evrima sucks: THE NOVEL

sorry just had to get it out of my system lol. feel free to ignore rather than do a meta analysis.

There will never be a successful attempt to prevent AFKing with how this game fundamentally works, and all of their attempts just suck fun out of the game, as-well as the many attempts at 'immersive' new systems. There really seems to be some serious tunnel vision going on, the evrima systems all sound nice in a vacuum and are hyped up well before their release, but when you zoom out none of it makes for a cohesive fun experience, it's essentially just legacy but with various ways to massage you into playing the way the developers intended, and also with basic capsule collisions I guess. Like the systems are entirely just 'rules', they don't expand the game in a meaningful way, they just add extra steps because 'da immersion'. this game never lacked immersion and in my opinion had more of it on V3, as you weren't engaging with annoying systems and seeing modern day animals run around alongside dinosaurs, so what is the need to sacrifice fun to such a degree as if immersion were lacking when it never has been? Even in the progression days I was able to 'get into it'. Beasts of bermuda (never thought i'd be praising it) atleast leaned into the rules being rules instead of hiding behind 'immersion', you straight up get debuffs for being near opposing creatures and you get bonuses for doing everything you are 'supposed to do'. The isle attempts to do the same soft rule system, but it tries so hard to stick to the 'immersion' that it ends up not being effective as rules or as a standalone fun design. This is likely due to one of my original points, tunnel vision, the isle tries so hard to have nuanced yet 'immersive' systems and never takes a step back to look at how they made something even more arcadey than legacy.

Nesting is the prime example, you craft a nest with materials and then you vomit into your babies mouth. I don't know about you but this doesn't make me feel any more like a dinosaur than when you were able to create a nest and sit for eggs, it actually feels more arcadey due to the crafting, the vomiting doesn't even make sense for most of the species, and the most important part; its not fun AT ALL and basically killed the nesting population because needing a partner makes it rng-dependent, with it not being in your favor if you play as less popular species. But hey it feels 'more grounded' in a game that is already as grounded as possible, and has more steps, so it must be the right choice.

Also as an artist, I feel like it's worth noting this point: immersion does not innately have anything to do with realism, and the threshold to be immersed in something is waaaay lower than dondi seems to think. It's all about consistency and believability from it's own standpoint.

One of the bigger gripes I have is basically everything to do with eating. No clue how they fucked it up so hard, they could've touched nothing and it would be better. Hot take(?): the game would be 5x more fun if the diet system was removed in its entirety and we were back to eating whatever. The 300% growth system is baffling, it's not something I would've foreseen dondi giving the okay to at all either, he is usually on the masochism immersion train. Such growth bonuses piss on the established growth times, which makes dinos more meaningless, and also its not fucking fun at all to have to minmax your growth in a way. It was advertised as "you will have potential for much faster growth, but will also have much slower growth if you have a bad diet". Which is another insanely baffling statement, because if you wouldve seen this idea in practice for more than 5 minutes you would've realize that it is literally impossible to get a bad diet now, better yet a bad diet even close to -300%, as you would've died of starvation long before then, a single symbol will get you to +100%, just existing gives you a great diet usually, so i have no clue why this update was falsely advertised as "growth has higher bonuses and greater losses" when it has nothing but bonuses that are also extremely unfun to obtain, and again the entire system is less fun than just being able to eat food that you find normally. Maybe it is possible but I have not had it happen to me in my over 100 hours since the update. maybe it can happen to herbivores, which by the way, have the worst food situation. You are locked into being in patrol zones, migration zones can have food although it is not guaranteed, food DOESN'T SPAWN outside of zones for some insane reason. If i can try to compute the reason for such a brain damaged decision, it was probably to prevent afking and to make players 'run into each other'. But you will afk at patrol zones once you are at max food, so you didn't prevent afking, you just made herbivores literally locked to certain parts of the map when they are growing and making them unable to go where they want. but hey I guess we prevented players from being able to fall asleep while playing, now they have to check in every 30 minutes instead, and by doing so you killed every ounce of enjoyment that I once had in the herbivore class. what a win. I can see the attempt at massing players that the diet system was, 'go to certain areas do certain things' but it doesn't pan out like that, you can't 'travel for exotic plants' like advertised as food doesn't spawn outside of patrol zones, the locations for creatures are meaningless for carnivores, and the whole thing just doesn't pan out. Its so unsatisfying and is one of the few killers of the game. It sounds better on a piece of paper than in practice, which is evrimas entire thing. If you cant make something better than the default which is just normal eating, then don't change it. Let me just insert here that ai literally doesn't spawn and I have seen a few deer in my many recent hours, combined with the insane food drain makes for an amazingly fun experience where you can die to rng twice in a row because fuck you. Literally never happened in legacy as AI would always have a chance to spawn on a player with low hunger no matter what.

The plans for ai spawns are even worse, ai is going to spawn in areas with low amounts of players, and not in areas with high amounts of players, that is a quote from dondi from the summit stream. Where do I even begin. A hunger calculation hasn't been mentioned, when lack of suitable prey + hunger is literally the reason AI should exist in the first place. Also 'amount of players' doesn't factor in whether or not those players are suitable prey, you could be a juvenile herrerasaurus starving because you have 5 minutes of hunger total and everyone in the cel could be larger and unable to be hunted, in this case well theres more players so ai doesn't spawn. This is another instance of where they could've done nothing and it would've been better, infact leaving it how it was in legacy is literally the only viable solution. Make ai spawn on you when you are hungry. That is fucking it. That is all it needs. More variables and extra bullshit for the sake of it has ruined the game in every other area and continues to do so here. The lack of any ai ever makes playing the game abysmal at times, and I have basically had to live fast and die hard and stick to south plains river for almost every carnivore life because I know there will be people there.

To get back to an earlier point, and this is probably the most depressing gripe for me; It involves the context of why migration zones try to get people to run into each other, that is an issue that has been invented by the games own errors. It's the hyper dense jungles and total lack of even slight care for player visibility. but hey, it looks like real life i guess! That's what you call visuals made by morons. It is impossible to run into people in many circumstances, and the game is currently more hotspot heavy than it ever has been, i mean you literally need them to survive at times so that is definitely a causal factor. In V3 you could see everyone within reason, and the enviroment was more immersive while also not having blinding amounts of foliage.

Another massive issue is the way in which the roster was implemented. Instead of adding a single small, mid tier, psuedo apex, apex, and then filling it in. We are getting a random selection of what feels like every single small dino, but still leaving many out so its not in order, but also randomly getting stegosaurus and deinosuchus which have nothing to contest them even though that is not the actual plan for balance. This is the biggest hinderance to the game. I believe the roster count currently could have mirrored the legacy roster by now, and I say this because the legacy roster is planned, not because I am principally attached to said roster. The ecosystem just feels like shit and it didn't have to be this way, its just saddening, the game was so much more unfun than it had to be for every year until the ecosystem feels right (still ongoing) and borderline unplayable because the average weight of a dinosaur is 200 pounds and the apex is ceratosaurus, which would be a black sheep mid tier if we had the actual roster. I do not get it, before evrima released it was advertised that the important dinos would be added first like i suggested, but they went back on this for no reason and opted for the worst possible roster order ever to make the game as unfun as possible. I don't really see how anyone could defend this, I also do not know of any possible justification.

Combat: Only area where evrima is good, the cooldown based combat is nice. Having to bait attacks and such adds strategy. It'd be nice if the dinosaurs didn't teleport though.

Evrima also just looks worse than legacy aswell, probably my hottest take. It does the cancerous blue rimlight on every model to mimic enviromental lighting and that shit makes my eyes bleed in every game I see it in, modern graphics is just aids in general to me. Legacy was more immersive, something about the visuals were so special. Evrima night vision is complete dogshit, with some dinos being inoperable at certain times in the night. Green > blue. The new high contrast blue ui scheme they threatened to change it to, jesus. I hope that never comes. Actual eye cancer designed by a monkey that hates humans. Also in legacy you also 'felt your size', you really don't in evrima. You do compared to path of titans which has literally no feel of scale AT ALL.

TLDR: legacy fun evrima not

Slow development time really isn't a large piece of the suckage, and to largely mention so would be like me writing a paper on how hitler was bad and adding a passage about him not feeding his dog right after I said he did the holocaust. The issues brought up here are due to the continued missteps in development and not because I can't play as protoceratops and titanoboa, however much I might want to. Although the more experience I gain in game development the more confused I am at how long playables take (troodon took over 2 years). I am failing to see how 'bad management' can get you to entire classes of dinosaurs missing 5 years in. Guess theyre just slow. I mean it has happened before where a lot of man-hours go into a game and nothing happens, that is often a product of technical debt and some modern game studios drowning in complexity, I played battlefield 2042 when it came out after all. Its also a consequence of needlessly making your game look like real life and not even attempting any interesting visuals. I guess its just a neil degrasse tyson universe doesnt care about your feelings moment lol, nothing I can do about it.

To put a close to my doctorate thesis on how a video game sucks, I don't say this in hopes of any of this being changed because it won't be, the reality is what I find fun and what Dondi finds fun are different and that's the end of it. It just stings a bit more because this game used to be really fun, I've played it since 2015 and I am just really attached I guess, and there is a certain threshold for me to where a thought will be so prevalent in my mind that I need to get it on paper somewhere, but im not too bothered by all this, my main thing isnt being a gamer. In general I don't think the devs should bend the knee to public opinion, being a gamedev myself I have come to find it a bit commendable how dondi 'sticks to his principles' and executes on small fractions of his vision across decades because he cant be fucking asked to hire people or learn how to program himself- *executes on his vision however bad it may be. If i had finally made my dream game and I had a bunch of people telling me to change it into how they like I would go insane pretty quickly. That statement was not in an attempt to invalidate future criticisms or lighten my own, I merely make the statement because what I have said goes a bit beyond things that could be easily worked on, there are issues at the games core that will never be changed that I have an issue with, and there really is no solution other than to move on. I'm still gonna have my cathartic rant while it's all still fresh in my mind though. May be a fresh perspective for some lost soul out there. I am usually in the camp of 'if you dont like something anymore dont pollute the community with negativity, just leave, and let the normies who like it through', but hey this is a one time affair for me I guess lol. My criticisms still stand on their own regardless.