The mortifying ordeal of being owned
On the user-generated sadism of Meet Your Maker, AI and the future of UGC
You know when a game is on your radar from a distance, but you still don’t understand what it’s trying to do? I find this always leads to the best surprises. I didn’t manage to get a review commission, but I was offered a surprise code for Meet Your Maker (£24.99, Steam), the new game from Behaviour Interactive. It launched around April Fools, which makes sense, given its focus on cynical trickery.
Beyond the first-person perspective, it couldn’t be much further from the asymmetrical killer-dodging of the studio’s last game, Dead by Daylight. It’s a UGC ‘building and raiding’ game, its nearest mechanical neighbours being Super Mario Maker or Clash of Clans. In a biopunk post-apocalypse, you have to steal genetic material from trap-laden outposts created by real players from all over the world.
Depending on how successful and thorough you are, you’ll earn amounts of resources which you can take back to your hub, a station controlled by a giant fetus in a tank that you feed with your progress, to unknown consequence. A series of human advisors surround the flesh boss, each with their own specialities.
After a few wins, you’ll have enough scrip to claim a piece of land upon which you can build your own outpost, which is where the advisors come in handy. With more resources, you can buy better armour and weapons to make the raiding process easier, as well as improved enemies, traps and mods to bolster the amount of frustration you can produce with your own outposts.
It’s a simple but compelling loop with enough atmospheric intrigue surrounding it to keep you interested. But if you like fucking with people, it’s a revelation.
Hell is other people
My first few raids went about as well as you might expect. You start with limited ammo, and you have to learn the game’s architectural language to find out how traps are hidden. Certain greebles denote impaling spikes or skewering metal poles. Some enemies are airborne and shoot fast, while others shoot slow and, god forbid, explode upon death. When you start, even if you check the inventory of the advisors ahead of time, you can’t know the extent of each trap in the game, so prepare to be hypervigilant.
It would take hours to learn how to act in each situation, and even then, an ingenious player can evolve the function of these building blocks to trip you up. Naturally, I got my head kicked in for the first few hours, but braying against these abstract pain museums gave me plenty of horrible ideas. By the time I got my hands on Meet Your Maker’s creative suite, I was positively buzzing with excitement to implement them.
What I’ve withheld up to now is that, for its respective owner, Meet Your Maker is recording every attempt you make on another player’s base, as well as every attempt a player may make on yours. It revels in its own sadism, then, but the schadenfreude this system produces is truly immense. When you’re deep in a Daedalian labyrinth of shit, you’re often reminded of the fact that you’re on candid camera. It’s reality TV for the Twitch generation. I’m not afraid to admit that I love it.
Although of course you end up becoming yourself
My first outpost, codename Spooner, has a KD ratio of 1.5, with 10 attempts and 15 kills. It’s currently at Prestige Level 2, with each subsequent level providing more bandwidth for demonic fuckery. It’s been tagged as ‘dangerous’, ‘fun’ and ‘artistic’ by its (mostly) unfortunate visitors. It’s not very long, made up of early-game traps, and you can beat it in about a minute if you’re crafty. Let me walk you through it.
As you approach Spooner from the desert landing deck, you’re going to be spotted by four bolt-shooting Enforcers, who patrol side to side. A low-effort but nasty opening before you even make it to the front door. Given that you can just hide behind a nearby pillar and shoot them sequentially, I didn’t expect this part of the outpost to trip so many people up, but it is responsible for around half of the player deaths, per my delicious selection of replays. Players seem to be overconfident or caught off guard by how brazen and dumb it is. They lack the necessary patience, getting caught up in a four-projectile crossfire.
What I like about this is that, from a psychological perspective, frontloading a challenge might convince new players that the rest of the base is the easy part. If I’ve allocated so much of my limited resources to the bouncers, then the nightclub must be a breeze. Au contraire. Then, for the knowledgeable players, it gives the impression that I’m a lazy trapper and just threw this together to farm XP.
Once you make it past the Enforcers, you descend a small, cramped ramp. On the way down, you’re forced to activate a Holocube (a fake block that shudders and disappears when you get close, useful for disguising traps). But there’s nothing behind it. Gotcha! Now you’re freaking out. Take a few more steps, and you reach the bottom of the ramp. Ahead of you is a blank wall, and to your right is the Genmat. It’s right there! Just grab it! But the blank wall is not what it seems. If you keep stepping forward, you’ll activate the Holocube. Now it’s a spike shooter.
If you’re awake at this point, you’ll dash onto the Genmat block, a safe haven. And this is where the fun begins. There’s a very clever system in Meet Your Maker that lets you mod your traps so they only activate once you grab the prize. As such, the entire ramp ascent becomes a minefield mausoleum. On the way up, walls of every angle become traps, and your movements have to be clinical so you can find a vantage to shoot or slice each one before they get you. It’s not impossible (you have to complete your own outpost before you can make others play it online, thankfully), but it is tricky. And once you get to the top, a final cruel twist. A ramp block above the entrance points down towards you. If you’re too used to moving slowly from the dangerous ascent, your back will end up full of holes.
As much as I can feel it activating some of the worst parts of my psyche, I took much delight in making Spooner and even more in watching people try to complete it. It reminded me of when I played online with a squad full of the oldest players in FIFA Ultimate Team and the biblical embarrassment of scoring with a 56-year-old Bronze striker against someone who had pumped hundreds of pounds of real money into their squad, boasting in-form Lionel Messi among others. It was often enough to get them to turn their Xbox off almost immediately.
In my mind, I saw it as a way to expose the farce, but maybe, deep down, I just get a kick out of virtual misery. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but Meet Your Maker still has more than 1000 players a day, so I can’t be the only one. Speaking of which…
What if it didn’t have to end?
I’m not a statistician, but if a live game is outside of Steam’s Top 100, I assume it isn’t going to stick around forever, which, in Meet Your Maker’s case, is pretty sad. Behaviour could have whipped up another Dead by Daylight-like game (by comparison, DBD had 38,000 players yesterday) and made a ton of money, but they decided to pivot with this weird, inventive new IP. Without any word from the devs, the jury’s out on whether it can be classed as a fiscal success just yet, but it has given me plenty of joy already, even if I don’t think I’m going to be playing it long-term. But in a sea of market-friendly familiarity, it’s refreshing to play something focused and interesting like this.
But how do you make a UGC game stick in the current landscape? Media Molecule is dropping support for Dreams, its magnificent, much more sophisticated creation tool, in September. Every UGC-focused game gets its die-hards, but the genre can’t seem to hang on to an audience that allows for long-term support. Meanwhile, Roblox continues to thrive and take candy from babies. I fear part of the problem with Dreams is that it didn’t come to PC. The more open-source, the better with these kinds of projects. When a question is asked about improving its accessibility to do more interesting things with the tool, you’ve got to have a compelling reason to swat it away, or you’ll lose your community.
I also think it’s something to do with the user's perspective of UGC games as playthings because the community creates the lion’s share of its content and not the developers. You get what you want out of it, and then you leave when you’ve seen its limits. And when it’s up to the community to make it fun, you will inevitably yearn for something with a stronger maker’s mark. We're only human. This made me think about a section of last week’s fascinating, essential episode of Triple Click about ‘The Great AI Craze’, which featured
of.Newton was talking about how as a consumer, he would (in theory) pay a subscription to an AI remix service that was trained on Elden Ring to make an endless procedural version of that game. "What if it didn't have to end?," Newton posits.
andboth wondered if something would be missing from that without the human element of iteration and progress. While it would be fascinating to look at, I would agree - I'm convinced a machine would bastardize all of From Software's subtlety.then raised an interesting point about the value of AI expanding authored datasets like Minecraft and Crusader Kings or The Sims and using them as a template for growth rather than just making a game out of thin air (and dragging in its entrenched biases), which sounds much more compelling. The answer to the UGC game problem is not A.I., not by a long shot, but in Meet Your Maker’s case, in lieu of a dedicated community, Behaviour could fill in the gaps and keep it afloat with artificial maps, trained on the more ingenious levels, to show off what the systems can do and attract new players, or compel fans on the verge of boredom to think of new ways to use the toolset. It can’t help but feel like a desperate measure, but it’s a measure, nonetheless.Elsewhere, dead multiplayer games wouldn’t have to be ghost towns, even though they may still feel like it. I have nearly 500 hours in Left 4 Dead 2, and at least 30 of those were spent in lobbies, waiting for humans to trickle on and fill in the slots of an 8-person Versus match. But here comes that human element again. Would it give me any joy to outsmart a team of lifelike machines with a Charger Instakill in the Dead Centre finale? Probably not. There’s no emotion in the potential comeback that you’re ruining. In the same vein, I don’t think it would bring me any glee to build a booby-trapped outpost for a legion of bots to bristle at. It’s why AI won’t conquer sports.
More and more, but especially this year, it feels like we are being asked to make a choice between authorship and the grit that comes with it and the endless junk food pizza party. In the past, it was an easy choice - Gun Game in CS: GO is fine against bots, but adrenaline-pumping against your mates. What scares me is that the pizza party is starting to taste less like Domino’s and more like something made by a local business in a wood fire oven. Eventually, it’ll be AVPN verified. When quality and convenience collide, will we still be brave enough to choose the thing with a soul?
The Rec Room
Read: Oli Welsh interviews the modern artist who immortalized World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood incident
“The griefer has the ability to really reform reality and reform these worlds in a way that the person who just kind of tacitly understands what’s going on around them and agrees with it doesn’t,” - Harris Rosenblum.
Listen: New The Japanese House song. Drop the tour dates pls.
Watch: Getting into Caveh Zahedi at the minute… no idea how to begin to explain this one, but it felt profound