Dead by Daylight developer Behavior Interactive has revealed its next game: Meet Your Maker.
It’s a first-person build-assault game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic hellish wasteland, with players building towering booby-trapped industrial outposts to protect genetic material, then infiltrating others’ outposts to steal the precious resource.
It certainly feels like a departure from the popular multiplayer horror game, both in its genre and aesthetic. But there are more similarities than you think.
For starters, Meet Your Maker has a bit of a horror undertone, albeit now in sci-fi. It is set in a desolate world filled with brutal, imposing structures and genetically mutated guards – a bleak future that could mirror our own, ravaged by disease and global warming.
But really, it’s the asynchronous multiplayer aspect of Meet Your Maker that feels inherently behavioral. The game is divided into two halves, with players building their own outposts for others to raid and raiding outposts themselves. Both can be done cooperatively with friends.
Let’s start with the construction. This is done in first person, by flying or walking around structures and placing large blocks in a grid system.
At the core of each outpost is the genetic material, or genmat as Behavior calls it, and there’s a little harvesting robot that must always have a path to the genmat from the outside. Players must strengthen this path, creating whatever structures they want and covering them with props (visual props, sometimes animated) and decals (essentially paint).
Next comes filling the structure with traps: arrow traps, incinerators, caustic waste buckets, bomb ejectors, and more. Multiple guards can also be placed and their patrol routes recorded directly by the player, for both ground guards and flying units. Of course, all this has limits to maintain a certain balance.
When everything is ready, players can test and then upload their creations for others to try to infiltrate. The behavior emphasizes that building is an iterative process, which means watching videos (in first and third person) of players attacking your outposts and then editing and rebuilding them later, making them more deadly over time.
The behavior ensures that there will be moderation to ensure that nothing adverse is built. Players can give feedback on builds and mark them for deletion, something the team will be involved with at first.
The other face is assaulting others. This works much like other first-person shooters, with two weapons available (a harpoon with limited ammo that must be salvaged, and a melee weapon), consumable grenades, and a grappling hook for added maneuverability. Players must grab the genmat and make it out alive. One hit and you’re dead.
Of course, you can try it as many times as you want. And with knowledge comes speed. Just don’t get cocky: the game is already designed to be a challenge, despite the brutal creations of the players.
Both building and raiding will reward players with resources that they can take back to their Chimera: a “living experiment created as a last resort to save life on Earth.” Providing your Chimera with a genmat in your sanctuary will allow you to level up your advisors, which essentially increases the abilities of your traps, guards, weapons and their associated mods and perks, thus improving your chances of thwarting raiders and infiltrating with success in outposts. We encourage you to try both for maximum resource rewards.
And so the loop continues. UGC is at the core of Meet Your Maker, but it’s also meant to be a social experience.
Not only can you play the game cooperatively, you can share builds with friends (although Behavior insists friends won’t be able to circumvent the game’s resource economy with their builds), follow your favorite creators, send screenshots of failed attempts of friends and bestow praise after each raid: funny, brutal, witty, artsy.
The behavior also has Twitch in mind. Dead by Daylight has become a sensation on the streaming platform, and the developer is hoping for a similar result with Meet Your Maker. It may not have been designed specifically for Twitch, but it has been in the team’s design thinking since the beginning, improving the social aspects of the game.
It also intends to be another long-term project. Players will gain resources and experience to progress as they play, and Behavior has plans for post-launch content: new block types, traps, weapons, guards, armor, and more. These will insert themselves into existing systems and affect both building and raiding equally, requiring new strategies for both.
Meet Your Maker certainly has the potential to be the next viral sensation, a game of intelligence versus skill. It should appease fans of building and shooting games, with a central loop that could prove irresistible.
The community is likely to quickly compare it to Dead by Daylight. However, it’s hard not to compare it to so many other games in an attempt to capture interest. There is Minecraft in its construction mechanics; Doom and Quake in its aesthetics; LittleBigPlanet in your social interactions; and countless FPS games in your shooting.
These could be the building blocks of something special, as long as you can capture a spark of originality.
Meet Your Maker will be released in 2023 on PC (Steam), PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X/S. An initial playtest will be live starting August 23 for approximately two months, sign up on the game’s website.