Meet Your Maker is different from other PvP games because we never meet our opponent. Phil tried it out and is blown away by the idea!
During the Game Awards we not only got the new trailer for Meet Your Maker, but also the release date: On 4 April 2023, the new game will be released by Behaviour Interactive, who are best known for Dead by Daylight.
Personally, I”m now anticipating the date more than I would have thought possible, because I was able to try out the post-apocalyptic base-building shooter for a good hour. Now I am convinced that Meet Your Maker might even change the way we play and perceive PvP multiplayer Namely, not as a reflex-based confrontation between two players or teams, but as a deadly puzzle sandbox where creativity is the best weapon
How do I arrive at this daring thesis? Here I will tell you why my very first round in Meet Your Maker left such a lasting impression.
All alone in PvP
“Meet your Maker is a futuristic first-person build and raid game whose levels are all created by players for other players. On the one hand, you devise deadly labyrinths filled with traps and guards, and on the other hand, you raid the creations of other players, heavily armed,” summarises creative director Ash Pannell at the first presentation of the game principle.
In the end-time setting of Meet Your Maker, the aim is to build the deadliest possible outposts and storm those of others from the first-person view. The goal: to recover a container with valuable resources inside the structure – or to defend it. One is more like Minecraft, the other more like Quake!
The highlight of this kind of PvP: We never meet our opponent directly, we don”t fight dramatic duels. Instead, we interact with other players via detours.
These can be their death markers, for example, which they drop when they die in our crafty maze (and earn us resources if we collect them in build mode while we optimise our fortress). They can be replays where we get to watch an intruder cut their teeth on our traps, for example – and then come back in co-op with a friend to try again! Or it”s little things like a user rating for a level played.
“After a raid, you can leave a rating. For example, an award for extremely brutal or particularly beautifully built forts,” explains Ash Pannell. “Well-rated builds, or those with a certain amount of kills, stay online longer and the creators get special rewards like extra XP and so on. “
Progression & Seasons
In Meet Your Maker, you unlock new content by leveling up – including equipment for your Raider character such as grappling hooks, energy shields or grenades. You can also earn upgrades in the form of resources in the building mode, which can then be invested in new traps or guards in the headquarters. After the launch, new updates will appear regularly in the form of seasons. However, the developers are still leaving open exactly what these will look like. “We simply don”t know yet exactly what content the community will want,” admits creative director Ash Pannell. But new weapons, new traps, new guards and more are conceivable. With each season, there will also be new rankings for the best raiders and builders.
The crux of Meet Your Maker is that it sees itself as extremely social game even though I never actually meet my opponents. Lead game designer Pierre Rivest explains it like this:
“It”s about players creating their own game experience and sharing it with the world. You can build in co-op with a friend or pull off raids. You can watch each player in replay trying to storm our fortress. You can keep improving your fortress based on feedback.“
Pierre Rivest from Behaviour Interactive
This even goes as far as subscribing to my favourite fort builders and always playing their latest works. And if I”m still not sure whether my own death maze is really successful, I can make it available to individual friends quasi-exclusively for testing. It has long been clear that Meet Your Maker relies one hundred percent on a lively, active community and its creative energy.
The super villain in me is awakening
On paper, it all still sounds pretty abstract, so the developers take me on my first round. Together with Creative Director Ash, I am to build my first fortress and it quickly becomes clear how
incredibly many possibilities the building mode of Meet Your Maker offers: Using blocks of concrete, glass or metal, we first build our basic structure, always leaving a path to the mission objective for the invaders.
With mouse and keyboard, building is a breeze after a short period of getting used to the interface and after a few minutes I am already embellishing the roof of my construction with stylish spikes. Even psychology can play a role in building: “You can decorate the walls specifically to distract players from the real danger,” Ash says with a grin – and places a few harmless lights on a wall opposite a device that makes skewers of steel shoot out of the ground!
While placing the traps the super-villain quickly awakens in me, too, and I imagine how the raid will go later: “Here I”ll rain bombs from the ceiling, then, yes, then the intruder will run to the front here, where a flamethrower awaits him. And even if he dodges that, I”ve still got a grappling arm around the corner to pull him into the bolt gun, ha ha ha,” shouts the bad guy part of my brain. I rub my hands together in anticipation. Building isn”t usually fun for me in games, but Meet Your Maker has somehow done it.
Ash completes my build by placing boiling hot blocks of glowing plasma at the bottom of our fortress. “You can even play ”The Floor is Lava” here,” he says. I can”t wait until some poor devil enters this hellish creation!
All nervous from watching
The first victim for my content is Jacky, my German PR contact to the developers. I get to watch her cautiously take her first steps into my first dungeon. Will she fall into my traps? Will she even take the path I had planned for her? Or will she still find a loophole in my defences that I overlooked?
After a few seconds she has spotted my flamethrower and destroyed it – obviously I placed it too obviously! But Jacky immediately comes under fire from a flying cyborg drone whose patrol path I had previously set myself.
A well-aimed shot with the railgun also makes short work of this obstacle. Nevertheless, my calculation works out: A misstep causes it to fall into the lava in all the chaos, a co-op partner rushes to the rescue to revive it. I watch the action tense and full of thieving anticipation. Jacky laughs nervously: “Shameless! What else have you hidden here?”
As Jacky reaches the mission objective and is about to retrieve the precious vial, our joker ignites: A heavily armoured robot shoots out of a wall and lunges for a devastating blow. Jacky reflexively parries with her katana and strikes down the giant. Everyone is stunned for a second. Then laughter rings through the chat room. “That was a professional move,” everyone agrees. My heart is pounding. I wouldn”t have thought that you could feel so much adrenaline just watching!
My head is starting to rattle: Might it have worked with a different monster? What if I moved the flamethrower trap a little forward? Immediately I feel the need to tweak at least four or five spots, try other traps and start another run, but our time is up. It clicks. I suddenly understand what the appeal of Meet Your Maker will be. And all of a sudden I can”t wait for April 4.
Editor”s verdict
I haven”t experienced the concept of PvP multiplayer like this before. And I am, as they say, hooked on Meet Your Maker. I was sceptical beforehand as to whether I would really enjoy the tedious build-up. I”m more the shooter type and prefer to tear things down in games rather than fiddle around.
Now I have to say: watching an opponent wander through my masterful death maze and fail at my traps is at least as satisfying and exciting as a thrilling 1on1 duel against an equal opponent in a traditional shooter! Of course, after one hour I can”t finally assess whether Meet Your Maker really motivates in the long run, but the sheer mass of possible combinations with traps, upgrades, guards and so on should provide an extreme amount of variety.
And therein lies the real stroke of genius of Meet Your Maker: once the community is established, the supply of creative maps will never end without the developers lifting a finger! Instead, they can tweak the balance and deliver new content. So now it all depends on whether enough players come on board for this experiment.
