Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Gameplay Reveal

Last month, Funcom and The Bearded Ladies unveiled a curious post-apocalyptic game they’ve been working on for a while – Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. And now, a press release we received directs us towards 35 minutes of early gameplay footage narrated by the developers, where we’re treated to a short cinematic followed by a couple of mid-game levels.

In the process, we get a good look at the game’s real-time exploration, turn-based tactical combat, environmental storytelling, party interactions, looting and sneaking. We also get to see the world map and the city hub screens. Check it out:

And here are the relevant parts of the press release:

OSLO, Norway – March 28th, 2018 – Funcom announced ‘Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden’ just a few weeks ago with a Cinematic Reveal Trailer that quickly made some significant ripples in the duck pond of the Internet. A lot of the credit for that goes to Dux, a duct-taped, crossbow-wielding anthropomorphic duck who saw a sudden rise to fame in the weeks that followed. Apparently, anyone can become popular on the Internet, all you need is ruffle a few feathers.

Last week the bird flu to San Francisco to present the game behind closed doors at the Game Developer Conference. This week you will soon see that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it probably is much more than just a CGI duck as Funcom finally reveals how ‘Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden’ looks and plays through 30 minutes of unedited gameplay presented by the developers at The Bearded Ladies.

Tired of duck puns yet? We promise to send you some more later.

“I would just like to apologize for all the duck puns in this press release”, says Lawrence Poe, Chief Product Officer at Funcom. “Our PR people are nothing but a bunch of quacks.”

The game, which is being developed by Bearded Ladies and published by Funcom, is set to release in 2018 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Players must take control of a team of unlikely heroes, such as Dux (a crossbow-wielding, walking, talking duck) and Bormin (a boar with serious anger issues), and help them navigate a post-human Earth with its abandoned cities, crumbling highways, and mutated monsters on every corner. The team behind the game includes former ‘HITMAN’ leads as well as Ulf Andersson, the designer of ‘PAYDAY’.

‘Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden’ is powered by the Unreal Engine and will be available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 in 2018. The game is based on the classic ‘Mutant’ IP that has spawned several popular pen and paper role-playing games since the 1980s, including the current ‘Mutant: Year Zero’ from Free League and Modiphius Entertainment. The IP is owned by the Cabinet Group and the interactive rights are controlled by Heroic Signatures, a company owned by both Cabinet Group and Funcom[.]

Additionally, PC Gamer offers an interview with several of The Bearded Ladies developers that doubles as a detailed preview of the game. An excerpt:

When you understand the pedigree behind Mutant Year Zero, its addition of more robust stealth than what you see in XCOM2 starts to make a lot of sense. The team I met with included former lead designers from IO Interactive, who worked on the last two Hitman games.

“This is actually a game I wanted to do 10 years ago, but couldn’t fund it, couldn’t find the opening to do it,” said David Skarin, who was the lead gameplay designer on 2016’s Hitman. He roped in former Hitman level design lead Lee Varley and Ulf Andersson, who co-founded Overkill software and designed the Payday games.

“I grew up on these things,” said Andersson, motioning to the Mutant RPG book they brought along to show off. “This is one of the things I always wanted to make. The whole entire Swedish developer scene of my age wants to do this game.”

Mutant revolves around a safe haven called the Ark, a sort of shantytown safe haven for mutant humans and animals built on top of a bridge. In the game the graphics aren’t completely finished and it’s a bit empty, but the soft glow of neon lights and fire barrels dot the trellises and light up the makeshift shacks. Here there’s a bar for taking on missions, a crafting station, and the chambers of the Elder, a frail old (and mysteriously unmutated) man who looks after the survivors of the Ark like his children.

Everything outside the Ark is the Zone, where you’ll explore, scavenge for resources, and meet new characters to recruit into your party. Varley compared the way you’ll expand your party to Japanese RPGs—those new characters will have a story that comes along with them. All of this comes straight out of the pen-and-paper RPG.

“It’s not a resource management game in the same way as XCOM, but you do bring artifacts and things back from the Zone, which improve the lives of these people,” said Skarin. The mission he took on had him hunting down a generator, which would let them turn on more lights at the Ark instead of burning trash. I asked if most of the characters would be animals or humans, and Skarin said that in the world of Mutant, humans are more common, but the playable cast will largely be mutant animals because they’re more fun.