The Overall Design

As mentioned previously, we want the CSG to feel and play differently from AoD. The core design (turn-based, choices & consequences, non-linear, text-heavy) would remain the same, of course.

So the new design elements are:

• Party-based. It’s a fundamental change that affects every design aspect, most notably content “gating”. If you have 3-4 party members, most likely you’ll have all skills covered.
• Feats. Feats require character levels (another departure from the AoD design) and will replace (and greatly expand) skills’ passive abilities. Our aim is to offer greater customization of your character’s abilities and builds’ support. So far we have the following categories: General (feats like True Grit or Critical Thinker), Specialist (Pistolero, Fast Draw, Paint It Red, etc), On Kill (Bloodlust, Second Wind), Target (anything related to the target: type, number, awareness, etc - Crowd Control, Duelist, Bounty Hunter, etc), Party-related (Warband, Magnificent Five), Combat (Adrenaline Rush, Headhunter), etc. No filler +1 to skill or +5 damage feats but meaningful feats that fit and strengthen your particular gameplay style.
• Focus on ranged combat. While melee builds will be viable, most enemies will use guns. We’ll discuss it in great details later.
• Focus on exploration rather than working your way up in a faction. While factions will get a lot of attention (see above) and play a large role, you won’t join a faction but will remain an outsider, free to work for and deal with all factions, which fits the setting better as these factions aren’t guilds but different hubs. However, many quests would have conflicting interests and reputation would play a stronger and more immediate role than it did in AoD, so you won’t be able to please everyone for long.
• Multiple-piece armor. AoD had a very basic “body armor + helmet” setup. With the CSG, we want to go a bit further: helmet, chest, right arm, left arm, legs. We’re thinking of cumulative DR against general attacks and individual piece’s DR against aimed attacks. We’ll test this system in the dungeon crawler to build up some experience in this area and see how it works.

The Character System

Expect the same 6 stats (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Per, Cha). So far the main changes are Cha determining the number and type of party members and Int determining the number of tagged skills (faster progression) instead of a SP bonus, which is a more elegant solution. A smarter person can excel at and master more skills than a person of average intelligence.

So far we're planning to go with 18 skills, grouped in sets of three:

Melee: Fist, Bladed, Blunt

Firearms: Pistol, Shotgun, SMG

Energy Weapons: Pistol, Rifle, Cannon

Science: Medical, Mechanical, Computer

Speech: Persuastion, Streetwise, Trading

Stealth: Lockpick, Pickpocket, Sneak

In the future updates, we’ll give you a proper overview of the four factions and 16 locations and talk about design.​