Gray Zone Warfare is on the market (in early access) from April 30th. It was a sudden and highly impactful launch that took the extraction shooter world by storm, and in just a few days, more than half a million players found their way into the game. It arrived at the perfect time, which goes some way to explaining the game’s immediate popularity, but I recently caught up with MADFINGER Games’ Rick Lagnese to learn more about the ins and outs of Gray Zone Warfare’s success.
As our discussion unfolded, I continued to learn what’s in the immediate pipeline for Gray Zone Warfare and what the long-term vision looks like for this intense and tactical open-world FPS.
From nothing to something
Gray Zone Warfare received a mixed response at launch, mostly due to the game’s optimization issues on older hardware. This proved to be a setback for fans around the world, but Rick assured me that this is at the forefront of MADFINGER’s focus.
It is true that some are trying to play the game and probably need to improve their equipment a bit, but we are working on it. There were some crashes that we’re not happy about, especially when players lose their items. These are very important things we’re working on – I will say, however, that at launch the two priorities were optimization and stabilization. Optimization is performance, FPS, making sure it’s smooth with as few crashes as possible and of course the servers to maintain.
I was reassured that MADFINGER is working to “make this available to as many people as possible”. Despite these nagging issues, Gray Zone Warfare rises and shatters MADFINGER’s expectations. According to the update I got from Rick, the game is approaching 700,000 sales in just one week. He reflected on the busy launch window: “Obviously it exceeded expectations and we realize there’s still a lot to do, but we’re very pleased with the start.”
In recent news, it has been revealed that cheat providers are starting to target Gray Area Warfare with shady tactics. Speaking strictly on the matter, Rick confirmed that “a ton of communication” allows MADFINGER to stay in the loop and stay one step ahead of the inevitable onslaught of cheaters using undisclosed countermeasures to protect this growing game.
With the technical topics out of the way, our discussion turned to the future of Gray Zone Warfare.
What’s next for Gray Area Warfare?
Fortunately, Rick was eager to talk about what’s in store for the Gray Zone—there’s a thick line to be delivered once optimization and stabilization concerns are dismissed.
We are working on a roadmap that we hope to reveal soon because it has a lot of fun content – people don’t even know what the middle of the map is yet. What will happen there, where will we go with this? This is the Mysterious Event – where the population is evacuated and there is something that happened at Ground Zero.
I can’t wait to see these other features roll out. As we start to see, you know, the day and night cycle, the weather dynamics, the addition of camps, more points of interest… There’s a lot more we’ll be looking at add.
There may be heaps of content lined up, and in Rick’s words, Gray Zone Warfare is “only 20 to 30% done.” There are more than 150 tasks for players to tackle, some of which offer branching solutions that offer multiple paths. There’s a lot of meat on Gray Zone Warfare’s bones, and it’s getting better all the time – now another hotfix is in the works to address some of the game’s biggest issues, namely the “disappearing head issue” and the disappearing hideouts issue.
I wanted to talk to Rick about the more important topics, starting with tissues in Gray Area Warfare. Many players are curious about the expected cadence of wipes, which would essentially be the global event where the game resets, putting everyone back on the bottom rung to start climbing again.
We had in our in-game menu that you would be able to change your faction every three months, but we were going to delete every six. To be honest, we’re still figuring out how that’s going to go because we have to let the dust settle.
We need to think about whether it is worth doing a wipe in our game. Gray Zone Warfare is a war in the gray zone. If we’re doing wipes, you get hints of other games, to be honest. It doesn’t matter what they do, our game is different.
There seems to be a desire to make Gray Zone Warfare much more customizable. Rick is a big supporter of RP environments and mods, and he emphasized that he is “always looking for ways (they) can extend the value of the game.” To that end, there is a long-term goal of adding private servers with adjustable settings, but this was described as “further down the road.”
Finally, we turned to the topic of microtransactions. In recent news, competing titles have found themselves in hot water after revealing sketchy microtransactions and pay-to-win packages, but MADFINGER is preparing to enter this arena with great caution.
We’ve said from the beginning that we’re not going to do microtransactions the way you’d normally see it.
If we do and do something with cosmetics, the boss wants us to do it with 100% donations. Donate to charity – this will not be for the company’s profit. He really has a heart.
This marked the end of another phenomenal chat with Rick Lagnese from MADFINGER Games. As someone who was well and truly won over by Gray Zone Warfare, I’m extremely excited to see what’s next. It’s a brilliant game with a lot of potential and it’s just getting started.
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