I have come back to The Forever Winter after several months of hiatus, expecting the game to have evolved from what I last saw. Even so much time down the line, though, The Forever Winter remains a lackluster, if unique, attempt at something grand.
Six months, not an inch forward
The last time I played The Forever Winter was back in February, with the same friends I pre-ordered the game with. We were excited back then for what the game had to offer, as we were when it first launched. The grip of its atmosphere, art direction, and designs remains powerful, and it'll keep you looking at buildings, guns, and areas for a very long time.
The gameplay loop was then the same as it is now and on launch. You gear up, drop into a zone, explore it, gather loot, complete quests, and then proceed to the extraction point. If at any moment you end up dead, your character is gone for good, while your friends can potentially salvage some of your loot and trade it back to you.
It's a fun little circle to run in, and I can't say we haven't had fun doing it. For dozens of hours we would explore the dilapidated post-industrial world of The Forever Winter where war is a constant and no one ever rests. Whether it's the trenches, wide open fields covered by cybernetic bodies and remnants of guns and tanks, or claustrophobic medical wards where every corner is potentially fatal, we enjoyed every bit of our stay.
So many months down the line, though, the game remains exactly the same. Given that it's an early-access title, we had hoped to see a lot of new content after a six-month break. Sadly, there’s very little to differentiate the game from what it was before. The loop is the same, a level and a half was added in, and the water system additionally changed, this time for the worse.
Whereas before you could drop into any zone whenever you wanted, you now have to pay a special water currency for particular places, meaning you're locked out of zones you want to play if you don't have enough water. You're then forced into playing the same zones, relying on RNG, to gather enough water to play something more exciting and newer, which is a system I fundamentally disliked.
Having not played for so long, all my unlocked vendors, reputations, and such were reset, forcing me to start from scratch, this time also without any water or ability to play the new zones. What's more, whenever I did drop into the gameplay, I was met with exactly the same enemies, now much tougher and more RNG-dependent, with difficulty spikes out of this world. The Forever Winter was always a challenging game, but now it's beyond unfair and unreliable.
Performance down the drain
Early-access titles tend to suffer from bad performance, since optimization is always the last entry on the checklist for a full game. I understand that perfectly, but what The Forever Winter has done over the past half a year is just beyond parody. A game which used to run with some hitches here and there and the occassional, expected bug is now a complete mess where each run is bound to result in horrible performance.
We were beset on all sides by T-posing unkillable cyborgs, players getting stuck in a looting animation and dying because they couldn't move or perform any actions, ungodly fps drops, unreliable shooting and surfaces, and so on. None of these issues were in the game when we last played, and I was awestruck by how poorly the performance side was being handled.
When coupled with stale and unchanging gameplay, issues that have been in the game since launch (floaty movement, horrible movement controls, randomized damage, etc.) have become significantly exacerbated, to the point that several of our runs were rendered completely dead right off the bat by some random, stupid bug.
And this wasn't just one instance—every match we played on our return ended disastrously due to technical problems, none of which were there before.
Though it promised to be a shining beacon in gaming, The Forever Winter still misses its light, and I'm afraid that its developers aren't going to change the game fundamentally enough to warrant my return again.
Things are “progressing” way too slowly which, when compared to other in-development games like Deadlock, is not enough to keep me coming back, though I do hope that changes at some point in the future.
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