Crafting, progression, advancement and freedom taken to an obscene extremity in Divergence: Online's modern survival prequel Divergence: Year Zero!
All Reviews:
Mixed (15) - 60% of the 15 user reviews for this game are positive.
Release Date:
Oct 16, 2016
Developer:
Publisher:
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Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Divergence: Year Zero is built on the same core MMO networking infrastructure that SGL have been developing for many years specifically to make this family of games with awesome capabilities. The freedom to spend our days continuously improving on our game systems however requires that we stay a private entity and not a vassal of a larger studio. Early Access worked out extremely well for Year Zero's predecessor Divergence: Online and allowed us to run that game for ten months self-sustaining and make massive leaps and bounds with new features such as player cloners, shuttleports, harvestable fauna and even vehicles. Releasing Year Zero on Early Access will allow us to expose our game systems to an even broader audience (as Year Zero is a prequel and exists in modern-day as opposed to sci-fi), bringing in new players and supporters to work alongside us as we add new features to Year Zero in the same manner as Divergence: Online. New players means new testers and new eyes running around pointing out all of them lovely bugs on our facebook page. Testers and early adopters active in the community will help drive development through telling us specifically which features they would like to see prioritized, and in turn everyone benefits.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Roughly six months. Year Zero began its life after nine-months of improvements and new additions to Divergence: Online and as a result will see full-launch roughly the same time as it's predecessor Divergence: Online completes it's tour of duty in Early Access.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full-release version of Divergence: Year Zero will contain features we're currently working on right now, such as:
1) Vehicles with integrated weaponry, such as enabling the main cannon on tanks and vehicles currently used solely for transportation.
2) Integration of additional professions such as Entertainer and Psychic
3) Fully-realized animations that don't look stupid to replace a lot of our existing animations that do look stupid.
4) Several additional "counties" of post-quarantine Washington, Oregon and California accessible.
5) Quests!
6) Spatial voice communication.
7) Tons of polish.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“100% playable. Hunt. Be hunted. Craft. Salvage. Drive. Build an empire. It has a lot of rough edges such as animations quality and that is the goal of Early Access; To finance completion.

*******SUPER-IMPORTANT NOTE*********

In order to guarantee that the universe doesn't implode the moment the flood gates open and Year Zero goes live on Steam (There's no guarantee that might not occur while we're in the bathroom or even worse, occasionally asleep) All currently exiting game features will be rolled out on a per-day basis over the course of the first fourteen days of Early Access. This way we can ensure a smooth start as with our last game, and more importantly that all new players are successfully able to log in, create their character, and get their zombie-apocalypse on at the same time no fooley-cooley. The first fourteen days of Early access will see, on average 2-6 individual game patches and content releases each day of the week including weekends. For example, day one will include the "starting county" (Temperate Forest), whereas day two will see the addition of one desert biome, then enabling all zones and features subsequently.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“More than likely the game will retain it's current retail cost post-launch exactly barring unforeseen developments.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Divergence: Year Zero maintains it's own Facebook group page just like Divergence: Online has since January for players in good-standing to post bug reports, ask questions, or generally mingle with other players.”
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! ! ! PLEASE READ BEFORE BUYING ! ! !

Active-Development Discontinued

While we had fun developing this game, met some new friends and expanded Divergence's capabilities in the process, the returns have not been sufficient to warrant taking it as far as we would have liked. It brings a lot of new things to the Zombie Survival genre including the "one universal server" connecting all players in the world, a highly-advanced building system and realtime freeform combat. Regrettably under Valve's current policies, this game cannot both pay it's fees and still have enough left over to enable full-time development. To survive, many indie developers have (frankly) resorted to turning their games into an item-mall and/or making up their losses by selling (and thus requiring players to buy) DLC even while still in Early Access. We are simply not willing to do such and will devote to other options.

The silver lining is that instead of selling-off our game as others have done in the past, we will keep it and it's servers online and functional 24/7 for any new players who wish to try it out for what it is; An exploration game. Additionally, the huge reduction is store price will endure indefinitely. Features we lack the resources to perfect such as NPCs will be removed entirely to streamline it better as a purely crafting and exploration game.

We didn't have to make this notice - We chose to because we care very much about making sure fellow gamers don't spend their money on games they expect to be one way and turn out to be another. If you're on the fence, we'd rather you simply chose to not buy our games rather then buy them and regret it. Hopefully things will change in the future and when that time comes, we'd like to get all of our friends back together to play a much more polished and playable game.

Until then, thanks for your support and take care.

About This Game

Divergence: Year Zero sets the stage for what would become the "Divergence" universe in a modern-survival adaptation and prequel to Divergence: Online.

As the emergence of the first non-sapien humans to inhabit the Earth in over 200,000 years (Homo-Solitus) coincides with the catastrophic rupture of the Californian San Andreas fault, a lethal virus designed in the clean-rooms of Silicon-Valley biotech firms specifically to wipe-out the Solitus humans is released to the environment dealing a one-two punch to western American civilization.

As the burning wreckage of California sinks into the Pacific Ocean and the Cascadia Subduction Zone devours large portions of the states of Oregon and Washington, The U.S Government, working with both Canada and Mexico frantically struggle to contain the spread of disease. A disease born of a virus designed to wipeout Solitus humans, but released before it could be perfected and constrained purely to the Solitus genetic code, now running rampant and infecting all humans who come in contact with it with incurable psychosis, hyper-aggression and even cannibalism.

You play as a survivor to the initial catastrophe now cutoff from the rest of America behind "The Western Wall" erected to prevent the spread of the virus. No word comes in, no one gets out. A total communications blackout prevents cell-phones, internet or even television and radio from reaching survivors beyond the wall. Only a handful of cities avoided total collapse after the great earthquakes and the subsequent rise in sealevel consumed most of what was once the North-American states of California, Oregon and Washington.

Without the advent of civilization to protect him from his fate, man now once again lives at odds with the wild, although packs of hungry roaming animals are no longer the most deadly thing you may encounter. If you survive the wolves, the bears, the elements, starvation or thirst, you just may live long enough to find yourself robbed or murdered by bandits or bandit-groups, or even worse, accosted by hordes of infected humans seeking to devour your flesh.

It's at least 30% worse than waiting in line for an iPhone is the picture we're painting here.
Welcome to hell.

Divergence: Year Zero is built on the same advanced technology that won it's predecessor Divergence: Online the rank of #1 out of Over 1,700 Games on Steam Greenlight during its cycle and benefits from six-months of additional improvements since then. Its key features being;
1.A True-MMORPG where all players coexist on the same server - No sharding or otherwise [/i]instancing[/b] of the playerbase. Any two people in the world who player Divergence: Year Zero play on the same server, guaranteed.
2. Simply Unbeatable Crafting. Divergence means "you determine every single stat of every single item that you craft by scouring the world for the absolute best raw materials and resources". Unless intentionally done so, it's impossible that any two items crafted in Divergence can be the same. Be the servers best weaponsmith who makes the best guns, the architect who builds the largest buildings for yourself or your group, or any of our other professions.
2. Skill-Based advancement. Chose as few or as many professions as you like and split your available skill points between them.
3. Combative and non-combative progression. Divergence rewards both weapons-related careers such as marksman as well as non-combat-derived professions such as scout, ranger, or doctor. Make your living healing other survivors, creating medicines, chopping down trees to create wooden fortifications or even training wild horses for use as trusty and reliable mounts.
4. Massive Housing and Construction. In Divergence, any player can work to create not just one, but multiple homesteads and in virtually any location in the entire game world for themselves or their group(s). Craft stronger walls based on the materials you used and create a huge fort, or even (with subscription) construct anything you wish out of Ferrocrete Voxels, Divergence's epic voxel-building and streaming proprietary system.
5. Advanced personal and civic power-management. Create power grids to bring light to the darkness around your home and keep the shitheads out while you're away.
6. Automated Resource Harvesting. Craft and deploy automated harvesting rigs to pull crude oil out of the ground for you, store it in barrels in your compound and defend it from Lord Humongous and his army of Road Warriors seeking to turn it into gasoline to power vehicles.
7. Design your characters appearance down to the smallest feature. This is how character customization should be in 2016 guys; We aren't going to make you wait two years just to be able to make a female character then act like it's some-kind of fecking accomplishment. Seriously.
8. Both world-loot and crafted versions of the same weapons and items. Love that AK you found inside the burned-out building but loathe the accuracy? Become an expert weaponsmith and build your own version of the same weapon from schematics with potentially even better features!
9. Craft your own respawn and fast-travel facilities for yourself or your group, helping you get around the world quicker, helping friends get to you quicker, and helping you get back on your feet quicker when some jagoff blows your face off.
10. A policy of total interaction with us, your developers. We have a facebook group page. You describe your bug or bugs on there. We read it and fix the bugs. That's how it's always worked with Divergence: Online, that's how it works with Divergence: Year Zero.
11. Finally live out your fantasies of a career in "Road-Warrior"ing! Not only does control over fossil fuels dominate the economy and the landscape, but almost any item you can craft can be bolted directly onto your chosen vehicle for armor or just to look badass! Be careful though, welding objects to a vehicle will increase it's top-heaviness!
12. Tons of wild creatures roaming the wild, some aggressive, some fearful. Hunt them, harvest them, or run for your god damn life!
13. Vehicle customization! Salvage a tractor from an abandoned barn and strap barbed-wire to it's frame, or nail wooden spikes to the roof to keep the baddies off. Virtually any items crafted or looted can be bolted onto any and all of your property, house, camp, base, or vehicle!

All these features and many more, but oh did I mention:
"Virtually Unhackable"
Built on the same technology that makes Divergence: Online virtually unhackable, Divergence: Year Zero benefits from the same extensive engineering developed through years of R&D to create a scumbag-free experience for our players. Want to play another hastily-thrown-together Zombie Survival game and get head-shot from two-miles away with a shotgun? There are a lot of those out there for you, but if you want to play a game that instead says, "You can't do that. That's absolutely ridiculous, GTFO!", you play Divergence.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: General Mature Content

System Requirements

    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS *: Windows 7
    • Processor: AMD or Intel
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Shader Model 3.0 Compliant Graphics Card
    • DirectX: Version 10
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 6 GB available space
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS *: Windows 7
    • Processor: AMD or Intel
    • Memory: 12 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Shader Model 3.0 Compliant Graphics Card
    • DirectX: Version 11
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 12 GB available space
* Starting January 1st, 2024, the Steam Client will only support Windows 10 and later versions.

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