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When nightmarish sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter launched into early access in September it was somewhat messy. Bugs and maddening enemy spawns diminished the tension of being a fleshy human scavenger in a mech battlefield. But one feature annoyed some players much more – fresh water. See, you need to keep your headquarters stocked with water, as it gets steadily used by your settlement’s inhabitants. The catch being that this water diminishes even while you’re not playing the game. If it runs out completely, then everything you’ve collected gets wiped. The developers have listened to complaints about this most Farmville of mechanics, and they’ve answered in an interesting way. Water thieves! Now, on top of the usual downward trickle, burglars will come to steal your H2O as well.
It’s not as bad as it sounds.
Far from making things more difficult, the water thieves are really a way to give players who run out of water one last chance to scrape back from the loot wipe. They’ll show up in your headquarters when you have basically no water left, and if you can manage to kill them and defend your home you’ll get some water from their corpses and stave off the hideous thirstwipe for the time being. Fail to kill the home invaders and you’ll suffer the usual consequences.
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The water thieves are just one addition in the game’s recent October update, which is mainly a bunch of bug fixes, a new map, and a frightening new mech boss called “the Rat King”. You can see the full patch notes here but it basically seems to be the biggest update to the game so far, featuring more quests, a means of “AI buddy control” and some “AI pathing and combat improvements.” Hopefully that means the enemies won’t act quite as unpredictably as I’ve previously witnessed.
Meanwhile, the water system tweaks are not over, the developers say, as it’s still a source of both confusion and annoyance for some folks. There are those who hate the way it gnaws at you even when you’re not playing, and there are those who think it’s not a big deal at all, insisting it’s easy to find sufficient water in the battlefield to stay stocked up for a long time. I just feel it’s the least of the game’s design difficulties. Maybe picking up items should be less fiddly first? Maybe enemy sightlines should be more reliably knowable? Maybe tanks shouldn’t fly into orbit? There are a lot of things that make the moment-to-moment antics in these captivating death zones feel janky. Taken altogether, I’d say that’s a bigger issue than one dwindling resource.
If you want to get a feel for the game without buying it, there’s also now a demo, in which you can only play alongside other demo users. It only has one map to enlootify – the Ashen Mesa. It’s one of the better battle zones of the game from what I’ve played. But you can also see what the player headquarters looks like. All my quibbles with the game’s rough state aside, it has some very good-looking environments. It’s worth playing the demo just to indulge in a bit of mech war tourism. If you find any water, let me know. I won’t steal it. Promise.
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