DEADROP
I continue to be interested in the saga of Dr. Disrespect, his studio Midnight Society and his new game, which now has an official name, DEADROP, after previously being called Project Moon.
The game caught my eye because of its use of NFTs to recruit players to be early players/testers, and its promise of a totally transparent development process involving giving those players frequent vertical slices of the game to play and give feedback about.
Now, besides the name debut, a live event provided those dedicated, NFT-holding Doc fans with their first live look at the game. It is definitely further along than screenshots from a blog post a few weeks ago indicated, though there’s plenty of pushback about how it does look, as well.
DEADROP (yes, it’s missing a D on purpose), is a Vertical Extraction Shooter, a new term Doc invented, but it seems to be some sort of spin on Escape from Tarkov mixed with elements of The Cycle or Warzone.
However, the early test footage from the gameplay reveal at the live event has not progressed all the way to showing an actual match. It’s mainly a firing range simulator and an exploration of part of the skyscraper environment. The general idea seems to be to fight your way past human and AI enemies to reach the top and be extracted by helicopter, but only the basics are shown in this early footage.
Does this footage look good? I mean, no, not really. The environments are okay, but the gun model/firing/reload looks pretty rough. Again, this is the first public build of the game ever, so that is going to be a common refrain used when things aren’t looking polished, but that’s what the Midnight Society has opened themselves up for with this new kind of ultra-transparent development.
People keep bringing up the fact that Doc said the following a few weeks back
“I could take a screenshot of our game right now, in-game, in-engine, and I don’t think anything [from Call of Duty] could match that screenshot.”
All of this remains somewhat strange because Dr. Disrespect is a “character” who frequently makes boasts of his own abilities and dunks on his competition, but Guy Beahm is now a developer making an actual video game. So which one said this, and how serious were they? Regardless, expect it to be brought up every time new footage is shown if it does not, in fact, surpass Call of Duty.
The plan now seems to be to produce more and more vertical slices for game founders showing off pieces of DEADROP. It’s unclear when it might expand outside the NFT-holding circle, but that seems pretty core to the concept of its “community building.” And it does seem a ways off from releasing something like a true beta. But yeah, I’m going to keep an eye on it, as all this continues to be fascinating.
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