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Save-the-world sim Eco’s 1.0 plans include oil spills, garbage collection and a bustling art sceneDeveloper Strange Loop Games details the roadmap out of early access
Developer Strange Loop Games details the roadmap out of early access
Image credit:Strange Loop Games
Image credit:Strange Loop Games
Ecois a very ambitious, wildly reactive multiplayersurvivalgame in which you try to save the world without accidentally destroying it. There’s a meteor scheduled to slamdunk the planet in 30 days, and in that time, you and your fellow players must progress from raising log cabins in the woods to building the means to develop technologies that might somehow avert the apocalypse. The trouble is, pioneering said apocalypse-averting technologies mightitselfbring about disaster in a gameworld that simulates things like habitat death, species extinction, air pollution and catastrophic flooding.
Theassociated developer roadmapis a fun mixture of the usual 1.0 plans for final polishing and various enthusiastic descriptions of how they’re going to make life worse for would-be meteor-survivors. On the one hand, you can expect more fleshed-out player professions “with lots more options to choose from and paths to take within those skills, to create a greater spread of possible careers, thus creating more ‘niches’ for players to specialize in and become valuable members of their community”. On the other hand, they’re adding a degradation mechanic, partly with a view to ensuring that certain vocations don’t run out of things to do. “Everything will wear down and, if not maintained, break over time,” the post explains. “This creates a constant need on professions to supply parts and perform repairs on these objects, preventing professions from going obsolete when all the needed objects are produced.”
Image credit:Strange Loop Games
Eco 1.0 will introduce various features designed to cultivate “deeper ‘emotions’: representing the beauty of the natural and man-made worlds, taking care of animals, and general coziness that makes it very comfortable to spend time in”. Take animal husbandry - the developer’s “marquee launch feature”, which will let you “raise animals for meat, milk, eggs, and wool, as well as pets, which will give a home bonus”. (I’m not sure whether you can build factory farms, or whether the simulation will model the colossal emissions footprint of the animal agriculture industry, but these seem like logical if not very “cozy” extensions of the premise.)
The devs are also “adding a new scoring category for outdoor land, so that you can decorate your space beautifully and get rewarded for it, making for quaint and pretty villages”, and are expanding the game’s culture system, which let you score points for creative works. But alas and alack, all these feelgood objectives must be set against the desire “to add more end-game disasters and challenges beyond the meteor, challenges that will arise and face society over time.”
Alice Bhad a crack at Eco back in 2018, and came away with interestingly mixed feelings. “Eco is good at showing how much impact we can have on our environment,” she wrote. “It’s just that it demonstrates it a bit too much, and the object of the game - cooperating with other players to balance saving the world with saving the world - feels like just as bleak an outcome as annihilation. I’d rather have been roasting a few tomatoes and cutting the grass on my dirt floor when it got too long, and welcoming the meteor.”
Steve Hogartyreached similar conclusions in 2020. “Eco is commendable in its mission to thread ecological nuance and serious critical thought into the sandbox survival genre, but it does its job a little too efficiently, inadvertently simulating the protective layer of climate apathy in which we’ve cocooned our petrified little minds to avoid going absolutely insane on a near daily basis,” he wrote. “The game’s message is vital, but if working together to prevent the end of the world was any fun we’d already be doing it.”
Good grief, what wonderful, optimistic people I work with! If you’ve been playing Eco and have happier stories to share of gameworlds that have successfully achieved utopia, I’d love to read them.
