Dead End


 * This page is authored by User:SArchangel

Dead End is an adventure survival video game with RPG elements developed and published by User:SArchangel for Microsoft Windows.

Dead End's gameplay is founded on five pillars---settlement, scavenging, survival, combat, and trading---in which players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally-generated, deterministic, shared open universe, currently consisting of 100 million square kilometers of interactable land (roughly the size of the entire Asian continent IRL).

Dead End is set in a post-apocalyptic world following a viral outbreak. Surviving humans live in a generation that has never seen the pre-apocalyptic world; they live primitively in competition with not only the undead, but also a diversity of evolved wildlife descended from genetically-engineered creations of pre-apocalypse humans.

Gameplay
The player controls a single character from a primarily overhead perspective and explores large outdoor areas affected by various randomly and procedurally-generated environmental factors. There are also indoor areas (caves, buildings, etc.), many of them "dead ends", which are the game's survival-based dungeons.

Dead End possesses no true form of in-game permanent progression with the sole exception of character skills, which come with a skill tree, one of the game's RPG-esque elements.

In-game items are very important for survival, but no item lasts long in possession as is with the game's nature. There are many frequent ways players will lose items; with experience, players will be expecting such losses. For carry-ons, Dead End supports a weight system which effects character mobility, creating an incentive to prevent carry-on item-hoarding. Items can also be lost when players take damage in combat or from other environmental factors (such as falling off a waterfall).

Compared to most adventure games, the amount of items a character can carry at a time on foot may be rather limiting. Items can wear out (the case of equipment) or rot (the case with food supply) over time, either passively or due to frequent use.

Items can be scavenged, but also crafted (and repaired) via Crafting Skills, that can be learned through "education-type items" (handbooks, magazines, etc.), which may require Reading Skills to access. Players can also obtain and learn skills from NPCs or even rarer, other players (usually at a price).

There are vast range of skills, many of which are item-specific (using certain weapons items, cooking certain foods items, making certain clothes items). All such skills are acquired through the gameplay experience.