StarCrawlers: Chimera – Character Creation & Skills Preview

StarCrawlers: Chimera, Juggernaut Games’ follow-up to 2017’s StarCrawlers, will take a single-character approach to its dungeon crawling. And as a result of no longer having a party of four, we’ll now be able to choose 7 out of the game’s 27 skill trees during character creation, and then later, upgrade our skills with some special perk points.

Here’s more on that:

Hey all! Periodically before launch into Early Access I’ll be sharing some screenshots of different features and giving an overview of how their systems work. Please note, these are early development previews, so expect things to change. Let’s start off with Character Creation and Skills!

This is the Character Creation menu and first thing you’ll see when starting a new game of Chimera.

A character is built by choosing 7 different Skill Trees to define what your abilities will be. Skill Trees belong to different Archetypes :

• Muscle Archetype uses brute force and raw power to achieve victory.
• Guile Archetype is favoured by roguish, roguelike, and rogue-lite types.
• Intellect Archetype is for people who are better than everyone else.

Archetypes are a guide for how your character will play and what stats you will favour, but there are no restrictions on what combination of Skill Trees you can select. You could build a stealthy melee hacker or go full war machine and make a heavy weapons pyromaniac soldier. Or combine them. I don’t judge.

Skill Trees are also informally categorised into Class / Weaponry / Utility trees :

• Class Trees contain signature abilities (you might notice some familiar faces from StarCrawlers on the top row)
• Weaponry Trees improve your use of different weapon types (melee, ranged, heavy melee, heavy ranged, dual wielding, etc)
• Utility Trees let you interact with the world differently (lockpicking, bashing doors, sneaking)

Once your skills are selected, pick a difficulty and optional permadeath with Ironmode, slap a name on yourself and you’re ready to play.

In game, you’ll be able to bring up the Skills Menu to add unlocked abilities to your action bar, assign Skill and Perk Points, and plot your character growth. This randomly genned character has the Soldier, Smuggler and Force Psyker class trees, Pistolier, Gunslinger (dual ranged weapons) and Smashmaster weaponry trees, and Loot Hunter utility tree. Not bad for a random character.

Most Skill Trees have a combination of active and passive abilities and all begin with the 1st ability unlocked for free. To unlock the next ability in the tree, simply assign a Skill Point which you earned by gaining a character level. Skill Trees will start Early Access with 3 – 5 abilities, with more added as we refine what each tree brings to the game.

Perk Points are earned by accomplishing something on each floor (no spoilers on what yet) and can be assigned to certain abilities to unlock a bonus effect. In the example here, the Fan the Hammers ability (which can trigger chained bonus attacks on a target) can use a Perk Point to gain Spitfire, greatly increasing the chance of a bonus attack when the hit is critical. Perk Points are limited, but can be added or removed to abilities at will, so you can experiment with which perks you like.

All the Skill Trees shown are currently implemented and will be ready to play as soon as Early Access starts. I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks about their favourite or least favourite trees and what to add and improve!