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My Early Access Thoughts on "Lay of the Land"

 I had intended for this to be my final thoughts on Assassin's Creed: Unity, after beating the main questline and a large chunk of the side content. However, the last mission of the main storyline has sufficiently whooped my ass up until now - it is 12:15 in the morning on Saturday, and I have yet to beat the game. In light of this, I couldn't very well *delay* my scheduled post...so I came up with a new post idea. 

This is a collection of my early, early thoughts on Lay of the Land - a voxel-based survival game, designed in the same vein as Minecraft but with a focus on greater build detail. It is in Early Access, release number 0.8.0 at the time of writing this, and I have a monthly subscription to the developer's Patreon which gives access to updates and new builds. The game has very little tutorialization, meaning that the learning process has been a mix of religiously checking the crafting recipes and following my gut. Let's get started.

Lay of the Land (which I'll be referring to going forward as LOTL) is currently Minecraft but with more mechanical depth and less tutorialization. I have no clue how most of this game's mechanics work at the moment, and that's entirely because I have yet to encounter things like planting or cooking or dungeon-crawling. My present mission is to simply get the damn kiln working so that I can make glass, but that alone has posed an issue when I have no clue what material I need to activate it. A torch? Didn't work when I tried to place it in the slot. Flint? Maybe, but I couldn't find a piece before writing this post. I love how little the game teaches me because it pushes me to learn, yet when this is compounded by a severe lack of community-banked knowledge outside of the Discord server, it can potentially turn simple problems into serious pain points. The plus side to this is that finding help will become easier as the game nears release, and especially once it has entered the public space and is widely available.

The building process in this game is much more powerful in the early game compared to that of Minecraft, which gets more detailed with the inclusion of redstone and half blocks and such. You can create various shapes out of the building resources at your disposal, including cubes and cylinders and so on, or you can create custom prefabs. Saving a building design or architectural feature, like a window or arch or staircase, yields a custom prefab that can be reproduced with ease. These can also be imported and exported, encouraging the formation of a prefab marketplace that could become a whole new aspect of the game's community if nurtured properly.

There's a lot I have yet to experience, but one aspect I'm specifically avoiding is combat. I want to prevent combat for as long as possible, solely because the game doesn't yet have controller support. I am a controller guy, and this game only supports mouse and keyboard, which means that I'm not only learning a new game with very little documentation: I'm learning how to play a game with an entirely different input scheme than what I'm used to. The challenges this game presents, though often imposed by my own inexperience, are intoxicating nonetheless.

I've got a lot more to say about this game, but I'd like to save that for a dedicated review. There's no real plot, so the review will just come when I feel like I've learned enough about the current build to give coherent thoughts on it. My next post will be the final thoughts on AC: Unity, and my expectations for Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. Stay tuned for that to drop on Wednesday, at 6:00 AM. Have a good day, y'all!

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