Thank you to our wonderful community for your patience while we’ve worked towards our gameplay reveal at Galaxies Showcase
What you all see is a small slice of the immersive cyberpunk action that we hope to showcase more of as we move forward with development and towards launch.
So, what do you see in the trailer?
We begin as The System’s Police Forces during our load-in sequence aboard the police transport ship via your PDA. This is how every mission for the police begins and will be a key tool for you while you’re in the middle of matches by providing health, inventory and other key pieces of information during matches. Since we are a HUD-less game, information in your PDA, Scanner, Weapon Screen or game world become very important for you. While you’re mid-transport you’ll choose an objective and receive further intel from System Control.
You’ll be able to gear up for the match with choices found inside your police transport or gang hideout such as weapons, ammo, and gadgets. And some of those weapons have some pretty devastating impact…which you may have seen on our socials. There will also be a wealth of weapons and gear that can be found within the game world as well.
The sequence continues with system forces entering the territory of Nodrog - one of the leaders of a gang faction who speaks and taunts System Police throughout the mission. He also monitors them using surveillance systems that players will be able to hack into themselves during their runs.
Players can deploy scanners that see through walls to provide valuable recon information on enemy locations and objectives. You’ll also notice the stealth wall tool which can visually obscure you and your teams presence and a drone you can deploy to gain even more intel on enemy movement.
Our squad continues into a room with the data they must retrieve. There’s an orchestrator(more to come on this character at a later date) - highly illegal tools at the disposal of gang factions - in the room which gives a taste of the kind of advancements in bio-technology that have become commonplace in the world of DEFECT.
As our squad advances to another piece of data, they are ambushed by Nodrog’s forces and you get a sense of destruction and the chaotic action that emerges as a result of conflicting objectives for you and your opposition - in this case, the gang that attacked you. Those could include arresting or kidnapping players, assassinating players, or some more passive goals like robbing banks or dealing drugs etc.
We’re happy to dive into more of the destruction features in a later post. However, to name a few, we have multiple layers of destruction on each wall or item, and have features like dynamic dust that fills the room the more you destroy it. This can be used strategically to reduce visibility in a space if you have equipment like the tactical goggles, or as a way to quickly escape a dangerous situation. Everything you see will be destructible to some extent. You might have also noticed the player flipping a table which is an example of the layers of interaction we’ve built into certain items to create cover and block paths as well to create a more interactable world for players.
When one of the gang members makes a run for it, a System Officer is able to subdue him with a stun round and then replace the gang member’s mind with a previously downed teammate’s mind. This makes this gang member a part of your squad for the remainder of the match. It's one of a few solutions we provide players who have been downed in action. Internally we’ve been calling this a Body Snatch.
As we continue, you’ll notice that health does not automatically regenerate. You must find health stations to heal yourself if you’re going to stay in the fight. These health stations generally have 3 charges and require you setting up defenses like cover from your team if in a dangerous situation to use them.
In this mission's finale, System Police must override the data they found and reboot local systems in order to remove the custom OS gangs have installed into their building. This is not an instant process, however, and you’ll have to hold your ground and defend your position if you’re to succeed. Other teams will have to remove the access drive from this terminal to stop you.
Your actions will result in the game world's lighting changing and notifying others. Each mission you play has a completely different type of finale for your team which range from defending a terminal to escaping a building with multiple enemies pursuing you to get back to your transport to stealing something to carrying bags of drugs or money to fighting Nodrog and more. These finales can change dynamically depending on what is happening in the world and provide more emergent ways to change the flow of each game so they always feel different.
So, we finish with an awesome face-off between System Forces and Nodrog’s Faction complete with destruction, explosions, bullets flying and ruthless action set to an original track by the legendary Mick Gordon.
Oh, and there’s a little surprise at the end when the player spawns as an orchestrator. More on that some other time.
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So there you have it. We couldn’t be more proud to show you what we have been working so hard on and it’s just the beginning. DEFECT has been a pure passion project for the team here, and we’ve been very lucky to work on it so far! We’ve always been intrigued by the challenge of making an immersive multiplayer mode that is tied to narrative and cinematic moments instead of being something ultra competitive. This is just a small slice of the game, we’re super excited to show more of the game like our Co-op and Singleplayer modes in the future.
- Emanuel Palalic, Director of DEFECT and emptyvessel Studios
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