The Front (survival / base building / battlefield?)

Spying tho

Played it when it came out. It took the best of Rust/Ark/Seven Days to Die/Conan Exiles and combined them together. There was a lot of complaints about Chinese hackers on other servers, and some idiots on our server blamed them for their base dying (they never set up auto-repair and their foundations collapsed), but they did release a list of banned cheaters and the servers they were on a week or two ago.

Anticheat shit and Tencent who knows. Tencent isn't a malicious as much as people want a Chinese billion dollar company to be, but they answer to Xi Jinping in the end so who knows.

Game was good, but we were on a PVP server with 30 day reset at start and it was dead in like 5 days. Very little PVP happened as a lot of people were test running for real servers. My three man crew (think max was 4-6 people) outdid everyone and were running the highest tier shit on day 3 or so and everyone else was two tiers behind us doing casual dad stuff. A lot of people were turned off by classic beta over-tuning with things changing literally day to day. They patched every night and some things were fixes others were big sweeping changes. Mostly for the good, but one day they had a bug where people in vehicles would get sent back to their original location when they hopped out. This was annoying for people with cars/tanks, but if you did it in a Helicopter you were sent under the world and you lost their kit. This happened for 60 minutes before they told us it was a thing server-wide and then 30 minutes later they said they were rolling back as some people lost not only kits but entire CHARACTERS they couldn't access. The Discord Redditors threw a shit fit because they lost 1000 iron or whatever dumb baby shit they did in that 90 minutes, but it was the right call.

Gameplay itself was decent, but there was a lot of undeveloped PVE they still had. There were several dungeons missing their bosses without anything special to loot besides a lot of high level mobs.

As for the 'steal everything from survivals' approach:

Conan:
-You had thralls (followers as they're called) who didn't really do much except carry stuff and help kill easy mobs, but they were immensely slow to level and fairly easy to kill in higher content. Taming them took up to 30-40 minutes IN THE WILD. They can be slotted into crafters, but this was used to help level them as there were few if any that actually had crafting bonuses.

Rust:
-Everything is Rust. Buildings, some of the guns, the resources, etc etc. Most of the same assets from the same place. Didn't steal the gambling or anything that I saw, but they did have a trader where you could trade for rare shit, but it was rarely worth it and it wasn't a protected area.

Seven Days to Die/OG Fortnite:
-You have this beacon where your base is located (though you can place one per person in your clan) and every 10-30 minutes you can basically choose for waves of PVE to attack it. You defend and you get the mobs loot as well as a reward pack. You earn points passively over time and the higher level you get the more points it cost per wave. I think at wave 30+ or whever we got it was something like 20 points to do a wave every 30 minutes, and you earned like 12 points an hour? But at lower levels you could do it every 10 minutes and it cost 5-10 points. It helps you get a lot of fodder weapons/drop only mats/exp equivalent items and blueprints for crafting. It was pretty cool because at the higher level you basically make kill boxes and death mazes to path these mods through turrets and flamethrowers and spike traps and springboards to kill them or weaken them as using bullets yourself would be a MASSIVE drain on resources in the medium+ tiers. It was very fun and was honestly the highlight of the game for us. Making our own death boxes and watching them annihilate stuff felt great.

Ark
-I can't speak to Ark as I never played it (I did play Atlas AKA Ark1.3!) but I think the Thrall thing is their worse version of dino buds. Again I can't really say what else is similar, but a lot of Ark veterans said a lot was very much the same stuff.


Overall they've patched probably 20 times since I stopped playing a month ago and I think if you're not worried about the Chinese boogeyman it's pretty decent. There's fresh servers being put up every day and I think the 5 day server time is the sweet spot. PVP itself is full drop etc and pretty decent, but I think at the highest end it gets absurd. People drive around with pocket tanks (Vehicles if they have no items in them besides gas/ammunition can be itemized) so they run into something and just hot deploy a tank and good fucking luck killing that as infantry. Base defense was TERRIBLE because there was a 3 hour window you set where you can be attacked. We set ours for prime time and were never attacked except for our old base we left behind which was destroyed and looted because we literally turned off defenses and were across the map not giving a fuck. Most of our server set their attack times to 6am server time so no one was on to attack them. I'm not sure if they've made larger windows for raiding as some one suggested a mandatory 12 hour window per server people have to select their 3 hour time frame in, which i think is a good idea. They DO have servers with 100% raidable time, but that's just asking for nightowl degens to fuck you over.

TLR It's got the best stuff from a lot of games and it's pretty good. It was missing the magic it could potentially have when I stopped playing a month ago, but it was a solid game. I definitely think if you like the genre you'd like a fresh server start. I'd do soft PVP rules or even PVE just to get your bearings and learn the skill/crafting system. It's one of those games that is a solid game that will either die because it never gets the population up and stable or it's over-developed and loses the few players it has. I bought it for $15 on sale and it was 100% worth it. If you're worried about China Boogeyman hacking your shit, go ahead and pass. If you aren't worried and love survival games and have a small crew I definitely think it's worth it.

Forgot to mention there was some interesting itemization. Basically you craft items that are green---blue--purple---orange---red rarity. So obviously based stats go up, but there are ROLLS within each. So for instance an item that was red, Exotic, could roll 2-2.5x damage as well as 3-4x durability. BUT these items also roll 1-5 crafted amount before the blueprint disappears AND they roll the ingredients 2-4x cost. So we had some items that were say 200 damage version weapons of 100 damage guns, but they literally cost 50x the total materials. Like instead of 10 iron and 10 wood and 10 stone they cost 800 iron and 900 wood and 1100 stone. These aren't made up numbers, we had shit at the high end cost 1,100 of some of the highest materials to make. But if you got a low roll instead of that 1100 cost it could be like 550 which was wayyyyy more manageable and for stuff like chainsaws/jackhammers with high yield well worth it.

Xevy said:

Tencent isn't a malicious as much as people want a Chinese billion dollar company to be, but they answer to Xi Jinping in the end so who knows.

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It's hilarious how you basically handwave away a 100% dealbreaker for anyone with half a brain by addressing it with a single line and then immediately burying with a simp essay.

This one of those 50 man server games?

Oh no, Xi Xi Ping Pong will know in into big titty goth bitches?

You had me at Rust without cheaters. Hopefully this game grows, the biggest complaint in the rust community is cheaters. Reading your review, my first thought is no pocket vehicles ( a la 7 days) on pvp servers, only pve.

Is this intended for multi only like rust or can be solo like 7 days or Ark?

fris said:

Oh no, Xi Xi Ping Pong will know in into big titty goth bitches?

You had me at Rust without cheaters. Hopefully this game grows, the biggest complaint in the rust community is cheaters. Reading your review, my first thought is no pocket vehicles ( a la 7 days) on pvp servers, only pve.

Is this intended for multi only like rust or can be solo like 7 days or Ark?

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The CCP would like to thank you for joining the botnet army! Insulting The Great Leader means your IP will be immediately enlisted into an attack on Mossad linked companies!

Which game? Games that don't scan all your background apps are games typically filled with cheaters