There’s a fair amount of games many would call survival MMOs on the market. It’s a popular subgenre, one that you can see the appeal for – the idea of building something from the ground-up, of making something that is so definitely your own, it’s enticing. But it takes a lot to get a game like this working – and Drop Point, the first game from New Zealand studio Tiny Indie, wants to break into that market with a bang.
Drop Point has been described by the developer as being a harcore zombie survival game, and it’s easy to see why. The game features all of the tropes you’d expect from a survival game – managing hunger, thirst, supplies and building bases, but it’s also possible to play the game as either a single-player game or a multiplayer game, if you’re looking to survive alongside friends (or mess with your friends, depending on how you’re feeling on any given day). You start with nothing and have to earn everything you need for survival – it’s a standard survival game start.
Something I find rather interesting about the game is the idea that this is a world that is being fought over. Developer Tiny Indie has said that the game has ‘contested crafting zones’, implying that these are points of interest that can be taken over and over again by different players. Nothing is forever in this world, and nothing is concrete – you will lose things, and you will have to get those things back if you want to make something of yourself.
Combat wise, there’s a lot here. Players need to actually find and build guns – these are things that rust and wear over time, after all, and you’ll need to sustain them. So maybe it’ll be easier to just use melee weapons as your main method of attack – but they come with the chance that you might get surrounded by zombies, or even by other players, and then you’re dead – something that would have been avoided if you’d actually picked up a gun.
There’s even vehicles (boats and wheeled vehicles are what will be in the early access) in the game – the way the developer spoke about them, it seems that fuel will be scarce, and that you’ll have to be very careful about when you actually use them. Do you want to get to your destination as quickly as possible? That’s fine, but it’s going to cost you – and there’s a chance that you might run out of fuel on the way there, which means that there’s going to be no real way to get your vehicle back without going out of your way to find some fuel and make your way back to your vehicle.
There’s a lot planned for Drop Point. Past the initial early access planned for later this year, there’s also monthly updates planned that’ll include features asked for by the community and content updates. Next year, the game is planned to launch as a full release – that release will have, among many other things, world events, moddable game servers and both local and dedicated servers, meaning it’ll cater towards a large variety of players.
How expansive world events are remains to be seen, but judging by the fact the game itself is a zombie survival horror game, it’ll likely be things such as outbreaks and hordes roaming through the world. There’s also a plan for more advanced AI – what this means is again, rather unclear, but it’d be cool if it was something like hordes knowing where the weak points in your base are, so that they can just break through and kill you with the greatest of ease.
Post-release, though, there’s even more planned. The developer wants to add new biomes and maps to the game over time, so that people don’t get bored just exploring the same place over and over again. In fact, they want to add a lot of everything – more weapons, more vehicles, more events, more clothing.
It’s absolutely worth keeping an eye on Drop Point when it launches. This is the type of game that is only really going to work if it’s backed by a community, but if it DOES find a reliable string of players? Then it has the potential to be absolutely massive, and could be a prime example of indie MMOs.
