Despite experiencing DDoS attacks back in May and June, Muse Games continues to push through and create new content for their Kickstarter backers and Guns of Icarus Online players. Muse Games has kept busy with Guns of Icarus Online since iDigitalTimes last spoke to Muse Games Team Lead Howard Tsao, working on their new PV modes for close beta testing.
iDigitalTimes had an opportunity to play a new PV mode for Guns of Icarus Online while chatting Tsao and the game’s PR rep Joseph Lieberman. The PV modes provide new challenges and objectives for players. For example, there’s a mode called Retreat where there are four bases that belong to your team. The bases don’t have any defenses and your team must defend them from the enemy AI. The enemy AI raids your bases, steal a bunch of stuff from them, and then run away and destroy them as they go. Your job is to retrieve the cargo and bring it safely back to one of your bases before it gets destroyed by one of the rampaging enemies.
Retreat is just one of the new PV modes for the upcoming Guns of Icarus Online closed beta, which Tsao confirmed Kickstarter backers should be getting a build of soon. Still, there’s a lot of testing for the new modes before Muse Games announces a release date. There a pre-order available on the Humble Store and the team is working to get the new Guns of Icarus Online modes on Steam.
“We’ll see how testing goes,” Tsao said. “There’s are a few major systems that are not in the game yet such as progression, the worlds, the factions stuff. Some of those things are not in [the base game] yet. Once those things get in, once we test with players and work out the kinks and take feedback we can have a better idea when the release will be.”
Guns of Icarus Online is dynamically scaling the difficulty based on your past performances, at least for its PvE mode. The better you are at the game, the more challenges are thrown your way. The challenges are also based on the difficulty mode. The AI’s goal is to never give you the same formations, ships or styles in a match twice. If you’ve never picked up Guns of Icarus Online, the general learning curb will depend on your familiarity with MMO game controls and the position you play in the game.
“Certainly some positions are more difficult than others or they at least require a different set of skills,” Lieberman said. “It depends on what you really like to do. If you’re good at time management and running around, almost like a platformer, you’d be great at engineering. You’re jumping from platform to platform, you’re hitting things with hammers, keeping an eye on several things at once. You’re jumping on a gun when you see the opportunity to do so, but your focus is on making the ship fly.”
Lieberman added, “If you’re good at aiming at targets and hitting what you want to hit, you’re a better gunner, occasionally jumping off your gun and helping out with repairs. If you like to strategize and are like, ‘Okay, I’m going to coordinate with another ship as well as all my crew members as to what targets we’re aiming at and where we’re going’…then you’re better off as a pilot. The ships move fast, but they’re not as hard to control as you would imagine.”
The Guns of Icarus Online team is also working on the lore and faction history for the game. The story is sort of tied to the overall meta world and fashion of the game, so you won’t see a single player campaign in Guns of Icarus Online any time soon. Guns of Icarus Online has come a long way since the unfortunate circumstances around the game’s launch. Tsao briefly touched on the DDoS attacks Guns of Icarus Online’s servers faced in May and June. Like his experience during Hurricane Sandy, Tsao took it as a learning experience because it was the only thing he could do.
“That’s like seeing your life flash before your eyes. We’ve had a few moments like that, but that was really [intense],” Tsao said. “The thing with those kind of things is it’s pretty untraceable. The only way to look at is to take it as a learning opportunity and just try to figure out what to do about it. As an indie game you don’t expect people to do that, but it happens.”
Learn more about Guns of Icarus Online and their upcoming PV modes on their official site here. You can also follow updates on Guns of Icarus Online on their Facebook page here.
