Earlier this month we ran a weekend-long public playtest and had more participation than ever! Here's a quick summary:
738 new participants
383 peak concurrent players (new record)
2 hours 43 minutes average play time
187 playtest review forms submitted plus many addition submissions through Discord
We spent a significant portion of the week following the playtest organizing each feedback submission into a bucket so that we could see which parts of the game need the most immediate attention. The top 5 were:
Resources and Loot: 60 mentions
Combat: 47 mentions
Player Controller: 32 mentions
Performance: 23 mentions
Scaling and Stat Balance: 20 mentions
It's been a few weeks since then, and we wanted to share with you the progress we're making on systems and overall gameplay experience based on the feedback we received.
The main driver for these mentions was the general scarcity of both harvestable and pickup-able stone nodes. One of the very first steps in the tutorial asks you to craft a stone hatchet or pickaxe which requires a small amount of stone, quickly leading to justifiable frustration because there's no stone on or near the beaches where players spawn. As ubiquitous as this complaint was, it's actually a very easy fix to increase the spawn rate and density of stone nodes in our procedural open world.
In addition to the stone scarcity, there were also several other specific resource related imbalances brought to our attention. Here's the experience one player shared of gathering heartwood and refining it into polished heartwood:
This type of balancing is much more involved. What may seem at first like a simple tweak of values actually led to a full reconsideration of resource types and crafting progression. As mentioned in the suggestions section at the bottom of this feedback submission, we could have taken the route of any combination of allowing crafting heartwood from regular wood, increasing refinement conversion output, increasing heartwood drop rate, decreasing quantities in crafting recipes, removing oil as a requirement, or even all of the above.
Instead, raw resources have been consolidated and simplified, and many no longer require refinement before use in crafting recipes. All mid-tier raw resources and their refined version have been removed: silkfrond fibers and silk, heartwood and finished heartwood, large hide and heavy leather, pristine crystals and polished crystals, coal and brightsteel bars. Crafting recipes have been adjusted to reflect these changes. Any mid-tier recipe that previously called for refined mid-tier resources now calls for a higher quantity of low-tier raw resources.
We're confident that this will be a three-birds-one-stone adjustment. Low-tier raw resources will remain relevant for longer, removing the extra step of refining every resource will free up more time for players, and hopefully we'll avoid cases like crafting a simple rowboat unintentionally requiring the harvesting of 700,000 wood.
We don't have anything to show here quite yet, but wanted to reiterate that a massive overhaul is still actively underway. As the second and third most mentioned feedback categories, we recognize the importance of getting this to feel great and we won't be satisfied until we've achieved that.
This isn't an all-inclusive list of what we've been cooking over the last few weeks, but we wanted to address the most commonly mentioned feedback, let you know that we hear you, and we're working hard to deliver an awesome experience with Lost Isle. We have many more bug fixes, system and gameplay improvements, and performance improvements on the way. Thanks in large part to your playtest participation and feedback we know which directions to continue moving in.
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