Neon Sirius

Hey everyone!

We’re very excited to announce we’ll be kicking off S5’s beta branch on July 5th. Let’s get into the details.

For anyone unfamiliar with these kind of testing phases, a beta branch is a separate branch of the game that has many of the changes intended to go in the game for the next season. It will be available through the betas tab in Steam, and will be open for everyone to join by simply switching to the proper branch.

Our intention with this beta branch is to have a proper stress test where we can gather as much feedback as possible on the early game experience in the first two maps available, find any performance issues (or worse, crashes), and get these things ironed out before we move into Season 5 release.

As mentioned before, we already have internal playtesting going, though for the most part it’s us developers, and the staging testers in our Discord. So far the biggest focus has been on the bad crashes that could cause an awful... Read more

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 ... Read more

Hi Nomads!

Now that many of the new features and changes have been revealed (though as you will soon see, it’s not quite the last of it), we feel much more confident talking more about and giving you more insight into this new direction for the game.

This week’s devblog will be all about the upcoming Base Building & Packing changes, and also an extension of our very first post back in early April. Now that there’s so much more information about the next season out, we feel like it’s a really good time to get into some of the more drastic changes and making sure we are keeping you in the loop in regard to our vision for the game, the approach we’ve chosen for this new season and generally the direction the game will be taking for the future.

As we talked about before, some of these changes come from a very simple place: many previous systems clash with our vision for Season 5, and that can mean we either disable them temporarily, or rework them entirely if the... Read more

For the past few weeks we’ve done a great deal of references to a reworked progression system that would enhance and be deeply connected with other features and changes we’re introducing to the game in Season 5 - features such as PVE maps, rarity system, siege weapon changes, the new creatures and their Rupu War Howdah variations (also known as Battle Mobs internally), and last but definitely not least, Walkers. It’s time to finally get into all the juicy details.

To get this out straight away so we focus entirely on the new system, we are completely removing fragments and tablets from the game and the associated progression. Our replacement system is to be schematics.

I will also touch some of the points that I failed to explain properly in our Rarity System devblog, such as for example, how an epic rarity Point of Interest differs from a common rarity POI, or what kind of bonuses would an item like a simple Bandage get from being crafted at a higher rarity, and most... Read more

Last week’s PVE maps and lobby removal announcement stirred a lot of discussions, so we want to answer some of the concerns we noticed before we get into the travel rework details.

For starters, private realms will have the ability to enable and disable these changes at the preference of the server admin/s.
This means they can choose whether or not there’s any PVE tiles on their realm (which may function differently from the current implementation of PVE tiles for private realms, which works through additional settings per-tile), they can choose whether or not they want the old or the new travel system, and they can also have the lobby functionality enabled realm-wide.

When it comes to the feedback we’ve received from you guys about the PVE maps, so far we are very happy to see that they are mostly well received. Some of the biggest points of interest are lobby functionality not being a thing anymore (which we fully expected, it’s been a core feature of the... Read more

Hi Nomads!

We’re adding PVE maps and removing the lobby system from the game. Let’s get into it.

As core features go, the lobby is probably one of the most “core” there is for Last Oasis, so I understand this change will spark some controversy - still, last month we started this series of devblogs by promising we’d be much more transparent and announce things a lot earlier, to give you, the community, the chance to give us much needed feedback on our new approach. This is something we are fully committed to, we want to bring forward our vision for you to let us know if you believe as we do that this is the best for the future of the game.

First I want to get into why we are scrapping the lobby idea entirely, what are our intentions with the PVE maps (especially in terms of balance and design, so very specific questions and answers), and what are the goals we want to achieve by introducing them in the first place.

After we talk about this in here, ... Read more