5 Things You Need to Know About The Surge

Jan Klose, CEO and creative director at Deck13, has penned a guest post on the PlayStation blog to give us a rundown of five bulletpoints about their upcoming dystopian action-RPG, The Surge. I have the feeling it will be a while until we get to see the game in action and learn something concrete about the mechanic, but at least we have an idea of what the developers are shooting for.

Combat and character progression seem tied to the main character’s exo-suit, and apparently classic RPG attributes and stats are out:

02. Setting the world in a dystopian industrial future allows for awesome combat!

Using a near future scenario, we can pick up a lot of trends from the real world and play with them, and we love that! Working with the fusion of people and technology also lets us do great crazy stuff gameplay-wise.

And it’s so focused: It all comes down to a stronger core mechanic which is the tactical close combat. Cut off limbs, and upgrade yourself with a mix of cybernetics, bone, flesh, and gadgetry. This is a gritty future it isn’t robots vs humans, it’s cybernetics and man-kind rather inelegantly gnawed, sawed, and nailed together, trying to improve what it is to be human. or, rather, making the human manufacturing machine more efficient.

In The Surge, most of what you see isn’t designed for combat, but when push comes to shove. a shove with hydraulics behind it is going to win.

03. Slice and dice your way to upgrades

The player’s progression is strongly bound to his most important asset: The Exo Suit he is wearing. This rig allows him to move with more agility and perform stronger moves, but you can also attach armour parts and weapons to it and improve its power level, and manipulate it in a variety of ways.

So instead of having some (fantasy) values that for example boost your hero’s strength all of a sudden without an apparent explanation, you are (really) modifying your character in The Surge, by improving all the technology that’s working in a fusion with the human body.