Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2828860/The_Forever_Winter/
The Forever Winter, which has launched in early access today, is a grim dark take on the PvE extraction shooter.
I’m pretty sold on the art style and premise, but will be holding off until a little later to play the game as it looks pretty rough around the edges.
Has anyone played / is planning to play this game?
This looks so cool and I love that it is PvE but this water level mechanic kills the whole game for me. I don’t want to play a game that makes me lose my progression when I’m not actively playing it. If they change this I will consider buying it but the developers seem to be pretty hellbent on keeping this mechanic unfortunately. Maybe they will change their tune in a few weeks when they notice that they can’t keep players around.
There is absolutely no way that people with kids will ever play this, that includes me. I get the idea, but this isn’t a question of it being good or bad - it’s physically impossible to ask this from parents. Which I guess probably means we’re not the target audience
Not even just parents though.
It also punishes people who go on vacation for a week, have a power outage, get engrossed by a different game, suffer any kind of longer term medical issue, etc. There are dozens of reasons someone could stop playing for a while.
It’s really a bullying mechanic that forces players to keep playing the game for fear of losing their stuff. People should be coming back because the gameplay is fun, not because of the threat of lost progress.
The mechanic would be much more appropriate if it were tied to actual time signed in to the game. I was looking forward to this game and was already going to wait for more polish anyways, but as long as this mechanic exists in its current state I’m completely turned off of it.
I’m not even a parent and I don’t want this. It’s just an unnecessary mechanic to punish casual players for no reason at all. It doesn’t add anything to the game.
I’m in the same boat. The water based upkeep mechanic seems punishing, especially for time starved / more casual gamers.
I do think it’s very on theme with the game, I hope that they’ll tweak it over time - something interesting could be adding a way for more active players to contribute surplus water to a shared supply.
If they manage to tidy the game up and fix some of the glaring issues I’d likely still give it a try even with the water “feature”.
Does the mechanic turn you off the game completely?
Yes, I don’t like mechanics that happen while the game is turned off. It’s unnecessary. I keep reading from players who are defending this mechanic that it’s so easy to get several days or almost a month of water supply in just a few hours of gameplay. But if it’s so easy to get the water why not just remove the mechanic? They wouldn’t even notice and everyone else wouldn’t have to play with this FOMO mechanic.