“The War Effort reflects the changes in the ongoing fight against the dinosaurs and ensures you’ll always have to stay on your toes. It’s a highly interactive, community-driven environment for players to fight in, letting us create new content that evolves over time,” said Second Extinction product owner Julianne Harty. “The War Effort is an integral part of how we’ll introduce new dinosaurs, missions, and more as a live service experience, and it’s a feature we’re excited to fully flesh out throughout early access.” As you can see in the trailer above, War Effort tallies the stats of player matches and uses them to alter the threat level for future matches, meaning you’ll take on various challenging levels of dinosaurs.
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The development team explained how War Effort works in more detail: “Essentially, the activity of the dinosaurs is constantly monitored and each area gets a Threat Rating – 1 being the smallest, 3 being the highest. These dinosaurs are pretty relentless. If you go squash ‘em down in one area until the threat level drops, they’re going to move to another area and subsequently that threat level rises. It’s like whack-a-mole with claws and gibs.” Furthermore, they added, “This Threat Level adjusts each week, and that is one of the things we’ll be looking into as part of Early Access.For us Early Access is not just about what the community does, it’s about how they do it. How are they coping with certain scenarios? What needs tuning? What do they want tuning? It’s also an opportunity for us to find other ways to kill dinosaurs in other modes outside of missions, like a horde mode, and see what people like. It’s a collaborative process and that is why we chose this route.”
But what exactly do these threat levels mean? “The Threat Level will affect the area’s difficulty first and foremost,” the team said. “If you can shoot straight – unlike me – a Threat Level 1 is probably solo-able; a Threat Level 3 would be only recommended for experienced 3-player teams. That’s where co-op comes into its own – you’re going to need that extra ammo pack from a friend (or random) and you’ll definitely need the odd revive unless you want to roleplay Jeff Goldblum’s final act in Jurassic Park. For higher level areas, this will also impact the difficulty of the enemies you encounter, as well as the activities you can perform. And of course, any areas under the Emergence Event will also change the flavour of the dinos, the environment, the rewards, and even your item effectiveness. It’s important to give players a reason to venture into the depths of our dinosaur hell, so the toughest dinosaurs drop the rarest parts. In turn this dino-loot is exchanged for coveted upgrades.”
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Second Extinction is also in development for Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.