Badiya is an infinite procedural survival and exploration game set in the desert (Think Lawrence of Arabia). Life is harsh in the desert and players must explore and discover the supplies needed for survival. Although the desert is vast, players have the opportunity of discover outposts, villages, camps, and ancient ruins, and will have to deal with the wild-life and local populations of the area.
Players must scavenge for tools and weapons, and must hunt for food to survive. Players are free to explore and discover the environment as they see fit, but they must be careful as the inhabitants of the area will treat them according to their behaviour. Badiya is built around the three key gameplay pillars of exploration, activities, and combat.
The trailer, which shows quite a bit of gameplay and locations, is a visual treat.
While everyone’s stoked for the next Red Dead game by Rockstar, Badiya might just be the cure for the itch. With both a single and multiplayer experience, the game does feel like a well rounded package. Also the trailer does a good job of introducing the game to the viewer, and represents rather aptly the theme and elements of the game, unlike No Man’s Sky, which which is again an upcoming procedurally generated open world game.
Features
- Infinite Procedural Open World: Every time you play you will see different looking terrain, events, enemy encounters, and items to loot.
- Time of Day System: A full 24 hour cycle is available. You can sleep to pass time and regain stamina.
- Weather System: Clear, Cloudy, Overcast, Rain with different intensities, Snow with different intensities, Sandstorms and Fog.
- Character Customization: Control your character ethnicity, skin tone, eye color, facial shape, facial hair, height and weight.
- Clothing: Build up your wardrobe from a collection of authentically designed Arabic and western clothing sets covering multiple styles for head-wear, upper body, lower body, feet and accessories. You can also mix an match if you like (Imagine an Arabian thobe with a Cowboy Hat. That would be cool!)
- Choose your own Camera Perspective: Ability to switch the camera at any time between first person and third person views.
- Survive: Keep an eye on your biometric indicators such as health, , food, thirst, temperature (you can get Hypothermia and Hyperthermia if you are not careful). Balance your diet and food intake in-game because your character can gain weight or lose weight with visible visual difference and gameplay consequences.
- Crafting: Loot everything you can and gather resources to be able to craft all sorts of recipes for weapons, medicine, and tools.
- Animals: Hunt prey animals (for meat, fur, fat and bones), be hunted by wild animals, or marvel at domestic animals roaming in villages and camps. You can also utilize horses and camels for transportation.
- Plants: Collect different types of plants that you can use to craft medical potions to help with poisoning, pain and stamina.
- Camping: You can craft and place a camp fire which can be used for cooking food and as a source of heat during cold nights. You can also sleep in a tent to gain more stamina and health back.
- Vehicles: Authentic military vehicles including armored cars, tanks, planes, and dune buggies with customization features such as tire armour, different weapon choices, desert camouflage paint job, side lights and more.
- Weapons: Utilize an arsenal of weapons including side arms, rifles, machine guns and (in future alphas) flame throwers and sniper rifles.
- Skill Tree: Upgrade your character across three different fields covering (Combat, Defense and Exploration).
- Environments: The desert is filled with interesting locations to discover including oasis, bedouin camps, villages, military bases, air fields, oil wells and ancient ruins.
- Trading: Buy, sell and trade with different merchants across bedouin camps and villages.
- Guns Blazing vs Stealth: You have the choice to approach each situation to your liking wither its to launch a full blown attack or sneak your way through undetected.
- Disguise (Future Alpha): If you are sneaking into guarded military areas or ancient ruins you can increase your chances by wearing clothes that resembles the guarding faction. This will prevent them from detecting you immediately if you don’t get too close.
- Sea Life (Future Alpha): Built your own ship and navigate to explore different islands filled with treasures, go fishing, or pearl diving in the sea.
- Underground Tombs (Future Alpha): Equip your torch, lantern and courage and explore tombs that are filled with traps, loot, treasures and dangers.
- AI Awareness (Future Alpha): Raise your weapon in front of civilian crowds and some of them will run away from you while others will draw their weapons in preparation for possible hostility from you.
- Procedural Narrative (Future Alpha): Experience a story line that is unique everytime you play along with specific goals. Just like in real life, the end of story is the start of another and in Badiya there is always a new adventure to embark upon.
- Photo Mode (Future Alpha): You can pause the game at any point, move the camera around to frame your shot, change color filters, control camera depth of field and field of view and then capture that perfect shot that you can share on social media.
- Map Editor (Future Alpha): Unleash your creativity and design custom maps using an easy to use yet powerful map editor. Set the desired weather and time of day, place different types of buildings, fill the place with props like crates and barrels, add gameplay entities like weapons, vehicles, and enemies and finally gameplay objectives such as winning conditions and player spawn positions. Once you are done with your masterpiece you can share it with the world for other players to play and rate in the community section in Badiya.
Badiya is going to be released in Alpha form on Steam Early Access and once it is finalized it will make its way to PS4 and Xbox One in the future.
The first release on Steam Early Access is going to be focused on the single player aspect of the game but co-op and multiplayer modes are planned to be added during early access.
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