Guns of Icarus Online developer Muse Games have just announced a new kickstarter project to expand their already successful dieselpunk airship skirmish game with an Adventure mode.
Guns of Icarus Online was released in October last year (see our review here) after being successfully funded through kickstarter back in February. The gameplay pits you as a crew member of a dieselpunk/steampunk airship in a skirmish mode against another team. There is a large amount of customisation to the ships along with your selected class. To all extents it’s a great PvP game for jumping into for some battles. With the announcement of the planned Adventure Mode, these skirmishes would now serve a purpose.
Adventure mode will be built on top of Skirmish mode as you will be able to travel to one of many towns to accept a variety of trade, raid or political missions. You can either ply your trade as a mercenary or pledge your allegiance to one of the factions. Each faction will have a unique look and culture, and one could imagine there will be different bonuses granted depending on which faction you chose.
The first goal of the kickstarter is listed as an AI DIrectory. This would allow them to extend the Guns of Icarus Online experience to be PvE or Co-op vE without changing much else in the game. One thing about Guns of Icarus Online just now is that the “training” environment just puts you in an empty map against some target balloons. Adding the AI Director would allow for some meaningful tutorials to get you used to the gameplay. And it is obviously essential for setting up missions in the Adventure Mode. The AI Director is all that the pledge goal of $100,000 covers, and Muse Games have obviously learnt from their past kickstarter as even though Guns of Icarus Online reached 352% funding (their target was a mere $10,000) the kickstarter funding didn’t cover the whole development costs. Credit to them though as they still delivered on their promise.
The first of the stretch goals will add an Econo-Political system to the world. Each battle you partake in
will influence this system meaning that you will help towns to rise and factions to dominate. As mentioned, towns and factions generate missions, and the mission types will be decided by the Econo-Political system. If one faction declares war on another, you will be able to accept raiding missions at each faction’s capital city. They suggest that if you are a decorated hero of a certain faction, then you will be able to influence the votes on that factions policies.
The next stretch goal is a set of World Builder Tools. This doesn’t seem to be anything that the players will get their hands on, but more of a tool for the studio to help them in the development of the world that Adventure Mode will be played in. They hope to be able to generate large parts of the world procedurally, adding the finer details by hand later. While you might think this isn’t going to benefit the players, it will benefit the long term development of the product, saving the small team at Muse Games lots of time and allowing them to focus more attention on the finer details.
As with all kickstarters, there are a variety of pledge levels from $5 to $10,000 with different rewards for each tier. The most interesting is that they are offering a truly unique reward to the person who makes the single largest donation. A hand crafted 16GB Steampunk USB featuring the Guns of Icarus Online “Pilotwings” logo.
The kickstarter runs until the 21st of May, and if they reach their $100,000 goal the project will go ahead. Over and above that, Muse Games have stated “If we don’t make it all the way to $500,000, then you backers will get a Season Pass to whatever we release.” This perhaps hints that when the game is released it will perhaps be under some form of subscription model. However, the pledge levels simply state that you will get a copy of the game via Steam (provided you pledge at least $20).
Muse Games have set an estimated delivery date of June 2014 for the project. Whatever happens, we will be watching their progress closely and look forward to seeing what they come up with. And based on the fact that the kickstarter raised over $10,000 (the original Guns of Icarus Online target) in less than a day, we’re not the only ones excited about this.