Pretty much everyone wants to play as a super powerful badass, roaming the city, saving lives and causing mayhem. But not everyone wants to do it the same way. Do you want to be a Nightcrawler-like teleporter? Or a Magneto-like manipulator? Or maybe you just want to suit up like The Punisher and blow people away?
Phosphor Games’ ambitious Project Awakened‘s answer to those desires is, basically, “Sure.” In the video above, you can see a demonstration of how their character-creation will work. If they can pull this off, it’ll be pretty cool.
Project Awakened has a story behind it — we reported the game’s existence way back in 2011, as a group of ex-Midway developers (i.e. Phosphor Games) took the lessons they’d learned on the cancelled but conceptually similar game Hero and made it into a new property. Phosphor is also the studio behind the very good iOS game Horn.
Phosphor are running a Kickstarter to help get the game made, and they’ve also got it on Steam Greenlight as well.
Here, you can see the game’s Kickstarter pitch-video, in which a lot of faceless dudes meet their maker.
Project Awakened will have a closed beta that’s estimated for August of 2014, where backers will have a chance to mess around with the power-creators and try to break the game. In a Reddit AMA today, a Phosphor representative said breaking the game’s the whole idea, while citing City of Heroes as an inspiration for the character-creation system:
City of Heroes was a huge original inspiration to our Create-A-Player system- we too looked at it and said “that would be awesome for an action game!” the problem with some of their skills in action game is that they don’t play well in classic video game character intricate situations- like they have a lot of skills that involve moving over large distances, when most action video game are about closer situations. Like even the super speed we have, doesn’t feel as a good as blink or teleport in closer environments. Super jump in small hallways is not fun either. We found that you either make a game optimised for characters that move very far or you optimise for more intricate detailed scenarios.
That said, we create lots of skills, and on beta release we can just put many of these skills in the game even if they break some stuff, so people that want to have fun with it can try it out . You can check out our youtube ability video where we show stuff like jetpacks and hover that we plan to support no matter what.
For more info, check out the Project Awakened Kickstarter and Greenlight pages, or their Reddit AMA.
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