Introduction
Similar to The Forest, Sons of the Forest puts you on an island inhabited by cannibals. You and an armed search team fly into the island in search of a missing billionaire and his family. Shortly after arriving on the island, your helicopter takes fire from an unknown shooter. As opposed to The Forest, where you're a lone survivor, you have one companion named Kelvin, who's deaf and can't talk, while being able to take commands with the help of a notepad.
You can play with 8 people in P2P, and you can have even more players on dedicated servers. With Endnight Games' sequel to The Forest coming out on Early Access on the 23rd of February, called Sons Of The Forest, players can explore a whole new island. Sons Of The Forest has gorgeous graphics, a revamped gameplay system, and lots of other cool features. Check out what we know so far about it below!
Seeing as Sons Of The Forest has dethroned Bethesda's Starfield from Steam Wishlist, it might be the most anticipated game of the season. After Endnight Games' first game, The Forest, received such a big following back in 2014, it's no surprise that their second game is getting such a lot of attention. Sons Of The Forest is coming out with the latest Unity engine and tons of new features.
There's been a lot of secrecy about Sons Of The Forest, but we gathered the most important info from several Q&As!
New features in Sons Of The Forest
Endnight Games teased a bunch of new features in their trailers and confirmed them. Most of them are new items, entities, or mechanics. Graphics and animations have improved too. Endnight Games was able to recreate realistic movements and facial expressions for the enemies using the latest Unity engine and motion capture. Every time it rains, water droplets show up on your skin and weapons, and trees are cut differently every time.
In one of the FAQs, they hinted at the steam workshop integration, so we're really excited about it. Imagine creating blueprints for players worldwide to use or the endless possibilities mods would offer. Companions can follow you around the island and act differently depending on how you interact with them. Endnight Games' developers have hinted at more companions that can help with certain tasks. You can ignore them, appeal to them, scare them off, or kill them, and how you interact with them is entirely up to you. Two of them have already been shown, confirmed, and talked about.
In the first trailer, Virginia appears to have three arms and legs, just like her counterpart from The Forest, though she's a mutant. She's a mutant like her counterpart from The Forest, but she's more appealing. The shotgun and pistol are shown in tandem, so she's capable of fighting alongside your character with weapons. Besides gathering resources like Kelvin, there aren't any other uses explicitly shown.
The second companion is Kelvin, who follows you around and helps you. He seems to have been a fellow soldier who arrived on the island with you but was severely brain injured, so he's unable to hear or speak. Kelvin can be instructed to gather resources by writing instructions on a notepad. According to the reports, he's like an additional player who helps you out, but he's a little slower. When Kelvin's by your side, he'll be a huge asset.
Endnight Games originally planned an experimental game with an A.I. focus. But they decided some of the ideas would work well in a sequel to The Forest. These concepts helped them build a new artificial intelligence tool called V.A.I.L. to improve all the entities in Sons Of The Forest. Different factions of enemies can fight among themselves, and types can decide how they act. Depending on the season, they feel angry, scared, thirsty, hungry, tired, etc.
Some of the new mutants that can be seen in the trailers were revealed in a Q&A:
A mutant named Fingers has multiple fingers that spread down its torso, giving the appearance of a sideways mouth.
There was a scene where Twins appeared with Fingers on the surface world, so its location isn't restricted to caves. Twins look like conjoined twins, which is why it has the same name and moves around like a slinky.
The Forest players might know about this mutant because it's named after one of the hardest enemies in the game. There's a mutant called John in the Forest that looks like a worm and is made up of a bunch of smaller entities. Its successor, John 2.0, is also worm-like but looks like two bodies combined at the torso. A truly terrifying sight.
There's a huge blob in the Sahara Therapeutics lab called Sluggy. It moves around by dragging its massive body across the floor with its many arms. There's also a whole bunch of mutant babies beside Sluggy, so it's probably going to have a bunch of smaller enemies around it.
As well as new enemies, Sons Of The Forest has a bunch of new items. In addition to new weapons, Sons Of The Forest adds new tools and weapons, although they're said to be scarce so you'd better be careful. The player can also use new tools to make the game easier.
Here are a few of the highlights of some items:
As a tool for digging up secrets on the island, the shovel is important for players. The first trailer shows it being used to dig up the entrance to a bunker containing a 3D printer. There may be lots more of these bunkers hiding on the island for players to discover.
One of the trailers shows a guitar leaning against a house, and the devs confirmed in a Q&A that it won't just be a prop but a weapon, with which you'll also be able to play some riffs.
The 3D printer allows players to make small components that can be combined into more complex items. It also lets them make masks to disguise themselves as cannibals.
In The Forest, there were only two guns: the Flare Gun and Flintlock Pistol, which had long reloading animations and rare ammunition. In Sons Of The Forest, the pistol is one of many firearms added. Firearms and ammunition are also supposed to be rare, but it's a big deal.
In addition to guns, we now have shotguns. Being able to deal massive damage, and feeling safe when we encounter a large group of enemies, shotguns will be a reliable weapon for every survivor.
As ranged weapons aren't always enough, especially in close quarters, Sons Of The Forest relies a lot on melee combat. Using the Stun Baton will hopefully paralyze your enemies for a short time, so you can keep some distance between you and them.
With solar panels you'll be able to charge batteries and keep simple electronics like lights or heaters running.
Using a chainsaw in The Forest, you could not only cut trees down fast, you could also defend yourself from enemies. It's a great tool because you don't need any stamina to use it, but it requires a constant fuel source, which you can only find in caves. We don't have to go into caves anymore to find fuel sources with the Battery Operated Chainsaw and Solar Panels.
In Sons Of The Forest, the map will be four to five times bigger than The Forest, and change according to the weather and seasons to make sure it's never static. In some areas, you'll see lush forests, while in others, you'll find rocky terrain. The island is also confirmed to be on Site 2, which is visible near the end of the first game.
In addition to the big island, Endnight Games improved a lot of the gameplay players liked. Depending on how you fight certain enemies, they'll act differently. Enemies have better AI and won't follow scripts in combat.
Developers confirmed that enemies react to leadership and religious stats based on their stats in Sons Of The Forest.
An enemy group's tenacity depends on leadership skills. To lower their morale, you have to kill the leader of the group and chances are they'll flee. If there's an enemy with high leadership, it's more likely that they won't disengage after you kill some of them off.
A religion, on the other hand, determines what enemies do. Whether it's stealing resources or defending their territory, different enemies have different goals.
There will be some weather changes in Sons Of The Forest, including changing the seasons. The water will freeze in winter, so fewer berries will be available in the bushes. Enemies won't chase as far, although they might craft and wear warm suits to stay warm.
In The Forest, buildings have blueprints, and items are instantly created, while crafting and building are more immersive, showing animations for every step and requiring actual work. In Sons Of The Forest, you'll see an animation for the actual crafting, and you can design your own buildings however you'd like, but you can still turn on blueprints.
In addition, they removed the sanity system, which was only required when building effigies. More traps will be available, making it easier to defend your base.
The only version of Sons Of The Forest confirmed by Endnight Games is the PC version, but there's no info on the console release yet. Despite that, they mentioned they'd like to release it on consoles one day, but are focusing on PC development right now.
There's the possibility of releasing Sons Of The Forest for consoles and having crossplay, so everyone can play together on one server. Sons Of The Forest isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Endnight Games said they'll release free DLC after launch, but we don't know what the content will be or when it'll come out.
It's not clear if Sons Of The Forest will come to consoles, since it's only supposed to come out for PC right now. Don't forget to subscribe to our news update if you're just as excited about Sons Of The Forest as we are! Sons Of The Forest servers will be available on our website as soon as they're ready!
Check out The Forest's story before Sons Of The Forest hits Early Access in a few days. So take advantage of the time before it hits Early Access to experience The Forest and not miss out on the story of Sons Of The Forest. Get your friends together and explore the Peninsula in the Forest world. Build your base, fight mutants, and find your son, Timmy, while solving the island mystery.
If you want more SOTF News?
Check out what we know about the Interview with Endnight Games developer of Sons of The Forest & The Forest. You can also read about Sons of The Forest Patch 01 and Patch 02 here.
