Biomutant Preview

At Gamesom, Biomutant was shown to us by Stefan Ljungqvist who previously worked at Avalanche Studios on the Just Cause series and Mad Max and who has now founded Experiment 101. He mentioned this to make clear that there is an experience with creating open world games, which is what Biomutant is.
In the announcement of the game before Gamescom the words open world, post-apocalyptic, kung-fu and fabled were used. Fabled relates to the story telling through an animal, which is what this game does as it features only animals, but it was emphasized that they don't take themselves too serious in doing that. Kung-Fu relates to the player being able to make various moves and during those moves make use of weapons or other skills, while still being able to switch between them smoothly. My observation is that the relation with Kung-Fu is not about being able to use martial arts in hand-to-hand combat, but in the ability to use your weapons or skills in mid-air or while you are rolling or dodging. The post-apocalyptic part is not about a nuclear bomb or a terrible war that took place. In Biomutant it is about an ecological disaster, where dead oil is seeping through to the surface contaminating the world and everything that lives on it.

The goal of the developers is not to create a linear story with the same ending for everyone, but to make it different. First there is the tree of life that stands at the center of the world with five roots spreading around the world. The tree represents the chance for world survival. The world is currently dying as the tree is dying. As a player you have the opportunity to heal the tree of life. At the beginning of the game you have zero percent chance of world survival and you can get this value up by your actions. There is no requirement to heal the tree of life, the game can still be finished without that happening. It just means that in that game the world dying is going to be part of that ending. To heal the tree you need to find small creatures in the game that will help you with that. Also at the end of each root there is a creature eating away at the root, by confronting and defeating them, you will also heal the tree. But these are basically boss fights so it will not be easy.
Next to that there is a karma system, consisting of two elements (red/blue, good/evil or ying/yang). Where you are in this karma system, will also affect the ending of the game. In the game there are six tribes and each of them has a leader. Who you work with and who not, will have an impact on your karma. You could side with an evil leader and help him to eliminate all the other leaders, after which all the tribes will be oppressed by this one leader, because of that you will become evil, in combination with the world ending that is probably the most extreme ending on the evil scale you can achieve. Alternatively you could also help a leader to unite the tribes and heal the tree of life, which is on the opposite side of the scale as far as endings are concerned.
Next to these two factors determining the ending, there is also the big creature you see in the trailer that has an influence. He is the only meat eater in the world. He is actually the key to your background and who you are and plays an important role in the narrative. You will meet him more than once in the game. All these elements combined determine the ending you will get.

When you meet NPCs in the game the karma of that character is checked against yours and depending on the result the dialog tree might be different and provide you with new quests, or block quests. The karma you have might change even during the dialog, depending on the choices you make and can influence the rest of the dialog.

Fighting with certain type of enemies will open new moves for you to use. When you defeat these enemies you pick up small green orbs, which are called biopoints. These are vital for applying biomutations to yourself, thus altering you physically and giving you new abilities. These specific creatures are found where there is oil, from which they spawn. However these enemies are contaminated. If you take a long time to defeat them you will become infected and once that happens your attributes will be lowered and you are less efficient in combat. There are anti-infection items in the world that you could use to compensate that. However if you are infected and have become contagious, you will start to infect others in the world as well, which means that they can get sick also. The biopoints are essential in gaining new mutation abilities that will aid you in combat. There are also other type of mutations that can be found in underground bunkers in the world, these mutations were referred to as 'X-men style' of mutations.
The mutations you can apply are very divers. There are about 30 of them. In the demo a mutation was shown that results in the ability to spew moths from the mouth of the character you play, which temporarily makes the enemies crazy and chaotic and they might even start shooting at each other. Another mutation that was shown was a telekinesis mutation, allowing our character to lift other characters or objects and throw them.
The biomutants are very useful as there is a large variety of enemies that you will encounter and each of them will require a specific way of defeating them.
Note that for some of the combat moves, you will need to find a Kung-Fu master to train you. These masters can be found in one of the tribes.

Oil in the game is always dangerous as you can sink in it and the controller will also give feedback on that. Reactions will slow down and it will become difficult to move. During combat this will be a very bad situation to get in to.
While roaming around in this open world, your enemies will scale to your level dependinf on where you are in the world. Some higher level enemies also scale to your level, but not all of them apparently and also some of the enemies will respawn. The work 'some' was explicitely usedin both cases, but more information in this was not provided.

In your stats screen you can see how much you have mutated and into what. You can be big and strong, small, fast and agile, or something else. Your choices will determine what you become. The game does not have any classes, but it does have customizations. You can change how you look, what kind of fur you have and the colors of your fur, but these are only there for cosmetic reasons.

It is possible to craft anywhere in the game and apply what you have crafted on your weapons. The bigger the weapon the more crafted add-ons can be added to it.  In that way you could for example create electrified bullets, frost bullets or a fire sword.

The world also has loot. Most of the loot has stats and can be used in the game. It's usage is not cosmetic either. If you for example want to go into a cold area, you should wear warm clothes to protect you. If you want to enter a poisonous zone you should wear a gas mask, use an oxygen tank or find a vehicle to take you through. The loot is placed random, but as you progress through the world it is different and gets a higher value or is even rare.

There is only one speaking character in the game, which is the narrator, who will comment about the area you are in, what you should be doing, what you have done and what the other animals in the game are saying.

The game is best played with a controller and the key mapping is also made for a controller. You have the four face buttons, you use for guns and sword moves and by pressing the left trigger key, these four buttons are used for the four mutations that you have assigned to them and you can use those in combat.

The world is 4x4 kilometers. You are also an animal so you can mark your territory and piss on signs to do just that. Once you did that the signs can be used as fast travel portals to other locations on the map.

For the most part Biomutant came across to me as being an action-RPG that is trying to be more than that. It has some elements that could be considered different from other ARPGs. The many endings might be worthwhile to explore, but that all depends on the implementation. Something like three carefully designed endings can better than a plethora of potential endings that are only somewhat different. As it is unclear what those endings are at the moment, it is difficult to say. The animal setting is definitely different. There aren't too many RPGs out there with only animals.
The combat in the game looks good and fluent. If it is challenging and divers enough it might certainly be a big pro for this game. As far as exploration and loot hunting is concerned, it is not entirely clear to me, with the information provided, how much that plays a role.
I'm sure we will learn more about the game in the next year or so, as Biomutant is scheduled for release in 2018, for PC, Xbox One and PS4.