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Development Info Gamedec Dev Diary: Introducing Low City

Infinitron

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Tags: Anshar Studios; Gamedec

After an exclusive early reveal at PC Gamer yesterday, Anshar Studios have officially published the first in what will be a series of dev diaries for their upcoming cyberpunk virtual world detective RPG Gamedec. The topic of this first video is Low City, the perpetually dark underbelly of 22th century Warsaw where players will spend much of their time between missions. I'll post it here along with an excerpt from the accompanying press release:



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – November 22nd, Katowice, Poland.

Warsaw City, where Gamedec takes place, isn’t officially divided into districts, but everyone knows if they’re in the upper, middle, or lower part of town. The inhabitants of these three areas have completely different qualities of life. In today's video, Łukasz Hacura, an executive producer from Anshar Studios, together with Marcin Przybyłek, author of the Gamedec saga, explain the complexities of Low City. Watch the video and transport yourself to a place where natural light does not reach.


Watch the first Gamedec development diary HERE and prepare yourself for virtual world investigation.

Low City is a place where, even on a sunny day, it’s so dark you can’t get by without artificial lighting. It’s where apartment prices plummet, Public Transport Tubes terminate, and aurocar stops start to show up.

The lower you get, the lower the population becomes. At the very bottom, called RoU (Roof of the Undercity), you can find both deserted places and areas bustling with life.

If you stand on the lowermost walkway of Low City and look 150 meters down, you will see the mist and dust-covered ruins of Old Warsaw. That’s Undercity. Inhabited by savages who rejected civilized life and nasty creatures like poisonous bats or toxic, mutant rats. Low City is protected from those oddities by MG buoys. Whenever they detect a bat approaching or a rat climbing one of the towers, they open fire, eliminating the menace.

Temperature disparities between Low City and Mid City can cause weather anomalies like dirty rains, created by vapor condensation under the walkways of Mid City.

Low City’s biggest allure are the night clubs that are open 24/7. If you don’t come from this polis layer and you intend to visit it, take a few words of advice.

First, watch your account. Don’t let any suspicious-looking individual, even a kid, come near you without a good reason. Second, don’t believe everything you’re told. Third, think twice before going online using local equipment: it’s all knockoffs and patched-up salvage, infusion liquids are not original, and a “cheap gamepill” can damage your metabolic pathways.

So, if you decide to use local devices or medications – do it at your own risk.

Oh, and pay some kid to watch your stuff while you’re in VR. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.​


Anshar have been running a "Steam Wishlist Challenge" since last month where they'll unlock various goodies as the game receives more wishlists. They're also running a community survey that you might want to check out. There'll be more to come next year, I expect.
 

bertram_tung

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>seemingly endless amount of fantasy based DND clones dominate the market for 30 years
>a few modern cyber punk titles finally come out after what feels like forever
>"damn i'm sick of cyberpunk give me some elves and orcs!"
name these fantasy based D&D clones released this year

name all of them in the last 30 years like I said, and then learn to read

edit: this was my 666th post
 
Last edited:

bertram_tung

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>seemingly endless amount of fantasy based DND clones dominate the market for 30 years
>a few modern cyber punk titles finally come out after what feels like forever
>"damn i'm sick of cyberpunk give me some elves and orcs!"
name these fantasy based D&D clones released this year

name all of them in the last 30 years like I said, not this year like your strawman argument says
I cannot fathom where do you see this 'domination' as it has waned since Mass Effect's release

i didnt realize mass effect was 30 years old
wow time flies

plus you're still wrong. fantasy & other mid-eval type settings do still dominate the rpg market. the next most popular would seem to be post apocalyptic thanks to fallout clones

cyberpunk settings (which is not the same as sci-fi, which is what mass effect is, you pleb) are still few and far between
 

Black Angel

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plus you're still wrong. fantasy & other mid-eval type settings do still dominate the rpg market.
they simply do not, you're engaging in wishful thinking
You must be fucking blind considering D:OS2 was 2 years ago, and even fucking POE2 was only a year ago. And don't forget Skyrim was 8 years ago and yet, people still play it to this day and drool at prospect of sequels (though it seemed their hope is dying down with Beth's current fuckup of 76) and an alternative like Witcher 3, which was 4 years ago. And like bertram_tung said, the next most popular genre would be post-apocalyptic thanks to fallout clones (and largely due to Beth's fallouts with the exception of 76)

Otherwise, I hereby petition to tag your ass with
shitposter.png
 

Zariusz

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I hope that they give us option to explore Undercity. Its sounds like a place with lots of hidden shit, risk/reward stuff and probably there is some forgotten entrance to certain building that is used for some main or side quest. Maybe Rakhghoul levels in KOTOR?
 

Ismaul

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Well I, for one, am interested. They've said the right things. And the idea of an interminably vertical city sounds interesting.

Though from what we've seen I hope the over-the-head tooltips will be toggleable.
 

grimace

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Can the codex collectively decide upon a better name for this game?

Gamedec?
 

JarlFrank

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>seemingly endless amount of fantasy based DND clones dominate the market for 30 years
>a few modern cyber punk titles finally come out after what feels like forever
>"damn i'm sick of cyberpunk give me some elves and orcs!"
name these fantasy based D&D clones released this year

Not this year but throughout the last ~20 years we got:

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2
Diablo 1 to 3
Temple of Elemental Evil
Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2
Drakensang 1 and 2
Blackguards 1 and 2
Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2
The Elder Scrolls 3, 4, 5 (and before that 1 and 2, and two spinoffs: Battlespire and Redguard)
Kingdoms of Amalur
Dragon Age 1 to 3
Two Worlds 1 and 2
Dungeon Lords
Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity 2, Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2
Sacred 1 to 3
Spellforce 1 to 3 (yes it's not a pure RPG but an RPG-RTS hybrid, but this further proves the point: hybrid genres tend to default to fantasy as a setting; see also Quest for Glory and its modern clones: Quest for Infamy, Heroine's Quest, Mage's Initiation, Hero-U; all of them are fantasy)
Grimrock 1 and 2
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Grimoire
Banner Saga
Gothic 1 and 2, Risen 1 to 3
Witcher 1 to 3
Jeff Vogel's catalogue of games (Exile, Avernum, Avadon; Geneforge is not generic high fantasy, but it still qualifies as fantasy rather than scifi or cyberpunk)

Yeah, and that's just the big names that came to my mind right now. I left out hundreds, if not thousands of shovelware clones that are all high fantasy.
Meanwhile let's see how many Cyberpunk RPGs we got throughout the last ~20 years:

Deus Ex and its sequels
Dex, a 2D sidescrolling cyberpunk RPG
Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong
the soon to be released Cyberpunk 2077

And, uuuh... yeah, that's all that comes to mind right now.

Yeah, cyberpunk is clearly an overused setting in RPGs. I'm getting sick of it. I hope we soon return to the heavily under-used setting of high fantasy. Nobody does those anymore.

EDIT: And yes I know there were also some cyberpunk and scifi RPGs in the early 90s and the 80s, but if we go back that far and list all the RPGs based on their settings, the overwhelming majority of high fantasy is going to be even more apparent.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
another brainiac trying to be snide for cheap brofists, how quaint
why bother arguing that the trend is slowly waning if I'm to be bombarded with such gems of intellection

The trend is waning? Really? There are several RPGs in development right now that promise the same generic high fantasy fare we are familiar with, and some of those have had successful Kickstarters, too:

Waylanders
Baldur's Gate 3
there's a new Two Worlds 2 standalone expansion coming up (lol)
Knights of the Chalice 2
Whatever Owlcat is about to announce, probably a Kingmaker sequel but it's definitely fantasy judging from the teasers they've shown
Jeff Vogel is probably making some Queen's Wish sequels as we speak
Realms Beyond
Diablo IV
Elden Ring, the new game by Dark Souls developers, with George Martin as a writer
The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

Three of these (Realms Beyond, Solasta, KotC2) are based on OGL D&D, one of these will likely be based on Pathfinder (Owlcat's new game), and one of these is based on the German DSA system (Book of Heroes), so we even have 5 games based on popular fantasy pen and paper systems in there.

And that's just the most well-known names here, I could probably dig up a lot more upcoming fantasy RPGs if I put some effort into researching it.

Meanwhile, among upcoming non-fantasy RPGs, we have:
- historical (whatever the next Expeditions game is going to be)
- WW2 (Broken Lines, Warsaw, and a squad management RPG whose name I can't remember right now)
- post-apoc (Encased, Trudograd)
- science fiction (ELEX 2, Stellar Tactics)

So yeah, I don't see cyberpunk being an overused setting right now at all. Fantasy is still the broad majority, with other settings being the minority and having about equal representation.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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EDIT: And yes I know there were also some cyberpunk and scifi RPGs in the early 90s and the 80s, but if we go back that far and list all the RPGs based on their settings, the overwhelming majority of high fantasy is going to be even more apparent.
It's almost as though fantasy settings have proven more popular for RPGs than SF settings, both in pen-and-paper RPGs and for CRPGs. :M

:philosoraptor:

The interesting question is why this has been the case, not why CRPG developers are following the market by mostly choosing fantasy settings.
 

Black Angel

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Yeah, but the most baffling thing in this discussion in particular is people who gets sick with cyberpunk RPGs - a niche within a niche, AND a shitposter trying to claim that fantasy RPGs are somehow """""slowly""""" waning.
 

JarlFrank

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Yeah, but the most baffling thing in this discussion in particular is people who gets sick with cyberpunk RPGs - a niche within a niche, AND a shitposter trying to claim that fantasy RPGs are somehow """""slowly""""" waning.

Exactly. My lists were a response to the argument that the trend of fantasy being the most common genre for RPGs is ending (it is not), and the claim that suddenly cyberpunk RPGs are the new rage and everyone clones them (they are not).
 

luj1

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This game looks too much like Cyberpunk 2077. To have an impact its gameplay would need to shine.
 

Matt [Anshar Studios]

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Here's a little extra we prepared exclusively for forums from the "Introducing: Low City" deleted content. It sheds more light on the origins of future Warsaw City:



FYI: We're doing a Q&A with the author of the Gamedec book series who's also working on a game. If you have any questions - fire away :)
 

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