Rooted

Features as posted on the Steam Store page.

• Build and improve your camp, using all the items you farm, salvage, and craft. As you progress in the game, you can improve your defenses, automate tasks, supply electricity, and develop your workshop.
• Settle in villages or in the city, securing houses, offices, or even entire floors in a building. Barricades, partitions, traps. Craft something to protect yourself. The travel distance can be long. Getting to build a secondary outpost is always a plus.
• Craft tools to improve your life conditions, facilitate transportation, eat, protect, and heal yourself.
• Salvaging is a major key component in Rooted. You can recover, repair and use a lot of items from the past civilization, whether they are mechanical, electronic, or even clothing!
• An array of AI.
• Rooted is a living world. From the forest to the city's downtown, explore a large world that evolves with your actions. You gain access to new areas, new items, and new crafting options over time. Major events will have an impact on the world, bringing new challenges to you and your friends.

Honestly, I have no fucking idea as of yet. It'll have foundational building blocks like crafting, building, and exploration. I poked around their Discord for a while, trying to hone in on words like 'survival' and 'mechanics,' wondering if I could get an ironed-out statement on included systems. Whomp whomp. There's a lot of flashy marketing talk, like this line directly from the developer, in a Discord post dated 02/21/2023.

"For the development, we can say the same thing but a survival game in 2023/2024 must have advanced mechanics, and not just pick up objects, put 3 walls and jump around." -Mat, Rooted developer.

So, yanno. There you go.

I dragged my feet forever on making this page, though I've been watching the development of/hearing about Rooted for ages. At least from mid-2022, but it's a while before that even. 

At the start of things, Rooted reminded me of The Day Before. We were getting some nice-looking video footage, but it was the same "person walking through a forest or broken down city, not interacting with shit, just walking with dramatic music." Unfortunately, a limited amount of information or detail was available then.

In the early days of the concept of Rooted being thrown out into the world, my viewpoint was that the game's creators relied heavily on descriptions and ideas from various sources. As if they threw Derelicts, The Division 2, SCUM, DayZ, and more into the blender, slapped a name on the resultant mashup, and relied on the goodwill & hype generated by folks who put in the work before them to arouse interest in this new title while bringing little to the table beyond pretty UE videos or assets. 

A video by Bluedrake42 (where much was made of literally nothing) coupled with an interview with 80.lv (where the answers provided by the developer just seemed...smarmy to me) soured me on the game for a while. 

Nowadays, they are leaning heavily into game development after completing a successful Kickstarter funding campaign. While they share images frequently to highlight development progress, it's primarily just pretty scenery or pictures of props with very little detail. Even the photos shared specifically to backers lack substance in my eyes. With Closed Alpha promised for "early 2023," - I feel like, at this point, there should be actual real gameplay footage; for crafting, combat, the player character, etc. There was one trailer shown back in August of 2022 that showcased a bit more gameplay footage, and I saw an action-adventure game that looked & handled like The Division or Days Gone.

I'm not saying this is another "The Day Before"- I would like to hope that it isn't possible for two studios/developers to trip over their dicks in real-time so frequently and so severely. However. I'm wondering if this is going to be more like Sons of the Forest- where there's a lot of hype, where 'everything nice gets shown in the trailer' (to quote the issues with movies these days), where it gets blown into an experience that it does not deliver upon. I hope I'm wrong, but I will happily gloat if I'm right!

Website Changelog

• 3/22/23- Changelog added.