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    DUCKSIDE Preview – A Quacky Time

    Quack away.

    A survival game where you are playing a duck and fighting for survival in a world only inhabited by you and your flock sounds fun on paper. Look at games like DayZ or Rust, and you will find a storied history within those games of a strong community that constantly sticks together and has sessions together. There are enough things to do in those games that give you a sense of survival if you are playing alone to have a comprehensive experience while also being in the same world as other players trying to live and survive in its harsh environments, which in turn would give rise to unpredictability and gameplay that has made the survival genre more appealing over the past few years. But…with ducks? Is it even possible, or does it even make sense? Well, yes, it does in ways that I did not expect.

    To begin this preview of the Duckside Demo, I would like to begin by saying I am a complete foreigner when it comes to survival games, a tourist with a fanny pack level of foreigner to the genre, so as a result, things stuck out to me like a sore thumb in the demo. The first glaring thing to me was just the roughness of the movement and the stiffness of everything. Things felt stiff from the flying of the duck to the gathering of the resources and even to the operation of the game’s menus things felt complicated and stiff.

    When collecting resources with just your beak, nearly nothing shakes or gives feedback, so the only feedback given to the player is a simple resource picture with a number going up. While you do begin to get feedback and even reactions if you use a tool to break a resource, it does not fix the lack of good player feedback by gathering the resources and the amount given, which ultimately still leads me to be lost for a short moment. Nor does it fix the fact that no feedback is given from the beak.

    The next main problem that I had with this preview came from the player user interface (UI). It is so confusing. The text is small (but clear) and does more of a disservice than a service to the player. Personally, I found the menu navigation a little hard. I constantly found myself going to the crafting menu and clicking to craft an item, but I could not check its progress, which would lead me to open the “crafting” tab and see the crafting progress time that remained for that item alongside other items that could be crafted. If you are keeping up, that is where the problem of clunkiness arises. I just opened the crafting menu and crafted an item, yet when I want to check the progress, I have to click on “crafting” and go there, leaving me with the thought, “what menu did I just leave off of then?” and that would be the inventory screen, but I would have to struggle to see which menu I am on because while the text is noticeably clear, it is too small. Normal players will get that and piece two and two together, But what if you are a newcomer like me or have a hard time understanding some things? The menus simply felt too clunky, stuffy, and not clear enough.

    To start touching on what I liked about the demo, I liked being a duck. Quite that simple and clean, I just really liked being a duck. In the short time I spent with the game, the most fun of fun times I had with this demo was me flying around as a duck and just pecking at all I could. I know this surely was not the developers’ intention when they were making the game, but it was fun. The world is not like the menus in the game; it is wide open and spacious, with tons of things from which to at least interact and gather resources.

    For example, when flying around, one might notice jetstreams of rising air on the map. These will make the player’s duck go higher into the air, and then you can depart that stream at any time to go cruise and fly around the map to a destination. Sounds exactly like what a duck would do in its everyday life to get around and peak its curiosity, which I loved because it’s a game named Duckside. I wanted to be a duck, and I got to be one!

    The last thing I want to touch on is the multiplayer experience for this game, but due to the end of my school year, I could not participate in any of the developer-led play sessions. So, I will have to speak on what I have observed from watching play session videos, videos found online, and the few chance experiences I had with people while I was playing the game. When looking at community gameplay and highlights of the community, it is quite clear to me why this genre has tons of love and fans across the world. It is a genre about trust and survival.

    Players come together to help each other survive or team up to defeat other players posing a threat while also making sure to look out for themselves. It’s a genre that, at its core, makes you feel like you are surviving and living and building from nothing but your bootstraps, so teaming up with others is like putting your trust in them. When looking at the gameplay, it is quite clear to me that the appeal to others might be that you can not trust a duck with a gun with your life.

    It flips the whole concept of the genre on its head, normally you are playing a human trying to survive in an area and go up against or team up with others. That reliability and realism of humans is something that would take people out of the game as that is too rooted in reality, so replace it with ducks, and well, now you are automatically introducing a level of wacky from the game launch and others for sure take that wackiness to heart. Bring the addition that you can take that wacky directly to another duck or a human, and now all the reliability of the genre is gone, and you are looking at a pretty appetizing game for survival fans to come and have a blast in.

    When flying around the game, I saw many players flying in pairs or groups, which shows the community aspect of the game and the genre, and it was very nice to see that during a demo period. I just hope it was equally as nice for them to kill me as it was for me to be yelling at my desk. Others play online together, and being able to interact with them and see what they are doing is something that is always cool to me.

    To conclude, honestly, before being reached out to preview this, I do not think I would have even looked at this game or even the genre. It was not something I would have had an interest in playing, but I am happy to say that now this game is on my Steam wishlist. This is why demos exist. While rough, admittedly, it’s still a very fun game with a community that seems to have some serious love and care for it, as well as a development team dedicated to making the game the best it can be for all players. So, I have confidence that the issues seen in this demo will be fixed by launch. Duckside is a wacky survival game that really made me feel like a duck surviving in the tough duck-eat-duck world, and I can not wait to at least see where its journey takes it.

    Trey O
    Trey Ohttps://www.artstation.com/olivertreyton
    BFA Game Design and Development Environment Artist/Tech Artist I love all things video games and media. Gotta do my part to contribute to this wonderful industry, so this is one of the ways I am choosing to do so!

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