is said that intrepid explorers, brave enough to explore the Ancient City, stand to find untold riches, while the Flotillan Historic Society will gladly accept new members, who help them research the ancient technology with a member-only benefit of an access to their Schematics Store at each Trading Station.

That is, if they can survive the Rupu claiming the ruins as their own. The Ancient Cities around the globe became a haven for Rupu, where they build various fortification to protect their Matrarchs. The most ferocious and powerful of their warriors reside in the ruins and the fortifications against the invading Nomads will be no easy feat to overcome on the road to riches and glory.

Map Overhaul
Now, backing off from the lore towards the technical side of this update.

The map received some pretty significant changes, as you might've guessed. Both literally - with fortified walls, now covering entrances to the city and a giant palace, featuring the most brutal melee-only PvE experience we've introduced to date, and from a conceptual standpoint - with the map's place within the progression being more defined and permanent, where going to the Ancient City will always be a rewarding experience.

All other maps in Last Oasis are built on a procedural spawning system, where Rupu camps don’t spawn entirely randomly, but they have a set of rules and pre-defined locations that can result in a significant seeming randomness. However, for the Ancient City, we wanted to go in a different direction. As an event map that introduces a whole new system of progression called "Relic Hunter", we iterated and tested various approaches, and realized that it would be much more interesting to have a more intentional and thoughtful design, rather than leave it all up to procedural spawners. In the end, it ended up providing quite a bit more of a deliberate gameplay, somewhat similar to how dungeons are played in other MMO games.

In addition, with the introduction of the newly designed Rupu structures that attempt to prevent incursions by Walkers, you will likely have to travel on foot quite a bit more, including the already teased melee-only camps and PvE experiences.

Relic Hunter
In the Ancient City, you will be able to find Relics and Forebear Coins, which are ancient coins that are, technically, also relics of the same civilization, but in a much higher abundance. These relics can be turned into the Trade Station for Relic Hunter Reputation, which is its own new progression system.

As you gain more Reputation, you’ll start receiving new Ranks within the Flotillan HIstoric Society, unlocking access to progressively higher rewards offered by them, as a token of gratitude for your efforts. The first mechanic that we're introducing with it is a Society Schematics Store, which allows you to buy schematics of any tier and rarity for Forebear Coins, depending on your Rank.

All of this can be found and explained in the Stats Menu (P) by scrolling to the Relic Hunter page, which will show your current Ranking within the society, your reputation, current bonuses, and what the next rank will unlock. Both donating Relics for Reputation and buying Schematics for Forebear Coins can be done at any Trading Station and the list of Schematics is unique for each member, refreshing the list every time, which can be found in the store itself.

Currently, Ranking up will increase the tiers of Schematics that can be purchased, their maximum possible rarity, the number of schematics offered on each level, and how quickly the offers refresh. Also, some lucky Hunters might find unique cosmetic Schematics offered only by the Historic Society.

But don't be so hasty to donate all of the Relics you find on your adventuring. The store only accepts ancient Forebear Coins as currency, which you'll need to also find at the Ancient Cities. Luckily, some black market merchants will gladly trade you those coins if instead of donating your Relics to the Historic Society, you sell them to those shady Nomads.

What else?
We buffed all the grapples, as we've mentioned we'll do for quite a while now. Longer range, more balanced reeling speeds, lower torque consumption, and other tweaks have been applied to every grappling hook type.

A bunch of changes to quests were also included. We've added some quests to kill various creatures and updated existing ones with better balance and clarity. For example, the quest for bringing items, rather than a delivery for specific armors and weapons, the quest will now request an “Armor Shipment” or “Weapon Shipment” which is crafted at a new station available within the Simple Constructions from a collection of equipment pieces.

We've also rebalanced some loot drops to work better with the addition of the new map, improved Rupu behaviors across the board and added some new ones that made sense to use outside of AC as well, and also a ton of small tweaks like removing the rated all-time-most-hated walker wing from the general items merchant, optimized performance where we could, and so on. And, as customary, a few packing fixes. Now, definitely last ones.

As we've been talking about multiple updates, such as the PvP Update, Quality of Life Update, and hinting at more, what you'll see this patch is an effort regarding, primarily, the addition of the Ancient City map and all the related features, while everything else that we've been working on in parallel like the King of the Hill feature and so on, will be coming separately. How we've already explained many times, a lot of those features only make sense when released together and won't have the desired effect or could even make things worse if added one by one, so we hope you'll be having fun with the new experiences for quite some time, while we'll have time to work on the massive overhaul of PvP and other planned changes.

We won't be including the bulletpoint changelog this time, as hundreds of changes can be summarized as "Added Ancient City" and many more are still in the works as explained above, so fishing for specific small tweaks on top of it that got in won't make much sense when everything critical was already explained above. Everything that's important has been described in great detail in this post already and what hasn't been, would be a great way to ruin your first experience on the new map, so try it and see for yourself!

More Content When
We’re still hard at work developing the things we’ve talked about and will be trying to release them as soon as we can. We're expecting to monitor how this new update is working and fix any issues if they appear, as well as release smaller updates when it makes sense, as we've done before. However, taking into account the size of the planned updates (we're talking overhauling literally the entire PvP experience here and more), and considering the upcoming Holiday season (with the international team being away at very different times in the upcoming months), we expect that it’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to deliver those full scale overhauls at least within a month. As mentioned, some parts might come out as separate smaller updates, but not the gigantic overarching overhauls.

Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the new update, the completely changed map, the new progression system, and much more that we've got up our sleeve in this patch (and I'm sure you'll find at least a few surprises we haven't talked about). We'll try to keep you updated and announce any concrete info on what's coming next whenever we have it. We're also discussing some new ideas that we'll be sure to put to a poll as we've got used to doing by now if they get some traction on our side first.

Don't get lost in the ruins and happy hunting!