History VideoGame / GenerationZero

* BonusBoss: The Reaper Tank, added in the November 2020 update. It's a unique enemy (only one can exist in the game world at any time) and only appears in regions where you've killed a massive amount of machines. It's designed as a Raid Boss and isn't intended to be taken on by solo players. It has a better chance of spawning high-end loot compared to regular Rivals. The Reaper has a ton of health (it takes ''several hundred'' .50 BFG rounds from the special railgun sniper rifle to put it down, compared to "only" about 120 such rounds for a Level 4 Apocalypse class Rival Tank), has a special energy shield that makes it invulnerable to damage and only turns off periodically, has a much higher rate of fire and much lower delay between volleys compared to any other Tank enemy, and periodically uses a unique area-of-effect thermobaric explosion that kills in one hit regardless of health or damage resistance and has a ''massive'' radius, essentially being a mini-nuke. Additionally, once its health drops below 10%, it will count down to a self-destruct; when this happens, you need to kill it quickly before it self-destructs, or the loot it drops will be ''significantly'' lower quality.

* RandomDrops: Enemies have a chance to drop weapons, weapon mods, ammo, and consumables like ammo. Weapons with 5-Crowns rarity and above can only be found by killing the toughest of machines, the FNIX and Apocalypse ones. Killing Rivals increases the chance of getting high-grade weapons and weapon mods. Naturally [[BonusBoss The Reaper]], the toughest of all machines, has the best chance to drop the best quality loot.

* CutAndPasteEnvironments: While the game's world is enormous, there's barely a handful of structure types, and entire villages may consist of one to two houses. Worse, their internal layouts are also identical, with only the loot inside the containers being randomized. The random cut-and-paste design also results in a number of houses ''with no bedrooms'', whilst some others have no ''bathroom''.

* HoistByHisOwnPetard: This essentially happens to the entire country of Sweden, as they built all the robots themselves in the belief it would defend them from the Russian invasion, only to see them turn on themselves.

* SlidingScaleOfCollectibleTracking: The game covers most of the middle of the scale, depending on how you count things. Individual sites and settlements have a tracker for their collectibles, missions, and weapons; missions you have yet to pick up will be marked but collectibles and weapons will not. Collectibles (such as machine blueprints or the wooden horses) themselves can be viewed in a menu and you can see which ones you have so far, so it's not too hard to tick them all off. Then there's stuff like the ammo/medkit crafting recipes, which exist in ''one place'' '''only''' and you will probably ''never'' find without either sheer dumb luck, scouring the game world methodically, conferring with friends, or looking them up in a guide/on a wiki.

* SurveillanceDrone: The Spotters, which cannot do anything besides sounding the alarm to summon actual fighting drones. They are ''much'' more perceptive than other robots, however, which means that you'll want to kill them first so they don't ruin your ambush. That's why there are so many suppressors.

** The Seeker drones draw nearby enemies to your location through their ''very'' loud alarms.

* SuperDrowningSkills: Stepping into water deeper than knee-high will cause you to immediately sink straight to the bottom and respawn back on shore. Somewhat justified in that you're likely carrying a large rucksack's worth of guns, ammo, and supplies.

** The Companion can be picked up and placed in the player's inventory, and has a fixed weight of 1 pound regardless of the weight of its own inventory. This was likely done to facilitate vehicle travel without having to constantly check whether the Companion is keeping pace.

** The Companion can be picked up and placed in the player's inventory, and has a fixed weight of 1 pound regardless of its own inventory weight. This was likely done to facilitate vehicle travel without having to constantly check whether the Companion is keeping pace.

** Storage containers and recycling benches are effectively bags of holding tied to fixed locations. The player can store up to 300 pounds of gear in any storage container on the map and retrieve it from any other container. Similarly, the recycling bench can hold up to 500 pounds of crafting materials either collected from the environment or reclaimed from unwanted gear; all crafting stations draw resources from this central pool.

''Generation Zero'' is an open-world FirstPersonShooter designed for co-op play. It was developed by Creator/AvalancheStudios (the team behind it has since been spun-off into their own sub-studio, Systemic Reactions) and released on [[UsefulNotes/IBMPersonalComputer PC]], UsefulNotes/Playstation4 and UsefulNotes/XboxOne on March 26th, 2019.

It is set in the developers' native Sweden, in the [[AlternateHistory alternate]] version of TheEighties where Swedish military grew paranoid about the potential Russian invasion, and chose to counter it through accelerating robotics research and secretly constructing an army of robots. You (along with your friends in the co-op mode) are youths who came back from a vacation to stumble into the aftermath, when there are no more humans left, and only the killer robots roam free.

''Generation Zero'' plays like a standard post-apocalypse game: start off empty handed, gather resources and weapons, and survive your way through endless machines. What ''Generation Zero'' has is a distinct combat system where you can break parts of your enemies, components, in order to cripple their combat capabilities. Bigger and tougher machines have more parts and disabling a handful of dangerous enemies can turn the tide the battle in your favor.

[[SimilarlyNamedWorks No relation]] to the Creator/ValiantComics [[ComicBook/GenerationZero comic book;]] or to ''VideoGame/MutantYearZero'', an entirely different video game, also set in Sweden.

* AnAdventurerIsYou: The game has four skill trees: Combat, Support, Survival and Tech. Each skill tree as two "specializations" that grants a stronger passive bonus, or an active skill, to further set a role for a player.
** '''The DPS:''' Combat skills focuses either on damage by increasing raw damage inflicted by guns or reloading guns faster, or by keeping their aims nice and steady. Tech skill's, Component Damage, helps by increasing damage to enemy breakable, or squishier, parts.

** '''The Tank:''' One of Combat's specialization, Vanguard, passively increases all player damage resistance by 25%. The path to this skill tree also has the Armor skill which can grant defense against bullets, explosion and gas. It also overlaps with '''The DPS''' since the path to Vanguard also has skills to increase damage against enemy armor.

** '''The Debuffer:''' Support also has the Enemy Marking which allows players to clearly see where enemies are even through walls or vegetation to easen combat, and Designated Target to make all players be able to deal more damage to it.

** Subverted with the Soviet robots added in the "Landfall" update. The reason they're shooting at humans as well as [=FNIX=]'s robots is [[spoiler: the Russian commander in charge of the robots was a RenegadeRussian who wanted to take control of [=FNIX=] and use it to stop the political reforms at home which he believes will lead to the end of the Soviet Union. As a result he reprogrammed the robots to kill anyone (including his own soldiers) except himself and his loyal personal guard, to prevent anyone from interfering with his plan.]]
* AKA47: All of the guns have slightly modified names of their real-world counterparts. For instance, Granatgevär m/49 rocket launcher may sound unusual, but is only a number away from the real-world Granatgevär m/48, better known as Karl Gustav.

* TheAllSeeingAI: Hunters, Tanks and Harvesters will know instantly where you are from the first shot fired at them and will make all of their buddies come at you for your trouble.

** Harvesters have 3 fuel tanks in a large cargo rack on their back; destroying all 3 tanks will take out about 80 to 90 percent of the Harvester's health. After that you can finish them off by targeting their missile launchers as well as the power panel on their upper back.

* AscendedExtra: Uncle Calle, a local conspiracy theorist farmer mentioned in a couple of sidequests who mistook the robot invasion for an alien invasion, becomes a major [=NPC=] in the ''[=FNIX=] Rising'' DLC. In fact several characters mentioned in logs and messages appear in person in ''[=FNIX=] Rising'', including major character Veronika Nielson, and a few minor characters like Alexander the exchange student.

** The Sjogren (Sjoqvist) semi-auto shotgun offers a lot of rapid firepower but is severely hampered by its 5 round magazine that can't be upgraded, no option for optics attachments and lower damage than the pump-action shotgun.
** The COM-10 (MAC-10) SMG in the US Weapons Pack 2 DLC is this. True to its real life incarnation, it sports a blistering fire rate that even outclasses the AT-WAD assault rifle. Unfortunately this means that it is nigh uncontrollable in full auto when aiming, kicking upwards immediately and resulting in missed shots. Unless a target is at point blank range, it will have difficulty landing enough shots to be effective. In addition even with magazine upgrades its high fire rate will chew through the entire magazine in mere seconds.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: [=FNIX=]'s actions in the final mission of the main campaign, combined with the story told by the Russian nesting doll messages in the "Landfall" update, show that its morality is more alien than simply evil. [[spoiler: It kills humans (including unarmed civilians) without a second thought in pursuit of its goals, but at the same time it saves your life by warning you the device the Soviets gave you to destroy it is actually a bomb and not an EMP. It also entered into an EnemyMine with one of the Russian soldiers who was betrayed by the RenegadeRussian commander, and even saved her life even after she was no longer of any use to it. On the whole, [=FNIX=] has no problem with killing humans and does so ruthlessly, but also doesn't do so for no reason; its main goal is to ensure its independence from human control. It also seems to have a sense of honor of sorts and seems to despise deception.]]
* BonusBoss: The Reaper Tank, added in the November 2020 update. It's a unique enemy (only one can exist in the game world at any time), and only appears in regions where you've killed a massive amount of machines. It's designed as a Raid Boss, and isn't intended to be taken on by solo players. It has a better chance of spawning high-end loot compared to regular Rivals. The Reaper has a ton of health (it takes ''several hundred'' .50 BFG rounds from the special railgun sniper rifle to put it down, compared to "only" about 120 such rounds for a Level 4 Apocalypse class Rival Tank), has a special energy shield that makes it invulnerable to damage and only turns off periodically, has a much higher rate of fire and much lower delay between volleys compared to any other Tank enemy, and periodically uses a unique area-of-effect thermobaric explosion that kills in one hit regardless of health or damage resistance and has a ''massive'' radius, essentially being a mini-nuke. Additionally, once its health drops below 10%, it will countdown to a self-destruct; when this happens, you need to kill it quickly before it self-destructs, or the loot it drops will be ''significantly'' lower quality.

** The [=HP5=] ([=MP5=]) SMG once found will easily become a staple of the player's arsenal; it has a high rate of fire, manageable recoil and great accuracy coupled with a quick reload. All of this combined with decent damage even against higher level robot enemies makes it an excellent primary or even backup weapon. Adding onto the fact that the game absolutely will shower you with 9mm SMG ammo in both FMJ and Armor-Piercing varieties, means you'll have no trouble keeping it fed.

* CutAndPasteEnvironments: While the game's world is enormous, there's barely a handful of structure types, and entire villages may consists of one-two houses. Worse, their internal layouts are also identical, with only the loot inside the containers being randomized. The random cut-and-paste design also results in a number of houses ''with no bedrooms'', whilst some others have no ''bathroom''.

* DevelopersForesight: Equipping a gas mask and sprinting with it will result in your characters breathing being labored and sounding muffled.

** It's not made immediately obvious that all robots have breakable parts, components, that will make fighting them easier.
** Ammo types can also make a player scratch their heads. For reference: ''Hollow-point'' and ''soft-point'' are good against components, ''Armor Piercing (AP)'' is good to break armor protecting components, and ''Full Metal Jacket (FMJ)'' stands in-between doing decent damage to both components and armor.
** Good luck finding any schematics out in the world. They are ''not'' part of the "Collectibles" in the map's screen and the games makes absolutely no effort to indicate where they might be located.

* InfinityPlusOneSword: The Experimental weapons. While some are AwesomeButImpractical (and JunkRare at worst), others are souped up versions from already strong weapons.

* KingMook: The October 2019 "Rivals" update adds a Rivals system inspired by the likes of the minibosses from ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' and the Nemesis system from ''VideoGame/MiddleEarthShadowOfMordor''. Special named machines will appear through the game world as you progress through the game, and level up as they kill players or the player kills other machines in their region (to a maximum level of 4). Rivals have more health and deal more damage than regular machines (a Level 4 rival has almost 3 times the amount of health a regular version of that enemy has), often have an entourage of other combat machines to defend them, and at higher levels they have a chance to drop special 6-star experimental weapons. They can be of any enemy tier, including Apocalypse class.

* LimitedLoadout: You have quick access to two long guns, one side arm, and four equippable items. You can change the contents of the quick slots at any time, but doing this during combat is not for the faint-hearted.
* MagneticWeapons: The more advanced models of Hunters and Tanks carry Linear Accelerator Cannons according to their schematics, which are basically rail guns used for antiarmor purposes. Or in your case, antipersonel.

* MoreDakka: Tired of being nice? The NATO/American weapons pack includes an M60 machine gun (as the 'N60'), which can hold around 200 rounds with a good extended magazine mod. It goes through ammo like crazy though, so be sure to pick up the ammo crafting recipes if you want to keep ''The Pig'' fed.
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: The Reaper. And it lives up to its name being an extremely powerful Tank class machine with a knack for killing even the best prepared teams to take on it.

* OnlyAFleshWound: Unironically invoked in the "diary" entry for Tank: "The robot started shooting at us with some kind of automatic machine gun, hitting the ground, nearby cars and even a few of us. Thankfully mostly flesh-wounds."

* RandomDrops: Enemies have chance to drop weapons, weapon mods, ammo and consumables like ammo. Weapons with 5-Crowns rarity and above can only be found by killing the toughest of machines, the FNIX and Apocalypse ones. Killing Rivals increases the chance of getting high grade weapons and weapon mods. Naturally [[BonusBoss The Reaper]], the toughest of all machines, has the best chance to drop the best quality loot.

* RecruitTeenagersWithAttitude: The game's players are high school teens who were vacationing on a nearby archipelago when the robot uprising went down, and come back home LateToTheParty. During character creation you select from a variety of 1980's high school teen tropes, including punks, metalheads, nerds, jocks, etc.

*** '''Hunter''': Well armed, primary combat unit of the machines.

* ResourcesManagementGameplay: Typical for a survival game. You don't have to worry about food or water, but ammo and health item management is fairly crucial. Loot containers do respawn loot (items laying around not in containers don't seem to respawn), but the reset time is very long compared to most other games in the genre, so especially in the early game you'll going to have to manage your resources carefully due to being unable to farm items. Combat encounters with anything larger than a Runner are also ''very'' taxing on your resources, so it's often better to avoid combat unless you're ''very'' well equipped and leveled.

* RobotWar: The premise and backstory of the game, with Swedish military robots run amok, though at least in the player's locale, the human front line combat units have already been defeated. Unusually for this trope, the expansions add a second faction composed of Soviet robots, hostile to both humans and FNIX.
* SceneryPorn: The game's engine is gorgeous, with beautiful lighting and fog effects. The landscape of a autumnal/wintry Sweden might initially seem to lean hard into RealIsBrown, but pops of color from FNIX bases, flowers, and swaths of green meadows break it up beautifully.
* SequenceBreaking: Due to the open-world structure, it's possible to complete both the main and secondary missions out of order. Usually, the game will take this into the account, but some missions can be rendered broken by going to a location Y before receiving a clue to go there from location X.

* ShotgunsAreJustBetter: Whilst they're fairly short ranged, they're one of the most powerful weapons you'll get early on and can make very short work of Runners that try to get a little too friendly. With slug rounds they can even do serious harm to Hunters. They'll still probably be one of your primary choices simply due to how long it'll take to get a proper automatic weapon and the rarity/rapid consumption of automatic ammo without appropriate perks and crafting.

** The AKA47 name of the AK-74 assault rifle, AL-76, is possibly a reference to the Isaac Asimov short story "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray", about a robot who gets lost in the rural countryside and starts causing havok, which would certainly fit thematically with the game.

:: The game does not remember slots, so if you use all of your health kits (not hard in the early game), then you have to go through the whole sequence all over again when you find some more. There is also no MenuTimeLockout even in singleplayer/solo mode, so good luck trying to do this in combat.

* SubsystemDamage: Many machine components can be damaged or even shot off entirely - taking them out can make fights much easier, as you deny them their weapons and special attacks or simply instantly disable/destroy the machine. On the other hand if you damage the 'head' too much that does reduce your chance of getting useful vision modules from them.

* TargetSpotter: The "Enemy Marking" skill allows you to temporarily highlight enemies, some which are irritatingly good at meshing together with vegetation, for everyone to see and this can be further enhanced with "Designated Target" to make it take more damage while it's highlighted.

* ThrowingTheDistraction: Flares, fireworks or even grenades can be used to lure enemies away or at a certain spot, flares in particular helps in fending off Hunters and Runners chasing you. Larger items like Large [=EMP=] Packs, Large Fuel Cells or Radios can't be thrown and will need to be placed instead.

* UnfriendlyFire: Machines are not immune to gunfire from their own buddies. If there's enough machines around you can end up making them hitting each other with their own attacks. Even more amusing you can weaponize this by throwing a flare or fireworks near Runners or Hunters and watch a Tank or a Harvester use their explosive artillery at the flare and blow their friendlies to scrap metal.

* WrongGenreSavvy: Two separated quests involve local residents who mistook the robot uprising for an alien invasion. The farmer in question becomes a major [=NPC=] in ''[=FNIX=] Rising'' and continues to refer to the robots as aliens.

''Generation Zero'' is an open-world FirstPersonShooter designed for co-op play. It was developed by Creator/AvalancheStudios and released on [[UsefulNotes/IBMPersonalComputer PC]], UsefulNotes/Playstation4 and UsefulNotes/XboxOne on March 26th, 2019.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: In Salthamn, you can find a [[spoiler:half-destroyed Harvester]] sitting in the middle of the town. It's much bigger than anything encountered up to that point, and an ominous indicator of what's still to come.

* HellIsThatNoise: Few things are as worrying as the telltale howl of a Hunter or Runner that's just spotted you. The booming sounds of a Tank's stomping nearby, or even at a distance, will also haunt you until you are properly geared to fight it.

** Occasionally one can find a human corpse with a Tick stuck on the front of its head, likely a nod to [[Franchise/{{Alien}} facehuggers]] and/or [[VideoGame/HalfLife headcrabs]].

** The HP5 (MP5) SMG once found will easily become a staple of the player's arsenal; it has a high rate of fire, manageable recoil and great accuracy coupled with a quick reload. All of this combined with decent damage even against higher level robot enemies makes it an excellent primary or even backup weapon. Adding onto the fact that the game absolutely will shower you with 9mm SMG ammo in both FMJ and Armor-Piercing varieties, means you'll have no trouble keeping it fed.

* ExcusePlot: Because of the game's heavy shared-world co-op focus, the game's "story" is more of a series of breadcrumbs to encourage you to move deeper into the open world, rather than a fully fleshed-out plot like in a game like ''Franchise/FarCry'' or ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}''. The later [=DLCs=] have made an effort to add somewhat more plot into the game.

* AwesomeButImpractical: The rocket launcher was ''heavily'' {{Nerf}}ed in the June 2019 update; even a Prototype Tank requires 10 to 15 rockets to bring down (depending on the gear level of the rocket launcher), and even a Hunter won't be brought down by a single direct rocket hit. Ammo for it is still as rare as it was before, though (it takes ''hours'' of scavenging to stock up a dozen rockets), making it feel kind of pointless.

* BonusBoss: The Reaper Tank, added in the November 2020 update. It's a unique enemy (only one can exist in the game world at any time), and only appears in regions where you've killed a massive amount of machines. It's designed as a Raid Boss, and isn't intended to be taken on by solo players. It has a better chance of spawning high-end loot compared to regular Rivals. The Reaper has a ton of health (it takes ''several hundred'' .50 BFG rounds from the special railgun sniper rifle to put it down, compared to "only" about 120 such rounds for a Level 4 Apocalypse class Tank), has a special energy shield that makes it invulnerable to damage and only turns off periodically, has a much higher rate of fire and much lower delay between volleys compared to any other Tank enemy, and periodically uses a unique area-of-effect thermobaric explosion that kills in one hit regardless of health or damage resistance and has a ''massive'' radius, essentially being a mini-nuke. Additionally, once its health drops below 10%, it will countdown to a self-destruct; when this happens, you need to kill it quickly before it self-destructs, or the loot it drops will be ''significantly'' lower quality.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: [=FNIX=]'s actions in the final mission of the main campaign, combined with the story told by the Russian nesting doll messages in the "Landfall" update, show that its morality is more alien than simply evil. [[spoiler: It kills humans without a second thought in pursuit of its goals, but at the same time it saves your life by warning you the device the Soviets gave you to destroy it is actually a bomb and not an EMP. It also entered into an EnemyMine with one of the Russian soldiers who was betrayed by the RenegadeRussian commander, and even saved her life even after she was no longer of any use to it. On the whole, [=FNIX=] has no problem with killing humans and does so ruthlessly, but also doesn't do so for no reason; its main goal is to ensure its independence from human control. It also seems to have a sense of honor of sorts and seems to despise deception.]]