While players on the server will be given free choice, the entire community will also have the opportunity to vote on laws that will change how they're allowed to interact with the environment. In the background the game is constantly keeping track of real complex data, which allows players to see the changes being felt by in-game populations in near real time. 'In Eco the goal isn't to save the environment,' said studio head John Krajewski earlier this year in the YouTube video above. A rock and a hard place.'īut the game doesn't want to be preachy, it just wants to attempt to simulate the real forces at play on our planet, give players a sense of ownership and empower them with the tools the make change. 'You’re facing two existential crises simultaneously: an external threat that you must avert, and the threat of causing your own destruction. This ecosystem is your only lifeline in a race against time. Pollute a section of land with mining runoffs? Your crops are poisoned. Hunt every elk for food? They’re now extinct. 'Chop down every tree and fail to plant more? They won’t be growing back. 'Resources are finite,' states the game's website. But unlike Minecraft, real ecological forces are at play in the background. Eco's world is a lush paradise, modeled after the Pacific Northwest, filled with plants and animals. The tools at players disposal are familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft. The clock is ticking, and players must work together to prevent the onrushing apocalypse or risk 'server-wide perma death.' Strange Loop calls their project a 'global survival game.' In Eco's fiction there is an impending disaster looming over humanity - an event like a meteor strike, a drought or a flood. Department of Education, Eco hopes to become a platform for teaching middle school students about ecology in a communal, cloud-based game world.

Veteran studio Strange Loop Games is embarking on an ambitious project to create a new kind of open world multiplayer game where the survival of every player on the server depends on careful management of in-game resources.

Eco global survival game reviews