Utopia... what a mess

[belfagor]

Definitely disappointed by the last chapter... it turned Raft from a survival game to a senseless mess. I got into the harpoon tower and i got a stupid thing after another:

**** Spoiler alert*****












- The cogwheel puzzle.. quite annoying
- the SuperMario like jumping segment... if i liked a platform game I would be playing super mario not Raft :P
- then the Olaf "fight"... i just went through a full suit of armor and 3 machete just to die for consumption of equipment. I tried killing the hyenas just to have some time to pile up the boxes... but they never stop, so i tried to ignore them but they drag you down and you loose the box so you need to kill a pack of three just to place a couple of boxes and then rinse a repeat. i pulled the bow, but you cannot recover the arrows as they drag you
I am playing solo so now i have to start over with no equip, another smart move.
Really poor game design.

not to mention all the titanium based raft components and equipment... senseless grind going from island to island just to get 2/3 ores or grinding the rep to buy it at the trading post. all for this just for some convenience: after the engine to navigate against the wind, everything else is definitely not relevant for the progression and you just build it for the sake of it.

Too bad i loved this game but this is stupid, IMHO.

maybe I'll launch again in a while but for now.. fed up.

have fun

[Zombiesbum]

The problem with the cog puzzle is the logic of the puzzle doesn't make sense. You arbitrarily can't jump while holding a cog, but you can while holding anything else in the game. And then there's the fact that you have to place the cog on "that" platform, otherwise the cog just floats in the air.

The cog puzzle could have been done in a way that doesn't break the immersion of physics within the already established physics of the game world.

The jumping puzzle is pretty weird. It's a bit out of place for what we've been doing so far. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense either to have this random jumping puzzle here.

Additionally, the end fight was not well thought out. After fighting the big shark, the first time I went into the arena I was trying to have the hyena interact with the collars. I didn't know initially that the boss was just a "hit it till dead" which was disappointing. But what's worse is the game being designed (whether intentional or not) to mislead the player into thinking there are interactive mechanics in that boss fight.

[distantlight]

"You arbitrarily can't jump while holding a cog, but you can while holding anything else in the game. And then there's the fact that you have to place the cog on "that" platform, otherwise the cog just floats in the air."

Exactly. It feels like they brought in a different person to make the final level who hadn't played the rest of the game. You can literally carry a llama and still run, jump and swim, but you can't carry a stupid little gear and jump? Makes no sense.

[❄️The Last Frontier 😊]

Originally posted by distantlight:

"You arbitrarily can't jump while holding a cog, but you can while holding anything else in the game. And then there's the fact that you have to place the cog on "that" platform, otherwise the cog just floats in the air."

Exactly. It feels like they brought in a different person to make the final level who hadn't played the rest of the game. You can literally carry a llama and still run, jump and swim, but you can't carry a stupid little gear and jump? Makes no sense.

The Cog and not being able to Jump with it I can agree with fully makes absolutely no sense at all.

[Nickel Jackal]

I cannot believe this is probably the right solution for the first cog puzzle.
There should be somewhere more obvious to put boxes.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840151579
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840151399

[T9]

Not of fan of most of the story (utopia and the ending super uncreative) but the hyenas hit me 3 times altogether. U can basically just ignore them and run from crate to crate lol
Jumping part can be annoying. But the biggest "challenge" is still to carry enough food and water lol

[Archie]

is utopia a new place after the frozen island??

[Illuminia]

I agree, it was disappointing all around.

At first, Utopia looked interesting - all the interconnected rafts to make up a sort of "floating city", even if seemingly deserted....
Wasn't fond of the stacking crates puzzle mechanic, but it wasn't too bad.

Get to the Cogwheel puzzle, and whole thing is a mess. While I figured it out fairly fast, it was still just not fun to work through.
They had to build some new mechanics for that stupid puzzle - it almost could have been forgiven if we received some sort of crank/winch elevator schematic for the Raft as a reward, but NOPE.

The jumping segment? There were (simple) jumping puzzles in other places, so didn't surprise me much, but making them timed with the windmills made it far more annoying.
Not a great game for platforming, especially when you have to make fairly quick jump/duck/jump combos; and the "low" windmill panel deceptively blocks your jump. >.>

All the Olaf "fights" were terrible, I killed at least a dozen hyenas farming meat/leather expecting them to run out.

Radioactive Hyena? ..... seriously? ..... seriously?!?.
Jumping puzzles? Annoying, but there have been a few before, so it's not unexpected.
Gimmick-laden point-and-click puzzles? Yeah, had those too, so no surprise...
An actual boss fight that isn't just a gimmick, where you actually do real combat??? ..... yeah, that felt really out of place.
It had an insane amount of HP, flooded the arena with acid pools, required bringing multiple weapons/buffs/healing items, and I ended up breaking 2 spears (I don't like the machete's slow swing), using up a stack of arrows..... and having to pluck arrows back out of the boss's body to shoot at him again.

Bad design all around.

..... and what do we get as a reward?
- A cutscene
- A "bazaar" area where 15+ people hang out in a tiny space while the "floating city" below remains a ghost town. (while sort of cool, would have made more sense to put it all into the city below.)
- Some free uncooked food stalls. Woo.
- Some vending machines with neat cosmetic stuff. (honestly the highlight....)
- Titanium Tool blueprints..... which mostly suck.

Titanium Sword/Arrows? Ok, would have been useful against the boss you just had to kill just a few minutes before. .... not really anything much left to use them on.

Titanium Axe/Hook? Depending on how you value Titanium, the Axe is 3-8+ times "more expensive" (relatively) than a basic Metal Axe, while only lasting twice as long.... I built one to try, and went back to scrap metal axes for my tree farm...
Hook is a slight bit more useful, but not that much.

Overall, I almost wish they left the game "unfinished" before the Utopia update launched.

[distantlight]

Originally posted by Illuminia:

..
Overall, I almost wish they left the game "unfinished" before the Utopia update launched.

Yeah, I like to think of Tangaroa as the "final" level and just pretend the rest doesn't exist.

I'm guessing that might be why this final update took such a long time to finish: they just didn't really have a great plan for what the final level was going to actually be, so they gave up and just put together something fairly predictable.

I almost wish they had just left the end of the game sort of open-ended: i.e. you don't actually find the survivors, but you can just keep sailing as long as you want, and maybe someday you will find them.

[songsmith23]

Super frustrated with the Alpha bossfight. I play peaceful and I'm not ashamed to admit it; I'm not here for bashing things repeatedly in a clunky combat engine. I liked the rhino shark fight - that was a good way to handle an unskippable bossfight in peaceful. This? Not sure I'm going to bother finishing, given what I've heard about the ending.

Utopia just feels out-of-place. The whole last chapter does a bit, in that for other places we had to craft things in order to advance, gained new blueprints that let us craft things to advance further, rinse-repeat. We didn't need any of the new things for the third chapter, and while they're nice to have on the raft, by the time you get them they're mostly just that.... nice to have. Not anything that feels like a relief from grind. And of the locations in the third chapter, Utopia is the strangest. Timing-dependent parkour which you have to do twice (I finished it once by dint of saving in key locations and reloading; then after getting the hammer I cheesed it), three stages of combat that all boil down to dodge-and-hack?

I liked Detto's water puzzle and I didn't mind the cogwheel lifts, even though it was a bit arbitrary that you couldn't jump with the cogs. Those felt like Raft, though. The end-game rewards also feel a bit out of place; yes, I could keep building my raft (though frankly with the wait between chapters it's pretty done), but I'm not going to be needing titanium tools for it. I'd actually think swapping the tools with, say, the advanced anchor or biofuel generator might make more sense -- the tools could be useful in the Utopia fights, and making your raft run smoother is your reward to be used in quiet post-story building.

Also, crazy guy vindictively destroying what's left of the world is not at all where I thought this story was going to end up. What happened to our family, referenced at the beginning? And the idea of Forward Scouts implied some sort of organized community we ought to be reporting back to somehow. Olof just feels kind of.... pasted on.

[❄️The Last Frontier 😊]

Originally posted by songsmith23:

Super frustrated with the Alpha bossfight. I play peaceful and I'm not ashamed to admit it; I'm not here for bashing things repeatedly in a clunky combat engine. I liked the rhino shark fight - that was a good way to handle an unskippable bossfight in peaceful. This? Not sure I'm going to bother finishing, given what I've heard about the ending.

Utopia just feels out-of-place. The whole last chapter does a bit, in that for other places we had to craft things in order to advance, gained new blueprints that let us craft things to advance further, rinse-repeat. We didn't need any of the new things for the third chapter, and while they're nice to have on the raft, by the time you get them they're mostly just that.... nice to have. Not anything that feels like a relief from grind. And of the locations in the third chapter, Utopia is the strangest. Timing-dependent parkour which you have to do twice (I finished it once by dint of saving in key locations and reloading; then after getting the hammer I cheesed it), three stages of combat that all boil down to dodge-and-hack?

I liked Detto's water puzzle and I didn't mind the cogwheel lifts, even though it was a bit arbitrary that you couldn't jump with the cogs. Those felt like Raft, though. The end-game rewards also feel a bit out of place; yes, I could keep building my raft (though frankly with the wait between chapters it's pretty done), but I'm not going to be needing titanium tools for it. I'd actually think swapping the tools with, say, the advanced anchor or biofuel generator might make more sense -- the tools could be useful in the Utopia fights, and making your raft run smoother is your reward to be used in quiet post-story building.

Also, crazy guy vindictively destroying what's left of the world is not at all where I thought this story was going to end up. What happened to our family, referenced at the beginning? And the idea of Forward Scouts implied some sort of organized community we ought to be reporting back to somehow. Olof just feels kind of.... pasted on.

this fight literally is the last thing and really is super simple even in normal mode. Just stock up on arrows and maybe 5-10 good healing packs and your set it's honestly a very pitiful boss fight but it does unlock the last items you will need if you are doing achievements as the titanium tool blue prints you get after the fight which are 3 of the needed blue prints for the research table achievement

[distantlight]

The final boss' health doesn't reset if you die. So there's really no point even taking any equipment with you, just a weapon or two. Then if you die, you just go pick up where you left off. The only thing you're losing is the time it takes to walk over there again.

That's part of the reason having a boss fight just feels so pointless; the game isn't really very well designed for it (poor combat mechanics and losing items when you die).

[felixader]

I am at the final place right now and have reached the cog puzzle and quite frankly i am probably going to leave it at that.

I could deal with the other point and click like areas, they weren't to bad. But even then the thing that was in my mind the most is that I just wanted to get back to my raft since non of the areas really fed into the gameplay that I was actually playing for.

I also feel that the story drags overall. Mostly due to the lack of characters to actually interact with.

I think what it comes down to is that the developers probably couldn't really make believeable NPCs and that is why we find empty area after empty area despite the fact that it would for example utterly stupid, even with the troubles, to abandon it with all the good space that could be used for actual farming, or that proper fishing could easily sustain them judging by my own fishing attempts.

It doesn't help that the "combat system" if you ca call it that is the most basic thing it could be.

So instead if NPCs they filled it with annoying puzzles, areas and most of all fights that are so pretty much the opposite of why I am here.

This was so far a great game. But the further i go into the story the more i felt like the dev's actually wanted to make a totally different game at that point.

[distantlight]

Yeah when the game was in Early Access, there were no NPCs at all.. and actually I think the game was better that way. It was just more mysterious, more intriguing.

I honestly imagined a scenario in which we reach the final destination and realize we are, in fact, the last person on earth. That would'be been kind of cool.

[seven]

Cool? That would have been quite depressing. All that work to survive for nothing? I'd have uninstalled the game and never played it again. I wasn't really happy with the ending. It should have had more answers, more of my characters story. But at least it was a reasonably hopeful ending.

[felixader]

I think the game shouldn't have had what is more more or less a supervillain.

And I don't agree on the depressing ending. That would have been awful and also illogical.

Well, even MORE illogical.

The issues you have to solve within the story should have been constructed around helping other people survive, maybe distribute technical discoveries you do as a discoverer. That would also have give the blueprints an additional purpose.

Maybe you could have helped healing the people of caravan town, show the floating city how to fish and farm. Maybe support any of them with your fishing and farming until they are atop their situation.

Instead we got a "i want to rule the world" super villain that can mutate and apparently control animals with minimal technical measures. The story should have centered around the obvious themes of survival and compassion under humans instead and use the mechanics to enforce that.