Cyber Knightsis the latest title by the legendary indie team at Trese Brothers, and in their mind, it represents the pinnacle of their already beloved brand of strategy games. As with most Trese Brothers games, at first glance,Cyber Knightsappears to be a turn-based strategy game with cyberpunk flare and some heavy stealth leanings, but digging deeper reveals one of the most sophisticated and complex emergent storytelling platforms since their previous game,Star Traders: Frontiers. That’s not to say that the moment-to-moment stealth strategy gameplay isn’t rock solid on its own, but it is truly impressive what thisindie gameteam has accomplished in ensuring that no two players experience exactly the same story.
Game Rant sat down with Andrew Trese and Cory Trese to discuss all thingsCyber Knights, from the team’s approach to its skill trees and stealth gameplay to the clever systems they developed for its procedurally-generated narratives. They also offered some valuable insights into how the team has managed to consistently succeed with Kickstarter campaigns and Early Access launches.The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: You’ve said yourselves that you have a long track record of success with Early Access, and it’s true. In your mind, how have you managed to succeed consistently with EA where many games seem to fall flat at that stage?
Cory:It’s definitely a difficult mindset to get into sometimes but in Early Access you have to recognize it’s really not the finish line, it’s the starting of the race. You’ve gotten to the point where you can beginthe Early Access process.
I think what we do well is we stay very engaged. We think of Early Access as a highly kinetic, very active time. It isn’t like we launch the game and watch it do its thing, it is a daily process of talking to the people playing it and trying to improve what isn’t working. You can put out a game and feel like you know what’s good, where the flaws are, and where it needs work, and sometimes you’re right, and sometimes you’re wrong.
We focus on the parts that players are talking to us about: parts they’re trying to have fun with, but it’s not working, and really drill in and figure out how to make those fun. That’s worked for us.
Q: Although each of your games is quite different, are there any elements you try to include in each game or common approaches you take when developing a Trese Brothers game?
Andrew:We’re always shooting for ahigh level of replayabilityin the game, which is in all of our games. They’re very highly replayable, which is often driven by both mechanical complexity like adaptive systems, and the way we approach story, which allows for you to have a lot of freedom with how you end up with your story and gives you freedom to fill in blanks that we might not say in the story.
I think mechanically, one of our biggest successes is that “onion” concept where there are so many layers, and the more you peel back, the more you’re going to learn about the layers and find how they’re interconnected. We very rarely would design a system that’s isolated or stands on its own and isn’t reliant on or plugged into half the other systems at the same time. So you get this mesh which becomes very fun for a player.
you’re able to learn about that corner of it, but then as you get more familiar with the game and start to understand it, you can feel a real gaining and mastery of skills. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, if I pull this wire and I do this over here, now I’m really cooking with gas.” I think that is what keeps us coming back to play our games, too. We put in 1000s of hours, so that approach worked really well for us.
Cory:You see any isolated mechanic or anything in the game totally by itself is a problem. It’s a dead end, so to speak, and the player gets interested and it doesn’t lead them anywhere. You enjoyed Star Traders, and it relies on this heavily that one mechanic leaves you at the doorstep of the next mechanic.
Exploration starts giving you scientific records, and you’re like, “Oh, what are these?” Then you start trading with contacts and then contacts start giving you new influence missions, and you’re like, “Oh, what are those?”
So having those connected mechanics gives a player a way to explore the game as they want, and I think that’s something that’s really important in the way we make games. We let the player decide how they want to play and where they’re going to put their focus. In Star Traders that’s like “Do you want to trade or whatever,” but inCyber Knights, that’s how you’re going to approach the missions. What kind of heist plans will you set up? Are you a door kicker? Will you sneak in the back? Do you pay a lot of bribes and take a minimal team to maximize your profit?
There are a lot of different ways to go about the missions, so I think that’s really front and center to our design. And then taking a step back, all of our games really were inspired bypen-and-paper RPGexperiences at their core, trying to capture this narrative journey that you can go on around a tabletop with other players in a single-player experience, which is a tall-order, but it is something that we keep coming back to think about.
Q: You brought up the “onion” concept in terms of layered game mechanics. Can you think of any interesting examples of that inCyber Knights?
Cory:I think the hacking system is one that’s very interesting because you’ll be drawn into a lot of additional interactions with the contacts. You could discover files or records in the corporate host that you’re breaking into that get interesting feedback from your contacts. You might steal a record from a matrix host and that would kick off a new type of interaction with a contact where they’re interested in whatever prototype records you stole.
Andrew:I think a really big one inCyber Knightsis the mission planning and the leverage systems. One of our jokes is how when you’rerole-playing a tabletop RPG, you never just get in the van and go to the mission, and you’re like, “Oh, cool, we got shot. Everybody in the van, get your guns, let’s go.” You always do some planning. You call some people you check in with the fixer, like, “What do you know about this district? Is there a guard we can pay off? Can we hack their external systems in advance and maybe get some fake IDs or something?” It’s a tabletop meme where the DM is sitting there, like, “Oh my god, are you serious?” and the players are three hours deep into planning on how to kick the door down.
So the leverage system is cool because it relies on who you know. There are a number of things you may do in a mission that will give you these unique advantages. Maybe you can get in a different way, you can get out a different way, you can open up alternate exits and entrances, you can pay somebody to have the lazy night shift or pre-hack the matrix. That opens up a lot of cool ways you can start to think about how to approach missions differently because you have these sorts of standing offers if you know somebody. You might not know the right person, and you need to go looking for them.
That can send you off into the world of trying to find the right people. If you know the right person, you’re like, “Wait, if we have the matrix pre-hacked, and I get my hacker to that terminal, we’ll just take the security net down.” That’s a totally different tactic and I wouldn’t have thought of taking a hacker before maybe. That’s a cool decision point. You can spend some time around that planning table trying to figure out which of these you’re willing to pay for. You have favors that are not money, but they’re valuable. So I think that’s a really good nexus in that game that points you to a lot of other systems and the missions don’t start with a lot of leverage options. As you go along, they get more and more cool things coming online which point to different stuff you can do in the game.
Cory:And they also let you play your way. The security one is a great example. I could give everyone on the team an echo jammer to take out security devices with gear they carry, or I could take a team of experts, or I could just pay the security technician to take everything offline and take a team that knows nothing about security but carries grenades. You have so many different decisions and it’ll impact how the contact that hires you ultimately feels about the results as well. If the contact was like, “Hey, we need to sneak in, very stealthy, and steal this prototype, and you’re like, “Yeah, knock out the security net, and we’re going in the front door,” the contact may be irked at you and that may send the story in a different direction. So there are a lot of different wrinkles that can happen based on how you play the game.
Q: Turn-based tactics is a well-established genre these days. Were there any common genre conventions that you really wanted to shake up forCyber Knights?
Andrew:I think the biggest thing that we wanted to change or try differently was to take a realstep away from grid-based games. It’s sort of turn-based tactics comfort food to have a grid where someone has neatly placed all these crates of the exact same size in a very ordered way across the map and all the desks are perfectly aligned. Forcing everything into a grid creates this sterile feeling environment that feels like it’d be harder to bring the real messy cyberpunk places that we want to be able to create and show in the game world. So we wanted to get away from that for visual aesthetic reasons, and also because we believe that stealth systems can be more fun. We’re really thinking about ray casting and sightlines at all times in a true, physical sense. It’s a physics-based rendering of the senses, as opposed to trying to approximate with grids.
It’s the same thing with a lot of things like grenades, where the fun of throwing grenades is very different if you’re not doing tiles, and we’re really talking about how many meters the enemy is from the blast point. If they happen to be on the other side of some cover, then that also degrades it, and you can get a lot more skill-based. Certain areas in the game open up in a fun way because we’ve taken away a grid.
How many times have you tried to throw a grenade and the guy’s square won’t go under the blast template, and you’re able to’t get him? Now if you move it close to him, his health bar goes down, and the other guy’s health bar goes up, and you’ve got to find that perfect middle zone, or maybe bank it off lamp posts near them and it goes over the cover.
Cory:I think that’s where the really fun stuff is. If it lands in front of the cover it’s going to protect them, but if I bank it off the lamp post, it’ll land at their feet, and they’ll have no cover. Finding those perfect throws is really fun. It’s not the right tile, it’s the right couple of inches on the wall in the game. It’s something you don’t see in turn-based games often where there are actual physics-based components kinetically calculating where the grenade will bounce at that rate and how far it’s gonna go.
Andrew:A dead body truly ragdolls to its final resting place and will be noticed in that final resting place by another guard. So if you kill it at the top of the stairs, and he flip-flops all the way to the bottom of the stairs, then a guard walks by the bottom of the stairs he’ll be like “What is this dead body that physically rolled down the stairs doing here?” So the direction in which you shoot him will in fact determine the direction in which his ragdoll goes flying. If you don’t want him to go down the stairs, then try to flank him a little bit more effectively so that he doesn’t end up alerting a dude at the bottom of the stairs. That for us is probably the biggest thing where we really said “Let’s see what we could do if we got away from grids.”
Q: Music is always a huge deal in cyberpunk games. How doCyber Knightsuse music dynamically to reflect on what’s going on in the game?
Cory:We’re always really excited about the music in our games. I think one of the first things we did forCyber Knightswas put together a music draft and start working on the music really early in the project. We knew that we wanted the music to be substantially more involved in the gameplay for the player inCyber Knights, and one of the ways that we did that was as we designed the game, we really tried to find the systems that couldinteract with the music dynamically. As we came up with the design forCyber Knights, the system that we really zeroed in on was the escalation track. As you anger the overarching security system that’s protecting these corporate assets you’re trying to steal, the response gets more and more escalated. The security level goes up.
We realized in the design that if the music changed with that, you would really get a tremendous benefit for the player because they would start with the right kind of music: this ambient background techno cyberpunk music for the beginning and it’s not in your face, but later in the game, when you’re on the last five minutes at the level and you’re almost at the exit, you’ve got just this last group of guards, that’s when you want the music to be hammering away and really tense and driving you towards victory.
We’ve built a system where the escalation level feeds into the music and as the security tightens around you the music gets faster, and there are more instruments involved. It adds additional synths and background percussion and beats per minute go up as you play through the level. It changes slowly, but you can hear it if you really mess up on a turn. It’s sort of fun, because you’re like, “Okay, what just changed? I messed up.” So I really liked that part about the music. If you aced the stealth challenge at a particular level, they didn’t see it coming and the music is still really chill while you’re walking out the exit. It stayed at that ambient intro because you didn’t escalate with the security system, it still hasn’t seen you. It feels like it adapts very well to your playing. Then on the levels where you are just shooting everyone, the soundtrack is blasting along right with you.
Q: What was your approach to stealth in the game? Is it fundamental to completing missions and more or less required, or is “going loud” in every mission something players can also pull off?
Cory:It’s intended to be viable with the right build and missions and pre-mission advantages, like the leverages Andrew was talking about. If you’re going loud, you may need to bribe a few more people to not trigger the alarm and maybe slow the reinforcements down a little bit so you don’t have to deal with SWAT right away.
Andrew:We built the game on the three pillars ofhacking, fighting, and stealth. So we really would like everyone’s playthrough to involve each of those to some extent. We understand that with the freedom of choice, you can go without that to some extent. If you really wanted to not play the stealth part of the game or wanted to just have a very loud team, there are certain levels and missions that maybe would be much more difficult for you where you would feel it, like “I can tell the contact really wants me to be sneaky here.” and that may be tougher for you. There are other points where we have players who are insane in the alpha group that are crazy stealth ninjas, but then those players struggle or find that their team is not built out for when you have a straight-up fight mission or you’re escorting somebody and there’s a throwdown or you have to go in guns blazing, and their team may not be as well balanced for that.
So it’s a good back-and-forth. I think what plays really well here is that it’s a fluid stealth model. Even if you go loud, depending on how you go loud, how loud you are, you can clean up enough of a local mess pretty quickly. Use some bribes, use some of your ability to tamp things down, and then move again and keep going. It’s a heist game, so you have to be quick. That’s what I would say as a tip to players who want to go loud: if you’re going to be loud, plan to go fast.
Cory:I think it’s really important to understand that we believe thatstealth is crucialto the game working correctly. We designed the enemies for a player that thinks about stealth. Maybe they don’t use it all the time, but they do think in that mode because the game is designed where each guard, soldier, or drone has its own mind. The overarching security system that is watching the whole level only gets information from the guards at the end of the turn, so she’s not omniscient. None of your opponents know everything. So even if you’re thinking about shooting people, like Andrew said, you should be thinking about tying it off. Who saw that guy? Can’t have any witnesses, he’s got to go. Somebody else saw that? He’s got to go.
As long as nobody sees anything, you can really be quite loud, but you have to think about the fact that the design of the game is that each guard has a radio, and they are not afraid to use it and report your position frequently to the other guards. If people can see you, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. So it’s not like you can’t go loud, but you’re not going to turtle up, you’re not taking territory and holding it. You’re a very loud, very fast missile that cuts through the corporate defenses, gets the data, and gets out.
Q:Cyber Knightshas a deep backstory system for each character that fleshes them out narratively. How do the various backstories affect gameplay or how players may use each character tactically?
Andrew:I think this is the pinnacle of our story systems. This is game number nine or something, so every time we just push the dream a little bit farther, a little bit closer, and this is what we’ve always wanted to do. Every single character – especially the ones you recruit or find or pick in a new game – comes with a pretty fleshed-out backstory. They have their people they know like personal relationships, they’ve got problems, they usually have some sort of teaser story that’s gonna get you involved with them. Maybe you did one of Emille’s jobs. She has some stuff that she’s really interested in and really wants you to do, and so you sort of get sucked into them.
Coming from the tabletop perspective, we believe and have always seen in tabletop that half of playing a cyberpunk mercenary team in the far future is managing the people on the team. They have lots of problems, they have lots of stuff that they need help with: money, enemies. InCyber Knightswe really have focused on how about half of the story should be cropping up internally, or being from someone they know needing something from them. That all will play into your ability to keep your team functioning and keep them happy. They’re going to form personal relationships, and it drives their stress and their edge, which is their positive points.
Those both result in gameplay effects. If you get enough stress, you have negative trait mutations. Zasha, who has this neurological condition, if she stresses about her friend Hammond who’s not getting what he wants, or she gets shot a lot on a mission or she doesn’t get to go on a mission, and she gathers enough stress, then her neurological condition or any of her negative traits may progress and level up to another point. Her particular condition “neuro-rot” can kill her. So that’s a big thing for you to figure out: how to help her finish her storyline and keep her involved in a way that keeps her happy.
There area lot of story elements. We’ve built a pretty deep, interactive story “pond” to play in, and they have a lot of effects in gameplay. You’re making a lot of choices for your people, but there are already places where characters will walk off if you don’t capitulate to what they’re demanding. You’ll have characters who disappear for a while, you’ve got characters who just stress out about being told no, and if you help them, then you’ve got negative effects. So you’re pulled in a lot of directions, and at the heart ofCyber Knightsat the safe house, you’ve got the timeline, and too many things to manage, right? That’s the right spot for a game to be. “I have too many missions, and I’ve been trying to get Aaron to surgery for his bone grafts but it’s gonna take him out for 18 days, and if I don’t do it Emille swears she’s gonna leave again. How am I going to manage this mess?” I think that’s really what we’re shooting for. This all comes from years and years of tabletop.
Cory:How much are you willing to risk to hold it all together? That becomes the question. Are you going to take them on this mission in this state? You can pull the mission off, Aaron is literally about to die, but he says he’ll go. He needs to go to the hospital, but if you can get them to go on the mission and pull it off, you’ll pay off the debt, Aaron’s going to the hospital, Emille’s brother will be saved, and no one’s gonna leave.
That’s that tabletop moment where the team’s like, ”We get in the van.” andthe Game Masteris like, “Wait, you’re ready?” and they’re like, “It’s on. We get in the van.” So I think that’s trying to capture that for the player where they’re in over their head, and they have to grab onto something and they have to save the day by pulling it all together and somehow making it work in spite of everyone being shot up and on quests to find their last siblings or whatever. All these complications, everything’s going wrong, somehow you still get the job done, get paid, everyone goes home.
I think a lot of players don’t expect at the beginning when they select these backstories they’re like, “Oh, yeah, ex-professional athlete. That sounds great. I’ll take her, ex-military. That sounds great. What could go wrong with this?” And then his unit shows up three weeks later and you’re putting your team back together after saving him. I think it’s a very different experience when 50% of your stories are coming from the characters you recruited or picked. I don’t think I’ve played very many games where it works that way. So I think that’ll be something that will excite and surprise players.
Andrew:You might get all the threads together and go on a mission and win, but then later, when you look back, well, we got most of the threads together, but some people didn’t come home. There’s a real poignancy there and that’s in all the stories. You’re always looking for that “We won, but what was the cost?” kind of feeling that tugs at your heartstrings.
I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about the casting director, which is a component that we’ve layered on top of all of this. So you have these backstories that give the players a starting point, but inside the game, once you get going, the casting director is a component that sits in the story system and has a list of stories that it could fulfill, and it looks for people that meet the criteria.
The way we’ve built out theemergent story systemto make it procgenable is that a backstory is like a list of 40 tags. You are an ex-UKF fighter, you were a professional fighter, you’re a martial artist, and you have media training. It’s a silly amount of things that come out of each of these backstories that get tracked by the system. And later, the casting director might be looking for somebody who was raised on the streets and was a professional fighter.
Cory:It’s not looking for Zasha or a named character, it’s looking for these little granular pieces of data.
Andrew:We have a story about somebody getting into an underground pit fighting ring, and we’re looking for somebody in your group that would be coherent and it would really make sense that that character would be like, “Oh, yeah, me, I want to get in on this.” and we’d pick them and put them into the casting director to fill slots in the story. So then it might be like, “Oh, I need to find a contact who could connect to the ring. Let me look for somebody who’s greasy. Oh, that guy, okay, the two of them.” You’ve never seen this permutation of the storyline before, but the two of them come together and want to get you involved in this underground pit fighting ring. We think that the backstories have to be that rich because we need to see the field with all of these tags so that the casting director can find people, it’s kind of critical that it can find people and then any story that you do adds to your tags.
Cory:And then they can pick up later. Like Andrew said, it’s never happened before. You get that combination with the contact, and you finish the pit fighting thing that creates a huge rep for her, and she’s now a pit fighting promoter. She had a story waiting where if she gets to 100 influence, she wants to break into this corporate citizenship ring if she can get enough money together, and she’s got this crazy plan. Normally, she could get her there a different way, but on this playthrough, it was her that went to the top with a fighting ring, and now she wants to do this next story with you.
That could be a combination that no other player ever experiences, where it’s this insanely rareone in 1000 combination. It really is yours because of the decisions you made that put traits on different people and tagged them so that they’ll be found by the next storyline. I think the uniqueness of each story playthrough where you can be playing a story, and it happens in different orders with different steps or different characters in different roles in the story makes it feel like it’s new every time you play it.
Q: Along with the backstories, there are also some pretty deep skill trees for each character. Can you talk about some of the ways that different skill tree builds might change a character’s playstyle or tactics?
Andrew:We’re superexcited about the skill treesbecause anytime we build out a class tree, we want to be able to think up three major build types within that class tree, and then we know the players are going to come up with many more viable builds, too. We also name these builds, and it’s actually quite visible inCyber Knightsbecause they’re broken out into the three major distinct sections of the tree. So Soldier right down the middle is the full-auto beast. It’s totally insane, it overpowers the full auto if you focus all your points in there, and then go off to the left for mobility and team leadership and off to the right for “never misses a shot,” crazy accuracy and marksman stuff. You can mix and match any number of those already to get a very distinct Soldier build, which is quite cool.
Cory was just talking about how he is using a lot more tactical reloading with his full-auto Soldier. Since you’re just burning bullets, you never want to be surprised, so you’re tactically reloading, but off on the side of that tree is Pop Slot which is a talent that reduces reload cost. So you gotta get that because you’re reloading all the time now because you full-auto everything.
But then with multiclassing, the ability to go from one tree to two trees and then spend your points across two trees just makes it totally crazy. We’re so excited to see what players do with it. You’re a full-auto Soldier who is now a Hacker, he’s got to get to the terminal and to get to the terminal, he just shoots everybody on the way. It also gives you a lot of ability to have those combinations. A Vanguard on their own is not really a highly effective killer, but if they’re in stealth, they can be really good at killing people, they can heal a lot of people quietly, and do a lot of good stealthy things. Then, once the enemies are aware that they’re there, it’s not their strong suit. So you can then be like, “Okay, maybe once they know I’m there I’m going to go with a sword, or maybe it’s a silenced machine pistol. So I want to get points into Soldier. Or “Never mind, they’re never going to know I’m there, I’m going to be the hacker, and then I can be the pinch hitter.”
Right now we have six jobs in the game and you can cross-class, so there’s some large combinatorial effect of how many possible class combinations you can have, not to mention the trees that you could buy out, like the different ways you could actually train talents and things, and I think we’re planning on adding 10 more.
Cory:I’ll becross-jobbing into a jobjust to get one talent. Sometimes it’s worth it. For a specialist, the build is enough that one talent or two talents from another tree can totally change the way the Soldier’s full-auto feels. Like if you have that plus silence, it’s a huge difference if he’s totally silent for the beginning, and he’s behind everyone when he steps out with his full-auto. you’re able to change the way you build by cross-jobbing, you don’t have to spend a whole lot of points on that other job to get a big effect on your gameplay.
Andrew:One build I love is that Cory has always preached the “sniper hacker.” He’s in the back, he’s at the terminal, and you’re like, “We need your help!” He disconnects, picks up the sniper rifle, takes somebody out 45 meters away, and plugs back in. It’s super cool.
Something that isn’t available in early access, but we’re very excited to add as the data underpinnings are there, is that there’s currently a button that says “preview build,” and we’re gonna have it change it to “share build.” So if you build out one of these complicated trees and you want to share it, you can click share build, and it’ll show you the whole tree and all the exact node ordering that you bought them in, and you’ll be able to export that as a string and share that and be like, “Here’s my hacker sniper build” and throw it out to the world and anybody can then take it and paste it into their game, and it will auto-train that skill tree.
So for anybody who’s a bit intimidated by them or just wants to use a pro build, soon you’ll be able to share those things. It can not only be for sharing, but also for repetition. If you have a build in mind, and you’re like, “Man, I don’t want to click that one more time, I have my text file with my six guys and Aaron always does this.” So that’ll be really helpful.
Cory:It’s possible that we’ll get feedback that players want us to can a couple of those and build them right in, so we might harvest the most popular ones and put them into the game. But for now, I think it’d be a great way for players to be able to communicate and brag and show off their teams as well in guide writing where you’re like, “Here’s my team, check it out, they’re unstoppable steamrollers.”
Q: Another thing that’s always compelling about cyberpunk is cybernetic enhancements. How do you approach things like cybersurgery inCyber Knights, and how does it affect the characters and gameplay?
Cory:Back to the tabletop thing: when we play these games, we have always made surgeries and medical stuff a big deal. It’s never been like, “Oh, you have cyber arms now, fantastic. Let’s go on the mission.” It’s always been like, “You have to play a different character for two weeks because your other guy’s in the back and his arm is cut off, it’s terrible.” So we set out from the beginning to make it an exciting part of the game. Wedidn’t want to look at Cyberware as a flat upgrade, it’s not something you buy just to get better, you’re going to be forced to upgrade your characters sometimes because you’re like, “Aaron has been shot to heck. My options are he goes to the hospital for three months, or buy him a new skeleton. We’ll put that skeleton in, it’s gonna make him a little more of a cyborg, he’s gonna be a little different afterward, but the hospital time is way less. He’s gonna have some drawbacks. He’s not gonna be able to go through metal detectors.
We want Cyberware to be this thing where it’s really awesome when it works, but it’s not great when it’s broken. We don’t want it to be something that you just buy instantaneously as soon as it becomes available because it’s the best upgrade. We want it to be something where you’re thinking about trade-offs.
How does it fit with my character build? Is this worth it? They’re going to be a little more fragile, a little more expensive to heal, you know, you’re going to be dealing with these drawbacks of this system. Instead of just the nice tough soldier I had at the beginning, he’s faster and stronger, but he needs an oil change on a regular basis, and if he gets shot up really bad his hospital time is worse.
But at the same time, maybe he got this lung damage, and he needs cyber lungs, and now he can never get lung damage again. So at the same time, it’s going to be like, “Well, Aaron has been hurt terribly. He’s been in the hospital I don’t know how many times, but he’s like a tank now.” That’s one of the reasons you love those late-game cyberpunk characters. They have this crazy history.
You’re like, “Here’s why he has cyber lungs. It wasn’t because I got the upgrade unlocked and I bought them. He has them because of a story event that happened. We were on this job trying to save this guy’s cousin, he got shot up, I couldn’t send him to the hospital because we had this other job, so I had to buy him cyber lungs. Every time he gets a cold now he has to go to the hospital, and it’s just awful, and Emille is in love with him, but he doesn’t understand because his brain is all screwed up.”
There are all these things that will happen because you’re getting to make these fun choices about cyberware early in the game. I feel like the cyberware for us is going to be a big part of the story. Like yeah, it’s gonna be fun and chrome, and you’re gonna get some cyber arms and be really tough, but also there’s going to be times when cyberware is the option you have to pick. Bullfrog’sSyndicatewas one of my favorite games of all time, but as soon as you got the cyberware you were buying it. You were like, “I got money. Put chrome on all of them. The more cyber the better.” I feel likeCyber Knightsdoes a realservice to the genreby making cyberware a technology where maybe sometimes it’s too much. Maybe you didn’t need to do that.
And there’s a whole bunch of story hooks for people with too much cyberware. It adds tags.
Q: You guys are very well-regarded for constantly supporting your games.Star Tradershas over 325 updates now, for example. What is your long-term vision forCyber Knights? Are there any big features you’d like to develop later, or a direction you’d like to go with future updates?
Andrew:I think that’s one of the things you can say about us: we’re consistently crazy about our way of doing things, which is lots and lots of updates. We love these games. We’re going on four-plus years of working onCyber Knights, we’re a small team, and it is an absolute labor of love. We plan to do it for a couple more years. We’re gonna play it so much, so we want to make sure that it’s amazing and enjoy every minute of this creative process with the community. So we’ve got a “Here’s to the first 100 updates, let’s keep going” kind of feeling going on here.
As far as really big features that we’re excited to be bringing on in the short term, we had to put a cap on a couple of things in advance of Early Access to make sure that we could focus on quality in what we can release and not overextend our team and grind everybody out. Safehouse modules, being able to customize the safe house. Today, you just have your top floor and the bottom floor is a toxic waste dump. Don’t go down the elevator, that adds tags, it’s really bad.
Being able to go in there and start to clean out those rooms and then add infrastructure like electricity and cryo and a number of other things so that you may put in installations that will give you a bustling, working safe house with crafting and sim training and a field operations room and all sorts of cool stuff going on is a big, a big feature for us to bring home that feeling of when you’re home, it’s your safe house, you really can customize it.
The other really big area that came from the Kickstarter is pet classes.Cyber Knightshas a history of hunters, mercenaries, and their pack of slathering war dogs, and we’ll add a cat class called the Assassin and then the drone pilot will also come online. Those three big groups together is another cool and huge expansion for the class tree and all the possibilities that you can bring to the table. Those are the two biggest that stick out to me, aside from the grand sweep of just updating and adding and improving and more story and all of that.
Cory:I’m reallyexcited about the crafting systemthat’s not in there at all. It’s something that you see more and more in turn-based games. Ours is a bit of a hybrid approach where you’re not doing a deterministic recipe. There are things for the players to puzzle out and ways to combine recipes and sub-recipes to get unique items. All those things you’ll be stealing from the corporation, so I think the crafting system when it comes online is going to be really exciting, and it’ll be another system that ties a bunch of mechanics together. It’ll tie weapon customization contacts, looting, safe house upgrading, and file collecting all into one big, nice, interrelated mechanical package.
Q: Any final thoughts you’d like to share before we wrap up?
Cory:Now that we’re in Early Access we’ll be doing a lot of updates and the game will be improving quickly over the next nine months. If that’s not your thing, and you want to play a more finished product after we’ve grown through the Early Access process, throw us on your wishlist. As you said, we have a track record of doing this. We will be coming out of Early Access, and if you want to give it a shot then, we’ll still be working on it then.
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Cyber Knightsis in Early Access on PC.
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