Mechy and messy extraction shooter The Forever Winter sees a big update today that addresses the biggest player complaint the game had on launch – the precious water that drained away in real-time, even while you weren’t playing the game. The patch to the early access shooter reworks water so it becomes a currency that you use to infiltrate the game’s brutal maps at different entry points, instead of dripping away and threatening to leave you thirsty and destitute. And this isn’t the only promising news – enemy spawning changes, reworked gunplay, and a new map also appear.
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If you missed the water fury the first time around, let me explain. The Forever Winter’s brutal warzones would often hide barrels of water you could strap to your back. Escape the map and you would add these litres to a big water tank in your home base (a hub of bullet merchants where you stash all the good gear you’ve scavenged). But that water supply would slowly drain – the cost of keeping your hub running. If it hit zero, your hub would “die” and all your stashed goodies would vanish. This water supply would deplete even while offline, the idea being that this adds more stress to the process of surviving in an apocalyptic hellscape.
Now the game’s creators are ditching that idea entirely. “Water is no longer a resource that drains [in] real-time,” say developers Fun Dog Studios in the update’s patch notes on Steam. “It is now a currency that is used to access region entry points. Region entry points have specific water costs that are in an RNG range.”
This basically means the game’s maps now have a default entry point, and you’ll need to use water as payment to enter the hellish battleyards from other starting points (you may also need to have a good reputation with certain factions for this). Water can now also be traded from player to player, and the frequency of scavengable water barrels appearing in maps has been rebalanced, say the devs.
Unsurprisingly, many players disliked the original water premise. It became one of the biggest gripes in an early access launch marred by performance issues and unpredictable enemy behaviour. The developers promised changes, but didn’t want to remove water as a stressy driving force completely.
One early patch saw thieves creep into your subterranean home to steal your last drops. Defeating these scoundrels offered a last chance to save your stash from a water shortage. Later, the developers added a “thief-proof vault” – a limited space for goodies that would never be lost, even in a critical water crisis. They also introduced water bots that would let players collect water automatically. (The meme-faced water thieves will still appear following this latest update, we’re told. Although the consequences for not dealing with them won’t be so high anymore.)
The water system, for all the ire it attracted, was the least significant of my complaints when I played The Forever Winter for our early access review. Enemy spawning was wacky, their combat behaviour was difficult to understand, levels were cluttered and visually noisy, bugs were commonplace, and even the simple act of picking up items from the ground was a chore. I loved the core idea (little scav caught in the middle of an eternal robo-war) and the art direction is precisely my weathered cloth bag. But it was hard to stomach the rough state of the launch.
This update addresses several of those problems too, though. Enemy spawning has been adjusted to “hopefully completely remove” the problem of “seeing enemies spawn right in front of you out of thin air” or “having enemies spawn right on top of you or out of view.” Guns have seen a big rework, and a new map featuring a fiery stone staircase has been added. We’re also told “rendering improvements have been made to increase FPS” and “enemy detection icons show up more reliably with the correct information”, meaning that you should theoretically be able to understand when and where a foe spots you or a teammate.
This is all good news, and I want to return to the game to see if it plays a little smoother now. I’m in favour of the water rework too. I understand that game designers often aim to elicit strong emotions in players, and here Fun Dog’s designers desired a feeling of unease and insecurity, all the better to fit their game’s permawar theme. But I prefer when those feelings are confined to the time when I’m actually playing the game, rather than spreading like a nervous tendril into my real life. I imagine many others feel the same about “FOMO” designs like this.
