Every time I went to any kind of military training, from basic training and job school to my National Training Center rotation and walk-and-shoots, I was reminded that "you're not special."
But in most video games, the message is the opposite. You're the chosen one; you're the master chief; "you're a wizard, Harry!" Such storytelling is ubiquitous. As a result, it's nice to play games where the creator decided that the player would just be another person on the battleground.
The creators of " The Forever Winter ," a new co-op tactical shooter from Fun Dog Studios, took this logic one step further: Everyone else is terrifyingly super-powered, and you're just a lowly scavenger trying to loot and survive as they battle each other in a brutal, never-ending conflict.
Fun Dog Studios CEO Miles Williams said this decision, like many that went into the design of “The Forever Winter,” was informed by his conversations with friends who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I actually reached out to an old high school teacher, and he was in an artillery unit in the Gulf and he put me in touch with folks from different units more recently,” Williams told Military.com. “And then some of my high school buddies as well, so it was largely Iraq and Afghanistan."
Following those conversations, Williams started comparing the games he was working on with his friend's stories from their deployments overseas.
"I was kind of approaching from a college thesis standpoint of just, 'Hey, most of these video games are about what you all do for a freaking living, and what do you guys wanna see about it?'” he said. “And one of the biggest things was actually just putting the player in a situation where they had to make legitimate choices and really choose between two [crappy] situations."
The Fun Dog team accomplished this by ensuring that players in “The Forever Winter” constantly face tough decisions, both because the enemies are challenging and the battlefield in the game is so dynamic. Williams was clear that he didn't want players to be super soldiers, with the best equipment and ample ammo every time they jumped in.
"With the combat in general, we're really forcing the player to have basic elements like situational awareness,” Williams said. “We're saying, 'Look, you might have a situation where, you know, you have a colleague that's down, and you have to choose between going out there and suppressing and then getting them to a medevac situation, or you might just have to be, like, 'Dude, we literally will not make our evac if we save you,' you know, and just basically putting the player in those types of situations on a regular basis."
One big part of making decisions hard for the player was making sure there were no clear good guys and bad guys.
"When it's like Stormtroopers in ‘Star Wars,’ it defaults to where there's a clear delineation of sides, right?" Williams said. "And that was one of the big things we tried not to do with our game. There is no good guy in this [game]. There's a series of people that are in a series of shady situations, and they're gonna have to use their brains to basically figure out how they're gonna get through, and the odds are definitely not in their favor."
While the factions in the game have everything from multi-story mechs and attack helicopters the size of city blocks, the players are lucky to have an assault rifle or shotgun with enough ammo. Williams said that came, in part, from watching his peers who got caught up in Russia's expanded war in Ukraine in 2022.
"I worked for Wargaming before stuff jumped off over there," Williams said, "so it was really rough because I had a lot of colleagues that were over in Ukraine that were working there, and we had colleagues on the other side, too, and it sucked. … But the Ukraine conflict was really interesting because you have drone coverage and advanced NATO weapons, you have Russian weapons like the Terminator tank, and that's next to dudes using StG 44s, right? That's next to someone with a Sten gun from World War II. So we looked at that, at the Syria conflict and trench warfare, the conflict in Mosul and obviously the conflicts that my buddies were involved in."
Looking at a far-future conflict, that translated into modern weapons, such as Leopard tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, as futures among the old materiel that fighters must pull out of storage and press into service.
For all the Fun Dog team's work on making a battle simulator and trying to give players challenges from real life, they still know they're making art and entertainment. So while “The Forever Winter” is defined by tough mechanics and even tougher tactical choices, it also features 40-foot-tall robot women that eat players.
"It's an interesting balance because I think of [comic book writer/artist and screenwriter] Frank Miller, who approaches this really well, and, like, 'V for Vendetta' and 'Children of Men,' where you make social commentary through art,” Williams said. “That can be super potent, but it's still art at its core. I think humans are always gonna have a fascination and a love affair with military hardware. There's no kid on the planet that sees the Blue Angels and is like, 'That was not cool,' that looks at an [M1] Abrams and thinks, 'That's not the dopest thing ever.'"
So if you want to see an Abrams fight a 40-foot woman while also trying to fold yourself into a tiny crack in the wall so that neither turns and kills you, keep an eye out for "The Forever Winter."
“The Forever Winter” will be r eleased on Steam on Sept. 24, 2024.
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