Well, I watched the dev stream off and on and it was a lot of wasted time, unfortunately. You would think they'd take the time to test things before going live rather than waste over an hour of everyone's time. Not even much was shown that was really worth seeing. Here are my takeaways:
- The new storage chests looked good and upgrading the chests is nice, I suppose. Though it seems just a way to use forged iron and forged steel for no real gain besides having fewer chests.
- The assassin's armor looked really good, though the cloak clips even when standing still. You'd at least expect clipping to be fixed when standing still, if nothing else. And considering this is the full set they showed, you shouldn't even see clipping. Clipping's usually what you get when mixing items that weren't properly animated. But when it's a full set that clips? That's pretty bad. The suit outfit (I forget the name) was kind of okay. And the enforcer armor looked really horrible. I hope at least one of the heavy armors actually looks decent since I prefer heavy armor.
- The update the the tutorial/journal is a good improvement for new players. Not sure how much it'll benefit anyone else besides some extra experience and whatever rewards you get for each part, but it's still a good improvement.
- The changes to the dew collector will make a lot of people happier, even if it doesn't change how you can get water. At least you don't need filters to craft the basic version, which will give you murky water. And mods to make that into clean water, increase speed, and increase capacity to 6 per collector... that's good for those who use the dew collectors.
- Unspecified balancing to the trader quest rewards so you aren't outpacing crafting as quickly with quest rewards is probably good, though they didn't give any actual details and what they consider balanced could still be way off.
- Animations for movements are a nice improvement and seeing where other players are looking can be helpful. Walking backwards looked a bit strange, though. The character leaned way back when walking backwards. If someone really leaned back that much when walking backwards, they'd most likely fall over backwards.
- There's apparently a "look at" animation when you're near stuff so that your character will turn their head to look at someone coming... I didn't see them show it off but might have missed it. It is something that works in some games... but usually in games that are 3rd person as an indication that there's something interesting in that direction. For 1st person, it seems odd. But they claim it is interesting. Not sure if your character's 1st person view will actually turn without your input to look at things. Hopefully not. Hopefully this feature is only something you see other people doing and doesn't actually affect any person's view. Still, that is a very limited feature in that case. Seems like wasted effort for a 1st person game.
- Cotton and hops art was improved... not really a big deal. It isn't like you're looking at those close up very often. I'd rather see other things get art improvements, such as trees. At least those you pay attention to and see more often.
- No changes to storage chests as far as being able to craft from the chests or have multiple people using the same chest at the same time. Not really surprising and it was stated that multiple people to use the same chest at the same time will not happen at all. Nothing said about whether crafting from chests has any chance of ever happening.
- 4x4 gets 4 seats by default and upgrades to 6. Motorcycle upgrades to 2. And I believe they said gyro upgrades to 4.
- Crossplay, as has been already posted on the forum, will not be available initially. The new info given is that it's working already and that the question about how or if it will happen comes down to a bunch of red tape certification processes with Microsoft and Sony. For initial release, it will only be 4 player co-op on hosted locally for console players.
- Graphics have a fade in/out instead of popping in, which will make things look a lot smoother. That's going to probably make the game look a lot better, especially on slower computers.
That's all I can think of right now. Again, I just watched off and on because of all the wasted time, so there may have been some other things that were worthwhile that I missed. If anyone has any other interesting items that I missed, please share. I doubt I'll waste my time on watching the VOD. All said, the dev stream was pretty lackluster and if I was deciding whether or not I was interested in the update based solely on that, I would not be impressed. They like to have fun in the streams and there's nothing really wrong with that but they really should make at least some effort to make these streams actually worthwhile to people. They are already late at night and then wasting so much time in them just joking around and trying to figure out sound and whatever else is kind of a slap in their viewers' faces.