Gamedec Revealed - Adaptive Cyberpunk RPG by Anshar Studios
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During this year's Gamescom trade fair, Anshar Studios, a team known for their VR-focused titles Telefrag and Detached, showed off a trailer for their new project - Gamedec. Set to release sometime in 2020, Gamedec is described as an adaptive cyberpunk RPG where you play as a private investigator specializing in virtual crimes. And apparently, it's based on a series of Polish science fiction novels. To learn more about this game you can check out its Steam page or official website, and watch this reveal trailer:
Here's the game's description:
You Are the Sum of Your Choices
You will hunt down the criminals of virtual worlds. Rich, spoiled businesspeople, mothers who want a better life for their children, or corporations with plans to rewrite humanity. Are they acting alone, or are they mere puppets? What does a "happy ending" mean to you or to them? Each decision you make shapes the game world and your character’s personality.
Some decisions will feel right, and others will be unexpected. The game continually adapts to your choices and never judges – only you can judge yourself.
Explore the Cyberpunk of XXII Century
Welcome to Warsaw City in the XXII century, where "real" is a relative term and "life" and "death" have many meanings. Virtual worlds give rise to real problems: lust, sloth, envy, and pride. That’s why the residents of these virtual game-worlds need specialists – Gamedecs who discover and exploit cheats hidden in the realities of their clients. Wild West or the jungle of a prehistoric entertainment park, throughout these and many other worlds, they are facing human nature, which, despite many changes, has remained the same...
Experience the Essence of Role-playing
Gamedec is a pure RPG experience equipped with mechanics such as a codex, aspects, and deduction. Fight conversational duels, discover or build schemes of intrigue, save lives, and discover extraordinary relationships between the virtual worlds and their inhabitants. The game emulates the nature of a tabletop RPG by focusing on choice-dependent character building.
Gamedec, like classic tabletop RPGs, gives you the freedom to approach situations from multiple angles rather than forcing a single solution. Remember: the choice is yours.
And if you'd like to know how it actually plays, you can also read several previews based on a build of Gamedec presented during Gamescom and PAX West. Going by these previews, the game's strong focus on narrative choices, the apparent ability to fail forward, and a dialogue-driven combat system instead of a more traditional one make it sound quite a bit like ZA/UM's Disco Elysium. Have a look:
GamersPack:
By playing the scenarios as a table-top adventure before making them into in-game cases, the team was able to come up with many different approaches and things to do in each. For example, you start the investigation by entering a bar where you can choose to investigate the bartender, the strippers, or even the waiter bot.
The choices you make during your initial character creation also come into play when investigating, in the form of “aspects”. Aspects are traits that define your character. Some are only good for one-time use, such as gaining wealth, but others can be used many times, like your character’s origin. In our case, our Gamedec is a legendary eSports player, and his renown helped us continue to the next stage of our investigation.
Each case in Gamedec that you have to solve, has more than one possible ending. However, the game itself has a linear structure where you solve one case after the other. The choices you make in each of the cases will impact the characters that are involved in that case. In later cases you will meet some of these characters again and your previous choices will influence the attitude these characters will have towards you.
The developers aim for you to spend 45-60 minutes on a case when you play it normally. But when choosing the shorter path, as described before, this can be reduced to about 20 minutes.
Gamedec has no combat system. There is violence in the game, but it will play out through cut scenes or dialogs and not via interactive combat. An example was given where the Gamedec was meeting a gangster, supported by two bouncers and two turrets. My character could say "I'm going to kill you", but the turrets or the bouncers will likely kill the characters first. I could however, hack the turrets to kill the bouncers, or bribe the bouncers to hack the turrets. In that case my actions would not lead to my death, but to the death of the other. All this takes place without a combat system in placer, which is a deliberate choice as the developers wanted to make a narrative game where choices matter.
Each case, or chapter, happens within a unique digital world. For the demo, the GameDec must enter Harvest Time, a hardcore farming MMORPG focused on grinding. Inside this game, player characters are getting sick and sometimes outright disappearing — something that clearly shouldn’t be happening inside of a virtual reality. Upon arriving at the bar hosting VR chairs for the game, the detective must find a way into the VIP lounge. He’s got choices — perhaps something out of the player-selected background will help him, such as growing up in a specific place or a hobby refined before becoming a GameDec? Alternatively, perhaps the detective’s charisma will sway the bartender? If no other options present themselves, there’s always a basic dialogue option or two to finesse the situation. Or players can completely skip the finesse and force their way into the VIP lounge with a good old-fashioned hacking.
