chadzTheDonkey

Last Oasis just launched the PvE-heavy Season 5 and is now FREE to play until Monday 10 AM PT.

Season 5 is a completely new direction! Tuned to allow small groups and even solos to progress through the content while featuring PvE-only maps, new monsters, new AI and dozens of new weapons, tools, features - and dangers!

See you in the sands!

Improvements

- Returned Stomping station to have only one slot
- Removed Bone requirement from Gelatinous Goo to Bone Glue crafting
- Overhauled tutorial
- Expanded Visibility of clan cap water consumption
- Added 2 small edge hardpoints to hammerhead rig for Dinghy Walker
- Rebalanced higher tier dinghy wings to have HP in line with the base wings
- Increased Heavy Rawbone Handaxe harvesting rate
- Enabled Redwood harvesting for Heavy Rawbone Handaxe
- Reduced sandbase building cost by 50%
- Increased fiber armor schematic drop rates
- Added 3 additional slots to Maintenance Box
- Increased stack size on Maintenance Box from 100 to 200
- Added Primitive Ammo schematics to ammo lootboxes in canyon

Fixes

- Fixed collisions on Medium Wood walls to prevent sandstorm damage
- Fixed Phemke and Nurr sliding/drifting
- Fixed Hangar doors and wall causing extreme upkeep costs
- Fixed drop bag o... Read more

The fist balance patch addresses the most major issues we've identified so far. Please keep your feedback coming so we can adjust the experience as we go.

Balance

Increased Water stored on player from 10 minutes to 15 minutes
Decreased water consumption by 33%
Reduced aggro range on most mob camps unless attacked first
Increased Walker wings HP to ~2.5x
Increased Range of Grappling Hooks by 20%
increased Reel in speed for grappling hooks by 40%
Decreased Respawn timer when spawning without water on walker
Added range finder schematics to canyon to allow spotting the harder challenges from afar
Reduced Skirmisher/Javelin Thrower Aim, Projectile Speed and damage vs players
Increased drop of backpack schematics on cradle
Added medium chest schematics to canyon drops
Removed hide requirement from Dinghy Wings, using Fiberweave instead
Removed Cattail requirement from Brittle Bone Armor, added hide requirement instead... Read more

Tomorrow, Tuesday August the 2nd at 7 PM CEST / 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT marks the beginning of Season 5!

This PvE focused Season 5 aims to bring fun to the solo and small group experience. It was nearly a year of hard and passionate work with quite a few bold changes and massive amounts of new content.



All of us here hope that you enjoy it, give us plenty of feedback, and help us iterate on this Season in the coming weeks and months!



Those are some small previews of the things to come, and together with the launch we'll release a trailer showing some of the cool stuff to expect in season 5.

See you tomorrow,

-chadz

And so it begins… New season, together with the whole new direction for Last Oasis, will begin early next week.

Exact time and date will be announced on Monday, but we wanted to let you know: We’re close.

As we’ve talked about in the past, LOverhaul is a massive rethinking of the game. Many of you got to experience a taste during the Beta Branch and gave us lots of critical feedback that we used to improve the experience and more appropriately balance the challenge with the fun. With our work on this overhaul, we asked the question: What could Last Oasis be if we started entirely from scratch?

If I were to sum it up as plainly as I can: LOverhaul puts solos and small groups first. All the testing of Season 5 has been done by solo players and small groups. We balanced around that and made sure that there would be no big obstacles to enjoy the game at your own pace.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the game is easy. The main difference, though, i... Read more

We received an immense amount of feedback from the Beta Branch Testing - this was quite incredible for us, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to vote in the poll and post their feedback.



Overall, we were very happy to see that in general, the community enjoyed the new direction for Last Oasis. Doubling down on making the game world more interesting and challenging through PvE mechanics and encounters will improve the gameplay experience for both new and existing players - it seems 85% agree on that, and so do we.

Having said all that, over one third of you think that the water and harvesting pacing were not enjoyable and basically no one thought the preview was perfect. Luckily for you, we agree. We absolutely do not think that we stuck the landing with respect to the early S5 experience. Nor did we expect to. ... Read more

As expected, emotions got high - my inbox seems about 50:50 split between love for the new direction and, well, less friendly words.

Since feedback is crucial for me to adjust the course for this new direction, at the end of this post you’ll find a poll to voice your opinion - please make your voice heard, positive or negative!

The new direction (and why the shift)
Originally, Last Oasis was supposed to be a game about people roaming the lands on walking land vehicles, fighting threats and each other while improving their vehicle. From there it went to a prototype where we tried this concept internally - and it was fun. Amazing fun. The thrill was high, fights were fun, victories felt great, losses were painful but still endurable. That was about 2 years before LO was released as early access.

However, if we jump forward to the status quo, this is the experience most people have when trying LO in Season 4: you follow the tutorial, build your first fir... Read more

Thanks for all the feedback so far - keep it coming please.

- fixed 3 known server crashes
- increased pickaxe durability from 170 to 300
- increased sickle durability from 170 to 300
- increased durability on stoneaxe from 140 to 200
- reduced sandstorm amount by 50%
- increased cactus flesh drop rates to 150%
- increased wood drop on hatchets by 20%, on axes by 40%
- lowered stamina consumption from 4 to 3 per pickup
- lowered water crafting time by ~35%
- increased fiber bandage healing from 30 to 60
- nerfed drudge leading precision
- nerfed harasser throwing precision

And I should know - I designed it. And more than that, I played it - extensively.

When I say it sucks, I mean I’m not having fun for long when playing it. Not as long as other survival games I enjoy. And I’m not alone with that opinion.

We could argue back and forth why Last Oasis is objectively not fun and what needs to be changed to make it a great experience. We did, actually - for 4 Seasons, to be precise.

And while each season got rid of tons of problems, there was always that one fundamental issue remaining:

I, personally, am not having fun when playing Last Oasis for long.

After Season 4 it finally hit me. I’ve been on a wild goose chase. I’ve been trying to chase down the reason why players don’t have fun in LO. This is a fruitless exercise until I can answer why I am not having fun.

Suddenly, the question was no longer “what can I do to fix LO”. The question became “If I were to make LO from scratc... Read more

Oh boy, looks like we hit a controversial vein with that last devblog - at the time of this post, it has:

• Comments: 263
  
• Up Votes: 226
  
• Down Votes: 243
...

Read more