Q: You call Gyre: Maelstrom a “Dystopian Steampunk RPG” - What kind of dystopia are we talking about? A Mad Max desert wasteland where everyone’s fighting over scarce resources?
A: You absolutely raise a good point. In fact, we went back and forth on how to best articulate this because "dystopian" is a reductive simplification. Such is the worry in a tag line.
To some, the world of Gyre: Maelstrom may actually seem like just the opposite. It’s a world of immortals where death is almost unheard of. As its citizens’ mechanical bodies do not need food, there is no such thing as starvation and hunger. Diseases of the flesh are unheard of and your ability to augment your senses and abilities is essentially unlimited. The Gyre itself is a walled city where the people and infrastructure work very hard to uphold the ideal that life is a perfect post-scarcity utopia.
But there are factions that disagree with that view and question whether something of the human touch may indeed have been lost. Or what impact the self-sustaining city of Gyre might have on the broader world beyond its walls. Or why those walls are even needed in the first place. Some of these factions choose to communicate their dissatisfaction through varying degrees of active resistance and the conflict and intrigue between factions will play an important part in the game.
Thanks to our Toska Narrative Engine, how these issues are communicated and even observed depends largely on the activities you choose to engage in as a player. How you view the city, whether as a utopia or a dystopia, will shape your experience. There isn’t a right or a wrong answer but there are decisions to be made and those decisions will have consequences.
Suffice to say that we have a love affair with quality science fiction. I'm currently re-reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and I just finished pre-ordering the next Expanse book by James S.A. Corey. We believe that good sci-fi offers a comment on modern politics which works on a level you don't need to engage in, but you can if you wish.
So, f'rinstance, is today a utopia? Many would insist this is the case. But, as William Gibson famously said, "The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet." To one of the disadvantaged or powerless, today may look as much like a dystopian wasteland as any post-apocalyptic tale proposes.
We're asking the question and offering no answers. We'll carry the water. You light the fire. At the end of the day, we're here to make a kick-ass game. Sure, we've got theme and procedural coolness like you wouldn't believe until you play the game a second time and *try* to make all the same choices only to see how much it still diverges... But if it's not fun, we’ve failed in our mission.
So whether you find it to be a utopia, dystopia or something else entirely, what’s most important to us is that you find it interesting, engaging and fun.
Q: When I see a game being promoted on Facebook, I usually assume it’s just another browser-based game or mobile app. But this is clearly something different. What can we expect in terms of platforms and gameplay?
A: Great question! We’re promoting
Gyre on Facebook right now because that’s where where all of you are and, well... we think you’re pretty awesome. Our
Facebook page is there to help get the word out about the game, start building a community, and give everyone an opportunity to reach out if they have questions or feedback.
As for what you can expect from the game,
Gyre: Maelstrom is a AAA steampunk-themed single-player parkour-influenced action-roleplaying game for PC and console that’s played from a 3rd-person over-the-shoulder view. (Big breath. Phew!) Oh, and we’ve got robots. Lots of them. Including the player. But don’t worry, you’re robots with souls and feelings and existential angst and the need to beat the #$%@! out of everything sometimes. It’s all good.
Unlike other RPGs, however,
Gyre’s got no grinding, no fetch quests, no fluff or filler. Thanks to the fact that our proprietary Toska Narrative Engine is constantly monitoring and adapting to your behavior, every quest is created dynamically in response to your choices and the dramatic needs of your personal story arc. So that’s what really sets us apart.
As for platforms, you’ll definitely be able to find us all over Steam and we’ve also got a fresh build running on our shiny PS4 Dev Kits as we speak. And, as we’re building
Gyre and Toska on top of the multi-platform Unreal engine, we’ll be able to explore plenty of other opportunities as well - it will all depend on what we have time and resources to properly develop and test.
As a studio, we cut our teeth on award-winning mobile games, augmented reality experiences and transmedia storytelling. In some ways we’re similar to other small, agile developers with limited portfolios, such as Hello Games (
No Man’s Sky). That’s how Blizzard was when they released
WarCraft, too. For us,
Gyre: Maelstrom is a very special labour of love and the by-product of 8 years of cutting-edge research and development where we’ve been quietly prepping the studio for AAA RPG production. We've now built up a very talented team that blends fresh ideas with Emmy Award-winning art and senior experience on AAA titles such as
Baldur’s Gate,
Neverwinter Nights,
Dragon Age,
Mass Effect,
Mortal Kombat 2,
Warhammer 40K Dawn of War, and more. Kind of like peanut butter and chocolate all wrapped up in a hazelnut ganache.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, to be sure, but we're no stranger to that and we're very excited to introduce all of you to truly revolutionary new RPG experience! As development continues, our goal is to open up the game to a significant, transparent beta testing period where subscribers to our Maelstrom list can experience the game and get involved (hey, you helped find Libby - it's the least we can do!). Again, thanks to Toska creating a unique story for every player and every playthrough, we’re confident that we can run a spoiler-free beta and keep you coming back for more. ;o) So we feel pretty good about where we’re headed and the benchmark we're setting. Thanks for being a part of the magic.
Q: The game sounds great! Any chance I’ll be able to play it on the Xbox One?
A: We celebrated our PS dev kit's arrival with a
Facebook post because official dev kits are tightly controlled resources in development-land. We look forward to continuing our conversations with Microsoft on the future of having
Gyre on Xbox.
Internally, we've had some conversations about whether or not we're open to being an exclusive for one console or the other, but nothing firm has gone forward. Our preference, of course, would be to launch for both PS4 and Xbox One so we can get it into as many of your hands as possible and on the console of your choice. We just always have to balance those benefits with the accompanying costs of development.
Q: What about Mac or SteamOS support?
A: For now, console and PC are our highest priority. Every platform added increases the development effort and we want to ensure we spend our efforts wisely in creating a great experience on the initial platforms first.
When we head into the beta testing phase, however, we’re going to be revisiting our platform selection and exploring the feasibility of other options like Mac, SteamOS and others.
We are using the Unreal Engine, which is quite robust and makes exporting to different platforms far less onerous than it used to be. That’s certainly one of the reasons we chose to develop on it.
Q: I want to play! When can I get my hands on it?
A: We're not fans of the trend towards three year-long hype cycles but we also don't want to take the cake out of the oven too early. With that in mind, we’re currently projecting a 2017 release. It’s aggressive, particularly for a AAA multi-platform roleplaying game, but we’ve got some tricks up our sleeves to make the impossible possible. Building on a well-understood engine like Unreal is one of them and our AI-driven approach to the physical and narrative environment that underpins the game is another (thanks, Toska!).
Ultimately, however, the release date is going to be a strategic conversation with the publisher -- they have the best understanding of the retail cycle, what else will be hitting the market and when, etc. But as a small Canadian game development team taking a crack at our first AAA game and bringing brand new intellectual property to market with Gyre, I’m willing to bet that we won’t try to release during the fall or early spring to go head to head with the big dogs releasing the latest sequels in their longstanding franchises. We’re bold, we’re brash, we’re scrappy but we’re also shrewd enough to pick our battles.
