It’s quite a big week for tactical FPS game Ready or Not. First, the SWAT shooter is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its 1.0 launch – a year that’s seen it establish a strong community but also find itself at the centre of a couple of controversies. As well as reaching this milestone, a new DLC is arriving today that delivers three “isolated,” “maritime” maps and improvements to its AI that will refresh the experience across all of its past maps too.
Despite being a PvE FPS game, Ready or Not prides itself on creating the same level of realism and tension that you find in many multiplayer tactical shooters. Playing as part of a five-person SWAT team that polices the fictional Californian city of Los Sueños, the goal has always been to enter familiar, metropolitan buildings like schools and car dealerships to investigate and defuse various situations. However, in its new DLC, titled Dark Waters, it heads offshore to some unique locations. In the words of lead designer Sean Gorman, “these aren’t particularly places you would expect a SWAT officer [to be] visiting.”
The first mission, and the most talked about in my recent discussion with Gorman and art director Mark Ranson, is Leviathan, which is set on an oil rig. It’s certainly an interesting map, as there are three distinct and very different areas that will require different gear and strategies to master. You’ll begin on the outer layer, which is the exposed, weather-affected platform. Rain will pour down and leave droplets on your visor to slightly obscure your vision, and there is “less affordance of cover” for you, innocent bystanders, and genuine perpetrators to use, according to Gorman. There’s a also a new gameplay mechanic which lets you tap into a live feed from a scout helicopter that encircles the oil rig, shining its spotlight down onto potential suspects.
Then you move into the second zone – a “shell” of close quarters interiors that surround the third and final zone of the drilling area. In this shell, the odds flip. “Now you’re in the suspects’ domain,” Gorman explains. “Now it’s smaller spaces, and you’ve got to switch from longer sight lines to using things like your grenades. You need to work out that puzzle in a different way as you might have done on the exterior, without as much support from the helicopter.”
Dark Waters also takes players to an abandoned, decaying hotel on a small remote island in the Three Letter Triad level. The “brutalist” architecture of the building has been claimed largely by mother nature, but you’ll quickly find that there is still activity here. “You can really feel the sense of history in some of these areas, but at the same time, something’s not quite right,” Ranson tells me. “It’s overgrown, it’s been isolated, but there are elements of people, you know, coming through these spaces.”
The third map in Dark Waters is Mirage at Sea, which takes place in the “aftermath of a party” aboard a luxury yacht. At one stage, Gorman mentions that an oligarch is the main suspect of this mission, but aside from that, not much else was mentioned about this map. Tonally, though, it is totally different from the harsh Leviathan and eerie Three Letter Triad.
While these three new maps are premium offerings, Dark Waters does also bring a lot of free gameplay improvements and features to Ready or Not. The biggest is the improved enemy AI system which adds plenty of new actions (both compliant and non-compliant), lets suspects call for back up, and introduces the new suspect loadout system. While previously each AI enemy could use one weapon at a time, there is now much more variety. Some suspects may have flashlights equipped to their guns, some may have a sidearm that they can switch to if it’s faster than reloading their primary weapon, and some may approach you and appear unarmed but have a sidearm holstered – take your eye off them, and they may be tempted to reach for it. Each level also now contains weapon caches, so unarmed suspects can sneak off and grab a weapon if you don’t monitor them closely or detain them.
“Importantly, [these AI improvements] are not just exclusive to the DLC maps,” Ranson points out. “This is an improvement that we’ve made game wide.” So even if you’re not willing to buy the Dark Waters DLC, this update will still bring a new lease of life and a fresher experience to those older levels from base game and Home Invasion.
A selection of five new weapons – the MK17, GA51, M14S-16, MP5SD6, and G3 – are also being added to everyone’s arsenal as part of this free update.
Dark Waters absolutely takes Ready or Not to its most unique locations yet – breaking out of Los Sueños, at least momentarily with this DLC, does feel like a breath of fresh air. Couple that with these free gameplay changes, and it really does seem like a strong finish to the game’s first year as a full release.
Ready or Not’s Dark Waters DLC is out now. You can also expect to see more from my chat with Gorman and Ranson later this week. Until then, jump back into Ready or Not, or maybe even give these co-op games a try. This list of upcoming PC games will also get you up to speed with what else is arriving in the coming weeks and months.
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