With its launch in Spring 2023, Meet Your Maker officially hands the keys to its post-apocalyptic wasteland over to players around the world.
If you’re new to the title, Meet Your Maker is a building-and-raiding game completely driven by user-generated content. Rather than designing a standard FPS experience, Behaviour Interactive is offering up a devious toolbox of blocks, traps, guards, and more, inviting players to create their own experiences and challenge each other.
Challenges come in the form of stand-alone levels called Outposts, which you’ll be both building and raiding. These huge labyrinthine fortresses hide deadly deterrents around every corner. They also house canisters of pure genetic material you’ll need to protect or steal to progress in the game.
Meet Your Maker’s Builder/Raider dynamic is one-of-a-kind, and today we’ll explore some of the ways it delivers uniquely connected moments for players.
Fair Game
For any strategic multiplayer game — even an asynchronous one like Meet Your Maker — keeping things fair is paramount. From Outpost selection to gameplay, the team has made sure to cover their bases.
“Often user-generated content (UGC) games surface their content by focusing on the cream of the crop, perhaps through a rating system,” explains Creative Director, Ash Pannell. “Meet Your Maker differs from this approach by making sure any Outpost built will be raided by other players, which is much more rewarding for our Builders.”
While a first-person perspective might be a natural fan-favorite for shooters, it was also a key in keeping gameplay on the level. “The FPS view for both building and raiding was a good fit for us,” continues Pannell. “For one, the claustrophobic view offers a great sense of immersion. There’s also a core rule: traps in the game can’t fire at a player without seeing them first and allowing time to react. This adds an inherent fairness to every death and leaves no room for ambiguity, which in turn helps Raiders to learn and not make the same mistakes twice.”
Staying Connected
Sharing an Outpost in Meet Your Maker means millions around the world will be able to engage with your content. That’s a powerful prospect, and the game works to ensure that a constant link between creators and challengers is felt, even if they aren’t online at the same time.
“It’s very important for us to keep reminding Builders and Raiders that they are both UGC to the other side,” says Pannell. Raiders select Outposts from a world map that flags the name of every Builder. Following a raid, the Raider is also encouraged to leave accolades for the Outpost by selecting words of recognition that describe their experience for future challengers.
On the Builders’ side, similar social features also carry a nice educational bonus. “Our Replay System lets you watch any Raider take on your Outpost and revel in the joy of their failure – or pound your fist on the desk as they breeze through. This is a real replay of real people, and you can totally tell,” shares Pannell. “There’s really nothing like watching a player fall for a clever setup you’ve built or come back to see a player who took thirty or forty tries to crack your Outpost.”
Meet Your Maker’s Skull System also lets Builders return to their Outpost to collect resources from skull markers where Raiders died. Each skull displays the Raider’s name, rank, and what killed them.
“We also have a Social Raids feature allowing any Outpost to be searchable and playable,” he continues. “Search a player name you know and access all their available content, anytime. This lets players directly share content with friends, forums, or their communities. Social Raids don’t provide direct in-game rewards, but they do provide replays and the ability for Outposts to remain alive forever.”
While Meet Your Maker is primarily an asynchronous multiplayer, classic co-op is always available, too. Players can combine their creativity and build with a friend or join forces to raid as a team of two.
Constant Evolution
A big part of the Builder/Raider relationship is pushing the other side to evolve. No Outpost in Meet Your Maker is ever final, and Builders can return at any time to strengthen and reshare their creations using the influx of new traps, guards, mods, and themed-block types that will be regularly added to the game.
“Sometimes things don’t go according to plan and returning to work on your masterpiece is a key part of the gameplay,” points out Pannell. “The Replay and Skull systems let you analyze every single detail of what you’ve built to understand what’s working and what isn’t. Then you can get back in there, learn from your mistakes and make a better Outpost.”
“Outposts stay online for quite a while and have their own progression system that can extend their lifetime,” he concludes. “There will be a lot of raids on your creation, and it was important to us to give everyone the freedom to improve. At the end of the day, if players make better content, whatever that means to them, then everyone wins.”
Meet Your Maker will be available April 4, 2023, on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Learn more at MeetYourMakerGame.com.
