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 theirhelp, 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.
Halo 5’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 thatT
here are some intimidating enemy
factions in Scavengers, a strange hybrid
that’s part-survival game, part-
competitive shooter and part-
cooperative 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.An exclusive hands-on with the
multiplayer survival game
SCAVENGERS
WE SAW AN OPPORTUNITY TO
TAKE A BIGGER SHARE OF THE
CREDIT FOR OUR UNIFIED GOALRELEASE
Playtests in 2019DEVELOPER
Midwinter EntertainmentPUBLISHER
ImprobableLINK
http://www.scavengersgame.comNEED TO KNOW
FIRST
LOOKScavengers
PREVIEW