My most anticipated extraction shooter of the year just launched in early access and the community is now fighting over the importance of regular hydration

We've got a lot of extraction shooter aficionados at PC Gamer, but I've never really been able to find one to float my boat. Then I got to check out The Forever Winter, an ambitious, improbably gloomy PvE extraction romp with heavy survival vibes and a penchant for ruthlessly murdering players—and it turned out that was exactly what I was looking for. 

It hit early access yesterday, and I managed to survive a few scavenging hunts last night. I love it, but like a lot of multiplayer early access ventures, it's still got plenty of kinks to work out. It's sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam at the moment, largely because of performance issues. I've not actually had to deal with any myself, but I'm also running it on a pretty beefy rig with an RTX 4090 and an Intel i9-13900k. 

One particular mechanic has also proven to be divisive, which doesn't surprise me. A bit of background first: The Forever War is set during an apocalyptic conflict between two heavily mechanised factions who've ruined the world by throwing cyborgs and mechs at each other. Players are not super soldiers or mechwarriors, though, instead being mere scavengers trying to survive in Hell. Missions, then, revolve around you scurrying across battlefields, looting, and trying not to get spotted by a building-sized death machine or a squad of troops. 

Loot can range from booze and packs of smokes to tech that can be sold for a premium back at your hideout, netting you cash that you can spend on weapons, upgrades and consumables—almost all of which you'll lose if you die while carrying them on a mission. Unless you manage to return to the site of your death, anyway. You always get one chance to get everything back. 

Arguably the most precious commodity you'll find out in the warzone, though, is water. H2O keeps your hideout running, and you need enough water for a specific number of days to access some of your facilities. Where this gets really punishing, though, is water runs out in real-time.When you run