The Forever Winter is not your typical looter shooter power fantasy, where you rush around gobbling up loot so you can grow into a powerhouse. You're a nobody. A desperate scavenger looting corpses while titanic machines conduct a war that's consumed the world. You're not trying to fight them; you're just trying to survive, and bring what you scavenge back to regular folk who are hiding from the devastation.
"So for him his POV is like, he's more of like a Godzilla/King Kong type unit," says Williams."We're not trying to create a situation where you're just plugging away at the on the boss. This thing got deployed for a specific reason, which means the lethality of the thing that it got deployed against is up here, and we're talking like street destroying heavy ordnance that will suck the oxygen out of the immediate AOE and immediately kill you.
On the subject of your team, Fun Dog isn't quite ready to reveal how each character works, but Williams does confirm that you'll be picking from a cast of survivors that each have their own playstyle and skill trees. When you die in a mission you lose all your loot, but you still get XP, giving you constant progression—but that progression doesn't equate to becoming more and more powerful.
It's exciting stuff, and this persistency is something Fun Dog wants to expand on post-launch as well, but Williams is also wary of over-promising. It's easy to forget, given the flashiness of the trailers and the ambitious nature of the team's plans, that this is still a small developer."We're trying not to promise something that we can't deliver at our team size," he says."So I'm very much leaning into like, yeah, we think this is cool.
Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings.