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French game developer Spiders has been creating various RPG worlds for players for many years, and they have brought people a futuristic adventure through Mechanical Wizard, a classic fantasy journey through Flame Boundaries, and a fun exploration through Autumn of Greed. Now, Spiders is heading for beautiful Paris, a place where robots control everything.
Although the Robot Revolution didn't really happen, the game is set on the French Revolution, where players need to control a robot named "Adés", who tries to find a way to success in bloodshed and conflict. Spiders' goal is to perpetuate the spirit of its past RPG and inject the right amount of modern action into new adventures. We recently took a closer look at this new game to get a more complete picture.
Rewrite history
Rise of Steel presents a different kind of French Revolution from a unique perspective, full of elements such as robots and alchemy. In a world where robots can live freely, but things get chaotic for a short time, and your task is to find a solution to this devastated and violent city.
Combining RPG elements and a clean fighting style, Spiders is working hard to shape an ambitious world. Rise of Steel isn't an open-world game, but the path isn't just linear from A to B. Throughout the game, Edes can get a variety of boosts, such as a grappling hook that can help her unlock entrances to different areas.
These discovery tools encourage players to revisit and go back to areas that were previously inaccessible, especially if you're stuck in a boss level. Of course, you can also choose to play it as a brush game, harvesting resources from mobs to enhance your character and invest in core attributes such as health and attack power.
"You have a variety of play styles, and in fact these are common mechanics of RPG. In addition, there are a variety of devices, skills, and attributes. But we really wanted to play the "robot protagonist" setting and introduce some uniqueness to it." Jehanne Rousseau, founder and CEO of Spiders, said, "So, you can add new modules to your body to change or tweak certain aspects, improve some skills, and all your weapons will be part of your body." In fact, the weapons you are equipped with will really extend from your hands."
Each level in the game is designed based on a specific Paris area, and in this machine-driven world, the situation will be slightly different from real historical sights, but for those who know the famous city, it is easy to recognize those key landmarks or streets. The art style of the game is bold and open to ensure that the game environment contains a variety of exciting elements of exploration, especially the addition of a vertical space concept, so that your mechanical protagonist can move more freely. You can jump, straddle buildings, and swing around with grappling hooks, and these are just some of the mechanisms by which Aegis interacts with his environment.
While the city may be very different from the real thing, many of the NPCs in it are real historical figures from the French Revolution, either posting quests to you or selling you items. In Rise of Steel, you may encounter some large mechanical enemies, or you may receive a mission from Marie Antoinette. While you won't be fighting any humans, the developers have created the same gorgeous lineup in this alternate universe to make this journey even more fun. Of course, not all of the characters were moved from the history books, and Edes also met some fictional characters.
Plot-driven
While strictly following the time setting is not the focus of the game, many of the game's robot design styles are mainly derived from the 18th century, when Swedish and German watchmakers could already create the simplest robots that played the piano, wrote and drew, and these ancient technologies provided the original inspiration for the design of the protagonist and other robots.
In this game, the player's choices and interactions with various characters affect the direction of the story and the final outcome. While the main plot is easy to understand and obvious, the developers wanted to use the ambient narrative to provide players with a sense of atmosphere.
"There are a lot of environmental narrative elements in the game, and considering that the plot takes place mainly at night, Paris is already devastated at this time, so you are no longer walking through the calm city, but a war-torn place, and everywhere you go is a dilapidated scene." 」 Ciaran Cresswell, head of localization, said, "Of course, there are a lot of traditional storylines in the game, accompanied by a lot of dialogue, but not as much text as Autumn of Greed."
It's been tough
If you die of a chance-encountered robin soldier or a big boss, you will drop currency at the place of death, and then you will have to "run away" to pick them up on the next rebirth, otherwise they will disappear forever. We can see this design in a lot of games today, and Rise of Steel also tries to create tension through this element. This inevitably leads to debates around the difficulty settings of such games, and whether players can adjust their gaming experience? According to the developers, Rise of Steel will not have a difficulty adjustment setting, but will add a secondary mode to help players moderately reduce the challenge.
"We've seriously thought about this, and we've really thought about designing a secondary mode, or something else that gives players more freedom to explore." Rousseau said, "If you're an 'old fritter' in a difficult game, you'll love it. But if you just want to experience more of the story and explore the game scene more happily, then we will also provide the corresponding auxiliary system. I can't reveal too much at the moment, because this feature is still under development, but we really value it, because we have received a lot of feedback from past works, and some players feel that the game is too difficult to reduce their enjoyment of exploring the world, so we think it is necessary to do something for these players so that they can explore without too much suffering."
Weapons and alchemy
Aegis has a variety of weapons to choose from, from the agile and fast sassy to the big and violent invigorating. However, no matter what weapon you choose, elegance is a constant theme, after all, our Edes was once a dancer robot. Like other robots in this world, Aegis had his own position before the upheavals. Many of the enemies you fight against (whether they're normal mobs or bosses) once had their own abilities, such as cooking or gardening robots. They don't necessarily all have humanoid forms, but many of them have strangely shaped enemies and are quite diverse in style.
In an early video released officially, we saw a battle demonstration between the protagonist and a boss named "Bishop", which requires players to master the skills of dodging, attacking, and observing timing, and learn to shoot down the opponent at the right time. While this may seem like a standard boss encounter, it does raise our expectations.
In addition to a variety of weapons, the Rise of Steel worldview also includes an alchemy setting that adds special effects or other combat buffs to your attacks. So, is this so-called alchemy actually a spell? As you can understand, this strange technology tree not only fits the game's background setting, but also gives players more options to serve the core battles. Instead of casting spells on weapons, you're applying a chemical to its surface.
In addition, if you fantasize about Edes carrying a rocket launcher around, it is better to stop this idea, but you can still expect specific weapons in the context of that era, such as smoothbore guns or various hand guns.
Can Spiders get a piece of the action RPG? We'll be able to see it when the game goes on sale on September 8 this year. Until then, this history of overhead chaos led by retro robots will continue to arouse our reverie.
Compile: Zoe