Hello everyone, I am Jehanne Rousseau, CEO and Senior Editor at Spiders. Today, we are very happy to finally unveil the gameplay of SteelRising, and to share with you the creative process that led us to this new project.
As SteelRising began production, we looked at our previous games, The Technomancer and GreedFall, to help us define our vision. Our games have always included a mix of action and role-playing elements, most often for combat and character / story purposes. But what if for this next game we focus and particularly develop the action? That was our starting point: designing an action RPG with a strong emphasis on fast-paced combat.
The idea of playing as Aegis, an agile automaton, quickly took hold, and our next step was to define our environment. As a studio based in Paris, we have always been influenced by our European roots, and have always had a taste for the baroque, the strange, the strange. After a few iterations the pieces started to fit together and we put SteelRising in an alternate timeline based on the French Revolution of 1789. To tame the flames of revolution igniting Paris, King Louis XVI unleashes a deadly army of mechanical robots on the people. You are Aegis, a mysterious automaton, bodyguard of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Revolution’s last hope against a king gone mad.
Aegis was originally designed to be a dancer and was not originally designed for combat. Considering that every opponent you face is a real killing machine, defeating them won’t be easy. You’ll need to make good use of your inherent grace, think fast, stay on your toes, and strike at the right time to come out in one piece. You can also tailor Aegis to your own playstyle with a flexible leveling system and a wide variety of different weapons, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses.
If you’ve played Souls-like before, SteelRising will be familiar to you. And that’s one of the reasons we wanted you to be an automaton: Aegis is way more acrobatic than any human could be. She brings great agility and verticality to any fight. Additionally, throughout your adventure you will unlock various tools, opening up new avenues to explore as well as new gameplay possibilities during combat.
It’s over for today, and while we still have some work ahead of us, we can’t wait to share more details with you about SteelRising, ahead of its release on PlayStation 5 in 2022.
