Scavengers Makes Respawning Harder, Because Post-apocalyptic Life Should Be Tough

Respawning is often a contentious topic in battle royales and battle-royale-like games. Some allow it, some don't, and nearly all have some kind of mechanic that makes it challenging or otherwise limits the number of times you can come back from the dead. Scavengers was a rare title that allowed for unlimited resurrections, but Midwinter Entertainment has changed that this week because "Mother doesn’t tolerate wastefulness ..."

The less lore-related reason Midwinter gives for mixing things up is because the old "Autorez" system "trivializes death" and leads to teams finding it more advantageous to split up and cover more ground than stick together. Also, in a game where you're supposed to be scrabbling to survive, being able to die with little consequences doesn't fit the theme.

The new system lets you Clone Backups -- basically extra lives -- as a kind of equipment. You'll start with one and can gain more by uploading data to Mother via uplinks. If you die while carrying one, you'll autorez after a one-minute delay. If your entire team is killed, it's still game over, even if you've got Clone Backups or are in the process of rezzing. More info about the new system can be found here.

This week's patch also made item-swapping easier and added some new weapon challenges, while also tuning and rebalancing various weapons. There's also a new high-value objective, the Growth Cluster, and research costs have been reduced for many items. Among the bug fixes are a couple of grenade-related changes: "Grenades falling through the world" and "Player is able to throw 2 grenades at the same time" have both been fixed, which should now make it tougher to nuke the core of the planet. Save that for bad movies starring Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank.