Gatewalkers
Gatewalkers at Poznań Game Arena 2019!
We are preparing a few stands for you where you and your friends will be able to take a journey to unknown places of the world of Gatewalkers! See you soon!
📍Pavilion 5A, Booth no. 46
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
Creatures of the night
The changing between day and night affects not only visibility, but also the world around us. Some creatures turn into bloodthirsty beasts at night. And you wouldn't want to meet them in the dark woods!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
Making of... Batmonster
Achieving satisfactory result often involves many attempts. Which version of Batmonster is the most frightening?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
In-game skills inspired by real-life
People are not born with skills. Not even with the basic ones. We all have to take time to learn and master them for future use. Some individuals come into this world with certain advantages that can speed or help the process, but they are in no way ready-made abilities. This real-world fact serves as a basis for the skill upgrade system in Gatewalkers that will be both familiar and challenging at the same time.
[previewyoutube="CxtWHsfAGSA;full"]
Modern games have taught us that there is a certain way our characters develop. There are some differences in how they obtain skills, but it's all about teaching the characters, not the player.
Let’s take the Pokémon series for example. Our lovable pupils learn new attacks as they level up, and achieving mastery of those techniques takes no time for them. They just know how to use them to their fullest. Moves obtained by the use of Technical Machines (TMs) are even more notorious – Pokémon cannot learn them on their own, they gain them with our help. The only effort required from the player is making the decision on which of their pets will they use the TM. In the early games, that decision carried some weight, as TMs were single-use, but modern iterations of the series lifted that limitation with the arrival of the fifth generation in back 2011 (or even in 2010 in Japan).
The same goes for the Fallout series (well, the entries made by Bethesda, at least). We traverse the wasteland and grow as a person, but our skills aren’t exactly related to what we're doing. Sure, we learn new things, but our mastery is in no way tied to that experience – we know some things because we arbitrarily decided that we should know them and often are more skilled than the story would suggest we are at any given point. Some games strive to provide us with a proper explanation for the skills, and one example of such a game is Fallout 4. Our protagonist, the Sole Survivor is either a war veteran or his wife, who probably picked up a few weapon skills from the hubby. Even better skill acquisition system can be found in the infamous Fallout 76 – there, you cannot use advanced weapons without going through some hoops. First, you need experience with a simpler, but similar armament, then you have to find a proper blueprint, special materials and knowledge related to the weapon.
And then there’s Gatewalkers – our very own game and our very own approach to learning, that includes… making mistakes and learning from them. You can miss attacks, but at the same time learn how the enemy behaves and what their strategy is so that you can get better at placing those attacks. Your own experience is the journey between worlds, so we will not introduce any shortcuts that might undermine it. That means no shortcuts in learning skills either.
To grow and succeed, your character will need to work, and work hard at that. If you encounter a new, extremely powerful monster on your way, you might need a new weapon to beat it, let’s say… an axe. How do you get one? Do you hunt weaker enemies, hoping that one of them will drop one? That’s how games work, after all, right?
Wrong!
You need to make one. What? You have no clue how to do it, because no one has ever taught you the mystical craft of axe making? Well, you need to find a blueprint, so get a move on, and remember: that’s just the first step.
Weapons don’t appear out of thin air, after all, so you need to gather the proper materials and that means, you guessed it, you’re going on an expedition to find those resources! And then…
You thought we’re going to the monster killing step from here, didn’t you? Do you even know how to use an axe? Have you trained with it? No? Try and guess where we’re going with it…
We think about skills in video games the same way certain Swedish furniture brand thinks about their products. You get the pieces, a manual describing all the steps, and you need to work to make something useful. At first, it will be rather hard, and you will probably have some difficulty with every new desk, table and cupboard, but the reward for learning the necessary skills and doing the work is rather great, isn’t it? When playing Gatewalkers you will assemble a lot of stuff – weapons, armors, tools. Do you think it would be fun if you built them perfectly the first time around?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
2 minutes of raw gameplay from Gatewalkers
Here are more than 2 minutes of gameplay from the latest build of Gatewalkers. This video has no sound. No worries, we are working on this, and we will show "louder" gameplay as soon as possible. And as a bonus... a few more pictures.
[previewyoutube="OU_ifkV1UUY;full"]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
A few shots from the latest build of Gatewalkers!
Nothing can replace live experience. But for those who couldn't meet us at Gamescom 2019 we have a few screenshots from the latest build of Gatewalkers.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
Gatewalkers @Gamescom 2019
Wwe had the pleasure to show Gatewalkers for the first time to an international audience. You gave us a lot of very valuable suggestions as well as the energy to continue our work. We hope that soon we will have the opportunity to meet you again. Here are some photos from the event!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/
Can survival still be innovative?
When considering survival games genre, the first thing that comes to one’s mind are bivalent titles, that very often mix the kind with some sort of apocalypse, for a climax, or battle royale, as a mode. No matter how strong this picture is rooted inside our minds, nowadays the survival games are far from that pattern, growing and becoming something unique with every new title.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrmTKjIUcy0
Since that time survival games have become extremely popular and, because of that boom, more and more game creators have decided to use the idea in their individual project. Sadly, most of the first survival products, following Minecraft’s and DayZ’s as their precursors, were often just lookalikes, with a little of changes added to the gameplay or setting. After some time, the players, bored with the lack of diversity, have started to walk away from the genre, looking for something more interesting to play. This groundbreaking moment was the greatest sign the developers could have ever asked for and, from that time, the genre started to evolve and abandoned its prototypes in order to develop and improve.
It came as a surprise that survival games can tell different stories than world after the zombie apocalypse or spreading fatal disease. Considering the setting of survival games – there are no rules. Everything that limits developers is brought down to their imagination only. And one of the best examples is, having its premiere back in 2014, Subnautica, created by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. This open-world game not only allows the players to do whatever they want, during their exploration of the alien planet ocean, but – in all its openness – will be forcing them to gather information and collect resources needed in order to survive. The survival part here isn’t about joining the battle against other human beings, but about growing as a person in a completely unfamiliar environment and by being more cooperative than destructive.
Actually, when it comes to analysing those radically varied approaches to survival games, the one’s beginning to wonder what would happen if there was a title that, actually, could have combined those features with each other. And it looks like the hero’s having its big entrance just in time for our expectations.
Gatewalkers – a survival-co-op game, that’s going to be published in the nearest future – is the perfect example of how you can implement freshness to a slowly disappearing genre. As a hero travelling through multiple dimensions, the players will be forced to fight various kinds of enemies. However, will they do it is a whole different story.
Every opponent will require the player to be highly flexible with selecting the right strategy. The combat alone will not be as simple as the ones we've been dealing with so far, in the previous titles. Gatewalkers really wanted to spice things up regarding fight, so the player will need to make sure that all the pieces of a plan work together. The skillset, the upgrades of one’ equipment, positioning and momentum must be in perfect synergy, in order for the player to emerge victorious from the battle. What’s even more entertaining – despite the fact that Gatewalkers is partly MMO game, there are no classes to choose from. The way the player’s character is going to overcome various obstacles is defined by decisions made during gameplay and not by means of a class-assigned strategy. And the character’s development will not take place at the same time as reaching levels, but it will depend on what conclusions we draw from travelling through different worlds, and how we're gonna use the recipes we found, to permit our character to grow. The weapon won't jump out of a defeated opponent, either. The player will have to assemble the correct fragments of the schematics, understand them and, in connection with the collected raw materials, craft his own equipment.
All the survival games will throw the player into a world where he will have to fight for one’s survival, but not all of them will follow a realistic approach. There is still some place for innovation in this genre, but in order to absorb the player, they need to create a realistic sense of threat, not just pretend that it exists and has no unpleasant consequences for the player.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1125710/Gatewalkers/