A few months ago, I was very interested in The Forever Winter, the post-apocalyptic extraction shooter.

After reading this PC Gamer article though, my interest has dropped precipitously:

Then there’s the water situation. This is the most essential resource, and when my hub runs out completely the area is reset, costing all of the practical and cosmetic enhancements I’ve made, and my inventory will be gutted. Even before then, when it’s critically low, some services become unavailable. And this all happens in real-time. 

“One of the things that actually came up in our beta, that we’re keeping, is that the water level has real-time degradation,” says Gregg. “If you and I log off with 10 days left and you come back three days from now, you’ll have seven days left, even if you haven’t played. It’s a hardcore game, you can build up a large surplus, but that is actually part of our co-op: to make sure people help each other.” 

Good fucking luck, chief.

The great irony here is that I praised them before for basically being concept artists following through on their vision way outside the norm. Not many other devs would put spacesuit-wearing flame-thrower units using American flags as hoods into their games, nevermind the battle-tanks covered in corpses as camouflage. That’s cool! If you go grimdark, go all the way.

Having an expiration timer count down even when not playing though? That’s not “hardcore,” that’s just fucking stupid. I don’t even care how easy water is to get in-game, because that is irrelevant. What is the design attempting to accomplish? Because by default, what this tells players is that any break from the game may as well be permanent. Meanwhile, the people who are playing the game aren’t even affected by this “hardcore” feature. Ask the Icarus devs how that shit worked out for them.

I guess we’ll see how it plays out. The Forever War will be in Early Access at the end of September.