Pectinodon

So Saurian has released a new update. At first glance, not too much added. A few toggles basically. Beyond interesting wind effects on plants, there is also a auto-walk toggle, a shadow culling toggle, and a dynamic spawn toggle.

Personally, all of these additions are useful and add something to the game, which is perfect. The wind effect is noticeable, but not too violent, so you can see the plants moving around just enough to understand they are not static models, and with the added dynamism in sound, you can feel the plants and the trees bending in the wind, as audio of leaves, twigs and trunks bend around. This helps a lot with ambience. Other toggles surely do help in minimizing performance issues, which have been a bugger for a lot of players, including myself, so these also help.

The addition of the auto-walk toggle became surprisingly more useful than I expected. No longer you need to keep pressing W to walk. You can just press T and you activate the auto-walk toggle. This is extremelly useful, specially when you are walking around without doing much, following your parents, siblings and/or herd members, with only slight adjustements required to change your route when needed. This really does also help for you to specify a route for you to auto-walk, and that allows you to keep walking while moving your camera around to see your surroundings, so that is also very cool, specially when you have to be on the lookout for predators. And predators, funnily enough, are much more of a danger now with this patch.

For the better or worse, the most striking feature of this patch is, by far, the dynamic spawn system. The dynamic spawn system can be toggled off if you want, but I really think it adds something to the game. Its hard to judge which types of AI spawns are "normal", in the sense they aren't part of this dynamism, and which ones are dynamic (i.e. not very common and very specific that it would be complicated to reproduce in normal spawning conditions). However, you can take some guesses, and I personally saw my gameplay become even more challenging (for the better). Predators appeared with more frequency, however not in a way that affects the gameplay in a heavy way. It just means you have to be on a more attentive lookout, and I personally find this slightly more stressing and makes your survival, specially as a young animal, much more exciting. As a young Dakotaraptor you have to be on the lookout for other raptors that might show up. I was surprised that my first gameplay in this patch ended up with me being killed by a juvenile Dakotaraptor. As a young Triceratops I was shocked on how I was peacefully grazing with my parents when I turn the camera around and I am quickly engulfed by the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus, dying in the moment, after a successful ambush made by the theropod. You can really observe how the environment responds to you with much more attention, and that is very satisfying for a player. On top of that, however, dynamic spawn systems are not just based on the frequency of predators but also on certain animal combinations that wouldn't occur so easily naturally. Some of these animal combinations aren't easy to discern from naturally made combinations, but sometimes they are quite obvious. For instance, as a young Triceratops, while walking along with my herd, I was delighted to see a rare occurance of a subadult Dakotaraptor hunting a Pectinodon. Just these small hints of a living environment makes the gameplay much more worth it, and the added challenge gives you yet another stronger motivation to keep moving forward in your growth into adulthood. So overall, this patch is a clear step in the right direction for the game.

Saurian has released a new update. I recently had the opportunity of trying out the patch 2.1, even though I haven't played too much of it. In part, that was responsible for a bug that made a normal gameplay impossible, but after notifying the developers, an hotfix was later made and the bug in question was fixed, and I can now play it properly. The disadvantages of EA.

However, from the little I experienced I took a little bit of a superficial exploration of the things that were added in the next patch. I can't say all of them necessarily improve the game, but they don't show themselves as outright downgrades. The most notable feature of change, in this new patch, was the change in the scent system. The change in the scent system was sufficiently radical. Instead of covering the landscape with colorful clouds, the scent system is instead manifested by just a few faint bright particles that emanate from a determined source. This makes scent more discrete and less visually crowded when in scent mode. I like the inclusion of footprints, droppings and blood decals as indicatives of the presence of animals, so even without the scent mode on, you can still guess their presence. The system now allows for scent tracking, turning the bright white particles into a bright blue. So, I personally feel this new scent system adds up to more realism, and the difficulties it presents, when compared to the old system, are great to serve that same realism. Animals can have a good sense of smell, but usually they just feel small hints of scent, that suggest the presence of an animal. However, I believe that, visually, the scent particles could get an amplification in terms of density. More particles emanating from a fresh source would be a good thing, because at a far away distance it gets a bit complicated to see them, and specially in the gameplays where the resolution is low (in my case I put my resolution to the lows, as my computer can't withstand the graphics at its max). So I would like to see the scent system getting a rework to accomodate this, but they are in the right track (no pun intended).

The weather system was also updated. Although I haven't had enough hours of gameplay to get a good sense on its manifestation, I did noticed that the weather is somewhat more dynamic, and that is very great. The soundscape has also changed, if you are attentive, and that gives a good small hint of immersion into the game. A new AI, Pectinodon, was added, though unfortunetly I haven't found any in my gameplays, maybe next time. Wounds in animals were also added. Personally I think that's a cool feature, not a very necessary feature, if you ask me, but it helps give realism and a sense of character to a certain animal. A dead one will surely be covered in blood, and an injured one will have wound markings on where it was attacked. For the time being, wounds have only proved to be an aesthetic complement, and I don't mind it.

Another notes about the gameplay that I would like to mention, pertain specifically to Dakotaraptor. As far as I am aware, pretty much no gameplay mechanic for Triceratops was compromised with this update, but in the case of Dakotaraptor it was. Given the scent system is different now, tracking prey is more complicated. You can still see the blue outline of small animals however. The spawning rate for small animals has also changed, making hunting more difficult. In my own take, it is an improvement, because hunting as a Dakotaraptor was super easy, but by reducing the abundance of small prey, it makes hunting as a young raptor, more challenging. Special mention to the change in spawning rate of Didelphodon, as of now, I don't recall having seen any after this patch, having relied myself mostly on the Chamops, which are more agile and less easy to catch.