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.
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.
What that means is that your experience from the first person as a crew member on board a ship is always the core of the experience. While the captain may be more focused on piloting and taking a general overview of the field, using tools like maps and the spotting scope to gain a broader perspective, the gunner, who spends most of his time mounted on a turret and sighting the enemy, is all about the FPS view. The first-person perspective is also key for the engineer, who has to run around the deck from component to component to keep all parts of the ship in working order, paying much less attention to what’s going on outside of the ship than what’s on fire on the inside!
In connection with the previous question, the class mechanic seems to be a big part of Guns of Icarus Online. What impact will choosing a class have on your playing experience and what were your thoughts behind creating a class system for the game?
One of the games we enjoy playing in the office regularly is Team Fortress 2, which we think is an excellent example of a game that does classes really well. For a team-based game, it’s crucial to accommodate different styles of play and give each role an essential and distinct part to play in the team effort. If there’s overlap of roles, or everyone can do every task, then the distinctions fall away and the game loses its flavor, with the strongest players often dominating and steamrolling over everyone else. Separation of roles allows team members with different play styles and abilities to all contribute without stepping on each other’s toes, and we think our roles of Captain, Engineer, and Gunner accomplish this well.
Depending on what class you choose, your experience of the game will be quite different. As a captain, you’re responsible for navigating the ship, organizing your crew, and engaging in high-level strategy and tactical maneuvers. You’re looking at the field of battle and assessing your enemy and your own capabilities, and choosing the form of engagement. As a gunner, the game is much more immediate -- it’s about fast action and twitch skills, getting the enemy in your sights and taking them down as quickly as possible. As the engineer, you’re playing a different sort of game entirely, a time management juggling act as you try to squeeze the best performance possible out of all the ship’s components without letting anything blow up.
Each role offers a distinct play experience that will appeal to different players, yet they’re all working together on the same ship for a common goal, and they’re all indispensible. And while three may sound like very few in comparison to games like TF2, an amalgamation of player-chosen skills will further define each role according to unique preferences of tactics and strategies.
On the official Guns of Icarus Online website you mention that there will be a multiplayer campaign. What kind of content will players be able to find in this multiplayer campaign and how big a part of the game do you expect the campaign to be? I.e. will it be mainly something to do in between exploration, pvp and trading or do you expect it will make up the majority of players gaming time?
We expect the campaign to eventually evolve and become the framework and motivation for all the individual combat encounters that make up PvP mode. In PvP, you just want a fun scenario where you can get on a ship and fly around and fight; the campaign is what will tell you where you’re flying to and what you’re fighting for. The campaign trade game and faction territorial game will shape the cargo running, raiding, invasion, and town defense missions that can be played as single scenarios in PvP mode.
To elaborate, the campaign mode won’t be a defined series of linear quests with a parceled-out plot and a beginning, middle, and end; rather, we’re using “campaign” to refer to the whole overworld trade/exploration game, where the missions and combat scenarios will be determined by the state of the game’s economy and faction politics. If one faction is attacking another and you’re in the region, then you’ll be able to participate in the “Attack the Town” mission; if a town is hungry and wants to purchase a shipment of grain, you’ll be able to accept a “ Deliver the Cargo” mission and get them the supplies they need.
PvP mode will be rolled out first with a few predefined scenarios, to get players in the air and playing the combat game as soon as possible; campaign mode, with world exploration and trade, is something we’ll be releasing a little bit later after PvP is off the ground.
Are there any particularly features of the game that you’re extra super excited for that you’d like to share with us?
I think that the way in which we’re allowing captains to customize their airships with different weapons and then the players equipping skills on top of that will introduce an interesting dynamic once a crew enters a PvP match. You’ll definitely know what your own ship’s and crew’s strengths and weaknesses are but you’ll be left wondering what enemies are up to until you can see what they’ve got from a distance. We hope this being-on-your-toes will keep players excited. The game is also co-op as well as competitive. Creating that tension is also really exciting.
Finally, is there any schedule you can divulge to us about when we might have a chance to set sail on our airships in Guns of Icarus Online?
We are aiming to release the competitive multiplayer experience mid next year. In the meantime, we are also working on the campaign part of the game. But more importantly, we want to take all the time we can afford to make sure that we perfect the game.
A big thanks to Muse Games for taking the time to give us some more insight into Guns of Icarus Online. It certainly doesn't look like any game that I've played before, so it will be really interesting to see how it plays, when we finally get a chance to get our hands on it.
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