The Surge Interview
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Gamereactor recently chatted up Deck13's Jan Klose about The Surge, their upcoming action RPG set in a science ficion-based dystopian future that'll mimic some of the same design tenets as Lords of the Fallen, despite a new publisher and a completely different premise. An excerpt to follow, as usual:
GR: Maybe one of the problems in Lords of the Fallen was that you could try to defeat an enemy or overcome a difficult section as often as you wanted. But when you were successful you never needed to go back again, so some people felt it was more like trial and error. What is your approach in The Surge?
The idea with Lords of the Fallen was the same as it is here. That when you meet an enemy the first time then maybe he's too strong and he will kill you. But maybe you learnt his attacks or some moves off him. Or you learnt that your attack that you were doing was just not a good idea. So you come back and this time you have some ideas. You have learnt a little bit and now you are better. And maybe you die a second time because you tried and you were just not good enough, but the third time you really know what to do and then you can kill the enemy. For the weaker enemies that feel maybe a little bit more like cannon fodder, you can of course have different strategies or be not so tactical about them. And every time you meet an interesting enemy in the game, we think it's OK if you die one or two times before you figure out what to do. Then if you figured it out then it will be easier for you to defeat another enemy of this type, however it mean simply learning the pattern. You still need to see what tactics he is using. Another thing is that you need items from the enemies you've met before if you want to craft certain things. So we encourage the players to go back and to fight enemies again to get more of the resources you need to craft new cool stuff in the game.
GR: With crafting, you mean gear and weapons, right?
JK: Yes, crafting is a very, very strong part of the whole game design with The Surge. If you defeat an enemy, it depends on how you defeated him, you will get different loot. And with this loot, which can be armour, which can be weapons, which can be other things you can apply to your character; you can craft this for yourself, use it for yourself. So when you see an enemy carrying a special type of armour which makes it maybe especially strong or hard to defeat, when you've defeated him you can get parts of the armour. But only if you defeated him in a certain way. For example, if you cut of his arm while he's wearing a cool piece of armour, you can then get it and craft it to fit it to your character and then you have it. But you just have one piece. So maybe you want to have other pieces... and so on. There are multiple ways. While it's interesting to fight an enemy, the type of loot you get from him depends on how you fight an enemy.
