EVERYWHERE Creators Beta
I got access into the EVERYWHERE Creators Beta, just by signing up and doing a survey. I think anyone could get access easily. EVERYWHERE is a sandbox game that is going to rely heavily on User Generated Content (UGC). The simplest way to describe it is mix together Roblox and Fortnite and you have EVERYWHERE. It’s an interesting concept, as it seems to be going directly after their competitors rather than growing naturally into that sort of community ecosystem like Fortnite and Roblox did. Everywhere is diving head first into custom content.
They offer some pretty nice tools in their building suite. Stuff from the basic level editor, game mode creator, and Stamp feature which allows you to create “dupes” of something you built and upload it for people to easily use. Then there are some more advanced tools like logic and custom rulesets among many others. The idea is that they want players to create custom maps and gamemodes without needing knowledge on how to code. You can make anything from a cart racing game, to a PVE co-op game fighting against NPCs, or even PVP modes.
The concept is very interesting and exciting to me. I was never big into Roblox or Fortnite, but I have played them and been impressed at what the community can create. In terms of games like this, I was much more into Garry’s Mod, even creating some levels and dupes myself. Everywhere’s Stamp tool is just like Garry’s Mods’ Save and Dupe tools where you can build something like a custom made vehicle or a mechanical machine, save the whole thing as one asset, upload it and allow anyone to download and use it within their own creations. This is really cool and will help making custom content a lot easier when you can rely on the community to have made something that you can use already. The problem is… it doesn’t work right now.
This beta has been extremely rocky which is of course expected, but many basic features are currently not working at all. When starting the game, you are thrown into Utropia City which is a massive social hub to meet other players and join custom games easily. In the city there are portals to custom made content, so far mainly made by the devs and other high profile modders, but you can also access a menu to search and browse all custom maps+gamemodes, these are called ARCs. The menu is completely blank and nothing loads up so you are forced to play the few in the social hub. A lot of these games require at least 2 players, and the issue with that if you don’t have friends to play with is that there is barely anyone ever in the hub. I’ve met a few people on the first few days of launch, but since then I have not seen anyone else to try to chat up and play with.
The building tools have similar problems. You can’t look up any Stamps currently, so you are stuck with fairly basic building blocks and shapes, nothing intricate like fully built houses or anything else like that. I managed to create a pretty awesome PVP map where you use jump pads to launch onto floating islands, but had to wrangle with all the bugs and basic shapes. Currently the Beta has had some serious bugs, so I’m waiting on updates to fix a lot of my problems.
From what I was able to play, it’s very basic so far. I met two people, we joined a party together, then played a co-op PVE game. The shooting and enemy AI is about as basic as you can expect. It’s all third person, so the animations look good but the feeling is so basic, like a low budget indie Unity engine shooter. The platforming is nice though, but there are some issues with network desync and stutter that can mess up precise jumps sometimes. A lot of the gamemodes so far rely heavily on platforming.
Bottom line is, I’m excited to see where this goes and what it shapes up to be. I’m not sure if it really has that much of a fighting chance against the behemoths of Fortnite and Roblox, but the community so far seems to dig it and want to see the building tools really flesh out to allow some major creativity. I hope the games become more intricate because so far they seem really basic.
DUSK
Getting close to beating DUSK. Just got to the final episode last night. E3M3 City of Shadows has been my favorite level of the whole game so far. Tons of room for high speed movement, lots of jump pads to do sick front flips off of, tons of enemies to kill. It was a total blast playing that level! I’m not trying to 100% all secrets but so far that level had some of the coolest secrets. DUSK is such an awesome game and I can’t believe it took me this long to play through it. Even when I bought it last winter it didn’t click with me right away, but now it’s so awesome. Highly recommended for anyone who likes the ol boomer shooters. Arguably the game that kickstarted the retro shooter revival we see so often today.
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