We knew a while back that we wanted to do something more interesting with the characters and progression in Cubed And Dangerous and today we're previewing it! Everything previewed here will be available once Content Update 3 lands in a few weeks' time.
Characters in Cubed And Dangerous are going to be extended and turned into Character Classes. Each Character Class will have leveling progression, and on top of that you will collect new characters within each class! These characters can have all sorts of new abilities, special modifiers, better stats, extra gear and weapons, or start their runs with certain Perks or Relics.
Each Character Class will have a starting loadout like the existing characters do, but you will be able to recruit more and more powerful variations on the Character Class as you go, each with near-infinitely variable strengths and drawbacks.
These characters are persistent and you'll be able to use them repeatedly. Leveling progress is made within the Class as a whole, such that you never need to lose progression in order to swap from your old character to the new one. (After playtesting, it was clear that it felt pretty bad to progress with a character and then have to sacrifice that progress the moment you found a new upgraded character.)
When can you recruit these new more powerful characters? After some more playtesting, we also found that it was counterintuitive to be given a new character at some point in the middle of a campaign. When someone got offered a new and better character, they'd have a decision - "Do I finish this run before I can start playing with the new character, and thus I don't get to use the cool character I just found? Or do I start a new run and throw away my current progress?" This situation always felt like you were giving something up.
To resolve this, characters are recruited at the most opportune moment - when you complete the campaign and are presented with the option of continuing into the Infinite Desert. If you found a character you prefer, you can begin a new run immediately without missing out on any completion benefits.
There was another question that came up in testing - what if I am only playing one character? If I can recruit a character from any Character Class, well, I mostly don't get something I want. I can't grind directly for an upgrade to my current character, since I'm always getting flooded with other characters. But, if the character you got was always from your current Character Class, you'd never have any incentive to try another class because you were locked into the one you were playing, which was already significantly upgraded and probably always your strongest playable character.
To solve this - when you recruit a new character, you'll actually recruit two at once! You'll recruit a new character in your Character Class that is a potential upgrade, so if you want to grind up to maximum power, you can do so; and you'll also recruit a character from a different class, opening up the ability to discover any character variation at any moment, potentially opening new avenues for you.
This is also how Character Classes are unlocked now. Completing the campaign will give you a new character of a new Class if you haven't unlocked every Class yet. This means that every new character you unlock will be from a new Class until you have seen all the possibilities, and you won't be locked behind random rolling to be able to explore and try every different character.
Finally - we are also including a fully-randomized character, for the masochists and challengers among us!
We hope you'll enjoy the new content drop and the big new changes to the game. Keep an eye on this feed and Wishlist the game if you want to make sure you see the update launch, we'll post more teasers in the next few days. Thanks for reading!