Wrap Up Warm - Permafrost Gamescom Interview

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone, I'm Alex here with Gamereactor. We are at Gamescom, we are checking out Permafrost. I'm here with Timo. Timo, what can you tell me about Permafrost? Why should people be excited about it? I can tell you that it's now going to be very cold. I hope you're warmly dressed because as you can see we're now going into the Arctic and the setting that we have for Permafrost is maybe you can make it out in the background. So it's the year 2025 and the moon has exploded. It is slowly disintegrating and of course the global climate is going haywire. Everything is freezing over. Humanity is on the brink of extinction. We have just barely a few survivors in the world and you are trying to gather a crew, gather a team, build some shelters for survival, prepare for the cold dark nights. And as you can see we have this cold mechanic here in the game. Right now we have a minus 19 degrees Celsius and the clothes that I'm wearing, the equipment, saves me up to a minus 25 degrees Celsius. So in the course of the game I can show you the inventory. We need to craft and maybe trade better equipment, bigger backpacks to carry more loot and stuff. So basically what Permafrost is, is a sub-zero sandbox survival kind of game. So we're a bit linear driven, so we have a main storyline that we follow, working with different factions. Everyone is struggling for survival. There's an ominous faction called the Moon Cult, which is like kind of the bad guys."

"They're like worshipping, you know, this shattering moon and everything. So kind of the crazy guys. And while we progress through the game we will meet NPCs. They will give us quests, we will ask for help. This is based on the latest Unreal 5 technology, making full use of weather effects, snow tracks in the snow, the wind effects and everything. So right now my first quest is to find some survivors in this world and I will go to the next location. And while we do that we may be able to see some white animals in the forest that we will be able to hunt with a bow that we can craft. Later on we can find rifles or maybe we can craft our own rifles, like makeshift rifles. But you should be very careful with your ammo because it's very limited. Every shot counts. It's not a third-person action shooter kind of game. We want to tone that down a little so it's more the focus is more on the survival aspect. Hunting, crafting, building your shelter."

"We have a crazy building mode in the game where you can build for up to four players in a cooperative mode. You can share your objectives. For example one guy can start building, another guy can go on a hunt during that time and another guy can like defend the surroundings while one more guy goes scouting the area. And this is how we progress in the game. So I will use cheats to to progress further and teleport myself. Oh I just walked out, it's not so far. So as you can see I will gather some wood to build up some some small shelter along the way."

"We have dynamic weather effects so you see the time of the day in the upper right corner. So right now it's relatively warm. So it's still a minus 90 degrees Celsius but it's still relatively warm for this world. So as you can see barely any survivors left. We are now approaching the so-called Hunter's Glade. There's a communications tower up there and in the distance you can make out some skyscrapers. This is as far as you can go on the map. We can show you this right here. So this is the area that we have now surrounded. Points of interest around here. I'll zoom out and show you the entire map. So this is what we will offer. I think for the linear story we will offer at least 10 to 15 hours of gameplay. And if you do all the side quests, all these side activities maybe again 15 hours on top of that. So 30 hours in total. But of course you can just play with your friends cooperatively and stay in this world forever. If you have the right equipment. So here you can see a companion dog that I will be able to befriend by feeding him. And I can use him as a transport. As you can see it's like packs, backpacks here. And we will be able to send him off on a hunt to help us hunt, drive wild animals towards us."

"Yeah so we can climb this this tower here. And in elevated areas we will be able to pick up radio messages like kind of side quests that we give. So for example we learned that this group of survivors, there's a guy called Ethan Hunt who is a the local sheriff of this group. So he's our first boss and then we befriend his team."

"How do you, with something like this weather system, how do you, in this sort of setting, how do you keep it so that players can always find something new?
Because in sort of, it's a world that's sort of become completely covered in frost and snow. And that might be bleak with, as you say, there's not a lot of stuff going on. But how do you keep it so players always have something interesting to keep going to? I mean the weather effects are dynamic. So we have different locations in the game. We call them the cold zones where it's extremely cold. You have to prepare for that, not only for the night. The weather effects go like from day to night. So we can, if we just ride this around, you can see the sun moving. So now it's getting very cold. You can see the moon now in the sky, a bit more impressive. So yeah, and everywhere in the game there's some things happening. You can loot, be attacked by wild animals, so you have to be prepared. Fulfill different side quests. Yeah, that's, I think that's what people will be doing in permafrost. And what sort of, you gave a very good sort of introduction there with the story of like the moon is shattering. It's only next year as well. So people have to sort of start getting prepared I guess. Early access early next year. So we want to have ideally a demo by the end of this year to keep players engaged. We have a big showing here at Gamescom with the trailer. A new trailer is out now. So yeah, make sure to check this out and learn more about this crazy moon cult. Yeah, I mean what can players as well find out about the lore within the game? Sort of is there other little notes they can find? Right, so as I mentioned there's these different factions and you will be able to befriend them in the later game. You will come into touch with the moon cult also. Find out what their agenda is, because everyone is like fighting for survival and they have different means to do so. We try to compare this a bit to the setting of the new Mad Max movies, where you have also different factions. Like one party has the bullets, the other parties has the oil. And it's a bit like this. We have a trading system in the game, where you for example, if you hunt and skin animals for their furs, for their hides, you can exchange them for ammunition for example. And it's the exchange rates are changing dynamically. So every item has a certain value. They go up in value, they go down. So it's a small economics factor also playing into this as well. So you can still trade in the stock market even though it's with animal skins and stuff like that. So you say there that the clothes that we wear have a sort of set limit of the cold that they can withstand. Does that change depending on our clothes and can we find sort of more? Right now temperatures are dropping in the night. We are at minus 34 degrees Celsius and the stamina bar is now slowly going down. So if the stamina is over, maybe I could check out if I have some alcohol. Because as we all know, alcohol keeps you warm. So that restores a bit of my stamina. But now it's depleted and you see this would be now a very critical stage where we'll start losing health and eventually of course freeze to death. And that will affect you by sort of slowing you down."

"Are there any other ways that the weather can sort of really sort of take its toll on you? Exactly. And sort of as you said, you can build with your friends, you can bring people in for co-op. Is that sort of a way to, as you say, after the linear story is done, after the side of story is done, you can still just keep building up your base to sort of make the best of the apocalypse? Yeah, exactly."

"You start building your base in different locations that are suited for these. For example, where there's a group of NPCs already. So right now you see how the system works. I would still need to chop some wood now to build up.
But you can see that we have different materials also. Like for metal is obviously the best protection and we have tin and least protective ones are from wood. But you are free to build, you know, whatever you want with this nice, already quite complex snapping system that helps you arrange your small shelter. And you can, you're free to build all the way to the top. So we have stopped at like five or six stories. You can connect them with ladders. And as I mentioned earlier, there are some radio messages that you are able to pick up."

"And in order to do so, you need to build towers in specific areas. So you can pick those messages up and the guys will tell you, okay, we've found a group of survivors here or we found someone over here. There's some loot over there. Go check it out. And this is what you will do with like building large, large structures. Can the weather affect your shelter as well? Absolutely. So if I now would have completed the shelter, you would see the temperatures actually dropping inside. I can start a campfire, build up a workbench to repair my tools, repair my weapons. This is all done inside of the shelter. And once I'm inside and build a door, close the door, then I'm usually safe. So, yeah."

"Timo, that's all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for your time."