Snowrunner: Wombat Logistics #1 - Starting our engines
Howdy folksies! Amalia here, and welcome to our latest project for this blog!
So, why are we doing a series on this? Well, it's quite a similar case to Hitman series. We love this game quite a bit, but it's absolutely -massive-, so we need a good excuse to invest the time to play it all.
....... which is what we're giving ourselves by turning it into a project to cover on this here blog.😉
Though the format is gonna be a bit different to that of Hitman. We'll take the time to tell you a bit about the game today, but it's not gonna be a gigantic mega-post like the first post in the Hitman series. We'll explain more as we go, this time around.
We're also going to be changing our approach when it comes to YouTube uploads. With Hitman, we're releasing destination-related videos simultaneously with blog entries, and while that works, we won't do Snowrunner map by map, meaning that we'll just blog about it when enough interesting stuff has happened. So you'll see videos coming out on our YT channel, with a blog entry later down the line, summarizing what we've been up to.
But eh, enough waffling, let's get on with it an talk about the game!
So, a bit of history: Back in 2014, a little indie game by the name of "Spintires" came out, made by a tiny crew led by one "Pavel Zagrebelnyy", a developer from Saint Petersburg, and published by Oovee, a British company that, thus far had only made train simulator addons.
An odd team-up, and a rather shaky one at that, with updates being delayed due to payment issues and such. Things weren't really going well at all behind the scenes.
The game itself was simple, but incredibly well received. You drove logging trucks through Siberia. There was no real progression system or anything. But it -did- have amazing vehicle physics and very advanced ground deformation, making it quite simply the best simulation of off-road driving ever created.
Now, a couple of years later, Saber Interactive got involved in all the background disputes, because as it turns out, Mr. Zagrebelnyy was an employee of theirs while working on Spintires, and (as is apparently common) a clause in his contract stated that any game development he did in his time there was company property. Mind you, Zagrebelnyy seemed okay with this, because he split with Oovee and went back to working for Saber.
As a result, we got Mudrunner, which was a very similar game, still about logging trucks in Siberia, also using the same engine, physics etc, but with some enhancements. This one also got some DLC, notably the "American Wilds" expansion, which, for the first time, added non-russian vehicles and maps!
More importantly though, Mudrunner felt..... stable? Like a full game put out by a solid company. We don't wanna besmirch Oovee here, but OG Spintires was an actual tech-demo at first, and then had the constant shadow of legal battles and licencing disagreements hanging over it as it grew.
It also started getting updates and DLC completely separate from Mudrunner, which honestly didn't help. What we had there was two companies with essentially different versions of the same game, both doing their own thing.
Well, generally speaking, most people went with the newer, more polished and better presented Mudrunner.
And then Snowrunner came out an kinda put the nail in Spintires' coffin. It does have it's detractors, mainly because the vehicle physics, specifically chassis flex took a bit of a downgrade over previous games, but it's still overall a very good offroading sim with little serious competition.
And more importantly, Snowrunner took the whole concept and turned it into a game with progression, where you gain experience and money for doing missions, buy better trucks, unlock upgrades for them, purchase trailers, and more.
Frankly, it makes Mudrunner, and especially Spintires, look pretty weak by comparison.
There's also been two spinoffs since, one called Mudrunner: Expeditions and one called Roadcraft.
Expeditions focuses mainly on smaller vehicles and seems to be centred around pure traversal, rather than carrying cargo. It also seems to be less open, focusing more on, well, expeditions, where you can only take certain vehicles and such. It wasn't very well received, though it apparently got better over time.
Roadcraft meanwhile is about heavy machinery, but unlike Snowrunner, it's not all about cargo transport. We're talking logging machines, cable laying machines, even asphalt pavers. It's a game about (re-)construction, which is a cool concept. Thing is, while it's clearly supposed to be a separate thing from Snowrunner, it's a game using the same engine, and it's about driving heavy machinery offroad. One can see why comparisons happen, and unfortunately, Roadcraft didn't fare well in those comparisons, because it originally came out with a bunch of the more -simulator-y- features of Snowrunner stripped out. Vehicles didn't need fuel, vehicles didn't take damage, there wasn't a gearbox system, things like that. One could argue that this is because it's a different game with different design goals, but when you've played a lot of Snowrunner, it just felt shallow.
Again, things got added after release and it feels more complete now. We tried the demo, and we might well take a proper look at it in future, but yeah, Roadcraft had a bit of a stumble early on.
I get Saber Interactive's predicament, though. Snowrunner is..... kinda perfect? Kind of a difficult game to improve upon, at least meaningfully enough to warrant a direct sequel. So instead, you serve that existing game with DLC and try your hand at spinoff titles. Just gotta get the formula right.
But yeah, with all that established, we're gonna play some Snowrunner!
We'll be doing a new game+, because it allows you to modify a few gameplay settings. Our modification are:
- Start without DLC trucks in garage: We own a number of vehicle DLCs for this game, and Snowrunner is annoyingly one of those games that just -hands- you these DLC vehicles ingame, meaning you get some pretty high-powered vehicles right from the start, which completely messes up progression. This option is the main reason we're doing NG+. DLC vehicles are still unlocked for purchase, but we do actually have to earn enough money to buy them ingame, first.
- Double daytime, but no timeskip function: It's a bit weird that these are mutually exclusive, but daytime makes for better videos/screenshots, and going into the menu and skipping hours of game-time on the spot is just kinda weird, anyway.
- Double damage! It's not that we hate ourselves, but we think the vehicles are just a touch too sturdy on normal mode.
- Fuel is free: Mind you, this is the default when you start a normal game. For some reason in NG+, "default" actually has some fuel costs. Might not sound so bad, but you have to consider: Snowrunner is one of those games where you never actually -lose- money. Every truck and part you buy, you can sell back for 100% of the value. And this works because there's no replayable content, as far as we can tell. You can do every mission and task once, and then that's it. This means that ultimately, there's a finite amount of money you can earn in the game. Now, in hard mode and NG+, you -can- introduce running costs for fuel, repairs, traveling between maps etc., but in a game with finite money, that seems insane to us. Even if you have a lot of leeway, it means that the playthrough is ultimately doomed to run out of money, if you play long enough.
None of that for us. When it comes to money, we're playing with normal game rules, meaning no fuel, repair etc. costs. Every penny we earn will simply add to our persistent net value.
...... okay, i think that's finally everything. Let's get started with some actual gameplay. Honestly, this time!😉
So, we started out in the garage in Black river, Michigan, with a Land Rover Defender (Normally it's a Chevrolet, but as part of the NG+ options, we chose to start with a random scout vehicle).
So, one of the first orders of business whenever you enter a new map in Snowrunner is to go check the watchtowers. You see, at first, each map has large areas that are covered up by a fog of war:
Like so:
There'll be plenty of Snowrunner videos on our channel going forward, so we hope you enjoy that. In fact, you can watch them all through this playlist!😉
But yeah, exploring the Black River map took a while. We do love a Land Rover (especially Michael), but it has to be said, the Defenders in this game hop around like mountain goats. Can be a good thing, but it makes them pretty hard to control, sometimes!
(Just FYI, the Land Rovers in question come from this DLC)
Exploring Black River involves some very boggy areas. The theme is that the region's been subject to heavy flooding, which in turn led to landslides, rockslides, and generally wiped out a lot of infrastructure.
So you come along with your offroad driving skills and help save the place! And this also involves working through the night, a lot of the time.
In the process of visiting all the watchtowers of this first map, we also picked up lots of missions along the way. Or tasks, i should say.
You see, Snowrunner has 3 types of activities:
There's the contracts, which are sort of the "story" missions of the game, if you will. These often involve big jobs to help set up some proper milestone projects. You get these directly from the menu.
Then, we've got tasks, which are usually smaller missions. These could be anything from cargo deliveries over towing vehicles all the way to funky stuff like rock-crawling challenges where you have to get to hard-to-reach places. Mind you, some of these are actually game changing, in that some of them involve delivering materials to clear roadblocks or build bridges, which can make traversal much easier. These are given to you by certain mission-giver locations on the map.
And finally, there's contests, which are more focused, timed challenges, sometimes with special requirements like only being allowed to drive from first person view or the like. You get these by visiting certain places, much like tasks.
Along with these, one could argue that your missions create themselves, because while you can recover vehicles to the nearest garage at any time, cargo and trailers don't work that way. So if you're in the middle of a difficult delivery, potentially going across multiple maps with a big, heavy load, the stakes are fairly high. You get stuck, your truck breaks down or you run out of fuel, you'll want to mount a kind of rescue mission to get yourself back on track, rather than resetting the contract/task and starting all over again. So emergent gameplay very much plays a role in this game.
Anyway, with all that said, we had plenty to do after our exploratory expedition, and we got right on it, getting into the best truck we could afford this early on and getting to work!
You see, later on in the game, we'll have the money to actually -keep- the trucks we buy, because we'll have something to hand for every occasion. But this early on, our funds are quite low, so when we wanna go and do a mission, it often means trading in our existing vehicles (again, you get their full value back) and using the money to get an appropriate vehicle for the job at hand.
So for the time being, we can't really tell you about the vehicles we have in our garage, because this early on in the game, it's basically a constant rotation, depending on what we need at the moment.
To be honest, this is a feature we seriously dislike about the game. We definitely didn't want to use the NG+ feature that involves trucks losing value when you sell them (Again, there's finite money in the game. We probably wouldn't softlock ourselves or anything, but the very idea that it's possible would kinda ruin it for us.), but if there was some kind of a cooldown timer encouraging you to keep trucks for a while, it'd be nice.
Still, that'll resolve itself soon enough, when our ingame net worth grows large enough to where we just have trucks available for various tasks. Then, we can actually keep those trucks long-term and they'll become a familiar sight on our videos.
Anyway, we were nice and busy, working our way through most of the missions local to the Black River map before exploring the other areas of Michigan!
To the left, you can see a description of the region, what's going on there and what overall milestone goals you have to accomplish there (These are done through the contracts, so effectively the main missions of the game).
And to the right, you have the maps that are part of the region, as well as some white lines drawn between them to show how they connect to each other (Important, since you often have to physically carry cargo in-between these maps!). Most regions have 2 maps, but some have 3 or 4. A couple of the DLC seasons are also focused on a single map.
And then, you have the maps themselves:
It's also of note that not every map has a garage in it, meaning that you can't conveniently quick-travel there and start driving. Going to these maps involves physically making your way there from a different map, and if you get stuck, fall over etc, you'll have to either mount a rescue mission or recover the vehicle all the way back to the nearest map that has a garage.
It adds some welcome risk and challenge to the game.
In any case, as you'll see in a few more videos that'll be coming out, we were quite busy with the Black River map, for the time being. We wanted to do most of the local jobs first before we broke out into the rest of the region!
Now we're not doing this series map by map, necessarily, but we -will- do the regions in sequence. With one exception: We might nip into one of the Russian/Asian regions from time to time, specifically for one purpose: Buying trucks.
See, the game has this curious feature where the vehicles you can buy are actually limited to whether you're in the western or eastern hemisphere. You can't buy things like this:
This is totally independent of level requirements or money, too.
Mind you, it's a tiny hurdle, because nothing's stopping us from quickly hopping into the starting garage in Taymyr, the base game's Siberian region, and accessing the shop from there, bringing anything we buy back to Michigan with us.
I'm sure doing so in hard mode would cost you an arm and a leg in travel costs or something, but well, we don't enjoy torture, so that's why we don't do that.😜
In any case, if you see us driving something eastern, you know we had a quick pop over to a garage in another region to get it. In terms of any actual gameplay though, we'll be doing the regions sequentially.
And actually, that'll be about it for our starting post!
There'll be a few more videos coming out, showing our progress through the Black River map. At the time of writing, we've just had our first expedition into Smithville Dam, the second region of Michigan.
..... actually, it ended in a bit of a mess, but eh, you'll see what we mean when that video comes out.😛
We won't write in detail about every single mission we do, and likewise we won't record every minute of gameplay. The videos and blog posts are meant to complement each other and give you a decent overview of what we're up to, rather than fully cataloguing every second we play the game.
Beyond this initial starting post, the plan is also to release videos first, and then summarize and put things into context with a post afterward. We make video content -way- faster than writing on here, so we don't really wanna hold back our videos until we're done writing each entry. That approach works with Hitman, but only because we go strictly destination-by-destination with that series.
So anyway, until our next post, stay safe, don't get stuck in the mud and have a good one!😉
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