Throwing in my 2 cents:
Going to have to echo most of the posts already on here, making Em8er into an "open-world survival crafting base-building mecha kaiju shooter" game is probably not going to turn out well. Also, that buzzword description is very deliberate: the mecha/kaiju/shooter aspects now seem to be some of the least important aspects of the game, based on the last livestream. It really seems like the new vision has transition the game to wanting to be Valheim/No Man's Sky/Satisfactory with big monsters.
To go more in depth on a few things:
1. Not everyone enjoys crafting. Forcing that to be mandatory for people that don't want to do it, especially right at the very, very start of the game, is going to turn a LOT of people off.
2. In addition to the above, considering how many games are out there with good crafting/base building there are - and, more importantly, how there are so, so, SO many more games with BAD crafting/base building - if Em8er isn't in the top 5-10% of quality, you're pretty much guaranteeing that the game will fail. Even if Em8ers systems were merely on-par with a lot of what is currently out there, it will be seen negatively - even more so, since the modding support to fix a lot of issue is likely to be very minimal.
3. The livestream detailed a bit on how Grummz wants the base building to save some sort of "save" or "blueprint" feature, that will allow people to share/sell designs. Assuming that the base building aspects continues, there should be ABSOLUTELY ZERO option to sell designs. Sharing is fine, selling is a HUGE no. This will cause the first few people that have good designs to be the ONLY ones that are ever sold/purchased, and will cause a massive gap in the economy. In addition to this fact, you would also need to implement some sort of marketplace for these designs, which is just going to be scope creep. Let people share designs, and people can make third-party websites/discords/whatever to organize and do so, but there should be NO official way to make in-game money through this kind of thing.
4. Player housing is appreciated in most MMOs, however, it should not be a mandatory things. The current vision for claimstakes seems to be going in this direction. It is nice that everyone can get one immediately, but it should NOT be the very first thing that you do in the game. Having to build up a base from nothing before you can get into the action is going to turn a lot of people off.
5. During the livestream, Grummz mentioned that additional areas of the game would be added on as DLC. I don't know if he envisions those to be paid DLC or not, but if so, that's likely going to be a bad idea. Sectioning playable areas of the game off as paid DLC is going to ruin it for a lot of players. If they aren't going to be paid content, then just call them Updates, not DLC. A LOT of people hate DLC whether paid or not - but they really like free Updates.
6. My thoughts on how the game should start/how the kickstarter vertical slice should be:
- Create your character, and start on some sort of communal space station newbie area.
- Get your first quest, where you are notified that a team on the ground with a Thumper has requested support from attacking Tsi-hu. You get issued a basic light frame, rifle, and melee weapon, then drop down to the planet.
- The tutorial fight is a small-scale fight, 1-10 players per instance, with the difficultly scaling up as more players join (so in the future, it could be done with only a single person, as fewer new players join the game, or during off-hours).
- Once that fight ends, you get taken back up to the space station. This is where the tutorial for the game itself can split off for what you get to experience during the kickstarter. For the real game intro, you can go more into various tutorial aspects; very basic crafting aboard the space station; basic tutorial missions to go into different types of combat; basic gathering missions for crafting materials; etc.
- For kickstarter, you need to get people back into the action. The next tutorial quest should be a fight against a kaiju. However, your basic tutorial light frame isn't going to do much good, so Gatestrider command issues you a temporary medium frame for the kaiju assault. You get to pick from a 3-4 different types of frames (i.e. melee-focused, assault weapon-focused, sniper-focused, heavy weapon-focused), then your dropship takes you into combat. As you drop into the fight itself, there should be a small cutscene where the kaiju attacks and damages your dropship (but doesn't destroy it completely).
- This fight should be much larger, something like 20-50 players plus NPCs (the NPCs can be used for scaling, so players can still complete the fight during off-hours). At the end of the fight, as the kaiju is dying, there is another cutscene where it performs one final attack that hits you, and completely destroys your medium frame.
- Once the fight ends, you call your dropship. The damage to it makes it so you aren't able to fly off-planet, meaning you can't return immediately to the space station. Instead, you have to pick a spot to make a small personal "base" on the planet. This section should be a VERY basic look into base building - you could heavily reference No Man's Sky intro, but I would recommend it be dumbed down even more. You get your personal mining drill out of your dropship, mine a few materials, make some sort of basic fabricator, which allows you to make the repair parts for your engines to get you back off planet and to the space station.
- Once you are done with that and back on the space station, you then have a few options, which can be completed as much as you want, in a demo fashion: the tutorial Thumper encounter, a bigger Thumper encounter for more people, the kaiju fight, and some intro crafting. Both the tutorial Thumper encounter and kaiju fight should throw players into the same fights as earlier (so there is a continuous stream of players in them), just without the extra tutorial fluff.
This would not only allow people to get into the action immediately, but it puts the parts that are going to turn a lot of players off of the game - the crafting/base building aspects - as almost optional. They are still there, and you will be able to get a glimpse of how important they are in the grand scheme of things, but outside of the short repair-your-ship tutorial, all other crafting is completely optional, and should be a secondary objective of the game.
