With the launch of The Wild Eight’s pre-alpha demo last week week, we reached out to developer 8pts to address some of the complaints and inquiries that have been previously brought up about the game on Cliqist. As of May 5th, 8pts has fully funded the Wild Eight on Kickstarter, and are looking forward to meeting stretch goals!

So why did they decide to go with the number eight, you ask? Well, when 8pts started out they had eight people on the team, so they wanted to create a game that they could all sit down and enjoy together. The number also has many “hidden meanings”, and many of them consider it “lucky and maybe even a bit magical.”

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The gameplay’s crux is its multiplayer feature; the going gets tough when you play solo, which I definitely experienced when playing the demo. It gets much easier as you add more and more players, which in turn means larger settlements which can also be moved from location to location with much less hassle. Scavenging for resources and food are equally as important as secure settlements and moving in packs. 8pts will be hard at work during and after the campaign to ensure that every feature of the game is as balanced as can possibly be.

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The Wild Eight is a procedurally-generated world with a variety of animals to hunt and kill, as well as a bevy of recipes and skills. An additional feature that was exclusively revealed to Cliqist is that there will be plenty of firearms, high-tech equipment, and even mutants and ghosts! 8pts also assured me that “parallel universes and spacetime glitches” will play a major part in the game’s plot.

…there will be plenty of firearms, high-tech equipment, and even mutants and ghosts!

The game is filled with quests, which are all located in zones—“bunkers, labs, HQs, and warehouses that were once inhabited by people.” 8pts described to me one of their “most interesting quests” (which they have yet to implement), where the players “enter a destroyed lab that was once used for artificial intelligence research.” They then activate a robot perched on top of a landfill that presumes the lab is still fully functioning and brimming with human life. When the robot discovers that a disaster has occurred, it “preserves the laboratory and then tries to take care of the players—who quickly realized they are doomed.”

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I’ve been fascinated with the game’s art style since the campaign’s launch, and so I inquired as to how they ended up choosing it. As 8pts is a small indie team, they didn’t want to go with 2-D, so they opted for 3-D instead, and the low-poly style had many qualities that the team desired.

In my previous coverage of The Wild Eight, I expressed a slight concern over the early release date (end of 2016), however, 8pts assured me that they will do “everything possible to release all versions of the game on time,” although stretch goals will inevitably take more time. You can download The Wild Eight’s pre-alpha demo on their Kickstarter page, and track its progress in our Campaign Calendar.

About the Author

Felix Wong

Felix spent a large chunk of his youth behind a 24 inch monitor and intends to do the same with the rest of his adult life. For reasons still unbeknownst to friends and family, he decided to eschew a more conventional career path to instead become a guy who writes about video games for cash and coin.

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