Psst. There you go. Know a cheeky guy with a passion for unbridled chaos and adorable two-dimensional llamas? Well then. Better tell him to take a look at Arch.
The new tactical action game from publisher Panic and the development team of Franek Nowotniak, Max Cahill, Jose Ramon Garcia and Antonio Uribe is out today and all signs point to it being a success.
It's a gripping tale of revenge where your decisions can shape the outcome of an adventure steeped in magic and forged in blood. of Arco The exciting pixel art visuals immediately capture the attention, but it's the RPG's simultaneous turn-based combat system that particularly intrigued us.
In short, the system works by allowing players to choose an action while time is frozen. Their enemies will do the same. Those actions will then play out simultaneously before the cycle begins again. It's a system of action, consequence, and reaction that's made unpredictable by the inclusion of anarchic abilities and items that can sometimes defy the flow of time.
The choices you make throughout your adventure will also raise the stakes. Each playable character has a level of guilt. As it increases, the emotional tension will manifest physically as hostile spirits that hunt players across the battlefield. These supernatural enemies do not obey the laws of physics and can pursue players even when time has stopped. The more inner demons you collect, the more difficult your skirmishes will become. Heavy stuff. But those llamas should take the edge off.
Finding the Balance Between Control and Carnage
Meeting with the game developer before the launch to explain it of Arco combat system, Nowotniak, Uribe, and Garcia said they wanted to create a system that felt truly “dynamic.” They felt that combat in other action titles often relied on quick button presses or reflexes, which could be fun for those who had mastered that specific art, but could also feel restrictive. In contrast, the bread-and-butter turn-based combat felt too restrained. The team didn’t want players to be forced to watch turns unfold rather than be an active participant. So, they combined the two.
That fundamental concept didn't waver too much during development, but there was still a lot of room for fine tuning. “The first time we [implemented combat]”It was very slow,” Nowotniak says. “We had you control the exact movement in the turning phase. You had to drag the mouse to draw a line that you would follow. A lot of the controls were very slow and precise, whereas later we realized you could just click somewhere to [queue an action]. We didn't need to micromanage every little thing.”
Another challenge that threatened to derail proceedings was the failure to include a combat time bar. The team scrapped a side quest that would have incorporated a timeline that told players what would happen during each turn, prompting them to counteract those actions. It was, in theory, a twist that would have turned combat into something more akin to a prophecy puzzle. But it just didn’t work.
“I think the main problem was that we were trying to implement it while trying to figure out a lot of the combat itself,” Nowotniak says. “If we had made the combat what it is now from the beginning and then tried to add it, it might have worked. But we were trying to implement too many features at once, and then if one of them didn't work, the other one had to change.”
Nowotniak explains that keeping skirmishes smaller in scale worked better in the long run. That doesn’t mean things won’t get tough. Death will come to players eventually, and that could have been a problem.
“We wanted to make sure players knew there were no major consequences to dying,” Nowotniak says. “It’s a linear game with multiple paths. It’s not like a roguelike where you die and get reset to the beginning. […] We wanted players to try different things and fail, but then try again. Because combat shines when you play with it a little bit.”
The consensus was to try to avoid punishing players for experimenting. “It's not turn-based, so I think if players go through it in a In the breach kind of way and studying the situation for 10 minutes, it's not that kind of game,” Uribe says. “It's more of a 'fuck around and figure it out.' Make mistakes, because if you get killed, it's going to happen fast.”
Uribe says the combat system is fluid in a “chemical” way. There are items and abilities that can chain together to create rampant, unpredictable carnage. The reality is that you really Have to mess around to find out. Even if that means flirting with your mortality.
“For example, there's an object that, if you throw it, creates a cloud of gas. Then, if you shoot an arrow through it, it poisons the arrow. Then, if it hits an enemy, it poisons the enemy,” Uribe continues, outlining how these sequences might play out. “We don't tell you these things, but you might find out [a lot of situations like this]. There are some combinations that we probably haven't even discovered. That's where I think the game shines.”
There are currently “too many” items, abilities, and possible combinations to list here. So, to encourage experimentation and discourage players with a tendency to hoard items until the credits roll, Arch will be generous when it comes to distributing contraband. Environmental hazards such as explosive cacti and bear traps have been deployed to entice players to live a little. The title teases players with the question “What if I did this?” and challenges them to find the answer.
As the team previously said, death will pass in a flash to avoid creating a vicious cycle of negative reinforcement. “I think the biggest thing you can take away from players is their time,” Nowotniak says. “So we tried to minimize the time between [death] and start over.” He says the team even tried to implement an “undo” button that would essentially allow players to go back in time if they died, but it was ultimately abandoned due to production constraints.
There’s also the hope that players will feel compelled to share their barmpot antics, creating a community of llama-riding chaos merchants who can push each other to greater heights. Experimenting alone is fun, but devising a system that forces players to register and distribute their unique brand of antics on the World Wide Web could perhaps provide another level of success for a group of intrepid indies. Wouldn’t that be awesome?