Recent reviews by Intercorpse

What a shame to have to leave a negative review on what should have been a fantastic entry to the survival genre.

Tldr: Hagga Basin good, Deep Desert bad. Play if you enjoy a one-time loop throughout the initial map's content and then move on to other games.

Hagga Basin was a blast. Leveling throughout the first map was enjoyable. The skill system, combat, atmosphere, progression and all were well done. Perhaps the combat-oriented skills themselves could use a bit more added, but for a survival game, it was great.

Upgrades between each tier were very well constructed and felt worthwhile, being that each tier added a measurable increase in effectiveness. Weapons became considerably stronger between each tier, gear provided much more defense and tools functioned much better than the previous ones available. Dune Awakening provided one of the only upgrade loops I didn't feel the need to skip tiers in, just due to how effective each upgrade was. They hit the nail on the head there.

Quests were available throughout the entire experience in Hagga Basin and rewards were often very worthwhile. The gathering/building aspects were well done as well. The amount of materials gathered and materials needed for construction both respect your time, more so than a lot of similar games in the genre (I'm looking at you, original vanilla Ark). You could go farm a few nodes and build up a base in no time. Great for those of us who enjoy hefty construction projects.

Overall, Hagga Basin was very well designed. The issues lie in everything that comes after and the current philosophy of the design team.

Due to the fact that there is no end game, they are meticulously attempting to slow progression and destroy their playerbase. The Deep Desert is a wasteland compared to Hagga Basin, leaving nothing to feel excited about. Tedious flight over lengthy sand stretches between POI's, a slap in the face for players who only enjoy PvE, Rockets, a needless grind for t6, the disregard for their entire skill system in favor of rockets.. Did I mention rockets? Do you enjoy spending time hand-crafting a build you enjoy playing to better prepare for late game combat, only to be met by thopters with rockets? If so, look no further. The Deep Desert is the place for you.

I seriously cannot comprehend where the team has their heads placed, besides firmly up their asses. Why bother going through the entire leveling process, adding skills to make a specific build, then invalidate it all with PvP combat that relies solely on flying around rocketing anything that comes into view? There is no point to ground PvP whatsoever when someone just flies by to carpet bomb you back to grinding for resources to replace what you just lost. Oh, you just spent a week grinding the materials for a carrier? It'd be a shame if a team of thopters spotted you a mile off and felt the need to rocket you out of existence. That solo player just reaching the Deep Desert that casually finds spice sand to gather for his needless t6 grind? Yeah, our rocket thopters can't be having any of that. Want to gather some titanium without being griefed by people that are in full t6 and don't need the resource anyway? Good luck little buddy.

There is absolutely no reason to farm t6 materials when there is no content in the game meant to be cleared with it. It can all easily be accomplished with t5 gear. Farming for the sake of farming, then an end game loop that relies upon griefing to add extra grind for the sake of grinding to ensure more playtime from players is atrocious.

What does the development team do in response to this? Their current incoming patch takes away very large water sources from natural fields, eliminates safe sand (of the flour kind, not even spice) farming and makes the worm aggro easier with a % chance of moving quicker based on its spawn location. They also fixed an issue where you could clip parts of the worm and accidentally not have hours of your progress destroyed by it. I mean, why would you even want to survive a worm attack?

They are increasing tedium for the sake of tedium, without giving any regards to resolving any of the actual issues this game has. At this point, I don't feel the need to support anything from Funcom in the future. If only they had a previous survival game with years of development experience and trial and error they could base their framework on. Maybe then they would know what they were doing. /s

As someone who has thousands of hours in survival games and loves a good time sink, it's disappointing that a game with so much potential is being killed by the people designing it, when they have a previous survival game they should have learned from. Seems to me that they've generated the revenue they wanted and the care for what comes after is severely lacking.

You afk farm wuk no mo. You cry home nao