I've played since closed testing (I've played probably 30 hours total.), I will try to give a fair write up of the game in its current state.
This game doesn't neatly fit into the survival or mmo genre, its a weird mixture of genres where it tries to be a survival game, tries to be an mmo and tries to be an rpg but kinda fails at all of them.
So for example, Scum is a decent survival game, as you can do a lot of small stuff in game to increase your survivability, you have to manually build ur base, you can do x things to manage ur nutrition, being wet vs dry matters, your characters weight matters etc etc.
This game's ''survival'' aspect ends at you need to constantly consume food/water and those being at max effects your hp regen rate.
RPG:
I'm sure we all know what a good rpg looks like so i wont give an example of one, this game has ''perks'' which in a way give your character some level of uniqueness, that's it though, all the armor/weps/building stuff is exactly the same for everyone, with the exception of a few pieces of armor/weps that people got from pledging before early access.
MMO: So....most MMOs (wow, gw2, eso) include being able to party up, play together with friends, fashion wars, raids, bosses, dungeons etc etc.
This game has none of that.
Although it is planned to be added in at some point, currently on release there is no way you can group up with anyone, there is no party system or ally system, you just have to find each other in game.
I do not know why this hasn't worked, it's possible it hasnt been enabled in the last 24 hours or it just flat out doesnt work, trying to get into the same server as my friend hasn't been possible, the ''join on friend'' via steam or him inviting me, neither have resulted in us being in the same server.
As far as i've seen and understand (I may have missed something or be wrong) you cannot pick a server to join, you get auto added to one (during the testing phase you could pick a server) which means you have no clear way to play with friends (again if i am wrong about this, please correct me, i am not trying to trash talk the game).
I originally was going to try and make categories like ''the good stuff/the bad stuff'' etc etc, but it's gonna make me respawn irl cause i'd be repeating myself a lot, so i'm going to throw all the info at you guys and add commentary as I go.
The game looks nice, the world, animals and environment all are pretty alienesque and are graphically pretty appealing, there is some variance in the different biomes which is decent.
The in game systems are generally easy to understand.
The ''survival'' aspect isn't overly complicated, you just have to spam food/water, neither of which are difficult to get, you could potentially add in the environmental effects as part of the ''survival system'' i guess....you will have to deal with gas/heat/cold etc etc, you use items from the tech tree to do so.
The main point of the game is to grind through the tech tree unlocking items that enable you to then venture into the ''harder'' parts of the map, doing this enables you to finish the quests which mean you will survive the coming night time, which you have usually a week to do.
If you successfully do this, you complete a ''cycle'' which levels up your account which then enables you to access other game modes (pvp mode, some other story mode, the ability to build structures in game - its RIDICULOUS that this is locked behind 10+ hours of grind, especially considering the inventory system, which ill explain later), your account probably levels as you complete in game quests, so you may not need to finish a complete in game cycle to level it up somewhat. (levels are up to 400)
Perk system:
The gist of it is that as you do stuff in game (crafting, killing, discovering, consuming), you earn perks which give your character ''buffs' in terms of harvesting stuff/food/water caps, wep damage etc etc.
You can make some perks permanently stick, some will be lost on death, depending.
There are different tiers of perk.
I really think the perk system is the biggest missed opportunity for this game to shine because you have absolutely no way of knowing what actions will unlock what perks, so until someone data mines the game, its just random stabs in the dark.
You can spend perk points (practice points, no idea why they arent actually called perk points) to increase the tier of your ''saved perk'' slots so you can put rare perks into them.
Harvesting resources:
You can harvest different things using different tools from the same object.
So hitting x thing with a knife yields something different if you hit the same thing using a pick axe etc etc.
There are a wide variety of different resources to gather, sometimes this is interesting, other times its just obviously tedious and annoyingly done to make you spend more time running back and forth from one place to another to generate items to make more items to do simple stuff, for example the most basic healing item in the game:
You need three items to create it, one of them is a cactus like material, you already find this in the initial starting area, but no, apparently that one isn't good enough and now you need to go to the desert area to get the same item (except now its got the word desert in front of it) to be able to make bandages.
Tech tree:
You gain tech tree points by ''discovering'' things/animals/stuff, which just means you see a rock and your character is too dumb to know what a rock is, so you ''discover'' it and bam, now you recognize what a rock is and have some points that you can spend on unlocking technology.
So then you can unlock a campfire, a bottle, tools/weapons/med items etc etc.
The tech tree has two major problems:
1. Its basically the same thing after the bone tier, just called something else and more annoying to get.
2. The actual game play loop around it is just time consuming and not fun, ill explain in detail below.
Tech tiers:
Stone
Bone 1.5x harvest rate, higher durability (compared to stone)
Metal - higher harvest rate/higher dur (compared to bone)
etc etc
So to make a stone knife, you just need a small amount of basic materials.
To make a bone knife you need to kill certain mobs to get the materials and you need to pick some stuff up.
Making a metal knife requires a lot more work as you have to go to a particular area to get metal which has environmental damage and stronger mobs.
So yeah, you could go get the mats to make a metal knife, its interesting the first time, however, the amount of time needed to make a metal knife vs making a stone or bone knife (overall id say bone is the tier you should stop at unless you have easy access to higher stuff) just isn't worth it.
Yeah you will harvest slightly more but thats irrelevant, cause the mats you farm respawn in a minute or two anyway and you can definitely make like 10 stone or 5 bone knives quicker than you can make one metal one, so overall you're going to gain more mats in less time by not making the higher tier item.
As you go along the tech tree, there are some different items that give you damage buffs and do a few other things that arent exactly the same, but none of it really enhances game play or makes a massive difference in how you interact with the world to make it anything to really care about.
The game seems to try to get you to explore the environment and find more efficient ways to interact with it by developing tech around that, which I think was a great idea, but poorly executed, both because of the obvious cookie cutter gear repetition and because interacting with the environment feels super plastic and fake.
My final point on the tech tree is this:
You're doing exactly the same thing at hour 1 to progress through it that you're doing at hour 10 and hour 20, the only difference is you may take slightly less damage from mobs/do slightly more damage.
Cont'd in comments, check last pages, from questing upwards
