PAST OASIS
After admitting their MMO ‘sucks,’ DONKEY CREW reworks the entire game
If you visit the Steam page for early access survival MMO Last Oasis, you’ll find an article bluntly titled ‘Last Oasis Sucks’. It’s not written by a disgruntled player, nor an opinion piece pulled in by Steam’s news aggregator. It was written by Last Oasis’ developer.
Last Oasis is a nomadic survival MMO where players construct and travel in land-crawling fortresses called walkers. It entered Early Access in March of 2020, promptly experienced some major server problems, and three days later went offline and offered refunds. Last Oasis resurfaced, but concurrent player counts have wavered between a few thousand and a few hundred since, and its Steam reviews have remained firmly ‘mixed’. But players weren’t the only ones struggling to enjoy it.
“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,” wrote the game’s developer Chadz recently. “We could argue back and forth why [but] there was always that one issue remaining: I, personally, am not having fun when playing Last Oasis for long.”
It’s a brutally honest statement for a developer to make. Plenty will admit when their game has problems, promise to address negative feedback, and outline future plans. But rarely do you hear such frankness about their own negative experiences while playing their own game.
Chadz goes on to say the developers decided to think less about what needed to be fixed and more about what needed to be
PLAYERS WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES STRUGGLING TO ENJOY IT
completely rethought, “If I were to make LO from scratch, what would I do?” This led to the major overhaul that came alongside the post. This update shifted the focus from PvP to almost entirely PvE.
LAST CHANCE
The nomadic vibe of Last Oasis has been essentially erased, which is pretty wild considering it was a major selling point of the original. Your walker was your base, a big roaming fort filled with your stuff that you took with you everywhere. And when it was destroyed, typically in PvP, you lost everything. Now, players build static bases and use walkers for excursions, exploration, and combat.
The developer admits this drastic change won’t sit well with everyone, and they may have a period of extreme balancing ahead explaining that “There’s fun difficulty, there’s challenging difficulty and there’s ridiculous rage-quit difficulty.”
I consider other players quickly destroying my entire base to be rage-quit-level difficulty, but these new changes sound more appealing: I definitely prefer harsh PvE to harsh PvP. As for whether this kind of dramatic U-turn can lead to a brighter future for Last Oasis, we’ll have to wait and see.