The Sleeping Giants map is finally here! This post will be mainly focusing on the Sleeping Giants itself, keeping the details of our plans for the future for later. Our main priority right now is to give as much attention to SG as possible first, since we’ll want to heavily focus on its iteration using your feedback and from playing on it ourselves. An important question many will ask right away, since it came up multiple times already when the map was discussed is will it have both PvP and PvE versions on release. The answer is - for now, yes and then we’ll see. Instead of theorycrafting and imagining how the game will be played by doing polls and thinking about all the possible things it will lead to by having the map as either PvP-only or PvP and PvE, we decided to just try it first and see in practice how it plays out. We’ll be monitoring the gameplay on both server types after release and gauge the sentiment towards the map on the different versions. Most likely, we'll still be making a poll afterwards to get an even clearer picture of the gameplay on both versions, but based on the real gameplay first, instead of pure imagination of how it will be played without trying it first at all. Considering that we’re also adding base packing back, it should be very easy to remove any tiles that we need with an easy way to move your belongings if it won’t be working out as well as we expect, but the main point of this experiment is to give both versions of the map a try and then see how they perform. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34371660/f2752329ff6147a5ebc31381dc2f5efde8351525.jpg[/img] [h1]Sleeping Giants[/h1] Now, when it comes to the main event of this update - Sleeping Giants map, we don’t want to spoil too much in the post and let you experience it on your own. Keeping that in mind, we won’t give out too many details, but will mention the biggest changes that are different from the previous version of the map that you know from older seasons. Keeping with the idea of the season heavily promoting PvE content in the game that was lacking in the past, you can assume that everything in that regard changed on the map. Regular Okkams got an upgrade in terms of their behavior and how to fight them tactically and will roam the deserts, greeting newcomers into the unforgiving lands of the Sleeping Giants. On the other hand, War Okkam - a heavily fortified Rupu town on top of its back full of guns, will be roaming the center of the map in the ash wastes. While both of them might seem similar at a glance, each requires quite different approaches when it comes to defeating them. What those are is up to you to figure out. All the camps are brand new, heavily featuring architecture of ancient civilizations as the base for their fortifications. Each will require a unique way of fighting it, some having more focus on using specific guns or ammo, some being more opened to melee combat, some forcing you to be quick by having Nurr Raiders circle you with explosive javelins, and some making you to take it slow not to get accidentally caught on fire by a supporting Rupu type. Overall, each camp is a very unique experience that is designed to create a ton of fun by figuring out the approach for each of them and, also, creating a level of unpredictability that sometimes puts you in a random situation that requires quick thinking and experience. The technology found on the map unlocks a whole new world of possibilities from a Curing Station to a Lathe, allowing you to craft completely new items and unlocking a whole new tier of equipment - Clay Tier. To name a few new things that will be found on the map - there are Medium Wooden Walls as well as Clay Walls, dozens of new weapons and armor pieces, new siege weapons and ammo types for them, which all have their own uses and designed ideal targets, new walker types, of course, as well as new rigs and walker parts for old walkers to upgrade them, new tiers of existing technology that has a brand new way of interacting with it like a new Windmill that generates torque passively without a Sandstorm like before, but also becomes an insanely fast generator when in an active Sandstorm, and tons of other new things that would take hours to mention them all in a post. As already mentioned, we’ll be closely monitoring both your direct feedback and how you play on the map in the first place, and continue iterating on Sleeping Giants as we did with the previous maps. Once Balang Walker becomes available next week, we’ll also be able to burn some of the permanent maps, so if we do decide to stick to PvP-only Sleeping Giants, as suggested by some of you, that will absolutely be a possibility at that point if we see that it would make the gameplay much better. When it comes to Rarity Even Maps, Sleeping Giants will be added to the pool of available maps to be spawned, but we won’t be spawning more Event Maps at the same time just yet, not to divide the community between too many maps. That said, adding more than one Event Map at a time is a matter of a few minutes, so that’s certainly on the table as we keep monitoring the gameplay. Now a bit about base packing, since it was brought up. [h1]Base Packing[/h1] Balang and Silur Walkers will be the only walkers that can pack regular bases from now on. The biggest difference from the previous version, however, is that they will not be packed and unpacked into a special Base Foundation to build your base on afterwards, but instead, will allow to just pack any base into them, similar to how it worked with regular walkers before, with restrictions only by the size of the base, not anything inside or its artificial weight. What it means is that when you finally get yourself a Balang Walker on SG, you’ll be able to just pack your base on Canyons and move it anywhere you want, as long as it’s not incredibly large, which would require to either make it smaller or cut it into pieces and use multiple walkers or multiple trips. From other details, the packing and unpacking will be taking quite a lot of time and, one of the main differences, it will not allow storing the base in the walker for long periods of time, as it will start decaying the packed base after a grace period, making it very important to unpack as soon as you can. Another thing with the packing that’s new to the system is that, in addition to packing bases, you’ll be able to pack other Walkers into the same Balang Walker. That means that with a single Balang Walker, you’ll be able to move all your belongings to a new place and settle down for good. A small catch, however, is that the decaying mechanic applied to the packed bases, will be used for walkers as well, so our goal with the packing walkers is to provide an ability to move your bases and walkers to a new place you can call home, and not a way to store them in a safe walker hidden deep in your garage. An additional idea we also have for a new walker, which we’ll discuss in more detail a bit later, is a walker that’s specifically designed to be packing war structures like forward operating bases. In those cases, we’ll actually allow you to store your FOBs in the walker for some time and make it possible to deploy them to use in combat as a designed mechanic, instead of an abused regular packing mechanic that’s not designed for it in the first place. When it comes to Packing Walkers, however, they will start being available in the update after the one we're having today, aiming at the next week. Since it’s a quite large change in the mechanic to begin with, and packing bases is an extremely delicate matter, where we don’t want to leave any room for errors not to lose any of the player bases to bugs, we decided not to rush it and give it at least a few more day in the oven until it’s out. Once it’s available, you’ll be able to find Balang Walker on SG as a regular loot drop, while the other new walker we talked about is still in a design phase and will take some time to arrive, possibly together with the next map. [h1]Plans For The Future[/h1] When it comes to our future updates, our first priority is, obviously, to make sure that Sleeping Giants is as stable as can be. We’ll be releasing updates iterating on the map and the game in general to make sure that it’s in the best shape possible. Releasing the Balang Walker and some other additions and mechanics next week is another thing we already mentioned we’ll be doing, so that's also one of our priorities for the moment. After that, as we said a few times, we’ll be looking into releasing a special PvP Update, similar to how we did the Rarity Update - a separate patch, unrelated to any map or progression step in the game, but heavily overhauling existing mechanics and features. In that case, our main goal will be to make PvP maps an important part of the game, especially by rewarding staying on permanent PvP maps and engaging in PvP combat. We’re still in the design phase of that update, since we’ve been focusing on Sleeping Giants for quite some time, making it as fun as possible, but we’re getting close to overhauling that aspect of the game as well. Other than that, we’ll be starting to design the next map in the progression, similarly to Sleeping Giants in terms of how different we want to make it compared to the previous experience. Our goal is not to just slightly tweak the parts of the game that are not yet out, but to reimagine the whole thing and create a fun and engaging experience on every map available through interesting mechanics, new systems, and many other improvements and complete overhauls. That said, we’ll keep you informed on everything we’re working on as we continue to do so, so make sure to keep an eye out for next posts, detailing our future plans. For now, check out some of the Relics infused with Nibiran Ore we're designing as a part of a new mechanic of gathering Ancient Relics and selling them to collectors, pushing the economy forward through exploration and travel. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34371660/e4365c25f18fb51b09dec44357f5398ca0fa2371.png[/img] The changelog might not seem that big, since the literal thousands of changes we did for the Sleeping Giants are put into a single line, but we’ve mentioned quite a lot of changes in the post already and we’d like for you to find all the new mechanics and features on your own. In addition to that, we’ve added some improvements and fixes for the existing mechanics since the last update, which you can read below. [list] [*] Added Sleeping Giants as a permanent map and a Rarity Event Map [*] Added thousands of changes that come with adding a new map that would be impossible to write in a single post, so just play it yourself. [/list] [list] [*] Overhauled UI of Schematics learning in Shrines, added lock/unlock icons for learned tech in all the menus, added visible elements showing which tech can be learned. [*] Added damage on walker hit for large animals like nurr, papak, and okkam, based on their size and speed. [*] Made scattershot rotate before you can man it. [*] Made Ballista a sniper-like weapon. Long reload time, but high damage. [*] Fixed wrong materials for brittle bone pieces, fixing dyeing them. [*] Set disassembling return rate to 100% for Soil Excavator to allow to reuse it for Clay. [*] Slightly increased Mollusk reverse speed. [*] Disabled foliage, POI, and Camp respawning on Event Tiles. [*] A whole ton of other things we missed when reading through thousands of changes. [/list] We hope you’ll have fun discovering the new map! Sands can be harsh there, so take care, Nomad!