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Season 2 is about to arrive! Servers will be up at 5 PM CET / 11 AM ET.
If you’ve been playing on BB, remember to switch back to the main branch!
One of the questions we’ve been asked is “How are you feeling about the current state of the game? Do you think it’s creating meaningful gameplay?”
This felt like a great topic to address, especially ahead of wipe and the start of Season 2.
From the desk of the one and only chadz:
With the next season about to start, I thought it would be a good moment to talk about how we see things, and what we learned from them. If you’re not interested in that, skip straight to the Season 2 changes.
What We Learned from Season 1
Let’s get that settled right away: a lot of things in the first season didn’t go as we expected they would. Many balance mechanics either didn’t work or backfired altogether.
We wanted to create a survival game in which PVP can be enjoyed by solos, small groups and large communities alike. Storing your belongings off-map, a territory system that encourages player-driven protection of nomads, a base that you can take with you anywhere you go, and many more - we thought it surely would make the game quite enjoyable for any playstyle.
Well, it didn’t. I could fill dozens of pages with our analysis, but I think it’s better to jump to some of the bigger conclusions.
Clan member numbers exponentially increase the power of a group.
While this is expected and unavoidable to some degree, we accidentally made it much, much worse. The feature to respawn on different tiles was originally intended to let everyone play together more easily. Clans used it as a tactical tool - the community fittingly calls this “clown car-ing”. You see a walker manned only by a skeleton crew, and within an instant an army spawns on the deck. Many of the new changes make the gameplay more local and intimate, with actual travel being important again. No more clown car-ing.
Solos and small groups didn’t have the necessary tools to defend themselves.
Last Oasis relied way too much on its inherent mechanics to give players a safety net, without giving players the proper means to make themselves safe. And many of those didn’t work out. For Season 2, a lot of content was added to bridge that gap, while also shifting more towards a base-driven gameplay that gives everyone a safe spot to rest.
Large clans bottlenecked the progression of smaller groups.
For many solos, tablets became an impossible bottleneck - large clans practically had the monopoly on it. In Season 2, trading is now a viable alternative to experience the game fully, no matter if solo or as a clan.
The grind, omg, the grind. Season 2 is addressing this in many ways.
Tools give substantially more resources, Walkers are quicker to build, commerce allows unlocking the tech tree faster, and many other changes to speed things up overall.
There is no denying that the last season did not manage to be good enough for many players. And players leaving is the most honest feedback we can get as developers. It became clear very quickly - Last Oasis doesn’t need tweaks. It needs a complete overhaul and radical changes. So we got our hands dirty, and here we are with the result: Season 2.
What We Changed for Season 2
For a full list of changes, see the changelog in the end. In here, I will go through some of the most game-changing ones:
Bind spawn to Walker
You need to pick a Walker beforehand and can only spawn on that Walker until you select another one. This stops clown-cars and allows players to estimate the strength of an enemy. Travelling to another tile will now involve actually travelling with your Walkers instead of teleporting around. For clans this means that the size of their territory will become more and more complex to handle the larger it becomes.
Founder Walkers and Bases
The Silur and the Balang are two new Walkers that fundamentally change the gameplay: Both have the capability to deploy into a stone base with the “solid” armor. This armor is incredibly hard to crack, making sure that any raider needs to carefully consider what target to attack - a balance known to work from other survival games that we felt would fit well in Last Oasis as well. The intention here is to move the gameplay away from the edge of the map and into the center where things are actually interesting, which is reinforced by disabling crafting in the desert logout zone and spawn protection bubbles. You will encounter a lot of bases and other player structures on the map, and you are no longer forced to take all your belongings to the lobby at the end of the day, making keeping them on the map a viable alternative.
Walker Damage
At the same time, we allowed any ranged weapons to damage Walkers and made Walkers easier to build by increasing the yield of tools. The gameplay will be more focused around a safe home base, while having Walkers that are more expandable than before. Losing a Walker will always be painful, but now you have a base on the map to fall back to and get back on your feet quickly.
Performance Improvements
A lot of effort went into improving performance, and it should be noticeably better in Season 2. This is an ongoing process and we will improve things constantly as we become aware of issues.
Burn Timer Increased
The time until an oasis burns up has been increased heavily, as constantly having to move became frustrating for many players. With the slower burn, you have more time to settle, learn your neighbors and the map, and feel like having a home. And once the time has come, the Founder Walkers allow you to pick up your base and move it to a new oasis.
Maintenance Cost
To help with performance and certain exploits, we added daily maintenance cost to bases. Each base consumes resources based on its size or starts decaying if not maintained. This will drastically reduce throwaway bases spam and allow different tactics to come into play.
Trading, Commerce & Flots
The Commerce Update completely overhauled the in-game economy. Not only are flots now highly valuable, they remain valuable throughout the game. You can use them to unlock technology and you can either earn them through quests or by smartly trading with other players. Furthermore, clans will always be in demand of flots, either for buying Proxy Licenses, or for using it to reserve slots for clan fights. This will allow every player to buy research tablets or other items and then sell those resources that are in high demand by clans for profit. Being a merchant is now an actual valid playstyle.
Clan Cap
Judging by the non-stop community discussions ever since it was announced, the added hard clan cap of 50 members is the most controversial addition in Season 2. Our goal with the clan cap is to stop the need to endlessly merge. Over time, more and more clans merged together because the exponential gains of doing so were just immense. We think that this change allows for a more diverse clan ecosystem, and more fair fights. We are, of course, aware that large clans can still split into sister clans, but it comes with an additional organisational overhead, and shared access to resources is very limited. Season 2 will help us in gathering more data and feedback to see where we take it from here. To all the clans screaming “bloody murder”, we love you and appreciate your feedback, but we will stick to it for Season 2 because we want to see the impact for ourselves before changing it again.
Proxy Changes
Proxy Walkers are now more expensive, have more health, and have an attack window of 3 hours compared to the previous 1 hour. These changes, together with the changes to spawning, will make it more difficult to hold multiple claims at the same time, and we think it will lead to a more diverse global territory map. We will see how this works out during the season and consider adjustments for Season 3.
Wide Range of New Weapons and Tools
There’s a whole lot of new structures to build, and many of them synergizing with new or existing mechanics. They will shake up the established meta and I encourage you all to be creative and use them to their fullest potential.
Removal of Visibility of Quality
This suggestion came from the community and we thought it was an obviously good idea. Enemies can no longer see the quality of your walkers and structures and you are, therefore, no longer painting a target on your back by improving them. Furthermore, destroyed structures no longer give resources back, reducing the incentive to fully destroy enemy Walkers.
QoL (Quality of Life) improvements
This is an ongoing process, but many QoL improvements were made as well. For example, increased chest sizes, improvements to the join-queue handling, renaming structures, and many other small things have been done. As always, please keep bringing in your suggestions.
Does that mean everything is perfect now? No - we are not naive enough to expect everything to be flawless at this point. There will be some balance issues, but we need to see them pan out before we can address them. A PVP game like ours will always be a ping pong game between players coming up with new metas, tactics and borderline exploits, and us trying to find a balance between all of it.
I hope Season 2 shows that we are committed, we take your feedback seriously, and we are not afraid to change things until the game is what you deserve.
What to Expect in the Future
Our plans at this moment are to focus much more on the PVE experience, new and additional content, and, in particular, end-game content. On the technical side, performance and privately self-hosted servers remain big things on our to-do list.
However, an early access game is a living, breathing thing. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on and take it into account. And while we can’t implement all suggestions, we try to look at the meaning of them - what is it that the player wants? We don’t claim to always get everything right, but we are not afraid to make big changes if some of our ideas don’t work out. We have a vision of where we want the game to go in the next few years, both during and after Early Access, but we need your feedback and input to get it right.
So please, keep the feedback coming!
COMMERCE
- Added Flots withdrawal/depositing at Trading Stations.
- Added wandering merchants with unique trade orders (tablets, etc.).
- Moved permanent Trading Station orders to wandering merchants (claiming license, etc.).
- Added Flotilla quests to Trading Stations.
- Added Flotilla auctions to Trading Stations.
- Added listing tax when placing an order, and sale tax when succeeding in selling an item.
- Added bidding on reserved slots for any tile.
- Added clan bank used for bidding on slots.
- Added global Flots vault to claim acquired money from any Trading Station.
- Made trade orders migrate automatically when a map burns.
- All trade orders which migrate to another Trading Station when a map burns will now have a lower price.
- Added Flot drops from lootsites.
- All items in the game can now be bought and sold at Trading Stations by players, including grappling hooks, tablets, etc.
- Made World Map show best prices for trading.
- Removed quick selling from Trading Stations.
- Made trading station menus clearer.
- Added a Dueling Arena to all Trading Stations - Initial implementation, it will be vastly improved in the future.
- Trading Station protection will now refresh after every meaningful action (such as trading, interacting with Vault, auctions, etc.).
WALKERS
- Added Silur Walker - allows packing solid bases.
- Added Balang Walker - Low tier Founder type Walker, allows packing of small solid bases.
- Added Hercul Walker - Torque! Now in industrial amounts!
- Made Walkers Robust - damageable by everything except melee.
- Added Armored and Heavy legs for Buffalo and Hornet.
- Added Armored legs for Stiletto.
- Forbid building wings and legs if they're blocked by hanging structures (gun pods, etc.).
- Overhauled Walker repair system to encourage repairs out of combat.
- Made it possible to only spawn on 1 selected crew Walker.
- Added logging out enemy Walkers (to prevent griefing with cheap Walkers).
- Increased max Walker crafting level cap to 20.
- Made Walker crafting level price increase quicker.
- Traveling with a Walker will automatically assign all the crew on board to the Walker Crew.
OASES
- Added Ancient City event map - Unique merchants, new lootsites, new rupu camps, new everything.
- Added Flot requirement and cooldown for teleporting to other tiles.
- Added 15 minute penalty forbidding spawn on beds and Walkers after teleport.
- Redeployment from event maps is now free, to avoid players becoming stuck in them.
- Added an option to spawn in the offmap lobby.
- Added an option to redeploy from the offmap lobby - No more getting stuck in the queue.
CLANS
- Added a hard clan cap of 50.
BALANCE
- Attack window for claimed oases is now 3 hours.
- Buffed Proxy Walker health to 100k.
- Increased ammo capacity of Remote Ballista to 20.
- Increased yield of high tier tools.
- Lowered Cluster Bomb radius and increased weight.
- Decreased effectiveness of improvised explosives such as “Nomadness Bomb”.
- Buffed Catapult and Small Boulder damage by ~50%.
- Made combat timer dynamic based on damage.
- All weapons except Beatstick can now damage Soft armor.
- All non-base structures with no previous armor rating will now have Soft armor.
- Characters now have their own weight, which impacts Walkers they stand on.
- Increased Rupu Turret activation time from 15 to 180 seconds.
- Made it possible to only have 1 sandbed per player.
- Added Hardened Hellfire Bolt - It has Soft armor and burns 3 times faster.
- Increased damages to Walkers from all projectiles from 5% to 10%.
- Reduced lava damage to Walkers.
- Increased HP of all Hullbreaker bolts.
- Increased Torque Backpack capacity to 3000.
- Buffed Scattershot - Improved aiming, penetration increased, buffed amount of pellets, breaks grappling hook tethers on hit, and more.
- Increased stack sizes of all medium and high tier chests.
- Decreased water storage sizes of beds.
- Increased redeploy cooldown to 12 hours.
- Increased redeploy cost to 500 flots.
- Removed spawning close to death location.
- Made Defensive Tower constructions decay if not built.
- Rebalanced costs of ceramic Walker upgrades.
- Forbid crafting in Trading Station areas.
- Forbid crafting in travel zones and protection bubbles.
- Buffed Javelins.
- Removed Grappling Hook stun mechanic.
- All equipment in the game now has durability - Exception for Grappling Hooks.
- Modules have been rebalanced - Some which didn’t see much use during the first season will now be usable.
- Lowered effectiveness of “ground ballista” meta. Harpoons shot from a ballista on the ground will have a less durable tether.
- Reduced Wingsuit tech cost from 50 to 20.
- Increased max quantity of Lifeforce Modules from 20 to 50.
- Made Mobility stat increase in cost at high levels.
- Made rupu camps respawn slower after looting.
TUTORIAL & FIRST STEPS
- Updated tutorial and first steps.
- Improved some tutorial steps (missing text, improper descriptions, etc.).
STRUCTURES & BASES
- Buffed Clay and Concrete bases.
- Rebalanced Clay and Concrete structural cost.
- Added Stone bases.
- Made ammo chest get disabled when netted.
- Made Sawblades require torque to operate.
- Added Battle Fan.
- Added Small and Large Base Walker Packers.
- Bases will now decay if they do not have maintenance.
- Added Maintenance Chest for bases - Large stack size for all your maintenance needs.
- Improved base combat timer to avoid in-combat building abuse.
- Added structure renaming.
- Added moving/packing mechanic to the maintenance box.
- Doors will now unlock at 50% HP.
- Unlocked doors can now be kicked open.
ITEMS
- Allowed to unequip grappling hooks.
- Buffed Obsidian Flask capacity
- Added new Infused Obsidian Flask.
INTERFACE
- Added confirmation to region selection at the start of the game.
- Restructured Walker Tech Tree.
CREATURES
- Improved and adjusted Killin behavior all around.
- Added Killin Nests as Killin spawn points.
- Several fixes and improvements to Nurr behavior.
- Several fixes and improvements to Okkam behavior.
POINTS OF INTEREST
- Pyramid POIs will now appear in maps correctly.
FIXES & PERFORMANCE
- Improved performance across the board.
- Fixed vitamin requirement inconsistencies for high tier tech.
- Fixed quarry issues after server restart.
- Fixed various issues with opening/closing wingsuit.
- Fixed being able to build Walker constructions on Walkers.
- Fixed issues with Hornet Walker wings.
- Fixed a bunch of VOIP issues.
- Fixed being able to abuse foundations built on different heights.
- Fixed all kinds of issues with calculating weight.
- Fixed players and exoskeletons standing on sawblades.
- Fixed sawblades having enormous containers for some reason.
- Fixed Torque Windmill having too large collisions.
- Fixed Net Thrower aiming and camera.
- Fixed small Walkers sending players to space.
- Fixed Walker camera going through stone walls.
- Fixed quest packages being tradeable.
- Fixed canyon mushrooms eating loot dropped on them.
- Fixed lakes eating loot dropped in them.
- Fixed sometimes not being able to sell items to merchants.
- Fixed exploit with rupu camp clearing quest.
- Fixed Nurr leaping forward behavior.
- Fixed not being able to disassemble
- Fixed Silur Walker Core meshing into terrain.
- Fixed some issues with the rupu weapon stick.
- Fixed netting issues for various structures.
- Fixed sometimes going through things when climbing.
- Fixed sometimes seeing wrong combat animations.
- Fixed quality spots changing after server restart.
- Fixed quality state resetting to 0 on all foliage after server restart - Quality on all resources now persists after a server restart.
- Improved performance around lakes.
- Improved clarity of some descriptions.
- Fixed a crash related to merchant interactions.
- Improved performance in a bunch of places.
- Fixed broken rupu camp allowing abusing rupu gel harvesting.
- Fixed buying too many items from merchants.
- Fixed Vitamin merchant sometimes not buying.
- Fixed large lootsite chest not requiring Hullbreakers.
- Fixed Redwood trees not giving more wood with high tier tools.
- Fixed some missing tooltip texts.
- Fixed incorrect repeater shooting trajectory.
- Fixed wrong sell order max quantity in UI.
- Fixed slot auction not showing local times.
- Fixed building a ton of Water Bags close to each other.
- Fixed building a ton of Clan Flags close to each other.
- Fixed some incorrect Tech Tree icons.
- Fixed lava collecting sounds missing.
- Fixed Silur Walker Core being nettable.
- Fixed getting high like planes by kicking with wingsuit.
- Fixed chairs pushing players through walls.
- Fixed Gun Pod meshing.
- Fixed not being able to open doors while packing.
- Fixed not being able to ungrapple while packing.
- Fixed some more incorrect icons.
- Fixed some issues with Killin spawns.
- Fixed some missing nibiran ore on hard maps.
- Fixed Cluster Bomb sounds making ears bleed.
- Improved Gas Bombs visuals, optimization pass.
- Fixed missing textures on the Lumbermill.
- Fixed Rupu Slings not working after being unpacked.
- Fixed issues preventing the player from reeling in and out, and cutting his grappling hook rope, after receiving damage.
- Fixed issues with Guard Rail structural part.
- Fixed issues with Camelop Walker not pumping lava.
- Fixed issues with some ammo not being usable on Gunpods.
- Fixed Firefly and Spider Walkers having some upgrades already crafted after being just built.
- Fixed being unable to grapple to some parts of Base and Armored Walker Legs.
- Fixed being able to bypass rupu turret activation timer.
- Fixed several texture issues with lakes on Sleeping Giants map.
- Fixed sandiness module calculation.
- Fixed fog effects in Pyramid POIs.
- Fixed issues with Walker Packing Compartment not allowing to pack small Walkers.
- Fixed an exploit allowing to flip on top of the edge of the map.
- Fixed a crash related to bombs landing on structures.
- Fixed and improved sandstorm visual effects.
- Fixed some issues with camera behavior inside Trading Station.
- Fixed issues with camera behavior when climbing on structures - no longer clips through them.
- Fixed some issues with shadows on specific materials on flags and cloth on Walkers.
- Fixed some issues with storage UI for Proxy Walkers.
- Fixed some incorrect values on harvesting resources such as mushrooms, small rocks, and more.
- Fixed players being able to clip through Walkers when being pushed by Sawblades.
- Fixed improper travel messages when Walker is combat tagged.
- Fixed duel knockouts disabling claim tax.
- Fixed Gas Mask.
- Improved climbing animations in general.
- Fixed several issues with Cobra Walker - Targeting issues and performance related ones.
- Several improvements to the PoI spawning system.
- Harpoons got an optimization pass, which should help improve client performance during large battles.
- Improved rupu turret collisions.
- Fixed some structures being able to push Walkers as if they were weightless.
- Fixed animation issue with Advanced Fiberworking Station.
- Fixed the first cutscene playing more than once.
- Temporarily removed Defensive Tower.
- Fixed being able to pull some harpoons from behind doors.
- Some fixes for Walker safe logout checks.
- Fixed respawn boost module max quantity.
- Fixed various VOIP issues.
- Fixed creative usage of javelins.
- Fixed javelins sometimes not dealing damage.
This round of Community Questions will be a bit shorter, but we’ll tackle more in the Community Devlog at the end of the month! Remember, check out our {LINK REMOVED}Living FAQ to see all the past Q&As we’ve done in these posts, plus our Reddit AMA.
If you have questions you want to ask the devs, join our Discord[discord.gg] and look at the latest post in #announcements for a link to the submission form.
Q: Why would you wipe the servers a day before the Shadowlands launch?
A: It seemed like the best date for the beginning of a new season, and while some of you, understandably, might prefer to play Shadowlands, our games are not related very closely, so we didn't want to disturb the wipe plans over it. Also, we still have some exciting things we want to bring in before the end of the year!
Q: Why rush the launch onto Xbox?
A: We've mentioned that we wanted to bring the game to consoles even before our Early Access release on Steam, so it wasn't a rushed decision. Since the premise of Last Oasis is the big living world where all oases are interconnected, we want to bring as many players as possible into it, and making it available on other platforms is a big step towards it.
Q: What about PlayStation?
A: We’re absolutely interested in bringing Last Oasis to PlayStation in the future! Right now, though, we don’t have an estimate for when that will happen. The main reason we chose Xbox as the first console to launch on is because they have Game Preview that’s easy to work with. PlayStation doesn’t have a convenient program for EA games, so it’s more difficult.
We also want to ensure availability of crossplay on every platform as soon as the game is available on them. Our intention is to bring every Nomad together in the same world of Last Oasis.
Q: Who helped with Xbox port? You better not have taken devs away from working on the game to focus on this.
A: We partnered with another team to make the Xbox port happen, so none of the PC version development plans were disturbed by it. As you've seen, we've maintained regular weekly patches together with larger updates all this time. Still, we can guarantee that both version will be as fair and close to each as possible.
Q: Since you are releasing on Xbox are there plans to support Xbox controller defaults on the PC version?
A: Yes. Controllers will be fully supported on PC alongside an optional controller-specific interface to make sure you have a smooth experience whatever controls you prefer.
Q: If we’ve already bought the game on Steam, will we need to buy it again on Xbox?
A: Yes. However, if you simply prefer to play with a controller and already own the game on Steam, we'll have full controller support available on PC as well.
Q: How will Microsoft's certification process for new updates to games affect development? Will the devs be able to react quickly to bugs or unforeseen meta changes?
A: Certification doesn't take months, as many seem to believe, so we don't expect any big changes in our development process. What it does mean is that we'll be putting more focus on our internal testing to make sure none of the updates have any immediate critical bugs in them, while all other adjustments and tweaks that might be needed afterwards shouldn't be a problem to add.
Q: When are you putting the game on sale? I want to buy it now that the wipe is happening.
A: There’s policies in place through Steam where we aren’t able to announce sale dates early, but you can check when sales happened in previous years to get a rough idea.
COMMUNITY FEATURE
If you haven't been around since the end of Season 1, BenJMinotaur has made a pretty cool video about the highlights of the latest updates coming into Season 2, aka the Commerce Update. If you'd like to see more of his content throughout S2, or have any other questions, you can find him on Twitch[twitch.tv].
Check out his Season 2 video:
Thanks for reading, Nomads! See you in the Oases!