I can’t speak for Pois0n, but I feel much the same as him. I still bop in from time to time to see if it’s more playable yet, but I feel like it’s stagnated. That being said, I do recognize that the game is actively being developed and that things take a lot of time.
Right now, the most functional thing I see in making the game fun is the prestige system because it gets people involved and there are metrics for it. Other aspects of the game lack things that show progress. IE, if your character is level 1 or level 50 they look the same. If you’ve built a ton, explored a ton, killed a ton, or done any other number of things, there’s nothing to show for it that is as effective as prestige (and obviously builds).
The skills are somewhat rewarding as it makes a lot of aspects of the game easier, but it currently feels so hard to begin with that they just seem cumbersome. Comparing it to a lot of other similar games, you start out at a great disadvantage and have to level quite a bit before you feel like you’re just on a normal starting plane.
The aspects that I like lack progressive feeling, but not value. That feeling part is the key, because how the game makes me feel is what keeps me playing. I love running into random creatures, but it doesn’t take long to see everything, especially on a starter world which is where I feel I have to spend a good chunk of time before being able to explore distant worlds. You don’t have to make a lot of new models and change things up that much if there are unique-ish spawns (like elites and rares in WoW). What I feel like those unique spawns did is take a really boring thing (like grinding kills for the current quests) and add some excitement to it by knowing after you’ve killed something that a unique version of that thing could spawn in that area and drop something epic.
Then there are the drops. It is exciting for the first hour when you see the variety of drops, but there’s nothing that I’m feeling “Oooh, if I kill things for another hour, I’ll be able to do that!” I know that it’s not very practical for all creatures to drop items like hammers and things, but with the combination of how quickly things break, how many hits blocks take to harvest, how many resources tools take to make, how many different blocks there are, how many spaces we have in our inventory, the fact that it takes several levels of skill points to be able to mass craft, and the fact that you usually break tools and have to go back to your base to make more, the whole tool-durability-functionality curve is un-enjoyable at the onset. If there were chests, or abandoned huts, or just exposed tools lying on the ground/in caves it would help unburden the front end of that aspect.
Menu navigation. This one is a bit complicated, but I’ll use quests as an example. I know that means this is a specific example for all of my examples here, but it will just be easier. There’s nobody giving you the quests at the beginning, and that feels really unnatural. There has been some functionality added as to tracking various quests, etc., but it feels so clunky in the beginning. I spend as much time figuring out how to navigate the menus, find quests that I can actually do, and track them and then going back in after I’ve done them to be able to collect the reward (which, again, doesn’t come from anybody, so it’s a bit awkward as far as as story-line/adventure feeling goes) that I hate the quests in the beginning. I think that some automation added (just at the beginning until the basic functions/resources/leveling is done) would do wonders for making the start of the game more fluid. Make the automation an option for those who don’t like it.
I tried ignoring the quests and just playing the game like MC, but it’s not that playable because I compare it to MC. It’s soooo good in looks and music, and potential builds (that you can see by looking at other people’s stuff), but it feels impossible to get from where I am at as a beginner to where they are at at. It is also different enough in many ways that the controls don’t feel intuitive. I only noticed this after taking a long break and coming back. Sure, you can learn them. But stuff, especially combat, feels clunky.
lolz