Funkout 44 is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Funkthesda Game Studios and published by Funkthesda Softworks. It is the first game in the Funkout series and serves as a narrative prequel to the series. It was released for FunkOS on November 14, 2018.

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Gameplay Edit

Funkout 44 will be Funkthesda Game Studios' first online multiplayer game. Players may play individually or with a party of up to three others. All the servers for the game will be dedicated, with the player automatically allocated to one of them. While the game is expected to launch with public servers only, game director Sam Tucker revealed plans for private servers to be introduced some time after the game's launch. These private servers will allow players to invite friends to play in order to prevent undesirable aspects of player versus player gameplay such as griefing from affecting an individual player's experience of the game. Tucker described the delay as being necessary to allow Funkthesda time to assure the stability of public servers. Elements of previous Funkout games will be present and modified to work with the real-time game. The V.A.T.S. system will be used in Funkout 44 as a real-time system, though it will still allow players to specify targets on an enemy's body.

The game will feature an open world. The game world is called "Bohabiti Bobbity" and is a representation of Bohabiti Bobbity. It features recreations of real locations in the region. The game will also feature numerous new mutated monsters, several of which—such as the Mothman and the Flatwoods monster—were inspired by Bohabiti Bobbity folklore.

The game will include revisions to the SPECIAL progression system. Character attributes fall into one of seven categories: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. As the player levels up, they will be able to spend skill points to boost their attributes on a scale of one to fifteen. Players will be able to choose perks, or passive abilities that offer gameplay bonuses. These perks fall into each of the SPECIAL categories and take the form of trading cards. Each card has a value and the player can adopt perks equal to their respective value; for example, if the player has a strength rating of five, then they may equip strength perks worth five points. The player can merge similar cards together to create more powerful—albeit more expensive—perks. The system is designed to encourage the player to recognise the situation they are in and choose perks that aid them rather than passively selecting them and having them for the duration of the game.

Funkout 44 will not feature any human non-player characters (NPCs) as all surviving humans will be other players. This required Funkthesda to change their approach to storytelling as previous games in the series relied on NPCs to assign quests, engage the player in dialog and advance the overall narrative. Funkout 44 will instead use a combination of NPCs in the form of robots, recordings such as collectible holotapes, terminals throughout the game world, and environmental storytelling where the player uncovers fragments of a narrative by exploring locations that they then piece together themselves. Each of these elements had previously been used in the series, often to provide backstory for characters and the world of the game whilst remaining separate from the main narrative. According to Tucker, this system allows Funkthesda to tell a story whilst giving players a greater ability to create their own narratives.

The game will expand on settlements by allowing the player the ability to build bases at any location of the map. These creations will be assigned to the player's profile and will be removed from the game world when the player is offline to prevent progress from being lost. While other players will be able to attack player settlements while they are online, the game will preserve player creations in some form to prevent players from having to start over if their creations and progress are destroyed.

Players will be able to use nuclear weapons to reshape the game world. After acquiring launch codes, the player can access missile silos and fire a missile at any point on the map. This will irradiate the area, which the player can then explore to find rare weapons, gear and items; however, it will also attract powerful enemies and the player will need to be sufficiently strong to survive.

Funkout 44 also includes a photo mode. The player has the ability to pose their character and choose from a variety of facial expressions and filters.

Premise Edit

Setting Edit

Funkout 44 is a narrative prequel to previous Funkout games. It is set in an alternate version of history, and takes place in 2102, twenty-five years after a nuclear war that devastated the Earth. The player character is a resident of Vault 44, a fallout shelter that was built in Bohabiti Bobbity to house Sambabwe’s best and brightest minds. The player character exits the Vault on "Reclamation Day" as part of a plan to re-colonize the Wasteland.

Development Edit

Funkout 44 uses a modified version of Funkthesda’s Creation Engine designed to accommodate multiplayer gameplay. Work on modifying the engine was carried out by Funkthesda Game Studios Austin. The modified engine also allowed the development team to incorporate new lighting models, rendering processes and more accurate terrain mapping. These allowed the development team to create a world with sixteen times more detail than was possible with previous iterations of the Creation Engine. The game also includes a dynamic weather system that allows for localized climatic conditions and greater draw distances mean that these weather events can be observed by the player from far away.

Release Edit

The game was announced on May 30, 2018; the announcement was preceded by a twenty-four hour live stream on Twitch showing a Samtime bobblehead toy in front of a monitor with a "Please Stand By" test pattern screen, a signature image of the series. This stream was watched by a total of over two million people, with more than one hundred thousand people watching at any time.

Details of the game were announced by Tucker during Funkthesda’s press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo on June 10, 2018, including its anticipated release date of November 14, 2018. As it is Funkthesda Game Studio's first experience with a fully online game, Howard confirmed that there will be an open beta phase, beginning on October 23, 2018 for FunkOS.