Developer Strange Loop Games details the roadmap out of early access
Ecois a very ambitious, wildly reactive multiplayersurvivalgame in which you try to save the world without accidentally destroying it. There’s a meteor scheduled to slamdunk the planet in 30 days, and in that time, you and your fellow players must progress from raising log cabins in the woods to building the means to develop technologies that might somehow avert the apocalypse. The trouble is, pioneering said apocalypse-averting technologies mightitselfbring about disaster in a gameworld that simulates things like habitat death, species extinction, air pollution and catastrophic flooding.
Players must thus walk a careful line between resource exploitation and self-inflicted calamity by monitoring their impact on the overall simulation, founding the right kind of government, and passing laws or devising economies (including player-created currencies) that don’t flip the ecosystem upside down. The Steam reviews teem with anecdotes about people waking up to find their oil wells underwater, and it sounds like things will only get knottier when Eco releases out of early access around the end of this year.
Eco 1.0 will seek to avoid grinding by increasing the frequency by which ability upgrades or new tools and vehicles become available. “We will be analyzing every profession to ensure that upgrades in abilities become available frequently, which we believe will greatly reduce any feeling of grind.” the post explains. “One example we intend to produce is explosives for mining, allowing much greater bulk collection of ore.” It will also, however introduce the problem of garbage, with crafting producing litter that must be placed in bins which must be scooped up by bin-collectors, who might need to be appropriately recompensed for their labours according to a tax-funded public sector - assuming that’s how you and the other players structure your society.
Eco 1.0 will introduce various features designed to cultivate “deeper ‘emotions’: representing the beauty of the natural and man-made worlds, taking care of animals, and general coziness that makes it very comfortable to spend time in”. Take animal husbandry - the developer’s “marquee launch feature”, which will let you “raise animals for meat, milk, eggs, and wool, as well as pets, which will give a home bonus”. (I’m not sure whether you can build factory farms, or whether the simulation will model the colossal emissions footprint of the animal agriculture industry, but these seem like logical if not very “cozy” extensions of the premise.)
The devs are also “adding a new scoring category for outdoor land, so that you can decorate your space beautifully and get rewarded for it, making for quaint and pretty villages”, and are expanding the game’s culture system, which let you score points for creative works. But alas and alack, all these feelgood objectives must be set against the desire “to add more end-game disasters and challenges beyond the meteor, challenges that will arise and face society over time.”
Good grief, what wonderful, optimistic people I work with! If you’ve been playing Eco and have happier stories to share of gameworlds that have successfully achieved utopia, I’d love to read them.
