Re: Survive the Wild!
I decided to revisit this game since I haven't played it in a few years.
I see that not much has changed in terms of server lag. Whether this has to do with location, the server's internet connection, BGT, or some combination of those I don't know. There are periods where the game locks up and I'm unable to do anything but close the client. Sometimes lag happens in certain sections of a map as well, and leaving said section fixes it. Thankfully rain doesn't lag the whole game anymore, which is nice. It's just disappointing that so much lag and false speedhack detection still exists after all this time.
The game still feels very pay-to-win, and if you dump enough money into it, you can be nearly invincible. This is supposed to be Survive The Wild, not Pay to Survive The Wild. Teleporters are pretty nice to have, but when you can buy a ton of gifts and never have to gather anything, or buy a ton of energy/health boosts and never have to rest, that feels almost as bad as cheating. Air necklaces also don't make much sense. SCUBA gear would make more sense. There's also this little thing about free accounts being limited in what they can purchase with STW points. Supposedly this is due to cheaters, but it still feels like a slap in the face for people who don't cheat and can't or don't wish to pay. I also see that the whole spam character thing is still there, which I still feel is a bit silly. You have to pay to use a name if it's less than five characters long, or the account gets deleted. I was really hoping this wasn't a thing anymore.
While I appreciate the detail in some of the crafting changes, some items now require a lot of glue. Glue is extremely, extremely hard to come by unless you pay for survival packs and such, which bleeds over into pay to win. If there was a way to craft glue, this would be a bit better. That said, i'm not currently aware of a means to craft glue without some sort of modern equipment. I may do some research into that though.
As others have pointed out, the temperature system is a bit much. However, you can craft paper fans to cool yourself off. I discovered this by accident when finding a paper fan in the camp site. I was also expecting being wet or in water to cool you down, but that bit of physics doesn't seem to be coded yet. The constant spam of you have to stop to cool off is also rather irritating, especially since speech from events instantly interrupts any other speech even when the screen reader interrupt option is disabled.
Speaking of the camp site, the boomerangs, hammocks, and survival packs seem to have been taken out. You can get bags of string there now though, which is neat. However, this makes survival packs and hammocks even more difficult to get without paying, and to my knowledge boomerangs are now impossible to find. This is unless I'm mistaken and those things are just now much harder to find.
I haven't yet been to the new version of the fishing village, but if it's easy to die there from mutated wolves, that's kind of not cool due to how much of a pain it is to get to the village in the first place. This is one way the whole pay-to-win thing creates an issue.
I think that's everything. There are definitely things that could be improved, but it's nice to see that Sam is still keeping the project alive. It's still fun to play from time to time, and yes, I did pay so I could use Draq for my name. A bit silly as I said, but it is what it is.
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