Draft:The Forever Winter

The Forever Winter

The Forever Winter is an early access third person shooter survival game being developed by Fun Dog Studios for the PC on Steam. The gameplay revolves around the player, or a group of up to 4 players, playing as scavengers that must loot, hide, and kill in a number of hostile war zone between geopolitical superpowers to survive in a "terrifying and gargantuan war machines locked in a never-ending conflict".

Gameplay

General Information

The Forever Winter is a purely PvE third person looter shooter game with no PvP elements. Players can choose to either play solo or co-op with up to 3 additional players. Players play as a variety of Scavs, civilian survivors in a war torn apocalyptic world of mankind's own making, with 5 different classes to choose from and a 6th soon to be released. These classes offer a variety of benefits, including but not limited to the ability to equip new weapons, increased movement speed, increased carrying capacity, and better accuracy with specific weapons. Unlike many co-op games, The Forever Winter doesn't impose restrictions on how many of the same class can be in a party at any given moment, allowing players to approach the game as they desire. Players use their their wits and their gear to dive into dangerous landscapes filled with hostile armies of AI controlled enemies, and complete quests for the very factions they're trying to maneuver around. At all times there are at least 2 unique military factions present, with said factions always being engaged in combat with each other. Players must carefully strike a balance between avoiding drawing too much attention to themselves and looting supplies, weapons, components and other valuables off both the corpses of soldiers and massive mechs and the battlefield itself. Once the player has filled their pack without losing their life, they must make their way to an extraction point in order to leave the map and return home safely. This loop of choosing gear to bring, venturing into a hostile wasteland for scraps, and then returning home safely is the main gameplay loop of The Forever Winter. The quests currently available to the player (as of October 31st, 2024), revolve around exploring specific maps, killing certain enemy types or troops of specific factions, and bringing back specific items from the battlefields.

Progression

The major forms of progression are Water, Reputation and Prestige.

Water

Water is the biggest progression pathway and limiting element of The Forever Winter, and is a resource which counts down in real time. As players complete quests or bring back barrels of water from the battlefields, their base, known as The Innards, gains more and more water. As certain amounts of water are reached and maintained, new merchants are unlocked within The Innards which allow the player to further customize their loadouts and arm themselves for future missions. However, players must either stockpile water or play fairly consistently to avoid losing water, as each barrel of water only lasts 24 real life hours. This timer ticks down even when players are logged off and aren't playing the game. Reaching 0 water causes water thieves to appear in The Innards. If these water thieves aren't fought off, the player will lose the loot and gear they have collected, but not their currency.

Reputation

Reputation in The Forever Winter is fairly standard, and is similar to most other games that use it. Merchants within the Innards have various opinions about the player, represented as Reputation levels, informed by which sides the player favors with quest completions as well as which foes they've slain on the battlefield. Merchants with a higher reputation score give the player discounts on purchases and offer new items, making certain weapons and items more accessible or available when they weren't previously. Inversely, merchants with negative reputation scores up-charge the player and offer none of the items from higher reputation levels. Players can raise their reputation levels with merchants by completing quests for their respective faction or by selling items to them, and lose reputation by killing enemies from the same faction as the respective merchant.

Class Prestige

Class Prestige is the long term progression system of The Forever Winter. Like many prestige systems from other games, prestiging is done by resetting a class after a player has gained enough EXP. The freshly reset class will have none none of its perks unlocked and its EXP reset to 0, but will permanently gain buffs in the form of increased movement speed and health and a new higher maximum EXP cap which allows players to acquire more and more perks to augment their gameplay.

Synopsis

Setting

The Forever Winter is set in a theoretical future where the earth has been ravaged by war machines of mankind’s own making. Giant super intelligences command armies of human and artificial soldiers in a never ending war against each other, developing and deploying gruesome creations and tactics with each passing day. The purpose of this war was lost long ago, and most of civilization lies in ruins. Most of what remains only exists to fuel the endless industrial war machines of the surviving factions. Food and water are a scarce resource, a fact which pressures scavengers, simply called Scavs, to brave the fields of war in an attempt to loot valuable and essential items from the endlessly warring armies. While not out risking their life, Scavs seem to mostly hide underground in safe havens where the armies can’t easily reach. At the moment little else is known about the setting, and much of the world building of The Forever Winter is still in progress.

The Scavengers

The scavengers serve as the single truly friendly faction to the player in The Forever Winter. The faction is said to be made up of civilian survivors, although there are likely at least a few Scavs that fled a life of war to hide away. The Scavengers primarily live underground deep in the earth where the wars raging above can't reach them. The primary territory held by the Scavengers is The Innards, a large underground settlement which serves as the player's home base. From what little lore is available, it's assumed that there are other settlements like The Innards buried underground elsewhere.

The only Scavenger aligned units that can be found out on the battlefields are hostages, which players can attempt to free if they can manage to cut down the military forces that guard them. Notably, these are currently the only units in the game that show a green friendly icon when pinged by a player, with all other units showing a hostile red icon instead.

Other Factions

There are 3 other factions beyond The Scavengers in The Forever Winter, known only as Eurasia, Euruska, and Europa. Each of these factions holds territory for which they are named after, with Eurasia occupying eastern and part of middle Asia, Euruska dominating Russia and other territories, and Europa controlling western Europe. In an interview with ScreenRant, Miles Williams, the CEO of Fun Dog studios, stated that they're meant to be "amalgam nation states". All 3 of these factions are highly militaristic, with their respective hostile units making up the entirety of the hostile forces players can encounter while out on the battlefield. Each faction has their own "military niche", making their units identifiable at a glance.

• Eurasia's units are focused on swarms and demonstrate advanced technological capabilities. Their most common units are cyborgs dropped from massive stealth wing inspired planes.
• Euruska's units are focused on armor and durability, making up for limited power and numbers with raw endurance. Their most common units are heavily armored foot soldiers armed with unmodified and somewhat inaccurate rifles.
• Europa's units are focused on damage output and accuracy, making them dangerous even in small numbers. Their most common units are medium armored soldiers equipped with high accuracy rifles.

Plot

There is currently no specific story or plot in The Forever Winter outside of the player character continuing their survival and completing quests, and the quests that are currently available are not tied to a particular narrative flow.

Development

The Forever Winter is currently being developed by Fun Dog Studios, a small company formed in 2022 primarily consisting of AAA game developers from varying other studios. The game was pushed into Early Access on September 24, 2024 , and has continued to receive a flurry of updates and patches. While there is no hard set 1.0 release date, Fun Dog Studios have stated on the game's official Steam page that they intend to try to fully release the game after 1 year of Early Access development. Due to the recency of the game's Early Access release and fledgling state, much of the game's features aren't implemented or polished yet, and design choices are still actively being made and remade.

As this is the first game being made by the studio, there is no existing track record for the company. To counteract this, Fun Dog Studios instead partially relies on their teammembers' affiliations with previous projects like Doom Eternal, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Mass Effect to lend themselves credibility. Notably the lead designer, Jeff Gregg, has worked as a lead designer for much larger game companies like EA, 2K Games, and Wargaming.

Marketing and Reception

Prior to the game's Early Access release, The Forever Winter was announced by IGN Entertainment via a gameplay video trailer on February 21st, 2024, and an additional cinematic trailer on May 2nd of that year.

The Forever Winter released to Early Access on steam on September 24th, 2024, receiving an average score of "Mostly Positive", reaching its highest rate of positive reviews per day on October 6th of that year. In total, the game currently has a little over 12,500 reviews on steam with 74% of them being positive. It's peak player count was a bit under 10,000 players, which it achieved a few days after it's launch day on September 28th, with that number dwindling to a little under 1,300 active players today.

PC Gamer wrote an article for the game prior to its official release as part of a run through with the studio's CEO, Miles Williams, praising the game's unique personality and boldness while still mentioning the hefty difficulty the game brings with it. Overall, PC Gamer felt that their playthrough "just scratched the surface" and that the editor who wrote the article, Fraser Brown, wanted to see more of what the game had to offer in the future.

Rock Paper Shotgun wrote its own article on The Forever Winter 2 days after it's Early Access release, criticizing the decision to release the game to the public so early in its development. The article points to the game's extreme lack of polish and overflowing amounts of buggy interactions and poor optimization issues as immersion breaking problems that drag the game down. The article also criticizes the game's use of a real time countdown for its water system, which has a tendency to push away casual players due to the brutal nature of real time mechanics. Overall, while they believe the game has potential, the article plainly lays bare Rock Paper Shotgun's opinions on games that release a little too early in development for an easily satisfying Early Access experience.