Scavengers puts players in the role of young explorers fighting in a not-so-distant future, where cataclysmic events have triggered a new ice age. The game will combine exploration, survival and combat elements, while maintaining a focus on teamwork and cooperative game mechanics. 

Players will begin each game by equipping their Explorer, venturing into the wilds, competing and allying with other human players to complete objectives, gathering resources and battling against AI-controlled enemy factions. Large and unpredictable AI populations, combined with the balance of co-operation and competition between the human players, will create rich, repeatable gameplay.

Scavengers will allow players to experience vast play spaces, densely populated with satisfying AI combatants and supported by rich simulation of the surrounding world, providing endless emergent gameplay possibilities resulting from the interplay of human competitors and AI adversaries within a large, dynamic world.

Scavengers will build on the game design principles that made Halo 5’s Warzone a revolutionary new mode for Halo players, by allowing teams of players to compete with one another while exploring a large game map populated with hundreds of free-roaming and highly sophisticated AI enemies, with distinct factions, weapons and behaviors.

We’ve heard your feedback: dying has few consequences when Mother can infinitely re-clone you at your nearest ally. There should be more risk when exploring alone, and more reward for picking up downed allies in the heat of battle.

So with this latest update comes hard limitations on how many times you can respawn in a match. Explorers will now be sent to Earth with just one clone backup kit (meaning one additional life), and can only get more when they’ve proven value to Mother by uploading data at Data Uplink stations.

This will provide more incentives to back each other up, as well as more trade-offs when splitting up.

Resurrection Changes

With this update, we’re adjusting the Respawn system to include a Backup Clone item that stores extra lives. This item has its own dedicated slot, and can’t be dropped or lost.

You can find all the details around the new Respawn system, including future work, in our recent blog.

Quality of Life Changes

Item Swapping

We’ve made a minor improvement to item swapping to make it easier to pick up a new item when your Inventory is full. With a full Inventory, you simply need to pick up an item and it will automatically be swapped with your active item.

EXP Boost

With this update, the Match Summary will separate your base EXP from any EXP gained through an in-game event or EXP Boost. This should help clarify how you are earning EXP in each match.

Challenges

We’ll continue to adjust and expand our Challenges, to provide players with different gameplay opportunities. We've added some new challenges that focus on finding and using the variety of weapons in the world of Scavengers. You'll be rewarded for dealing damage with weapons in the following classes, so get out there and try out all there is to offer!

Types of Weapon Challenges:

• Damage dealt with assault rifles
• Damage dealt with SMGs
• Damage dealt with melee weapons
• Damage dealt with shotguns
• Damage dealt with bows
• Damage dealt with grenades

Weapon Tuning

We did a weapon tuning pass, to re-balance many of the weapons in Scavengers.

The following weapons were adjusted:

• Bows
  • Added 0.2 second minimum windup time to all bows to control the fire rate when rapid firing
• Letty’s Rosie
  • Increased damage slightly on Rosie
  • Increased impact damage slightly on Rosie Sledgehammer
• Tarik’s Longstriker
  • Removed the bolt action animation on Longstriker Taskmaster
  • Longstriker Taskmaster now uses heavy ammo
• Rattler
  • Reduced the recoil slightly
• Warsong
  • Reduced the damage slightly
• Cruz’s Cazador
  • Increased the reload duration on Cazador
  • Reduced the damage slightly for Cazador Cheetah
  • Reduced the headshot multiplier of Cazador Cheetah to be the same as the other Cazador variants
  • Added spread to the last bullets of the burst for Cazador Cheetah
• Opus
  • Increased the damage
  • Increased the fire rate slightly
• Halden’s Strike Rifle
  • Reduced the damage and slightly more damage falloff for Strike Rifle A-Spec
  • Reduced the recoil slightly for Strike Rifle A-Spec
• Repeating Crossbow
  • Increased the damage
  • Increased the fire rate slightly
  • Reduced the recoil
• Devastator
  • Reduced the explosion damage and increased the impact damage for Devastator Hyperion
• Argonaut
  • Reduced the damage falloff slightly

General Gameplay

• New High Value Objective: Growth Cluster
  • Can appear throughout the match starting at Category 2 storms
  • Produces 35 Datapoints over 60 seconds.
  • On completion, it produces Scrap and a high-value weapon.
• Warlords can appear more often
• Research costs have been reduced for several items, including Talents and Components

Performance, Optimization, and Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Rosie Sledgehammer no longer stun locks the AI on every shot
• Fixed: Longstriker Desperado now reliably triggers an explosion on headshot kills
• Fixed: Environment bug fixes for improper collision, mantling failures, visible seams in the ground, and floating set pieces
• Fixed: Sometimes a player can get stuck in a weird party state where they see default lobby text (every player is Rob)
• Fixed: Explorers on draft screen sometimes appear to be invisible, leaving their weapon floating in the air
• Fixed: Parties not reliably staying together after match end
• Fixed: Camera going through Dropship doors
• Fixed: Missing teammate names
• Fixed: Cold indicator never stops flashing red if a thermal boost is used in a storm
• Fixed: Some players on EGS cannot access in game Shop tabs
• Fixed: The draft camera is not highlighting the correct player
• Fixed: When using Controller, all controls stop working if a controller is disconnected while loading in a match
• Fixed: Dropship safe zone missing an area (sometimes players are left on planet when on the ship)
• Fixed: Grenades falling through the world
• Fixed: Primary weapon swaps when secondary weapon should
• Fixed: Player is able to throw 2 grenades at the same time
• Fixed: Camera stutters when using melee weapons

Scavengers is available as Early Access title through Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The multiplayer “co-opetition” survival shooter will be built with Unreal Engine and powered by Improbable’s SpatialOS game development platform. With these technologies, Scavengers will provide endless emergent gameplay possibilities resulting from the interplay of human competitors and AI adversaries within a large, living world.

By dividing the action between multiple servers in the cloud, all of which contribute to building and running a seamless and consistent world, SpatialOS allows more sophisticated artificial intelligence, more AI entities and players occupying a seamless, shared environment, and a larger, more detailed and more deeply simulated game world than can be supported by the traditional client-server architecture used in online gaming.

Scavengers is in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), scheduled for 2021.