The Surge
Dark Souls in a mech suit set in a post-apocalyptic, sorry, near-future world? We definitely need to find out more...
“We were wondering if Donald Trump had been reading our design documents,” laughs Jan Klose, managing director at Deck 13 Interactive and creative lead on the German studio’s upcoming actionRPG The Surge.
I’m chatting with Klose via Skype having just played through a preview build of The Surge consisting of an early game area that introduces players to a dystopian Earth on the brink of environmental collapse. The level is an intricately designed industrial ruin full of half-destroyed machinery, crazed workers wearing mech suits, hostile drones, dust storms and toxic waste, and culminates in a boss fight against a giant robot that bears more than a passing resemblance to ED-209 from Robocop.
Klose is keen to stress that he doesn’t consider The Surge to be post-apocalyptic. He constantly and very deliberately refers to its setting as “near-future.” I get the feeling from talking to him that he’s more interested in how society falls apart, and discovering if we can find a way to prevent it, than how we manage to cope and rebuild things after the fall.
The player-character, Warren, works for a technology corporation called CREO Industries. At the outset of the game, he’s just another working grunt, labouring away; a tiny cog in the monolithic machine. The world hasn’t been destroyed, Klose tells me, but climate change has made basic resources scarce and placed likely irreversible strain on the Earth’s environment. A desperate coalition of world governments called on the private sector to pitch their solutions and CREO won the contract.
“Our basic idea was to look at the world today and paint a very grim picture of a near future,” says Klose. “If we take a look at the news we see a lot of frightening things happening all around the world. What will happen if people don’t get their act together and do something about [climate change]? Or what if we do act but we’re too late?”
At this point I ask Klose what he thinks about developing his game to a backdrop of an American president pledging to pull out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, repealing environmental regulations left, right and centre, and signing executive orders that lease federal land to coal mining companies.
“Did [Trump’s] secret service have access to [our design documents]? Because it reads and sounds very familiar to the the road we’re
climate change has made basic resources scarce and placed irreversible strain on the Earth
By the time you encounter the boss, you’ll have unlocked five distinct paths heading out from the hub
predicting,” says Klose. “We hope that when the game comes out in a couple of months that it doesn’t feel like history but rather still a projection of what might or might not happen in the future.”
Of course, The Surge is hardly a political game. Having played through the preview level I can nod in agreement with what Klose is saying, but he’s not bellowing any kind of call for a global revolution. He doesn’t want to beat you over the head with Ideology and Dogma; he’s happy for his game to offer little connections to reality and nudge players to make the political links themselves.
“I don’t see a reason why games should merely be escapism from reality,” he says. “It’s important to give your game’s background and story a little bit of meaning and purpose. I think it’s cool if you consider games a cultural product, if you pick up cultural references and also put in cultural statements.
“If you want you can see or read a lot in The Surge, however if you don’t want to then hopefully it’s just a nice action game and we don’t bother you with it. But of course there’s a lot that we think about, that we see that’s going on, and there’s a lot of that reflected in the game.”
He’s right, too. The Surge does seem, at least based on our short time with it, a nice action game, though we would append RPG to the genre categorisation. Warren is initially equipped with a handful of weapons and implants for his exo-suit. He ventures out from a hub through multi-pathed levels, fending off enemies with a few combo-able melee attacks, salvaging scrap and gear schematics, and unlocking shortcuts that circle back round to the hub where he can level up and upgrade his gear.
It’s a nice action RPG that, and let’s be honest here, is very, very, very heavily indebted to Dark Souls. To this writer, that’s both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you’ve got my interest immediately and I’m more likely than most to connect with the deliberate combat, not bounce
off the high degree of difficulty, and appreciate the satisfaction that comes from gradual mastery. On the other hand, any game that borrows from probably the best game of the last ten years is just setting itself up for failure in comparison.
With The Surge, Deck 13 is having its second go at making a Souls-inspired game. 2013’s Lords of the Fallen was its first, a sort of heavy metal meets Warhammer spin on Souls, where manly men have manly beards, every hammer is as big as an anvil, and even your pauldrons wear pauldrons. It was a solid affair: the beefy, impactful core combat was only let down by samey enemies and straightforward level design, while the whole thing was carried along by an enjoyably goofy yet overly-serious to the point of parody storyline.
Lords of the Fallen was also Deck 13’s first proper big budget title, having previously cut their teeth on much smaller point-and-click adventures and the 2009 action RPG Venetica. Klose says they learned an awful lot from that experience, his team has numerous structures and work flows they didn’t have before, and they have been able to apply all that new knowledge to The Surge. He highlights three areas where he believes The Surge really improves on Lords of the Fallen.
“In the level design there were things we tried to do,” he says. “Some of them worked really well but in the end [Lords of the Fallen] was pretty linear, even within one level there were not many ways to take or opportunities to experience things in a different way. So for The Surge we said let’s make the level design far more intricate.
“We also wanted to let players experiment more and do more with their skills. And with enemy design, especially with our limb-targeting system where you can cut off parts and reuse them in one way or another, we also want players to experiment.”
Looking at the preview build as evidence, I think it’s fair to say that in terms of the level and enemy design the improvements are a success while perhaps the jury remains out on the possibilities for experimenting with skills.
The dilapidated factory at first feels tight and compact. Later, as you discover shortcuts and connections not immediately apparent, it reveals itself to be as sprawlingly labyrinthine as the best Souls locations (say, Lothric Castle in Dark Souls 3 or the Lost Bastille in Dark Souls 2). By the time you’ve encountered the boss of the area, you’ll have unlocked five distinct paths heading out from the hub into the surrounds, all of which intertwine with at least one other path at various points deeper into the level.
At one point I found a lift leading down underground, but decided to leave it and keep exploring above ground. About an hour later, after entering some tunnels elsewhere and slowly working my way through a network of dark and twisty passages I stumbled upon the same lift, only this time from the opposite end leading back up to the surface. I’m not suggesting this is a revelation akin to taking the lift in Dark Souls down from Undead Parish and ending up back in Firelink Shrine where you began the journey some hours earlier, but it’s a good indication that Klose and his team will deliver on their goal of more intricate level design.
Combat in The Surge adheres closely to the typical Souls experience of punishing players who show their impatience. Each encounter demands you manage your stamina, drained with each attack, dodge or block, learn to read enemy attack patterns, understand how to
by targeting an armoured limb you’ll be able to cut if off and salvage the parts for your own use
position yourself both in and out of attacking range, and realise when you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. If you’ve played a Souls game, you’ll know the basics. But there’s a few unexpected tweaks to the formula.
Despite what you might expect from the near-future setting and the concept of a sci-fi Dark Souls, there are no guns or any kind of ranged weapon. Your weapons are mostly drawn from a selection of repurposed work tools: a metal pipe substitutes for a staff capable of crushing and thrusting attacks and an exo-suit saw attachment serves as a sword. The five weapons I used in the preview build varied enormously in terms of their attack speed, damage output, and moveset, even if they all in theory possess just one vertical and one horizontal attack.
Weapons can be upgraded, boosting their raw damage, as long as you have the requisite crafting materials. You also become more proficient with them through use, as in the recent Nioh; the higher the proficiency level, the higher the bonus damage it applies to each attack. Curiously, proficiency levels aren’t applied equally across all weapons; some apply a higher scaling to the damage bonus than others. I increased my primary weapon’s proficiency to level 8 by the end of the preview area and noticed a significant boost to its damage output. But there were other weapons I could have used that offered even more of a proficiency buff. I’ll be very interested to see how these variations balance out in the final release.
The other notable addition The Surge brings to its combat is in the limb-targeting system Klose mentioned earlier. This kicks in when you lock on to an enemy and, if it has multiple limbs, allows you to flick the right analog stick (trust me, you’re not playing this with mouse and keyboard) to target one of six specific areas: head, body, right arm, left arm, right leg and left leg. These limbs correspond to the six places where enemies (and you) can wear armour, so if an enemy’s left his head exposed you can aim all your attacks there and do extra damage with each hit. The flipside is by targeting an armoured limb you’ll be able to cut off that right leg, for example, and salvage the parts for your own use.
The limb-targeting system has a nice element of risk and reward, and Klose is justifiably pleased with how it has turned out.
“We’ve got a good feeling about the limb targeting,” he says. “We know it’s the sort of thing that if you do it badly it can feel like a useless add-on to the combat or something that just makes it feel more difficult. We want players to use it in a variety of ways.”
My experience was the first time I encountered an enemy I would target his unprotected limbs, if he had any, to make each fight easier and allow me to save my healing items. Later, when I was running through parts of the level I was familiar with, I’d focus on the armoured limbs in order to get those materials I’d need to craft my own armour upgrades. Farming becomes intentional, rather than relying on the RNG of item drop rates.
“If you want to have a full set of armour then you’ll need to have targeted pieces from the six body parts on enemies to even get the blueprints,” Klose explains. “Then to craft the item you need to obtain more parts from enemies of the same type. So you might say, ‘For this run I need one head and two legs,’ which sounds a little weird, but it’s really a lot of fun when you go hunting for the materials you need from enemies that you now know how to defeat. They’re still going to be tricky to defeat, since you’re targeting their armoured limbs, but they are now basically prey for you.”
All this crafting and upgrading is done back at the central hub of the level, which was a medical bay in the case of the preview build. Here’s where you trade in your scrap (read: souls) earned from defeating enemies or found in out of the way places throughout the level. Level up and you increase your exo-suit’s core power, which acts as both your level and a cap on the parts (armour) and implants (skills) you can attach to your suit. Each piece of armour costs power, as does each implant, with additional implant slots unlocked every five levels. Early on in the preview level I could only equip armour on my legs and fill three implant slots without exceeding my core power. By the time I defeated the boss, though, I had enough to fill five implants slots and wear a full set of armour.
Klose wants players to appreciate the flexibility of the implant system and to be forced to make hard choices over which ones to use.
“You can mix and match your skills depending on the situation you’re in and that gives you a lot of freedom to think about how you want to approach the next location,” he says.
“If there’s an area with lots of environmental hazards you might want to take an implant that shields you from fire or poison or whatever, but you maybe need to drop a health implant that increases your maximum health. Or maybe you want to go for finishing moves or to get a good bonus from defeating an enemy, but these won’t help you in a boss fight. So maybe you might need more healing or something that increases you stamina instead.”
I probably didn’t get to play with enough implants to get a feel for how tough these choices will be. Aside from one early moment when I opted to go without the implant that lets you see enemy health bars in favour of one that gave me extra tutorial information, I never had too many implants that it felt like the decision were painful. I can say, however, that I was pleased to hear Klose say that the implants do get really specific; beyond the early game health increases there are plenty of later implants (such as one that provides a stamina boost after defeating an enemy or buffs a particular type of damage on a particular type of weapon) that allow players to fine tune and customise a distinct play style.
My time playing The Surge and chatting to the developer leaves me feeling confident that Klose and his team understand how to make an action RPG in a post Dark Souls world. I asked Klose why he personally likes the Dark Souls games so much and he said it’s not just about the challenge but the feeling of a game “where you really need to advance bit by bit and need to take care about what is happening, what you’re doing, how you’re equipped.” Which sounds like good advice for Donald Trump, too.