BEFORE — from Facepunch Studios, makers of Gary’s Mod, RUST
You may remember Before, from Facepunch studios, developers of famed Gary’s Mod, successful survival game Rust, as well as many others, announced at the 2014 game awards. It is a new foray into the simulation, management genre and development looks to be well and truly into the swing of things. Being indevelopment for the last 4 years, it is safe to say, the idea has been well realised and will only continue to become more refined as development continues. Facepunch is extremely open to community feedback and has according to the Dev-blogs pivoted a number of times through development to ensure Before is as fun and rewarding as possible. Facepunch is avoiding putting Before into Steam early-access, to avoid obvious problems and stress that might bring to the table, and is opting instead for a more private beta prorgram. Players can signup to test out the beta on their website (link at the end of the article), where they are added to a queue of sorts.
The developers say they have made the decision to move from a free-roaming camera, as in traditional realtime-strategy games, to being locked to your selected unit. They say this made ‘for a big shift in how the game feels to play’, which we would expect allows for a greater feeling of immersion in the game world and perhaps more agency and empathy in relating to the in-game characters.
They also say you can choose different scenarios which effect how the game is played and even start out a game as a single character. Facepunch seems to have a very keen interest on ensuring Before is not only packed with features, and functions but making sure gameplay is refined and fun and that the smallest details such as the characters movement, and ensuring combat feels good.
The game, although first of all a sandbox, features lots to do, and each scenario will have ojectives and an overarching goal to strive for. The game is highly customisable, and already has a powerful editor, which allows players to create their own scenarios, set their own objectives which other plays will obviously be able to play. It sounds like Before will avoid pitfalls other sandboxes have fell into, which although large, are empty — Before aims to be full of things to do.
We can expect that as well as survival, Before will feature some sort of town management, combing the survival elements of Rust with more-common RTS games such as Age of Empires. Before will have tribes and feature an element called ‘Tribe Cohesion’, which seems similar to mechanics found in Civilisation, where your tribes happiness will increase or decrease over time depending on your actions, or lack thereof.
Before’s artstyle is ever improving and developers from Rust, so it is to expected Before may become more detailed as time goes on and environments become more in-depth and exciting such as having caves, climbable cliffs and other landmarks. Before seems as though it will combine gameplay from both RTS and FPS survival games into a brand-new genre, and will gameplay fresh with rich and varied scenarios with some given examples being ‘survive through the winter. wipe out all neighbouring tribes. reach a certain population’. Perhaps Facepunch will take Before in another surprising direction, and what we will see at release will be entirely different to even this iteration, and given Facepunch’s experience with online games it will only be expected Before will have some multiplayer element when it is finally released. By choosing more private beta-testing, Before is allowed to evolve at a rapid pace, and change significantly through its development cycle, something many games, once released to Steam-early access are unable to do.
We haven’t personally had a chance to play Before first hand, but it looks to be shaping up as another fresh, new experience fom Facepunch studios. With their previous expertise in the survival genre with Rust, it can only be expected Facepunch will make a similar ripple in the gaming community as its previous titles have, again disrupting the gaming status-quo when players can finally get their hands on it en-masse. Read more about Before and sign up to their mailing list at their official website here, and sign up for Beta testing here.
