(ALERT: This topic contains SPOILERS!)
Here i want to elaborate on all reasons why isle of siptah feels dull after a longer while of playing it.
-Every resource is everywhere - especially dropped from the maelstrom monsters
i remember playing with my cousin on exiled lands and we were like: “Ohh let’s make an expedition for the iron, let’s make an expedition for the tanner! tanner II found, feels meeh, but there is a III one, and look, i found a sulfur in this cave, awesome! I gotta mark this spot on my map for sure… Oh boy we finally found a star metal!” Expedition was like a religious word. Every expedition had it’s purpose and area to achieve the purpose of it, on IOS you just go in a random direction and harvest everyhing you meet on your way. I miss these very special experiences since i play on IOS.
…So here it is: there are no caves in IOS with anything special in them
…Every recipe in the game drops from the same npcs, no altars with priests that you can learn religion from. Little to no real human beings’ objects.
…Exploring the isle of siptah i not very rewarding at all if you look at it from the point of view of player experiences (and other things as well: the recipies, the emotes, the more or less rare resources).
…There are no rare resources, nothing is rare at all.
…The heat and cold are almost unexistant if we speak about experiencing them.
…The night and day cycle are unexistant (i elaborated on this one in another topic)
…Access to each locations are kinda easy, you don’t need to rember the places, and there is nothing really worth remembering that much. Can you remember the map area around the black galeon? Remember the Scuttler’s Shortcut? Remember the Shattered Springs, the Telith’s Island? The jungle that felt like it’s endless? And the thunderstorms in it? Unique ones.
…The map itself should be bigger. Because it gives some doubts if you could fill this world with some new nice things even if you wanted to.
…I don’t mind the world being kind of emptied of human beings. It’s just feels like the humans are unexistant and never were existing here. It feels slightly contradicting the lore that we know from the dungeon orbs. There are almost no journals giving hints about the storyline, almost no notes in most “important” places. The problem is not about the isle being emptied of humans. The problem is that journey through the isle itself feels hollow and empty.
…From the other side of the story you “meet” alot of humans from the wormholes and they feel like just descented there for totally no rational comprehendable reason whatsoever. And what do they do after descention? They are not even patroling the area, or looking around, they’re doing absolutely nothing at all but stooding there. And they are agressive but why? They’re not defending their homeland or anything (but… whatever). All these factors combined brings us a feelings of wild surges being very (and even awkwardly) artificial. They’re not immersive, not in a bit.
…So if we allready know that there ARE humans on the island, so why none of them have colonised this island even in the tiniest bit. It’s makes things feel even more unnatural.
…The gameplay currently strongly orbits only around the mealstrom farming where you can get every “rare” resource easily and the generic copypasted dungeons. Maelstrom, Dungeons, Maeslstrom, Dungeons repeatedly.
Suggested by me solutions to implement to maintain and escalate the unique experience of Siptah as dangerous, misterious lands (AND INTERESTING):
-Add more notes and journals on the grounds giving some hints to the lore and the past in a core lore locations.
-Add just a little more npcs to the isle, maybe even some tiny settlments. Generally speaking ANY humans non-wormhole spawned at all so the sense come together. They came here from the warmhole in the middle of nowhere and they at least tried to settle in this harsh place. Maybe one of them is even the religion teacher who became a hermit here, who knows?
-Slightly less warmholes spawns to balance out the new possible sources of thralls and to also make them feel less arificial.
-Make the resources to be more segregated on the areas.
-Make the areas around the particular vault(s) to be somewhat more themed with the elder races that inhabits (and the vault aswell) it, and add more background objects that can suggests they are species of any intelligence, not a completely witless monsters.
-Add a few especially windy places that are cold - make cool to be cool again (but differently).
-This is a big idea: Develop a weather system, a few days hotter, few days colder, at random it may sound funny but it might be worth considering. If it’s done in a right way it can be cool(hehe) and very unique experience to the game. It’s a survival game overall. And even going further: the maelstrom itself could emit a heat or cold alternatively as a wild evil force.
-Fix the lighting at night.
-Create a forests (i mean a REAL forrests, not the woodlets/copses that are present everywhere on the map currently) and the plains. Make collecting wood and plant fiber a real thing to be taken into account when placing base/house. No small plants would grow in the forests (besides some lotuses to be collected in this particular place for example), and just some tiny number of trees would grow on the plains. Somebody may want to build his house in the dense forest for it to be hard to spot, but the dense forests must exists at first
-Make a different types of trees (or even giant mushrooms) so the biomes differ more one from one another
-Make the star metal to have a chance to fall EVERYWHERE on the isle (including the “ocean”). For those who do not know how to break it open it will be misterious object found rarely, and for those people who are familiar with it - the right places to look for them are going to be plains, desertlike areas and in the “ocean” because there they can be spotted most easily (this is how meteorite searchers actually look for them in real life - in the deserts i mean). AND maybe you will just be lucky enough to spot one falling from the sky and to follow it?! Afaik the greatest plains are located in the middle of the map. It’s a open large area, so it’s a good one to look for star metal.
-I guess when you summon the surge it makes humans to be abducted from the exiled lands but if it’s all chaos magic so it probably should also abduct some animals at random as well. There are 4 good points for it.
1: It would kinda subliminaly explain how the animals from the exiled lands have inhabited the isle of siptah.
2: Suggest the explanation of how the elder races used the leyshrines (also getting a different types of food in this way)
3: It’s funny ^^ and makes sene, why would only humans be abducted(?), and it also let’s you to integrate with the lore, to experience it, not just to hear about it on the cutscene. So you can think to yourself: “Wow, So this is how they contributed in inhabiting this island with animals met on the exiled lands.” animals and beasts deserve their backstory because: why not.
4: It’s worth noting that the beast can be hostile to humans or not (nordheimers). It can increases the risk while catching thralls (No risk = No fun), and can make it slightly more tactical, because you don’t want your thrall to be killed by the beast so you kill it in the first place or you stun him with the “lever lightning”.
-How about the maelstrom range could be spawned in a random size? I guess this is a powerfull unknown force that made us reach the island. It’s about to be wild, unpredictable and terrifying, reaching ocasionally even the furthest areas of the island. There are 4 good points for it:
- It can make sense to the bio, because the ship you travelled was attacked by the (elder?) beasts. So in fact the mealstrom ocasionally(but very rarely though) can cover the whole isle and it resemble that it can spawn nightmare creatures even beyond the borders of the isle, and THIS IS EXACTLY how you got to be here.
- Like in previous examples: it’s immersive and let’s you experience the storyline on your own skin, by using your own brain cells to know what was behind you getting onto the isle in the first place.
- It would also resemble to why the isle is so emptied of humans ! And why there are no big human settlements even though they are descented through the warmholes on daily basis.
- It would be a replacement for the purge that we all know and we all love <3 you know the siege elder things?
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- It’s worth noting that the strength and spawn rate of the siege elder things should greatly depend on the distance (the more distant the weaker they spawn and less often) from the center of mealstrom so these bastards do not clean up the whole server with ease including the newbies’ homes ^^ also: the elder siege things should not attack the buildings of offline players (it’s unnecessary to explain why, right? ^^)
The goals are to make players figure things out in more immersive way by connecting the dots together and also for them to find out the mysteries of IoS way without a dissonances. So players can better understand the answers for the following questions: “Why i reached the isle?”, “Why there are all the exiled lands’ animals here?”, “Why the island is so emptied of human beings?”, “What does the leyshrines do and why?”, “Who built this and that?” “So it was not humans who inhabited these lands originally?” “What elder race inhabited an area and how powerfull it was?”
And also to make a questions like: “Where’s the sweet spot where i can be harvesting alot of wood, iron and the black ice at the same time?”
“Should i go out for the maelstrom at night?”
“Can i learn this and that, and if so, then how?”
If you leave all the recipies in the game in the hands of random drop from surge spawns and resources will not be separated in more ways of collecting them, we will feel in this game like our freedom of choice in experiencing the content of game is taken away.
I want to feel some uniqueness of the resources that i gather so they feel like they are a real thing.
I want the gameplay to be immersive.
If i want to be the main exporter of black ice on the server let me be one.
If i want to be the polytheic archpriest in my game, let me be one.
So just please don’t make the players be so dependant on the rng, because the IoS lack many of the aspects of exiled lands have.
I perfectly undestand that the gameplay experience is supposed to be different than EL, but as i pointed out it’s not the different experience where the problem of IoS being dull is.
I’m pretty sure that you have a lot things to work on as IoS is in alpha version, so i don’t hate you for it being uncomplete yet. By the way i wanna say that you did a very fine job on the Leyshrines and Delving bench. Peace.
Any replies welcome