Deck 13’s The Surge: Everything we Know Q&A

Deck 13 sprung to a middling level of fame thanks to Lords of the Fallen, the studio’s Dark Souls-like title released on new-gen and PC late in 2014. With a sequel to that game now out of its hands, the team has turned to a new project under publisher Focus Home Interactive. Billed as a sci-fi visceral hardcore RPG with innovative new combat mechanics, I sat down with Deck 13’s CEO and Creative Director, Jon Klose, to get the first info on The Surge.

So your lead character, as you described, has found himself somewhere he’s not supposed to be, a somewhat anti-hero, but have your team decided what his overall objective is yet? What’s the endgame aim for the player?

At the beginning, it’s [based around] survival before [giving the player a] real objective. However, the objective is not thrown at the player that strongly. It’s not like ‘ok, you need to go to the next checkpoint’. It’s more like, you say ‘So where’s the next door? What are these people about? What’s happened here? I think I might go back’ and so on, so you can figure it all out, but it’s not like you play and then there’s a cutscene telling you what to do next. It’s really more [that] you need to find that out and the objective basically is to experience the game world, find out what’s going on and then take your standpoint on it.

You say you want to keep the combat in a similar vein to Lords of the Fallen, how do you balance that with the weapons like grenades and other range types you mentioned?

It will be focused very much on close combat weapons, however the remote weapons you have will either be very limited or they will just help you in close combat: attracting enemies or stunning enemies, stuff like that. But you can’t just camp somewhere with a sniper rifle and take them all out and then go onto other stuff. This will not be possible, hopefully, if we do it right.

Will you use a similar checkpointing system like in Lords, too?

Without spoiling too much, maybe [we’ll be] a bit meaner than we [were] in Lords of the Fallen. We tried to learn from the feedback from Lords, but not only the mainstream feedback. We want to have it [be] very core-[focused], where people say something like ‘ok this is a tricky game, this is a challenging game but I understand how it’s supposed to work’ and try to figure it out. That’s very important for us: we don’t want to make it nicer, we want to make it meaner but fair. We don’t want to have it be frustrating, it should always be a fair thing, but you’re supposed to die a lot. But every time, like I said before, you’re supposed to say ‘OK I more or less know why I died and will try to do better’.

So the other thing is, you do have all this RPG stuff in there, but it will not be so broad at the beginning. [With] Lords of the Fallen, at the beginning it was really like, people said ‘Hey, this game is so slow, what is going on?’ and they were playing the fighter who had very heavy armour and the sword and the shield at the beginning. Others say ‘It’s not slow, it’s fast!’ and they were playing the rogue, who was really really quick. We want to offer this variety, but not just throw it at you at the beginning when you don’t know what the game is really about. So you’ll have this, you’ll have these choices, you can develop your character…[but] the idea is to have the variety but bring it to the player bit-by-bit. No tutorial, but features coming in as you play and extending what you can do, then you can pick what styles you want to have.

Lords of the Fallen included character choices with dialogue, will that happen in the Surge?

Yep, we want to do that. I mean, I’m also not so sure because it’s not all settled, but I’m pretty sure we will have very similar techniques that a player can use and you can make choices. Maybe more than Lords, maybe yeah, let’s see. You can make choices in a variety of ways, like [choosing to] go somewhere, doing something or not doing something. it shouldn’t be like ‘I play, then I make a choice in dialogue, then I go play’. It should be more interwoven.

Is your game more or less linear than other RPGs?

It’s less linear than Lords of the Fallen, where we also had this idea to open up the gameworld bit by bit. So it’s not a road movie, but it’s maybe more like a Zelda game where you’ll have new levels that you open up and you can just stop there or you can come back later and you really also like tempted to come back. [Perhaps] sometime later you walk through the game and say ‘OK, that’s something I probably missed at the beginning’. Because you build up the game world a bit differently this time, it’s really sending you through areas again more than we did with Lords, where it was like, yeah, of course you could go back to the beginning but why would you? We tried to learn from the level setup we had [in Lords of the Fallen].

The simplest example is maybe Batman Arkham Asylum, where you had the yard in the middle, and you need to cross it and it was changing during the game. They didn’t do it so much but they did it and there were plants and there were snipers and there were [Joker’s goons]. Stuff like that you just go through somewhere, but we wouldn’t drop stuff in when you come back later, but we would say this is already there, but you shouldn’t go there maybe at the beginning, or maybe you do and maybe you were stupid to do so but you succeeded and you get a cool item at the beginning that other players get later in the game but you were so brave and tried for one hour to beat that enemy for one hour. We don’t script it, or we try to script as little as possible and let you decide what you do and when you do it, and if you do it at all.

Will there be NPCs and camps to interact with?

Due to the layout of the world there will not be towns and stuff, but there will be several places where you will meet NPCs and there will be probably, or hopefully, the feeling that you will get different story elements from the NPCs if you like. So it is more going in the direction [of] more story, but less presentation if you will.

There won’t be the situation where you go somewhere, cinematic starts, guy comes running out and yells ‘Help me!’ and five people spawn and you fight them, that’s not the idea. Maybe we’ll do it and then you can hit me with a stick, but the idea is to [have] you see someone fighting there, you ignore it because you’re alone and you’re off somewhere else, but you come back later and he’s dead. Or you say ‘Yeah I’ll jump in there and kill the guys’, and the NPC is still standing there, so then you can talk to him, then he tells me what’s happening, then he gives me the quest, then I go and play. That’s the idea. So doing it this way, you can do it, you can just get the loot from the enemies, not care about that character, or you just talk to him and say I don’t care and move on or you can get another piece of the puzzle of the whole world.

So you say you can interact in these story elements and help and NPC, does that mean the player can also choose to kill the NPC?

The idea is that it’s not just good and bad that you can do. So it’s not like ‘OK, I solved the quest, I’m the hero’ and everything you do will shape the outcome, maybe not of the whole game but of your story and you’ll get feedback later in the game on the actions that you did and now I should really stop talking. Because yeah this is all evolving right now, we have a really strong plan for that and we’re very far into developing it even though you’ll just see some white blocks moving around right now, but there’s really already a lot that we have [done].

We’ve got a terrible [amount] of meetings with all of the different departments. It’s like ‘well why are we doing this, we want to do that’, you say ‘OK so this doesn’t fit together’ so we try to make it fit together. It’s a bit new for us but we tried it before but we put the focus on other stuff…now it should all come together and if it doesn’t then maybe we’d rather not do it, and say ‘Sorry, I promised you this but for the game it was really cool to do it [another] way’ and that’s what we’re doing right now. But we’ve had a lot of these discussions already so, we’re really advancing that pretty nicely and I hope it’ll work the right way.

Will the bosses be realistic or can we expect huge monsters?

Erm, you can expect huge stuff. Definitely.

Is there any multiplayer support?

There will not be multiplayer. We were thinking about things, but right now we’re absolutely focusing on the single-player experience.

We’re really just starting thinking about how can we enrich the game with some other cool stuff. But I told you [about] so many, so innovative tricky things we’re just doing, we want to get them right and if we get them right, we’ll do more. And of course after the initial release, we want to evolve and change stuff, improve stuff and give like new cool things to the player. It shouldn’t be over with [the] release.

In Lords of the Fallen, you got a lot of stock, and you’ve said there’ll be towns here, will we be able to trade weapons and build up currency?

There will be some sort of currency system, but it will not be real currency.

And you said you’re planning for post-release content, will that be story based, weapons?

We don’t actually know yet, I mean there’s so many options, so many ideas that we could do, could be story additions, could be new game modes, could be new weapon packs, could be anything. We hope to also really find out during the process of development [and] when people play, what they like most. Maybe we find out but we can’t yet include into [the initial release], but we know before release and we can start thinking of it, planning it and say OK that’s the right point where we can do it [additional content].

So we hope we really learn that as we develop the game. We’d rather keep it open and say ‘OK, let’s find out what’s really best about the game’ and put [additional content] in later when it really works.

Do you guys have a release window?

Yeah it’s end of 2016, beginning of 2017 on PS4, Xbox One and PC.