Scavengers
PC, PS4, Xbox one
Very few of us have come out of the maelstrom of the past year looking good. But Scavengers,a Halo Warzonestyle multiplayer showdown in which the frigid environment is just as much a threat as the other teams, is a rare exception: our latest hands-on reveals a game much improved from a promising, but also rather generic-looking, E3 2019 demo.
It’s been a year of growth all round for Scavengers and its makers, in a very literal sense. The team’s nearly doubled in size over the past year to a total of 45 people. “Our intention was always to build a much larger experience,” says Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment, and former studio head of 343 Industries. “We knew we had to build it slowly over time – both from a content standpoint with our team, but also in getting our systems to work at the larger player count. Because as you scale player count, you also scale AI count. So we have 60 players and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400 to 500 active AI at any given time within a session.”
The map (littered with scavengable resources with which to craft shields as you level up through completing objectives and encounters, and eventually your chosen hero’s unique weapon) is now three times the size of the original iteration, due to feedback regarding PvP encounters being too frequent. That change, Holmes and head of production Mary Olson tell us, led to the inevitable addition of vehicles, which we find are often worth sinking scrap into. This is a game that is all about the ever-shifting tactical cadence of advancing and retreating, after all, and so ease of movement and repositioning is key.
A Titanfall-esque slide is a welcome addition too, then, hurling ourselves as we do down snowy hills and valleys while being chased by inclement weather, gurgling mutants or bloodthirsty Twitch streamers. “What we’re trying to do is provide you with a variety of different strategic approaches, and allow you to sort of approach this almost like a boardgame,” Holmes says (his work-fromhome setup also hosts a staggering collection of tabletop games). “If you look at the map, you’ll see all these different opportunities that you can respond to, different ways that you can
“What we’re trying to do is provide you with a variety of different strategic approaches”
pursue victory: you’re going for that podium, or trying to survive and discover salvage items to move your account progress forward. And you can look at that board, look at the map, you could employ different strategies towards those goals. And then you’re constantly being asked to respond to a dynamic world that is different each time you play.”
The result is that we’re constantly kept on our toes, even in this much larger locale
(somewhat to the devs’ consternation, we suspect, as experienced playtesters seek out conflict with especial gusto). This is a world full of real and thrilling threats, and even when things go wrong it’s amusing to watch the chaos play out. A routine clearing of a camp of AI grunts turns into a desperate gunfight, a random roaming pocket of storm pushing other players our way. The first three-person team arrives on foot, taking down Holmes, who waits to respawn as we try to hold off AI nasties with EMP blasts and crack SMG shots into the more unpredictable human opponents. But he breaks out in a howl of horrified laughter as he tries to warn of another problem – one we don’t pick up on until a hovership crashes in through the top of our screen, and its human occupants fan out to pick us all off.
The systems have taken plenty of iteration and balancing; this is Scavengers’ eighth playtest ahead of release early next year, in fact. But it’s borne out in just a few short rounds, each one playing out very differently depending on what goals we have, the route we map, and the varying threats drifting into our vicinity. It goes to show that no matter how innocuous something may seem, it’s the 90 per cent of the iceberg beneath the surface where the real work lies – and its icy depths are now more apparent than ever.