game
game
the setting we’ve all been asking for our entire lives. had to do it ourselves
Nexis City Seven
What a shit hole. Something of a tourist attraction now, of a wrong kind. Ever since a solar flare knocked out the unprotected power grid a year ago. Ever since everyone who had a safe space outside the city — did leave and never looked back. Ever since the mega corporations, who built the city in the first place, turned it into a web of battlefields, waging war for each other’s dirty little secrets in dark labyrinths of abandoned streets. The city is not entirely without light — but you may want to avoid it.
it’s not all just pretty pixels here
We will not waste your time. Story serves no purpose in a video game other than to make it marketable to an audience of non-gamers. For everyone else it’s an annoyance and a distraction. In NEXUS you unlock the story by playing. Consuming it is a choice you don’t have to make. And you do it on your time — not ours. That being said, the story is present, the lore is deep, and playing as each faction grants access to plenty of exclusive information. Welcome to the true meaning of cyberpunk. No samurai to wake up here.
inspired by immersion sims. made for domination
For all of your exploration and gunfighting needs. What makes an awesome level design? Us. Always have cover. Always have alternative paths to your destination based on your build. Know the map better than your enemy? Could be the only advantage you’ll ever need.
only when everyone is overpowered the balance is achieved
Whether you need faster legs, stronger arms, eyes with thermal vision, or subdermal armor plating – we’ve got you covered. How about invisibility? Remote hacking? A defibrillator built into your chest? Or maybe just a spare synthetic heart? Would you like to lock pick this door or to blow it up? That wall surely looks like you can shoot through it – with right augmentations you could also walk through it.
right tools for every job
Different situations call for different approaches. A good selection of weapons, most of which either suck or does the same thing, is always appreciated of course, but we do things differently here. We love our guns. We spend a lot of time on them. Why would we make most of them pointless? Instead, we made all of them the best, but each – for different scenarios and different playstyles. On top of that we placed a deep customization system that makes any stock gun feel like a glorified club.
pick a side. any side
Cerberus
Highly secretive agency working for some of the most powerful people in the world.
Hostile with everyone: their directive is to kill everyone who notices them. Stealth approach highly encouraged.
Special abilities of Cerberus operators mainly have to do with detection avoidance, situational awareness, and handling security systems.
Equinox
Highly influential hi-tech weapons and combat gear manufacturer.
Friendly with Resistance: buys most of the valuables they scavenge, supplies them with weapons and ammunition.
Equinox operators are equipped with some of the most technologically advanced weapons and armor.
Daedalus
Medical and cybernetics giant.
Friendly with Militia: buys for organs and experiments whoever Militia “rescues”.
Daedalus operatives have increased mobility, physical strength (carrying capacity, melee effectiveness), health regeneration, and have the easiest access to high-level sensory cybernetics.
Resistance
A local paramilitary group pretending to be a peacekeeping force fighting to end the corpo proxy war in Nexis City Seven.
In reality they are an organized group of looters on Equinox’s payroll, with whom they are of course friendly on the streets.
Militia
A well-organized paramilitary group pretending to have the humanitarian mission of helping civilians in getting out of the city.
In reality they sell them for organs and experimentation to Daedalus, but that dark secret is known only to a few Militia officers.
Each faction is available as a separate playable character. Don’t want to risk your current loadout? Play as a new character for a while, instead of doing a run with a randomly rolled fully disposable one. All items can be transferred between all of your characters, but for a fee (to not allow for optimization of fun out of a new character’s journey). Except for specific faction-related quest items and faction-exclusive equipment. Eventually the player builds up multiple different characters, so the fear of potentially losing a loadout or two is not debilitating: even if it happens, the player can be back in the game, playing with an interesting loadout immediately. Instead of either having to play as a random near-naked crap character, only semi-rebuilding the loadout they just lost fearing to lose it again, or spending the next 20 minutes fully rebuilding that loadout (undoubtedly having all of the fun in the process). Those kind of systems encourage players to never play with the tools they want, to never play the game “properly”. Risk should be part of the fun — not the reason to not have it. Our system encourages players to be aggressive with their loadout choices, which creates better times and more badassery for everyone.
move through air — not through imaginary water
There is no need to make an already highly competitive game with no-lifers in every lobby more “hardcore” by designing it as a clunky jenkfest. “Hardcore” – or even “realistic” – doesn’t and shouldn’t mean “frustrating” and “limiting” in relation to the moment-to-moment gameplay. We don’t believe that making a game feel painful is the best way to make it meaningful and rewarding. You decide what level of mobility and how many superhuman movement options you need, and whether you can manage it.
With right cybernetics you can greatly increase your sprint speed and jump height, and even perform a reasonably long wall run. The beyond-basic movement abilities are not necessary to get most places, but they provide more fluent access to tricky areas, and in some cases may be required to complete a quest (in other words, they can be metaphorical keys to metaphorical doors).
dumpster diving is currently unavailable
We also refer to this principle as “No Prison Economy”. Call it realism, if you will. Sorry, but there are plenty of other places to explore, from the perspectives of both fun and reason. No, that pair of pants you see in the ditch there doesn’t have anything of value in any of its pockets. There is absolutely no point in wasting your time checking them, just trust us. No, that bottle of lemonade won’t pay for your next gun, and also no — you’re not dying of thirst. You are a soldier and you’ve been on the mission for 10 minutes — you are doing fine. Yes, some relatively pointless looting is possible, but it is highly discouraged by the game economy: much like in the real world, in Nexis City Seven random garbage doesn’t hold much monetary value.
we didn’t invite you here to just loot and be afraid of distant footsteps
Neither are you here to work on an endless checklist of meaningless chores that have nothing to do with being a murder machine. Our assignments – steps of the main story, side-missions, and even smaller optional objectives – all share the same goal: to take the player new places. The objective of a mission is there to provide direction and progression, not to provide an excuse for why you are looting the same closet for the 7th time this evening.
you are the danger
Bots can make the world feel more busy, but ultimately they cheapen a competitive environment, while simultaneously disturbing the balance by putting players who engage with them at an unnecessary and unfair disadvantage by revealing their presence or even exact position to other players. Our world is engaging enough already: there is no need to have bots running around it. Additionally, creating a satisfyingly smart enemy AI would divert our attention away from working on things that actually matter in a multiplayer shooter. Right now bots are reserved for separate solo/co-op PvE modes.
The problem of underpopulated lobbies is addressed by not having a “temporary lobby” system in the first place. Instead, each map exists as a persistent open world zone (not unlike how Destiny does it) into which players drop in and out. To make it fair, upon joining a map the player receives an intel report on how many hostiles and friendlies are in the area, and in return every other player receives an intel update on a new hostile/friendly being spotted in the area. Depending on the player’s faction, times for receiving a report or being reported on may differ. Each faction has its own level of ability to mask their operators’ presence upon entry, while also having different levels of “spotting” ability for each other faction. For example, Cerberus has the strongest intel support that notices new players in the area almost immediately, while the presence of Cerberus operators takes the longest to discover for all other factions (although some do it faster then others). Friendly factions (Daedalus & Militia or Equinox & Resistance) also get reports on each other instantly.
equal risk. equal opportunity. equal recovery. equal battlefield
Having a “no risk, no fun” mode in a game about high stakes and unique builds is a clear sign that the system doesn’t work: risk outweighs the fun rather than contributes to it, punishing players for expressing themselves and pushing them towards safe, boring experience. Instead of putting a dirty band-aid on the problem to actively discourage players from being bold, aggressive, confident, and therefore having fun, we just fixed the system.
don’t be discouraged as a lone wolf, don’t be so confident in numbers
Putting teams and solos in the same lobby is only unfair if you assume teams have the inherent advantage. You really shouldn’t.
because we don’t have any excuses for only having one mode
We don’t use the complexity of our loadout system to compensate for terrible gameplay: we got bitching FPS mechanics, we are proud of them, and our level design is top-notch. Why would people play TDM, FFA, or Domination instead of just the main mode (which you could technically call Extraction for now)? For the same reason people still play CoD MP instead of Warzone, and Crucible in Destiny. Only in our case all modes are actually good. They are all part of the same game, and the MP modes are not an afterthought. It should also be mentioned again that we do hear those seeking a co-op PvE experience and will implement it as soon as we have a competent enemy AI.
night time is not the only time for fun
While not a terribly big innovation, you may be interested to know that the same locations are explorable at different times of day and at different constantly shifting levels of electric power available to individual districts. This not only provides visual variety to experiencing each area, but also majorly rebalances maps with drastically different general visibility as well as illumination levels of their isolated parts.
there is a big difference
If the same gear or even cosmetic can be unlocked by both playing and paying, you may as well not have the playing part, since the paying option all but completely takes the achievement out of earning the unlock anyway. At that point you could also just not have the game part, because you are actively sending the message out to your players that discourages them from playing. The fun part of our game is the road to earning the next unlock, not the brief novelty of having it.
more than enough
Latest. Greatest. Yet-to-be-announced. All the audio tech.
Don’t worry about it. Listen to some music instead.
design that doesn’t hold you back
Minimizing the occurrence of “closing session due to server disconnect” type of situations is very important to us, and right now the primary way in which we are addressing it is by not creating systems that lead to those situations in the first place. Not everything needs to be server-side. In fact, being client-side greatly enhances smoothness of many actions, which is one of our biggest priorities regarding the game feel. Unfortunately, to combat cheating we most likely will never be able to have the game function without checking in with the server at least periodically even in menus and hideouts-when-solo, but in general we don’t have any plans on forcing the player to be in constant connection to the server no matter the scenario. For example, the “co-op shooter” PvE mode will be player-hosted, as well as the hideout/lobby environments, with host migration-type of failsafe. Single-player options for PvE modes will be entirely controlled by the client, only checking-in with the server before and after a session: the game will even be fully pausable and won’t react at all to your internet going down in the middle of a run for a few minutes. We don’t claim to be revolutionaries in this department: some games like Deep Rock Galactic already function in this way.
your very own
NEXUS is currently in pre-production and being worked on by a small all-remote team from the USA, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. At this moment we cannot offer any more paid positions, and for that reason — yes, we are looking for additional funding to expand and accelerate.
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