Phoenix Point aspires to break the mold of turn-based tactics games. The game’s environments are also procedurally generated, meaning no two missions are likely to feel the same. “We're making a game that we hope people are going to play many times and, potentially, for years and years if we if we support it in the way that we want to,” Kaye said. In some ways, you’re not only anticipating your enemies’ behavior but also your own.įurthermore, procedural generation keeps the game fresh playthrough after playthrough. The need to be flexible and stay a couple of steps ahead of your enemy has always been a staple of turn-based tactics games, but Phoenix Point takes that principle to another level. Phoenix Point uses procedural generation to generate meaningful challenges instead of simply creating vast amounts of randomized content. “What we want is for people to always be on that knife edge.” “We want the player to exist in this state where they're not too comfortable and not thinking, ‘Oh, this is a cakewalk,’” Kaye said. Instead of a gun, an enemy might recur in a later mission with a giant pincer instead of using a grenade, the enemy might have one limb that acts as a fully-body shield. Each limb governs different properties, and destroying individual limbs can disable abilities, cause negative side effects, or impede movement across the map.īut once an enemy type is beaten using the same means repeatedly, it might develop a variation that possesses a different set of mutated limbs. Many Pandorans in Phoenix Point are designed to have destructible limbs. Procedural generation drives the mutation of enemies, granting them the ability to learn. Phoenix Point utilizes familiar turn-based tactics mechanics, but with a twist: Rely too heavily on a specific tactic for taking down enemies and they’ll adapt to overcome it. Yet the real terror stems not just from their appearance, however, but their behavior. Indeed, Lovecraftian cosmic horror pervades the design of Phoenix Point’s alien enemies (named Pandorans after the virus), which ranges from enormous, crablike monstrosities to face-hugging parasites. “Lovecraft is definitely a strong influence there.” “I think there was a desire to try and bring back a little bit of that sort of existential terror that really stood out to me as a fan of the original XCOM,” Snapshot Games President and Co-Founder David Kaye said. As the leader of the Phoenix Project, your job is to save humanity from extinction, fighting terrifying alien forces along the way. The virus makes mutant abominations out of any living thing it touches, and by 2047, Earth has been ravaged by apocalypse and split into conflicting factions. Phoenix Point is set in 2047, 25 years after an extraterrestrial virus named the Pandoravirus started spreading across the Earth via melting ice caps that had been housing the virus in permafrost. The game takes place in a not-too-distant yet utterly dystopian future. Phoenix Point furthers Gollop’s work in the genre by enlisting the help of advancements in procedural generation computing. Snapshot Games was founded by David Kaye and Julian Gollop in 2013, the latter of whom is best known for creating the legendary XCOM series of turn-based tactics games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |