Scavengers
An exclusive hands-on with the multiplayer survival game
There are some intimidating enemy factions in Scavengers, a strange hybrid that’s part-survival game, partcompetitive shooter and partcooperative exploration game. There’s the Scourge, an alien horde that sprouts from the ground, and the Outlanders, a band of rogues hardened by an eternal winter. Neither is as powerful as a bear. It’s a single bear that finds our lowly group; four survivors shot down from a space station to explore an Earth claimed by decades of catastrophic climate change. It’s a single bear that chases us until we run into another group of players in a shootout with an Outlander camp. As the final blizzard moves in, and the extraction point is marked 500 meters away, it’s that single bear that leaves us for easier prey and cleans up a camp of both NPCs and live players while we scoop up some of their spoils and sprint to the space van.
I’d like to say we did it on purpose, but it was a happy accident, the result of overlapping AIs set free in a massive world and set alight with poor human judgement. It’s the kind of fun mess typically reserved for singleplayer open world games, but now a mess we made and experienced together.
As one of the first people to play Scavengers outside of Midwinter Entertainment, even in its very early state, you don’t need to squint too hard to see what the team is aiming for. Think of it like a match-based survival game where you, in a team of four, explore a massive, randomly generated winter wasteland scrounging for supplies, working towards a common goal with the other couple dozen players scattered about.
We could’ve, maybe should’ve, helped Team Bear Food. We wouldn’t have collected enough shards without their help, but in a stressful moment we saw an opportunity to take a bigger share of the credit for our unified goal and run. The team that makes it out with the most shards is declared the winner and given a larger helping of rewards. And the fewer people that make it out alive, the more you and your pals get. So can you blame us?
But if you take an adversarial approach, chances are you won’t have the manpower to gather enough resources before the final storm moves in and forces you to head back to space. The tension between choosing whether to help or hinder strangers is at the heart of Scavengers, and the stresses of surviving a perilous environment make it much more than a decision influenced by whether you’re in the mood for competition or cooperation.
Making camp
As the former creative director and studio head of the Halo series at 343 Industries, Josh Holmes knows how thrilling first-person combat is made. But as a founder and CEO of Midwinter, his goals for Scavengers are more nuanced than ever, even with a much smaller team.
“Our mission as a studio is the creation of togetherness, which is that feeling that you get when you work together to overcome big obstacles and accomplish great things,” Holmes tells me.
Halo5’ s Warzone mode is the most obvious point of comparison, and one Holmes invokes often. For the unfamiliar, it’s a 24-player mode in which taking out AI enemies is as important as keeping enemy players at bay. It’s possible to finish a match without bothering with other players. Coordination matters the most, and Holmes is carrying the same ideas into Scavengers’ help-or-hinder ethos.
Characters are divided into classes, and each come with unique abilities and weapons that you can improve over the course of a match, with enough salvage found in abandoned settlements and on enemy corpses. I tried out a character that
we saw an opportunity to take a bigger share of the credit for our unified goal
could deploy a bubble shield, and another that could place a campfire that didn’t just heal, but also warmed my team. Yeah, there are survival systems in there, too.
Holmes knows the stigma that comes with survival games. Babysitting meters, farming materials, constructing items from recipes—all that’s streamlined in Scavengers. All you need to pay attention to are your warmth and hunger, and both food and fire are plentiful so long as you’re willing to take on an enemy encampment or, if you’re desperate, take out another team for their supplies. Holmes sees those meters as important pressure points. “The survival mechanics are going to press upon you in a way that forces you to take advantage of the materials and options that are available to you.”
The intent is to push players into making tough decisions, to keep them moving, to make sure there’s never a state of absolute contentment. I’m told Scavengers is meant to be paced like a thriller, where players are always on edge, a game where uncomfortable silences punctuated by bursts of noise and violence (and bears) are the norm.
The importance of staying fed and warm tends to push players towards violence or cooperation with one another, but it’s not always enough. If DayZ is proof of anything, it shows that interesting and ambiguous social systems quickly devolve into shooting one another on sight.
It’s why Scavengers is being developed as a living game, to be updated regularly with drastic meta changes, which means daily, weekly, and seasonal incentives to play both aggressively and peacefully will lead to rewards of all types: Cosmetic, XP, and whatever else makes the final cut. Holmes and company make it clear that Scavengers will change often and as much as possible to best support the tenuous social relationships and systemic chaos that makes their project so compelling.
There will be big meta changes, too, according to founder and UX and art director Daryl Anselmo. “We’re talking fairly large scale, creative event-driven type stuff, “he says. Holmes drives it home: “We’re unafraid of change.” He explains, “For a live service to be really compelling, my opinion is you have to be willing to make those big changes and share them with the community.” Anselmo says that while the release notes will include the incremental, smallpercentile tweaks and changes to otherwise invisible systems, they want players to adapt to big changes. Scavengers is all about responding to change in a moment’s notice, so why not expand that to the beloved meta?
Weathering the storm
In my final match, an ally spots another team busy with a Scourge harvesting event, fighting off waves of fleshy enemies in order to get some shards. I let my team know, and we go on the offensive for no reason other than greed. Three go down without trouble, but the fourth gets away.
He stalks us throughout the match, following our tracks in the deep snow, taking potshots on occasion. My teammates tell me it’s Daniel, the animation guy. We never see where the shots are coming from, but they keep coming. I’m on edge, unnerved. Daniel, the animation guy, stalks his prey from the shadows, screwing with us.
Nowhere near our collective shard goal, we run into a Scourge nest and kick off our own harvesting event. It doesn’t look like we’ll thin the horde before the blizzard moves in and kills us all, but who appears out of nowhere to help? That stalker, Daniel. It takes me a minute to realize what’s happening and I’m severely tempted by instinct to pull the trigger. But I don’t. We survive, all thanks to Daniel. Aesop has a fable about this, I’m sure.
This wacky, systemic, social experience comes from a game that’s so early it’s barely hanging together. I can’t imagine how it’ll play a year from now.
“We have the bones of a dynamic weather system in place. We have the bones of a dynamic time of day cycle in place. We have the bones of deformable snow terrain in place,” says Anselmo. “We have the basic foundations of our characters, we have enemies, we have a whole set of modular pieces.”
It’s true: The bones are there, they work and they’re capable. Midwinter is shy about Scavenger’s current status, but it’s in a better state and far more interesting than most Early Access releases. Even so, Midwinter is making sure those bones are easy to iterate on and rearrange before any sort of public playtests, due sometime in 2019. But even this early, I can’t say I’ve played anything quite like Scavengers.
The intent is to push players into making tough decisions