《Gray Zone Warfare》Rogue Ops 更新承诺更深战术模拟战斗世界

Gray Zone Warfare is building into something special through Steam Early Access. With the version 0.5 ‘Rogue Ops’ update releasing this week, Madfinger has taken big strides forward over the previous version, ramping up the capabilities of the AI roaming this world, introducing a player Hideout to grow and enhance, bringing more reasons for why all these special ops teams and factions are heading into the Southeast Asian wilderness.

Now, look, as soon as you see that ‘Extraction Shooter’ tag alongside ‘Tactical’ and ‘Simulation’ on the Gray Zone Warfare page on Steam, you’ll probably know if this is the game for you, but before you swipe away this tab, there’s one very important fact to state. This is self-described as being PvE-first, putting pure co-op within this shared world on an even footing with the high pressure PvPvE extraction shooter set up.

That single point alone makes this game so much more appealing to me, and given the way the rest of the extraction shooter genre has PvE as an afterthought, gives this game a massive opportunity. Ghost Recon Wildlands was one of the best selling games of the late 2010s, regardless of its middling critical reception, tapping into a core desire to team up with friends and go shoot bad guys.

Gray Zone Warfare still has a way to go, but with the Rogue Ops update, it’s taking that next step. Quite literally, as Madfinger has made a symbolic shift from pre-alpha to alpha.

Up until this point, the game already had a gameplay loop of heading out, taking down bad guys, completing tasks, collecting loot and levelling up vendors. Now the Hideout adds a second loop alongside that, tasking you with collecting materials with which to grow and upgrade facilities back at home base. You’ll also have some freedom and choice here, as the chem lab can be used to create medical items, opening up routes and contracts to provide some supply to hospitals, or to cook up drugs that you then need to try and smuggle out in collaboration with the character Vulture – this, in turn, provides a bit more of a reason for the PvP action between players on the competitive servers, and sets more of the foundations for the coming story that will see players gearing up to tackle the quarantined Ground Zero at the heart of the island of Lamang.

Much of the rest of this update is about ramping up, revising and improving various other parts of the game. Lamang is already a quite beautifully realised place, but this update ramps up the atmospheric weather as rain rolls in and, if you’re caught by it at night, just how blindingly bright a thunderstorm can be as lightning strikes.

And then the enemy AI has also been expanded, so they can now make use of cover, grenades, with use tourniquets and bandages on themselves so they won’t just bleed out, and now have a bunch of idle animations and behaviours. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a jump between version numbers like this. Similar to other areas, it’s a step toward overarching goals of having complex and believable enemy AI combatants.

Hearing of these changes is great, of course, but this was my first time playing the game, as opposed to community members that are in this for the long haul.

So what is Grey Zone Warfare actually like to play? Well, my experience was naturally coloured by playing with people who really, really knew what they were doing – Madfinger’s comms lead Jakub, and Twitch streamer Bethuel – taking me on a light tour of what the game offers.

Launching into the game in the dead of night and in the pouring rain, the inky darkness around forces the use of NVGs to see anything, giving you a narrow green-lit tube to look through for your surroundings. We called in a chopper to take us closer to a mission point, and then worked our way through the darkness, sticking to the sides of streets and taking down enemy AI, idling on guard. This built up into more pitched battles, taking on enemies in larger numbers through a town’s streets, or clearing a compound with multiple outhouses and potential nasty surprises.

This is a tacsim shooter, so there’s plenty to factor in, both in the moment-to-moment action, and when prepping for a mission. You need a helmet with the right kind of attachment point and adapter before you can have NVGs at night, you might have half a dozen magazines on your combat vest, needing to refill them from a pool of bullets you could stick in your backpack or pockets, and you’ll want to make sure that you have bandages, tourniquets and blood handy for if and when you get hit.

In battle, the guns are tight and quick encounters can end in seconds, but require you to manage breathing and aim, which gets trickier as you’re rushing around or if you’re missing shots. The AI isn’t quite perfect yet, and at the limits of range, can still tend to idle and hide behind inadequate cover, but naturally this is something that Madfinger is working on, and I feel like they’re fairly active and take their chances in mid-range encounters – blasting down from a first floor window, for example.

And when one or two of us were knocked down for the count, slowly bleeding out, I really quite liked the approach to needing to first diagnose the issue before you can apply the healing items. No use slapping a splint onto an open bullet wound, is there?

If you’re already in this for the long haul already, version 0.5 brings some welcome AI improvements, the new Hideout system and smuggling in PvP. As a first time checking out Gray Zone Warfare, it’s naturally still a work in progress as it goes through Steam Early Access, but it definitely has great potential, especially for PvE-focussed gamers.