As I continue to keep tabs on Dr. Disrespect’s DEADROP from his Midnight Society studio, the self-proclaimed “Vertical Extraction Shooter” with a unorthodox open development process, the game keeps throwing out twists and turns.
While cars have been a part of DEADROP marketing visuals for a while now, last week a number of “Drivers Keys” went online for sale, a new package of pre-sale items that DEADROP has rolled out for early players of what are called “Snapshots,” as even a pre-alpha doesn’t quite seem like the right word.
The car packages cost $30 each except for a special Dr. Disrespect model which costs $40. At first, I though these were like ships in Destiny, loading screen adornments that are just cosmetic and aren’t actually piloted in the game. That is…not what’s happening here.
As it turns out, the cars have actually been integrated into the game itself. The…first person shooter game. The way this works is that before a match of DEADROP starts, you participate in something called the “Midnight Ride,” which is you racing against the other cars in your lobby down a bunch of winding roads and launching off ramps. You have some onboard weaponry, some healing items, and you try to jockey for position in order to have a specific spawn point in the game itself. I believe it may also be the case that the sooner you get there, the faster you can start looting before everyone.
This is, to say the least, somewhat confusing.
I went and watched a chunk of Doc’s stream from the Snapshot VII event where the Midnight Ride segment debuted with featured other big name content creators like Dr. Lupo. The race segment itself is, fine, I suppose. Twisted Metal light. Very light. But I’m more trying to wrap my head around the concept, as what this looks like is that you have to do a three minute race before a match of the actual FPS starts. Whether there are modes without this segment, I’m not sure, but I’m not quite clear on what the appeal of this is here. Racer players and shooter players are very different segments of the gaming population, even if there’s some amount of shooting in the racing.
This feels like if Valorant made you 1v1 someone in a small League of Legends arena before starting a match. I guess maybe you could compare it to something like a Warzone lobby fully of casual killing before the server populates, but it doesn’t function like that in practice, as it’s like if kills in that mode gave you better starting locations somehow that other players didn’t have access to.
But also uh, as you may have seen, the game is selling $30-40 car packages which went live right before this Snapshot. I don’t believe these cars have a specific advantage in Midnight Ride, as there aren’t stats or anything for them listed, so in that sense they are cosmetic. But the fact that something like this is being sold at all this early, along with the game’s “exotic crates,” gives me Star Citizen vibes, the game that sold countless ships and accessories before the game launched. And it never really launched.
I’m not saying DEADROP will never materialize but A) this seems like a deeply odd direction for the game to go, turning a lobby into a racing game and B) it is hard not to be cynical that they are selling microtransactions for this specific part of the game right now, cosmetic or not (so far as I can tell, they’re not NFTs, at least). Midnight Society’s Robert Bowling says cars will also be a part of “Creative Mode” later on where pure racing courses can be designed. DEADROP is a platform, it seems.
All of this strikes me a strange. The “open development process” seems to be working in the sense that they keep throwing these Doc fan events and there is actual stuff to play. But they are already doing loot boxes and large purchase items for the game which doesn’t have anything like a alpha, beta or release date, just an endless string of “Snapshots.” I do not find that particularly endearing. I truly have no idea where this is going next.
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