Initial release date 2017 Publisher Supergiant Games Mode Single-player video game | Developer Supergiant Games Genre Action role-playing game | |
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Platforms PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows Similar Transistor, Bastion, Absolver, What Remains of Edith Finch, Death’s Gambit | ||
Pyre is an upcoming action role-playing video game developed by Supergiant Games, to be released in 2017 on Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4.
Contents
Story and gameplay
The game takes place in a high fantasy setting. The player controls a character who is an exile, that meets three other exiles who, upon finding the player-character is literate, have them join their party and name them the Reader to help them travel the land of purgatory, looking to cleanse their souls by defeating other exiles. The story is told through on-screen narrative passages that include a hyperlink-type system used by the player-character to explore the story further. The party can only travel during the day periods in the land and must stop at night; at this point, the player as the Reader must determine what actions to take to help support or improve the party, such as scavenging for supplies, learning more of the world's lore, or mentoring the three exiles to improve their skills.
Through the land the party encounters other groups of exiles, opening a Rite, the game's combat system which was described by Marty Silva of IGN as a mix of DOTA, Rocket League, and Supergiant's previous game, Transistor. Rites takes place on a field with two columns of flame, called pyres, at opposite ends, with the three exiles facing off against three opposing ones on a top-down perspective from the player's viewpoint. These teams attempt to launch a singular glowing orb that starts at the center of the arena into their opponent's pyre, causing damage to it, with the goal to completely destroy the pyre. The player can only control one character at a time but otherwise switch freely between the three. Any character can pick up the orb, but this makes them vulnerable to being affected by the aura of an enemy, a small circular area around the character, and if they should touch this aura, their character is temporarily removed from the arena and drops the orb. Characters have a number of skills that aid in this combat approach, such as brief dashing bursts or being able to shoot a projectile at an enemy to cause them to briefly be removed from the arena; during the larger game, the player will be able to improve these skills through populating a skill tree. Each of the player's characters have different inate abilities, such as one that can move quickly about this arena but does the lowest damage to the opponent's pyre, while another is slow and bulky, but can do the largest damage.
The game will include a local multiplayer mode to allow two players controlling separate teams to compete. Supergiant was unsure if they would be able to include online multiplayer in time for the game's launch and opted to keep this mode to local as well as player-versus-computer matches for release.
Development
The concept of Pyre came out from prototyping several game ideas by Supergiant Games, according to creative director Greg Kasavin, eventually coming to the theme of "what happens when you face defeat, and have to come back from it the next day, look your friends in the face, look yourself in the mirror, and deal with the consequences of the decisions you made". In trying to devise gameplay around the nature of failure, they came to see the use of sports as a metaphor for combat, featuring non-violent gameplay but consequences of losing. To connect these battles, the developers came onto the use of a narrative idea to have the player guide their party across an overworld, making decisions on where to go based on available resources and timing. They worked through prototyping to adjust how this part of the game would affect the Rites, adjusting the interaction of these two gameplay systems to get an appropriate balance. Kasavin stated they were worried that as some aspects of the game may be confusing, players that were not invested in the game's narrative would not come to appreciate some of these systems, and that if they were providing enough variation in the game to retain the player's interest over time.
The game was announced in April 2016 and first demonstrated in playable form at the 2016 Penny Arcade Expo East shortly afterwards. Kasavin and his team used this PAX testing to help evaluate how they had set up some of these gameplay systems.