Nether: A Smoother, Slicker DayZ?
Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2013 6:22 pm
Feeling helpless in a virtual world is an experience that’s surprisingly difficult to convey without making your game feel clunky, sluggish, or outright broken. Even successful examples like the popular Arma 2 mod, DayZ, can feel alienating to players used to bounding across beautiful battlefields as their super-soldier of choice. But survival-action games don’t need to look and feel so stiff, and from the brief time I spent with it, Phosphor Games’ upcoming shooter Nether is looking to prove that.
The elevator pitch for Nether is a familiar one. You join a server with a bunch of other players and explore a once-populated city that’s been left in ruins after a disaster event (ominously named The Call here). Your character is fragile, your supplies scarce, and your enemies are best avoided, or engaged with no worse than even odds. Players can either pool resources and help one another, or kill fellow survivors on sight. Player-driven anarchy in a large-scale open world is certainly a compelling concept, but one you’ve doubtlessly seen before.
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The elevator pitch for Nether is a familiar one. You join a server with a bunch of other players and explore a once-populated city that’s been left in ruins after a disaster event (ominously named The Call here). Your character is fragile, your supplies scarce, and your enemies are best avoided, or engaged with no worse than even odds. Players can either pool resources and help one another, or kill fellow survivors on sight. Player-driven anarchy in a large-scale open world is certainly a compelling concept, but one you’ve doubtlessly seen before.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...