In the latest Last Oasis devblog, the team at Donkey Crew reminds players about a feature called “The Burn”. The mechanic decays and eventually removes an Oasis from the world map entirely, but the developers have been reevaluating the benefits of the feature.
Many games implement decay for plenty of different reasons. Mostly, decay can keep players striving to repair and change things, but in Last Oasis the decay mechanic known as “The Burn” has always been a controversial mechanic. However, now that the game has made massive changes to the PvE maps, travel, and the evolution of the game loop at its core, the team has noticed how detrimental a decay feature is.
“Season 5 is - very intentionally - a much more static experience. You will have a permanent main base from which you go on adventures with your crew on Walkers, and eventually have to return to it. With this approach, the Burn does very little to aid this experience - quite the opposite, we believe it would mostly just be frustrating.Therefore, we’ve decided it’s best to disable the Burn mechanic, and use a mostly static world map. You get to know your neighbours on PVE tiles and enemies on PVP tiles. We think this is an important social aspect of Season 5.”
-Neon, Last Oasis Steam Page
For those that haven’t been keeping up with the game, Last Oasis has been going through a lot of changes as they aim to bring players back to the game. Last month, the team divulged that their initial vision wasn’t working, and that a new player experience is underway that will hopefully bring new players in, and old players back. Donkey Crew may have a rather steep uphill battle to bring players back, but judging from their consistent devblogs and insistence on reinvigorating the game with new features meant at making the game more accessible, we look forward to seeing how it all turns out as Season 5 gets underway. Last Oasis is currently in Early Access and has recently trended into Very Positive territory on Steam.
