PUBG: Ded.Net was revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, a new shooter with roguelike elements that was introduced to us in spectacular fashion, kicking, screaming, and sliding like a snake down hills in a shower of bullets and explosions. After the reveal, I spoke with creative director Dave Curd about bringing this epic new entry to the beloved franchise.
Ded.Net is set in a fictionalised 1996, and Curd tells me one of his favourite films of that era was The Big Lebowski. “There's this quote of, ‘Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you’. This is a game about big highs and big lows, where sometimes you are getting absolutely stomped out, but then it feels really good when you know you're just denying someone else's fun and sending them off sad.”
What sets Ded.Net apart is that when you lose, it’s not immediately game over, as you can continue the unpredictable wild ride. The game offers runs that you can build off, so you’re not really considering each match as a standalone win-or-lose situation.
“What's really neat about our game is, in most battle royales, you might hot drop and lose, and you're like, ‘Alright, maybe it's time for bed’. But in our game, even if someone blasts you and totally shuts you down and makes you sad, you're immediately off to the out game, where we offer some new powers and injuries and abilities to consider.
“Even if you're coming off a bad game, you might say, ‘Oh, the boombox power showed up, or the akimbo power showed up, so my build's coming online; maybe we should play one more game’. I think that you can't win every game, but every game you're on a rising path takes the edge off of occasionally getting killed by a guy with knife hands or a baby doll.”
Blending PUBG with roguelike progression was “super natural”, Curd tells me. “The two things between PUBG Classic and PUBG DeadNet are pace and persistence. We knew we had to do both. To make the rogue stuff work, we had to have fighting, life, death, less friction. It's easy to get in, it's easy to take fights, it's easy to come back, and then even if you ultimately lose, it's easy to grab the power and keep going.”
He tells me that Ded.Net didn’t start as a project where the team knew the idea immediately and fought like hell to make it. “This was experiment 19, and we're like, ‘Oh sh*t, there's really something here. Now, finally, the gameplay is so fun. Let's start inventing characters and talking about the arc crate that comes down and opens up, and it's actually a room you can get into, and it's a room you can camp. Once we felt that the idea was solid, then we began the fun work of building a world and creating characters for that world.”
Curd tells me that when the team was challenged to do their take on PUBG, the first thing they did was “compare and contrast” what PUBG was doing and consider what they could do differently. “I've called PUBG the ultimate storytelling engine, because each game is an adventure, and I just thought, ‘Well, could that story have multiple chapters? Could you take an avatar on a longer story, where win or lose, you're still having fun?’
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/pubg-dednet-gamescom-interview-dave-curd-love-hate/
