How to Install Ravaged: Zombie Apocalypse and Join a Server

Ravaged came off the Steam store on 20 November 2015 and has never gone back on. You cannot buy it. If you already own it, it is still in your library and it still installs, because Valve leaves delisted games with the people who bought them — but there is no store page to send a friend to, and that single fact reshapes everything else on this page.

So this is a guide for a narrow reader: somebody who picked it up in 2013 or in a bundle, still has it, and wants to know whether any of it works. Some of it does. It is smaller than you were hoping and it requires you to do the organising yourself.

Listings collect on its hub. This site queries Ravaged with the Source protocol on port 27015 by default, the same way it queries any Steamworks title of that generation, so anything that appears there has been polled and answered rather than self-reported.

Why it disappeared

Ravaged was released on 17 October 2012 by 2 Dawn Games, published by Reverb Publishing, built on Unreal Engine 3 and part-funded by a Kickstarter that raised $38,767 in May 2012. Reviews landed in the middle. Metacritic settled at 64, which is about right for a game that drove beautifully and shipped with nothing around the driving.

In August 2013 it was reissued as Ravaged: Zombie Apocalypse — a free update that added a co-op survival mode and renamed the whole product. The rename did not go down well with the people who had already bought a vehicle shooter. Sales stayed flat, the studio went quiet, and in November 2015 the store page went dark. A Steam moderator answering the inevitable forum thread said only that the developer had "some legal issues going on", and that remains the nearest thing to an explanation anybody ever received.

The important consequence is structural rather than sentimental. A game with no store page acquires no new players, ever. Whatever population it has on the day it is delisted is the largest population it will have from then on.

What you find when you launch it

The premise is solar flares. The sun cooked the planet, civilisation went with it, and two groups are fighting over the remains. The Resistance want to rebuild something. The Scavengers want to own everything that is left and are not fussy about method.

Both sides field the same five class roles — soldier, recon, sniper, demolition and heavy — each with its own weapon set and a loadout you can adjust within limits. The armoury is more inventive than the class list suggests. There is a crossbow. There is a flamethrower. There are grenades that bounce like tennis balls and a butcher's cleaver for melee. What there is not is any explanation of what any of it does; the loadout screen gives you a name and a picture and wishes you luck.

Three things are missing that you will notice inside five minutes. No tutorial. No bots. No offline mode of any kind. When a player raised exactly this on the forums, the lead developer replied that basic bot support already existed in the codebase and that giving those bots usable AI was the expensive part nobody had time for. It never shipped.

That matters more than it sounds. A multiplayer shooter with bots degrades into a single-player game when the servers empty. A multiplayer shooter without them degrades into nothing.

Three modes, eight maps

The mode list is short and the naming is idiosyncratic.

Thrust is a control-point push. You take points across the map and the win condition is leaving the other team with nowhere left to spawn.

Resource Control is capture the flag with fuel canisters instead of flags. Eight canisters returned wins the round, and you capture respawn points along the way to shorten the run.

Team Deathmatch is team deathmatch.

Eight maps shipped at launch, and the good ones commit hard to the ruined-landmark idea. Liberty has the Statue of Liberty broken into pieces and half-buried in sand. Bridge puts the wreck of the Golden Gate down the middle of the map with ravines either side, which is where the aircraft earn their place. Rooftops is a frozen village built around an accessible roofline with a vehicle route circling it, dominated by a snowed-in Eiffel Tower. Canyon was the demo map and is the one most people saw. There is also an oil rig, notable for being the only stage in the game with no vehicles on it at all.

The larger maps were built for 32 players. Read that number against the population and you have the whole problem in one line: Destructoid's reviewer counted 78 people online worldwide at launch, with a peak around 120.

The vehicles are the reason anyone remembers it

There are roughly ten of them and they are the part the studio clearly cared about.

Trikes and quads for getting somewhere fast and dying instantly if anybody notices you. A buggy, a muscle car, a pickup and a light armoured 4x4 for the middle of the fight, several of them with separate driver, passenger and gunner seats. A slow, heavily armoured thing whose job is killing other vehicles. And two aircraft — a gyrocopter and a small helicopter — flown from either first or third person.

They handle well. Reviewers who disliked everything else said so. The maps are sized around them, which means that on foot the same maps are long, exposed walks, and a player who ignores the garage is playing a much worse game than the one on the box.

The zombie mode is the part that still works

This is the section worth reading if you own the game and have nobody to play with.

The August 2013 update added a co-operative mode where the objective is getting out of an infested area alive. It caps at five players. The 29 August patch notes give a clear picture of how it was tuned: everyone starts with a medic gun, the downed state lasts longer before you die, the Howler's radius of influence was cut, zombie health came down, chainsaw damage went up and fuel drained more slowly.

A co-op mode against generated enemies has a completely different survival profile from a competitive one. Team deathmatch on a 32-player map needs thirty-one other people to exist. This needs four, or three, or none — the opposition turns up regardless of what happened to the studio in 2015.

At the time of that update, while the network-listed dedicated servers were being brought up to the new build, the developers told people to host their own listen server and play from there. That instruction has aged into the standing advice.

Getting a game together now

There is no browser full of servers to pick from and there has not been for a long time. What works is arranging it.

Everybody needs to already own it. This is the hard constraint and there is no way around it. You cannot buy a copy for a friend, gift one, or find it on the store at any price. The group is whoever already has it in their library.

One person hosts. A listen server run from the game covers a small session — that was the developers' own recommendation for the zombie mode and it holds. For anything longer-lived there is a separate dedicated server package. It ships with a redist folder containing the Visual C++ and .NET 4 installers it depends on, and skipping those produces an unhelpful error about being unable to read a value from the server's INI settings rather than anything resembling "install this first". Run the redistributables before you run the server.

Agree the build before you agree the time. Games of this era fail on client-server version mismatch with error messages that describe something else entirely, and a delisted game's install is whatever Steam last shipped, which is the same for everyone. That is one of the few advantages of the situation.

Pass the full address, port included. Copy address:port in one piece. A machine hosting more than one game cannot leave everything on the default, and an address handed over without its port fails in a way indistinguishable from the server being down.

If you are the one standing something up, how many slots to run is the relevant reading. The instinct is always to open thirty-two because the maps support thirty-two. Six people in a thirty-two slot server feels like an abandoned building. Six people in an eight slot server feels like a game.

If something appears on the hub

Treat it with interest and some suspicion. Thin populations attract listings that flatter themselves, and a server claiming a full house on a game nobody can buy is claiming something remarkable.

Check the ordinary signals: whether the count was measured or asserted, whether the box has been up longer than a day, and whether there is a community attached that exists somewhere you can look at. Our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy set out the reasoning, and how to find servers worth playing on covers what to do with a plausible one.

For a game in this position the single best signal is a schedule. One group that plays on Sunday evenings is worth more than twenty servers that are technically online and permanently empty, and a schedule never shows up in a browser.

The vehicle shooters that still have people in them

If what appealed was combined arms on big open maps, that idea has a long history and most of it is still running.

Battlefield 1942 invented the form and still has servers hosting custom maps and mods. Battlefield 2 is where the community server scene for the series properly settled and has the deepest surviving mod culture. Bad Company 2 is the one people go back to for the destruction, and Battlefield 4 holds the largest population of the modern entries.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is the closest match to what Ravaged was reaching for — asymmetric factions, vehicles, deployable structures, and an objective chain that moves in one direction across the map. It came from a period when every shooter shipped a server binary, and it shows.

Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront share a studio lineage and a near-future combined-arms premise, though both sit in a position uncomfortably close to this one.

For the setting rather than the vehicles, Rust and 7 Days to Die are where the post-apocalyptic audience actually went, and both have servers you can join tonight.

None of that makes Ravaged worthless to the people who own it. A five-player zombie run still works, the driving is still good, and there is a real if small pleasure in playing something nobody else is playing. It is just no longer a game you find. It is a game you arrange.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Ravaged: Zombie Apocalypse servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.