The Surge 2 Interview

When Deck13’s Dark Souls-inspired action-RPG The Surge 2 launches later this year, you’ll get a chance to explore a futuristic city, fight plenty of tough enemies, use parts of them as your own gear, and uncover some mysteries in the process. And if you’re interested in reading a bit about the upcoming game’s improved area design, hidden areas and secret paths, varied environments, and even some early story bits, you should check out PCGamesN’s recent interview with Jan Klose, Deck13’s managing director.

An excerpt:

“We wanted a broadened experience in terms of how the levels are built, how they unfold, where you can go next,” managing director Jan Klose tells me. “We asked ourselves, ‘What environment would be more suitable?’ We decided no confined spaces, we wanted inside and outside, up and down. A vertical environment.”

This is why Jericho City is a concrete jungle of side alleys, secret paths, and hidden areas. But its layout also recognises that a city is more embedded in the natural landscape than the machine spaces of a factory. This encouraged Deck 13 to create different environments, washing away the overwhelming grey of the first game with a new range of colours, and given them textures beyond the smooth steel and concrete of industrialist architecture.

“The factory was nice but it was just a factory. If you have a city it can be anything,” Klose says. “A forest environment with parks, there are underground caves, we have skyscrapers, we have a gigantic wall shielding off the city. There are lots of locations that are all very different but still work together as being a city.”