The Surge 2 Preview, Interview

Last week, we got a fresh batch of hands-on previews for Deck13’s upcoming Dark Souls-inspired action-RPG The Surge 2. And if you’d like to add another one to the pile, you can now check out what the folks over at WCCFTech have to say about their time with the demo. A few sample paragraphs:

Other things that are well worth mentioning is just how much of a visual improvement The Surge 2 has over the original. Partly this is due to the setting, offering more variety and creative freedom, but also thanks to the brand new rendering engine found within the game. It’s pretty commonplace to now see that games look better than they did, that comes with the territory, but it’s the smaller details that make it. In this case, it’s the foliage on display and how it reacts to your movements.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for The Surge. It at least tried something different from the games it was inspired by, unlike countless other titles that decided to stick rigidly to the originals. The Surge 2 looks to build far and above the original, going further into sci-fi territory and carving a space of its own through an improved combat system and ways of developing and customising your character.

And then, you should read their extensive interview with Jan Klose, the creative director on The Surge 2, where he emphasizes the new game’s focus on exploration, talks about its enemies, challenging nature, and more. An excerpt:

Chris: Ahh, so a follow-up project for yourself. From what I’ve seen and heard, the game follows up directly from the first title?

Jan: It does. So it follows up on the timeline. It’s set two months later and the stuff that happened at the end of The Surge, like especially with these nanite structures evolving. It’s all projected on your new game world, which is Jericho city, where a sort of nanite-based techno-disease is happening. It’s under quarantine and we need to figure out how this happened, what it will turn into and what we could do against it.

Chris: So the use of nanites carries on and is a core story concept. How has the world changed in gameplay aspects from The Surge? From what I’ve seen, it seems a lot more open with more directions you can take.

Jan: Yes, it’s a city so you expect that you can go to a number of places and not just in a straight line. One thing is the variety, we can show many different environments. You can already see with the forest like park area, we also have some underground areas, a run-down harbour district and places like that. Also, and what’s even more important, is we can offer much more variety in terms of gameplay. So what we wanted to do is move away from the linearity in the first one. We did open up the game world in the first one as you played, but there was little reason to go back to previous levels even though we tried to incentivise it a little bit.

This time it’s really different. So you have the city centre as your hub of exploration and you can go in whatever direction right from the beginning. You could say “Okay, I want to follow the main quest” or “Let me go explore a little bit”, “Where does that lead me?”, “Maybe that’s too strong for me now” or maybe “Hey, I’ve found some cool stuff. That will help me in the main quest”. However you want to play it, you can take on major tasks in whatever order you want and have different outcomes that affect how you continue playing the game.

Chris: I imagine the more you explore and do side quests, the stronger you are and you can make the challenge of the main story easier for yourself?

Jan: That’s absolutely the right impression. This is what we want to do on a very strong level. You can change the difficulty of your game by your actions, not by a menu entry of going onto easy mode but by saying “Okay, I’ll go here first – then I’ll come back and I’ll show you”