An Arctic environment and new Arsenal Pack deliver a breath of fresh (frigid) air to your building and raiding experience.
Meet Your Maker is going sub-zero with Sector 2: Shattered Peak.
After the Red Sands of the desert and the murky coastline of Sector 1: Dreadshore, Behaviour Interactive is excited to bring their most distinct environment yet to Meet Your Maker with Sector 2: Shattered Peak. Expanding their visual identity alongside the game’s toolbox has always been a huge driving force for their team, and Shattered Peak’s suffocating snowstorms are the perfect way to transport you into a new frostbitten fantasy.
Shattered Peak also includes an Arsenal Pack with two of their coolest building and raiding additions to date. Behaviour never gets tired of watching you take the tools they create in wild new directions, and can’t wait to see what you can do with their new stealth-based Guard and all-seeing Custodian suit.
Into the Deep Freeze
If you thought Earth’s most remote areas might have been spared by the madness of Meet Your Maker… you’d be wrong. Set in the Arctic wastes, Shattered Peak explores what happens when paranoia overtakes a small, secluded region.
“We wanted to create a completely different mood and feel from the other two locations in the game,” says Meet Your Maker’s Creative Director, Ash Pannell, of the inspiration for Sector 2.
“The isolated setting and freezing temperatures fit the traditional tropes, and there are plenty of horror films set in the snow, of course. There’s a false sense of security up on the mountain, like the scientists who withdrew to the Shattered Peak Sanctuary thought perhaps, this far away from the catastrophic collapse of civilization, they might be safe.”
Naturally, they weren’t. This is the world of Meet Your Maker after all, and with feelings of isolation and paranoia running rampant, violence was always going be close behind.
“I was partly inspired by the winters during my childhood, in which I grew up in a small town in Northern Alberta, Canada,” shares Narrative Director, Joe Dermo. “There’d be stretches where it would get so cold that you’d rarely venture outside, and cabin fever would begin to set in. I imagined the same cabin fever turned up to 110% and considered how that would affect a group of people living together: paranoia, stress, aggression. Humans are fascinating creatures who have a tendency of taking a bad situation and finding unique ways of making it worse. That’s the basis for a lot of Meet Your Maker’s lore.”
The Overseer & The Assassin
Before the Shattered Peak Sanctuary descended into bloody chaos, it was a high-tech research facility responsible for some of the most cutting-edge innovations in gear and cloning. These very creations are what they're putting in players hands.
Building on the themes of paranoia, one of the Sanctuary’s members got their hands on a prototype Custodian suit and fused it with her nervous system. The link further augmented her paranoia providing increased detection of the environment around her, and the Overseer was born.
“The Overseer can more easily spot resources in an Outpost, and even glide after jumping, offering a totally new way to interact with levels,” points out Pannell. “My favorite is the Pathfinder perk. It reveals the location of the Harvester Path and is a real counter to crazy, time-consuming mazes.”
Sector 2 will also drop a terrifying new guard into Builders’ toolboxes. The Assassin’s skeletal character design alone is the stuff of nightmares. Add the fact that this is a stealth-based guard, and the tension they can create goes through the roof. You may not see their vicious dash attack coming until it’s already too late, and since they’re impervious to fall damage that attack may even come from high above.
These jump-scare masters are enough to trigger paranoia in even the most hardened Raider.
“It’s really about what we think players will have fun with,” points out Pannell on how new gameplay elements are decided upon. “We start by looking at gaps in both the building and raiding gameplay and try to find the best way to shake things up. When speed runners just start blasting through levels, we look at Custodians who could support that. For Builders, we give traps, guards, and augments to counter it.”
For a game all about empowering the player, it’s no surprise that your feedback plays a huge part in what gets created for Meet Your Maker’s updates.
“The vast majority of feedback and analytics are gathered and prioritized weekly,” adds Pannell. “Obviously, there’s an art to interpreting solutions and crafting that into a useable feature can take some time. Other times, it’s very obvious and we can react quickly, but our entire roadmap is almost exclusively dictated by player feedback.”
Sector 2 Shattered is available on Sept. 26th. Get out there and do your worst!