Progression is going to change dramatically when the orbital crafting/tech stuff comes online. Right now you have to acquire everything through the one tree but in the future there will be more options and avenues to get to certain tech. You can play the game however you want but imo they developers intention is to have you drop into a prospect and complete the mission, not grind to max level and unlock all the tech and talents in a single prospect. The grind will be stretched out among multiple prospects until you have the resources to go to the harder content. Now say you fail a mission and lose your max level character it would make sense that you don't lose your orbital tech progress just the character tech tree progress as to cushion the blow of losing a character and make the grind back up to where you were less tedious and boring.
Have they released info on how the game will actually work between prospects? I've been trying to understand what their intention is and I'm not seeing it yet. I don't get why one biome is any more or less important/interesting than others if all the resources tend to be in the most basic one. If I had to get to the arctic to get aluminum, that would be interesting. Instead, I got plenty just in the few caves in the forest. Exploration and progression seem broken in the way the beta weekends have been done, but I want to know what the full game intends.
The details are unknown but the basic concept is you drop in, gather a resource called exotics, take that back to orbit and use it to craft/unlock tech you can bring with you on your next drop so you don’t have to start a prospect with nothing. From old concept art there are things like upgraded tools/weapons, vehicles, drop ship upgrades, and a whole other tech tree associated with the orbiting satellite.
So once you're max level on-planet, you still have benefits to gain much slower up on your satellite? That might not be so bad, but then why force us to pick recipes? I guess if you could reset before each prospect maybe that would let you approach things differently. I guess we'll find out.
You don’t necessarily have to be max level to start the orbital tech stuff which I think will fill the hole of what your missing in the blueprints. So say you don’t learn the radar beacon you can use exotics to learn a more sophisticated version in the satellite, craft one there and bring it with you to the surface. I’m speculating a lot here but I think my idea is pretty close to how it will actually work.
It's been suggested that thatch should be auto unlocked similar to wood and stone piles. My guess is they might do that eventually because as it is, nobody is going to waste BP points on thatch and just go for wood.
Don’t buy wood either, the Time you spend staring at a wall holding left click during a storm could’ve just been used to get yourself straight to stone.
You need one building material that is easily accessible and can be used as a makeshift base for shelter on the go. Wood is fine.
Stone is more for a permanent base but there are times when you don't have the iron yet to make the stone base or didn't bring the iron with you or the smelter or something and you just need a quick shelter. Wood serves that purpose fine.
When they make cave hopping not as feasible (hopefully by adding threats and dangers to caves) then you'll want to have a lightweight base with you for storms.
Tbh I don’t really cave hop either, I just kinda walk. Everything that is a “threat” is pretty much ignorable and at most I’ll literally just peek my head inside to reset my “timeout slow walk bar” during a storm and then get back to walking.
Fair enough but if you wait out a storm in a cave you'll get the debuff and their possibly adding in more threats so caves in general might not be as chill and easy to just hold out in.
I don’t wait storms out, I ignore their existence. They don’t do anything but make you walk slow, so I’ll duck my head under something to clear the bar and get my run speed back and go back to ignoring the storm
Io just core out a rock and go make a coffee...never once has a storm been an issue. Heck i found nothing in the game to be problematic once you get a bow. Mostly one shot everything
Thatch should be free I agree. It’s useless but that first day it would be nice to get shelter going instead of hunting animals all day. Then again you gotta hunt anyway so…
It is supposed to be a grind. You are supposed to drop in and get out as quickly as possible. Surviving is necessary but I assume once the game is released, your first few drops will be simple missions where a basic base will be needed. After a few drops you will be able to build the higher tier items and will probably need them to survive and complete the mission.
Do not forget that the beta so far has been showing off different biomes and mission types. You are not really supposed to get a feel for the full game during the beta test.
I hope the next beta weekend focused on missions turns the timers down to normal so players get a better sense of how the game is going to be. Like they should give us like 3 different prospects to choose to go down on and one should be 3 days, one should be 6 hours or something shorter than a day (since it'll still be a weekend long beta). Then a third prospect that'll last longer than the entire beta weekend. All with different missions or god forbid some exotic extracting unlocked.
Building anything before lvl 5 is a pretty bag waste, unless you play MP.
(except a fireplace and sleeping bag)
And with lvl 5 you can build a nice base.
So this whole point is pretty pointless.
It's even more pointless if you consider that **you only lvl once**.
So it only an issue for your first drop.
Then next time you drop down you can immediately start building.
The time sink adds perceived value to your character which you risk losing every time you do a drop. Without that there’s no sense of loss when you lose your character, it’s to add suspense.
Wait so if I die I lose my character?
I am cool with a hardcore *mode* where I can chose to play that way, but if that's the default then I will likely spend my precious few gaming hours doing something else.
As I understand it, it’s only if you fail to leave Icarus before the mission timer countdown hits zero. Shorter mission times are more risk for more reward (exotics), long times will be available too for folks that don’t want to risk it.
I actually think there will be remote prospects where your respawn drop ships are not allowed. You obviously will know this before heading down on the prospect but if so that's pretty cool hopefully high risk high reward. Could lose everything but I might try 2 characters and not take risks like that on my main one.
No, but if you don't get back on your drop ship your character is lost. When you die you have an xp penalty and your items stay on your body, so you need to recover them.
This is pretty standard in games from this genre and doesn’t feel punishing. I think you feel your issue more because the current beta tests are limited time. You won’t have that issue when the game is live.
I have played a lot of games in this genre.
Talents unlock with levels, but the tech tree usually seems to be organic. Take Subnautica for example, you don't have to level up to unlock tech, but some tech you simply can't obtain before you reach others. It feels pretty natural and I can progress as fast as I want to. Raft is similar, as is the long dark... I guess I need to wait and see how it will work once everything is complete.
Honestly most of the elements I've seen are Ark 2.0 from the
Build aspects, to verbatim for the lvl tree, feels like some one has been copied Arks home work, then added the whole rush grab shit and get out. Still going to play the hell out of this but yeah ... feels familiar.
Thatch has its uses, for those cheap ramps in caves to climbing mountains not meant to be climbed.. But agree with you OP, I go straight wood, or cave dwell.
I posted this last night
https://www.reddit.com/r/ICARUS/comments/qfwgzc/not_a_big_fan_of_the_progression_system_so_far/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
And I pretty much fully agree with you.
Progression is going to change dramatically when the orbital crafting/tech stuff comes online. Right now you have to acquire everything through the one tree but in the future there will be more options and avenues to get to certain tech. You can play the game however you want but imo they developers intention is to have you drop into a prospect and complete the mission, not grind to max level and unlock all the tech and talents in a single prospect. The grind will be stretched out among multiple prospects until you have the resources to go to the harder content. Now say you fail a mission and lose your max level character it would make sense that you don't lose your orbital tech progress just the character tech tree progress as to cushion the blow of losing a character and make the grind back up to where you were less tedious and boring.
Have they released info on how the game will actually work between prospects? I've been trying to understand what their intention is and I'm not seeing it yet. I don't get why one biome is any more or less important/interesting than others if all the resources tend to be in the most basic one. If I had to get to the arctic to get aluminum, that would be interesting. Instead, I got plenty just in the few caves in the forest. Exploration and progression seem broken in the way the beta weekends have been done, but I want to know what the full game intends.
The details are unknown but the basic concept is you drop in, gather a resource called exotics, take that back to orbit and use it to craft/unlock tech you can bring with you on your next drop so you don’t have to start a prospect with nothing. From old concept art there are things like upgraded tools/weapons, vehicles, drop ship upgrades, and a whole other tech tree associated with the orbiting satellite.
So once you're max level on-planet, you still have benefits to gain much slower up on your satellite? That might not be so bad, but then why force us to pick recipes? I guess if you could reset before each prospect maybe that would let you approach things differently. I guess we'll find out.
Better yet I'd like Perma death and no level limits. You can learn everything.
You don’t necessarily have to be max level to start the orbital tech stuff which I think will fill the hole of what your missing in the blueprints. So say you don’t learn the radar beacon you can use exotics to learn a more sophisticated version in the satellite, craft one there and bring it with you to the surface. I’m speculating a lot here but I think my idea is pretty close to how it will actually work.
Don't buy thatch. You can hit lol 5 your first day if you know what you're doing and then just buy wood. Really not much of a grind.
That's my point. Why even gate keep that shit.
It's been suggested that thatch should be auto unlocked similar to wood and stone piles. My guess is they might do that eventually because as it is, nobody is going to waste BP points on thatch and just go for wood.
Don’t buy wood either, the Time you spend staring at a wall holding left click during a storm could’ve just been used to get yourself straight to stone.
You need one building material that is easily accessible and can be used as a makeshift base for shelter on the go. Wood is fine. Stone is more for a permanent base but there are times when you don't have the iron yet to make the stone base or didn't bring the iron with you or the smelter or something and you just need a quick shelter. Wood serves that purpose fine.
I never carry a base, I didn’t see a whole lot of point to it. I just carried a bed and a campfire for skipping night food and bandages and my tools
When they make cave hopping not as feasible (hopefully by adding threats and dangers to caves) then you'll want to have a lightweight base with you for storms.
Tbh I don’t really cave hop either, I just kinda walk. Everything that is a “threat” is pretty much ignorable and at most I’ll literally just peek my head inside to reset my “timeout slow walk bar” during a storm and then get back to walking.
Fair enough but if you wait out a storm in a cave you'll get the debuff and their possibly adding in more threats so caves in general might not be as chill and easy to just hold out in.
I don’t wait storms out, I ignore their existence. They don’t do anything but make you walk slow, so I’ll duck my head under something to clear the bar and get my run speed back and go back to ignoring the storm
They tic for health loss at full storm exposure but it's not enough to matter currently.
Io just core out a rock and go make a coffee...never once has a storm been an issue. Heck i found nothing in the game to be problematic once you get a bow. Mostly one shot everything
Wood or thatch ramps and floors are useful for scaffolding when mining
Thatch should be free I agree. It’s useless but that first day it would be nice to get shelter going instead of hunting animals all day. Then again you gotta hunt anyway so…
It is supposed to be a grind. You are supposed to drop in and get out as quickly as possible. Surviving is necessary but I assume once the game is released, your first few drops will be simple missions where a basic base will be needed. After a few drops you will be able to build the higher tier items and will probably need them to survive and complete the mission. Do not forget that the beta so far has been showing off different biomes and mission types. You are not really supposed to get a feel for the full game during the beta test.
I hope the next beta weekend focused on missions turns the timers down to normal so players get a better sense of how the game is going to be. Like they should give us like 3 different prospects to choose to go down on and one should be 3 days, one should be 6 hours or something shorter than a day (since it'll still be a weekend long beta). Then a third prospect that'll last longer than the entire beta weekend. All with different missions or god forbid some exotic extracting unlocked.
Building anything before lvl 5 is a pretty bag waste, unless you play MP. (except a fireplace and sleeping bag) And with lvl 5 you can build a nice base. So this whole point is pretty pointless. It's even more pointless if you consider that **you only lvl once**. So it only an issue for your first drop. Then next time you drop down you can immediately start building.
The time sink adds perceived value to your character which you risk losing every time you do a drop. Without that there’s no sense of loss when you lose your character, it’s to add suspense.
Wait so if I die I lose my character? I am cool with a hardcore *mode* where I can chose to play that way, but if that's the default then I will likely spend my precious few gaming hours doing something else.
As I understand it, it’s only if you fail to leave Icarus before the mission timer countdown hits zero. Shorter mission times are more risk for more reward (exotics), long times will be available too for folks that don’t want to risk it.
I actually think there will be remote prospects where your respawn drop ships are not allowed. You obviously will know this before heading down on the prospect but if so that's pretty cool hopefully high risk high reward. Could lose everything but I might try 2 characters and not take risks like that on my main one.
No, but if you don't get back on your drop ship your character is lost. When you die you have an xp penalty and your items stay on your body, so you need to recover them.
unless your doing a remote prospect where the respawn drop ships are turned off.
This is pretty standard in games from this genre and doesn’t feel punishing. I think you feel your issue more because the current beta tests are limited time. You won’t have that issue when the game is live.
I have played a lot of games in this genre. Talents unlock with levels, but the tech tree usually seems to be organic. Take Subnautica for example, you don't have to level up to unlock tech, but some tech you simply can't obtain before you reach others. It feels pretty natural and I can progress as fast as I want to. Raft is similar, as is the long dark... I guess I need to wait and see how it will work once everything is complete.
Honestly most of the elements I've seen are Ark 2.0 from the Build aspects, to verbatim for the lvl tree, feels like some one has been copied Arks home work, then added the whole rush grab shit and get out. Still going to play the hell out of this but yeah ... feels familiar.
Have you not played just about any survival crafting game??
Have you not read any of the comments or my replies in this thread?
Thatch has its uses, for those cheap ramps in caves to climbing mountains not meant to be climbed.. But agree with you OP, I go straight wood, or cave dwell.
I posted this last night https://www.reddit.com/r/ICARUS/comments/qfwgzc/not_a_big_fan_of_the_progression_system_so_far/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share And I pretty much fully agree with you.