I'm very happy to be able to bring you an interview with Joseph Lieberman from Muse Games, makers of
Guns of Icarus Online. You may remember that I had
the first gameplay trailer from this game up on the site back in November.
With its dieselpunk setting and first person piloting of giant airships the game is looking to be quite the unique experience and after this interview I'm even more curious to see the finished product.
First off, can you tell us a bit about what Guns of Icarus Online is all about? Obviously flying the airships is the key gameplay element, but what sort of tasks will you be using your nifty ship for?
There are two modes of play that together embody what Guns of Icarus Online is all about. On the smaller scale, the game is about the thrill of flying and moment-to-moment airship combat, with its strategy, skill and frantic action, and the teamwork of a well-knit crew where everyone has a job to do. These experiences are the core of the PvP combat mode that we will aim to release first. In the campaign mode on the larger scale, which we will expand to, the game is about the politics of alliance and conquest, and the economics of nurturing the growth of struggling towns while increasing your own profits through trade. As the captain of a merchant ship, you will be the one that towns depend on to deliver the supplies they need to survive. Lose the cargo en route, and shortages will hamper growth and affect the local economy. As a warship captain, you’ll be on the front line defending or expanding your faction’s territory, protecting merchant fleets so shipments get where they’re going -- or raiding them and bringing the spoils home.
Steampunk and Dieselpunk seems to be enjoying quite the surge of popularity these days, which means that the setting in Guns of Icarus Oline is not necessarily as unusual a sight as it has been before. What would you say really sets the Guns of Icarus Online world and setting apart from the standard steampunk/dieselpunk themes of greasy engines and smoking mechanics?
Steampunk and dieselpunk were starting points for our concept, but they’re only a part of the aesthetic. This obviously isn’t a high Victorian steampunk setting that’s all gaslight and gleaming brass, and it’s not an Atomic Age dieselpunk fantasy setting, either, although it has elements of both. The world of Guns of Icarus Online is what you get some 300 years after history has basically been arrested at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, so that’s the upper limit of technological progress. In the war, humanity essentially bombed itself back to the Dark Ages and had to build up from there.
Some parts of turn-of-the-century technology still exist or can be salvaged or recreated with a lot of effort, like electricity. At the same time, without access to global trade and production, most of the world is living a pre-industrial agrarian or even hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with animal labor and maybe some limited steam and diesel power -- all in the ruins of an urban, industrial world that has been iced over, desertified, and thoroughly scavenged. Guns of Icarus Online also draws on a broad range of cultural influences, as the current population is the product of centuries of upheaval and migration. We’ve got elements of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian cultures all remixed in different ways, from the fashions to the architecture to the place names. We don’t think it’ll be quite like anything you’ve seen before!
A steampunk airship flying game is something we don’t see every day. From the gameplay footage you’ve made available it looks like you’re going with a very special kind of gameplay that is focused on controlling your ship from the first person, as opposed to something like Eve Online that is all 3rd person with UI to handle all the ship controls. Can you give us a more detailed look into how players will be operating the airships in Guns of Icarus Online and how that will impact the gaming experience?
We’ve had quite a few long, philosophical, late-night discussions about what is an MMO, what is an MMORPG, an RPG, a MMOFPS, a non-MMO -- an MO? -- and finally, what is Guns of Icarus Online?
One thing that’s clear is that this is not your typical third-person, open-world, mouse-driven MMO. We’re not Eve Online or World of Warcraft. What we’re doing is bringing team-based, match-driven, FPS-style play to what in the campaign mode will become a persistent shared world, with some more traditional RPG trappings like trade and crafting.
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