SCAVENGERS
Battle royale meets survival game, to fight it out in the snow
Battle royale meets survival game, to fight it out in the snow
THE MAP ITSELF IS HOSTILE, WITH ROAMING BLIZZARDS AND THE OCCASIONAL BEAR
The first real surprise playing Scavengers is the map. I think I’ve got the measure of it, and then the captain of my three-person team – Midwinter’s head of production Mary Olson – mentions something I can’t see. I scroll the mouse wheel to realise I’ve been looking at a small fraction of the nine square kilometres of snow known as Cascade Springs.
This is a good thing, as it turns out, because it puts more distance between us and the other players stalking the tundra. Looked at one way, Scavengers is a battle royale: there’s a big map, a shrinking circle, and 60 players trying to scrape together gear and eliminate the competition. But you can, just about, make it to victory without killing a single other person. That’s certainly Olson’s preferred approach. At the first sound of an approaching engine, or the red minimap dots that indicate enemy fire, she encourages us to flee like a ledge-dangling Gandalf.
Not that the match passes without bloodshed, however – because players aren’t the only threat you need to be worrying about when having a go at Scavengers. The map itself is hostile, with freezing temperatures, roaming blizzards and the occasional bear mauling.
And then there are the hundreds of AI-controlled baddies you’re sharing it with, split into two factions: the Outlanders, who provide more than enough gun battles for my first outing, and the grotesquely mutated Scourge.
Both cluster around objective points, applied to the map randomly at the start of each match. Find one, fight back the local mobs and you’ll be rewarded with scrap for crafting weapons and upgrades, or the data point canisters that decide each game’s winner, or pieces of salvage that – as long as you survive – can be exchanged for longer-term unlocks. It’s enough to keep you busy even if you dodge your fellow players, and Midwinter Entertainment is hoping this will help attract players averse to the bloodbath of a battle royale.
CYBERJUNK
Like, for example, Olson: “I’m probably in that player category that is the big question for everyone: can a player who prefers PvE play this game, have fun and be successful?” Midwinter is confident it can make a satisfying competitive shooter, but blending it with something more akin to a survival game? That’s something the studio is still working on as the game heads into a closed beta.
It’s already led to a major reinvention of Scavengers’ endgame, where players rush to a dropship for evacuation. In early playtests, this was a single, tiny point on that enormous map. “And the second you entered it, you were safe,” Olson explains. But that didn’t quite work, which brought Midwinter to the current approach: a large arena, and a one-minute countdown. When it reaches zero, the dropship at the centre takes off, and every team with a representative aboard gets to keep their spoils.
This means each game can have multiple winners. Following Olson’s lead, I hide under one of the ship’s ramps until the last second, then break cover and I hop on board. Victory! Of a sort. But if you can’t accept being halfway down the scoreboard as a win, then there’s plenty of reason to turn this into a bloodbath. When players die, they drop their data points in the snow, which also happen to decide who sits at the top of the table.
It’s like a psychological test for what kind of player you are deep down. In my case, a conflict-avoidant coward who’s happy in their little corner of the map. But hey, that means I’m exactly the person Scavengers is trying to invite in.