How is this game so far?

[Eppleson 0]

I just paid for the shadow tier for the pre-alpha today. After searching the forums it seems like lock down is manual and happens once a day or so. So in the mean time I thought I'd see from the community how the game is. Is the game difficult to go through? I read something about perma death and no saves. Also that it's more of an adult game so I was curious as to overall difficulty. Sounds and looks like a great game so far from what I've read/seen.

[SyAlmans 0]

Difficulty is not too bad (yet) as long as you're either good at combat or run like a coward/stealth to avoid detection. The biggest learning curve is discovering what helps you fit in and how close to the line you can get utilizing certain items before you risk serious damage to yourself. (And incidentally, no matter how good you are at combat you are very unlikely to survive trying to take on more than, say, three people at once unless you have a LOT of healing items.)

 

The resource gathering is a dice-roll; there are certain items that make blending in or breaking and entering a lot easier, but you won't always find all the components to make them. The current build has only three islands compared to the usual five because Compulsion fine-tuned it for the demo they presented, so the world's a little small at the moment, but each biome provides different resources. Only one area has clean water, for example.

 

Death is indeed permanent (though you can continue from a save as long as you haven't died), but the world is procedurally generated so it's actually not that annoying; different events and landmarks spawn in different worlds.