PAX East 2017: Introducing Rend, a three-way survival sandbox from Frostkeep Studios

I don’t really like survival games, typically — I understand why a lot of people do like them, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t care for them myself, for a whole forest of reasons. To make a survival game that I want to play, you have to really come at the genre from a side angle, which can be hard to do while retaining the things that people like about the genre.

At this early juncture, I can’t say that Rend (official site) will do all of that. But I can say that the groundwork is in place for something that might be worth getting excited about.

I was incredibly fortunate to be granted one of the first meetings with Frostkeep Studios and a first look at Rend itself, in a conspiratorial PAX meeting on the second floor of a fish restaurant on the Boston piers. It felt a bit as if I were being shown something that should not be seen, some artifact of great power that had been hidden away from prying eyes. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

Frostkeep Studios, as a whole, is made up of people who have been in online games for a while. There are veterans of vanilla World of Warcraft development, League of Legends, WildStar, and other titles. And they started with a very simple fundamental question: What doesn’t work with survival games? How are these games currently broken?

The answer goes to several layers, but the most fundamental issue is this: While current survival games are set up to provide really great experiences, they’re also set up to discourage those experiences from happening. You frequently find servers dominated by PvP groups that can effectively neutralize you immediately without any chance of your fresh characters fighting back. They also discourage fair fights, preferring to strike when you’re logged out and can’t defend what you’ve made. More to the point, if you do survive to the point you build up a decent cache, you’ve effectively “won” the game without any real conclusion; either you get steamrolled or you break the system.

Rend is, from the ground up, meant to address all of these points. And it does so, at least on paper, with a number of elegant solutions that seem almost painfully obvious when you first hear them.

In Rend, players start as part of one of three factions. You choose your faction, but all three factions want to gather souls and reach a win condition of having the largest amount of accumulated souls. These souls are also used to research tech upgrades and similar improvements, though, so there’s a built-in mechanical tension. Banking souls puts you closer to winning, but banking too many souls means that you’re behind in the tech race and vulnerable to attack.

But those attacks won’t come – or at least, they won’t be constant and relentless from the beginning. Each faction’s base is protected by a forcefield that keeps out enemy players and wandering monsters, making the base safe… for the most part. Once per week, at a scheduled time, the shields will fall and monsters will begin attacking all three faction bases at once.

This is where the core of the gameplay is built. For one thing, it puts a clock on the game. There’s no hard reset timer, where the servers will reset after a month, but the enemy invasions become more and more ferocious every week. Eventually, you will be overwhelmed. It also means that everyone is online at the same time when the shields come down… and that means that if one faction decides to assault another, it’s happening when everyone has the opportunity to react. There are no surprise attacks when no one knew this was coming.

Plus, since everyone is vulnerable at the same time, it introduces some real tension. After all, you could attack a rival faction… but then your base might be underdefended against the monsters or another faction attacking. Maybe it’s better to pull back and be safe… but you might miss an opportunity to pull ahead decisively. There are no absolute “right” decisions, but a constant dance of what your best options might be.

The game is also built to allow for specialization across a broad range of fields. There are more skills to level in the game than you’ll likely have time to master over the course of the game’s duration, before someone wins or everyone loses, so you’ll have to specialize. The goal here is to encourage players to have a place in the game no matter what you like to do. Enjoy gathering? You’re vital to your faction’s crafting efforts, and since you’ll have both perks and specializations to pick up over time, it’s actually better to have dedicated gatherers and crafters rather than just having all of the combat players do the same thing.

As mentioned above, the game isn’t strictly timed, but it does feature a win condition when your faction collects enough souls. It also features a loss condition, since every faction’s base can be destroyed without anyone reaching the win condition. Once everything is all said and done, the game ends, the winner is declared, and everything is wiped out. Fun for a round, right?

Except that there is meta progression on top of that. The meta progression will not allow you to be more powerful than another player, so a veteran of seven campaigns will still be trading even strength with a new character. The veteran, however, will have options that the other one doesn’t. The comparison was made to a game that lets you start with a few classes to select, but after a few wins you can select from several other classes which aren’t more powerful but do have new options. You get more traits, more potential paths, but no more raw power.

In terms of raw power, you do have access to various game-breakingly powerful artifacts available in hidden tombs in the frozen wastes. The frozen wastes are designed to kill you; just like other parts of the game, there’s not an explicit time limit, but every expedition is running on borrowed time. Still, journeying there and picking up artifacts can yield some huge advantages… assuming you make it back from the expedition in one piece. After all, someone could chase you, or you could be blocked on the return trip by another faction…

It is, obviously, meant to force players into conflict. And that’s really the whole point of the game. It’s meant to deliver those big moments of high drama that you can find in survival games, but in a way that never makes you feel as if you have to be either lucky or constantly playing. You know big things will go down at regular intervals, and you can specialize in many things as you like. You have options, you have tools, and you will need to specialize in order to contribute, but everyone should be able to contribute.

If you’re not sure how to contribute? Veteran players will have a system giving players bonuses for turning in certain materials or completing certain tasks, thus giving breadcrumbs to players who aren’t sure of what to do. And of course, you’ll be able to run custom servers which tweak the rules to your preferences.

Rend is due out on Steam early access this spring (you can already sign up for the pre-alpha), and the fact of the matter is that I’m eagerly anticipating it. I don’t care much for survival games, but this looks like one that’s cutting out the chaff and focusing on delivering fast, furious engagement across a broad spectrum of scenarios. If you already like survival games, you’ll probably like this, but even if they usually turn you off, this is one to watch.