I suppose it’s perfectly sensible that a dev who’s spent their career making war games would eventually move on to something that’s essentially what’s left after the war. Rad New World is a post-apocalyptic RPG from the same solo dev as the Frontline series (the WWII strategy games).
It’s a complete change of genre, going from military ops to the problems of the individual survivor. A change of scene for sure, though it would seem humanity’s lot in general hasn’t really improved. The dev name Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics as direct influences. Wasteland is very much a grunge/punk/western thing. Radioactive frontier in all its questionable company.
Build a Survivor, Then Find Something Worth Surviving For
Character creation and perks support the combat, stealth and trading specializations. Lockpicking, crafting, and vehicles are all present, as are radiation, addiction, and injury. It’s interesting really that surviving the end of civilization still leaves you with so many other problems to develop!
Dev update gives a much clearer picture of how the RPG side is coming together. 0.25E added factions and a quest system, finished off the bartering and inventory implementation, and added several ways of going about quest solving.
That final point is the one that interests me most. Character building options are so much more interesting when they actually alter the way you go about dealing with a real situation. I’d like to see how a persuasive trader and a heavily armed troublemaker would deal with the same assignment (beyond just the way they open the conversation).
As for the company you’d keep, the Scrappers are hostile scavengers who will take any part off a vehicle they can get their hands on (even if it’s still on someone). The Children of the Vine are a cult who worship a plant which nourishes and transforms them. Post apocalyptic gardening has clearly gone horribly wrong.
Locations introduced in the dev updates are Hidrotek (an underground complex of flooded corridors and derelict research labs) and Black Well (an industrial site with very confined areas of combat). Those are the places I’d expect to see the game’s own character come through beyond the usual suspects.
Aimed Shots With Unpleasant Consequences
Combat includes melee weapons and firearms, with crouching and crawling among the available options.
One very interesting feature is the aimed shot system. The dev has indicated that the hit bonuses and associated behavior will vary from species to species. That could bring some real variety to your targeting decisions. A useful shot against one enemy might have quite different consequences against another.
The notes for the internal test build 0.26 also mention critical hits which can result in blindness, crippling injuries and panic. At that stage, aimed shots were working on around 60% of the humanoid NPCs and creatures (giving some idea of the amount of work still to be done).
Civilization Has Collapsed, but the Radio Schedule Survives
A much more characterful addition came in version 0.27 with the introduction of a portable radio and stations to discover throughout the wasteland. In addition to the music and emergency broadcasts, there’s Oasis Radio, run by B.O.B. (the robot), who has been on the air on AM for 150 years since the Catastrophe. Whatever else went wrong in the world, someone clearly forgot to turn off the morning show.
The Steam page also states that AI has been used to generate some of the backgrounds and environmental art (taken from the dev’s own 3D assets), as well as some of the voices. The intention is to replace those voices with human recordings for the final version.
Rad New World is heading to PC via Steam Early Access (no release date at this stage). The devs are expecting around a year in Early Access, though that is, of course, a very rough estimate, as the content and systems are still very much in development.
