The Forever Winter, my favourite extraction shooter, just overhauled its most contentious feature for the second time: 'It was a hell of a rollercoaster to make the adjustment'

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The Forever Winter—the brutal early access extraction shooter that pits puny scavengers against armies of androids and building-sized mechs—has just released a huge change to its important but contentious water system.

OK, here's the skinny: The Forever Winter tasks you and your squad of fellow scavengers with sneaking through the battlefields of a ruined future Earth, trying to pick up anything you can sell while avoiding being caught by the terrifying armies still duking it out over this husk. And in this grim world, water is worth more than gold.

See, clean H20 isn't exactly in abundance, but for your scavengers and the survivors you support to keep on living, you'll need plenty of it. You can find water canisters within the battlefields, but only in small amounts, and you can't bring much back with you. One of them will support your base for a single day.

You need to hit a specific water supply milestone to unlock certain features of your base, and when it starts to run a bit low—which happens in real-time, regardless of whether or not you're playing—you'll start losing access to certain features. In the launch version of the game, running out entirely effectively killed you, and your base. This meant you lost all of your base upgrades, as well as your gear and cash. All you got to keep was character progression.

It quickly became the biggest complaint from the deluge of new players, prompting developer Fun Dog Studios to create a safety net in the form of a bandit attack. Instead of immediately losing everything, you'd get one shot at survival: kill the bandits, defend the base and survive. Fail to win the battle and everyone dies of dehydration.

In December, the safety net was expanded to include water-bots, which scrounged around for water in real-time, even when you weren't playing—but which could also be followed back to your base by bandits, necessitating a battle when you returned. A battle, I should add, where you could be aided by defensive turrets.

The tinkering continues, however. Fun Dog has now effectively removed the water mechanic entirely, turning water into currency rather than something that depletes in real-time. Now you gather water so you can spend it on accessing different map entry points. You'll still be able to send out water-bots to search for more, and water thieves may still attack your base.

It's a significant change. "It was a hell of a rollercoaster to make the adjustment, and we wanted to make sure," says creative director and Fun Dog CEO Miles Williams. "There was enough constructive feedback from our fans, as well as some creative and awesome ideas from within our team to address the fear that real-time water drain created, balanced with keeping the fantasy intact. We felt the change was both internally and externally a push in the right direction."

When I first played The Forever Winter, it was obvious that Williams and design director Jeff Gregg had a very clear vision for the game, and that included a real-time system that created tension and anxiety. Despite being the only part of the game that I thought might not be well received, it seemed at the time like this one system would be a dealbreaker—something the team wouldn't go back on.

But this is the nature of early access: you can never quite predict how a game will change. And, as Williams says, this was something the team has been giving serious thought to: "We also knew that once the nuclear button was pressed we couldn't go back, so we got buy-in from everyone on the design team and we reached out to key community members to get their ideas for a solution. Luckily our community rocks. This is one of the joys of working with them in early access so we can build that dark future together!"

While I've given the spotlight to Water 3.0, this is just part of a larger update that makes a lot of tweaks, improvements and fixes. Here's a few highlights:

• Players can trade water with each other outside of missions.
• The combat overhaul, Gunplay 2.0, changes things like recoil, dispersion, weapon handling, animations and more.
• Enemy detection icons should be more reliable, and it should be easier to sneak past them while they are in combat.
• AI spawning has been adjusted to stop enemies spawning out of thin air right in front of you.
• Performance and network stability have been tackled, along with rendering improvements and faster matchmaking.
• The looting system has been improved, with the HUD now providing more information.
• New quests have been thrown into the mix, which you can now do in a new region, known as Stairway to Heaven.

It's a meaty update, then, and you can check it out now. Conveniently, The Forever Winter is also 20% off until March 13.