We’re currently experiencing the death of genre in video games. It’s great for developers, who are constantly innovating and finding new ways to stretch the boundaries of game design without being beholden to genre conventions. It’s great for players too, who get to enjoy experiences built out of the best parts of every kind of game. The only person it sucks for is games writers like me, because it’s getting harder and harder to describe anything.
Upcoming time travel roguelike Out of Time is a perfect example. The reason why you see so many “X game meets Y game” descriptions these days is because games like Out of Time refuse to fit nicely in any one box. I just called ita roguelike, but Out of Time is also a multiplayer RPG with MMO dungeon-inspired gameplay and Bullet Heaven systems, all mixed with some new ideas you haven’t seen in any of those genres before.
Maybe if it really takes off, we’ll call other games “Out Of Timelikes” someday, but for now, the best way to describe it is with a question: what if there was an MMO with nothing but dungeons? Out of Time is the answer.
World Of Warcraft Warped
It’s actually pretty fitting that Out of Time takes such a postmodern approach to genre because it perfectly complements the game’s themes. Following a cataclysmic event called The Shattering, past, present, and future have been fused into a single chaotic timeline. Your party of adventurers (up to four players) will travel to a variety of time periods to clear temporal tangles, take on hordes of time-twisted enemies, and collect endless piles of loot.
Out of Time will launch with three eras consisting of four maps each: medieval, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and modern. Each season new eras from the past, present, and future will be introduced, each with their own challenges and period-specific gear to farm. Upcoming eras include prehistoric, antiquity, three kingdoms,cyberpunk, and solar punk utopia.
From an MMO-style social hub, you’ll party up, customize your character’s avatar and mount, and build a team-synergistic loadout before heading into one of the available time periods branching off of the central hub,Crash Bandicoot: Warped-style. Each mission has its own pool of loot, allowing you to target farm the items you want to create or upgrade specific builds.
There are a few unique systems that make Out of Time unique among similar multiplayer roguelikes, such asRisk of Rain 2orGunfire: Reborn. The first is its gear-based class system. Instead of choosing a class and collecting gear for that class, the gear you wear determines what your class is. And, just like every other aspect of Out of Time, that class can be an amalgamation of several classes, depending on the gear you have on.
Gear is specific to the era it comes from, and collecting items from different eras will give you more variety in class building. you’re able to combine a Druid’s cloak with cyberpunk rocket boots and a medieval knight’s sword to create a completely custom class. Developer Manticore Games says there are over 190 million gear combinations to choose from, so it looks like there’s a lot of depth in the loadouts and character building.
When you join a party there’s a cool visual that shows how balanced your team composition is. That way if you lean too much in any direction, you may swap some of the gear to help your team have a better balance.
A New Take On Dungeon Runs
The gameplay in Out of Time is similar to an MMORPG dungeon run with a few interesting twists. The goal is to clear the tangle off of the map within 15 minutes, and you do that by simply moving around the map with your team, using your combined aura to erase the dark tangle that creates a fog of war around you. As you clear the tangle, enemies will spawn, and the faster you clear, the more enemies you’ll have to deal with. There’s an interesting balancing act at play. You have to clear the map quickly, but not so fast that you become overwhelmed by enemies.
The players in your party are all connected to each other by a tether. As long as you’re close enough to each other, your tether will stay connected, and while it’s connected, you will all share each other’s stats. This means your team’s tank will make everyone else tanky, and your DPS will make everyone deal high damage. So while the traditional class trinity is relevant, your role isn’t as narrow.
When you break your tether you will lose the stats from your teammates and start taking damage over time. It’s almost certain death to go off alone, but it can be useful at times to quickly clear more of the tangle.
There’s a lot more to a build than just your stats and how you share them with your teammates, though. Your gear determines the abilities you have, and finding synergies between yours and your teammates' abilities can give you a huge advantage. In the developer preview I watched, one player created pylons that would electrocute enemies when they got near, and another player created bouncing saw blades that he would use to push enemies into the pylons.
As you progress through each run, you’ll gather experience and level up as a team, giving you an opportunity to upgrade your abilities with better stats, or even evolve them into a new version with extra effects. In Vampire Survivors fashion, you have to keep your level higher than the enemy’s levels so you don’t get overrun.
Also like Vampire Survivors, you auto attack enemies within range.
If you clear the tangle in time you’ll be able to take on the boss. While not as technical as an MMO raid boss, you’ll still have to learn their attack patterns to avoid taking damage (GTFO mod when?). Defeat the boss and you’ll get a piece of gear, as well as a pile of upgrade materials you’re able to use to permanently improve your gear.
Altogether, Out Of Time looks to be hitting that sweet spot between fresh and familiar. Dungeons have always been my favorite part of MMOs anyway, and I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting my Risk of Rain 2-loving friends to give this one a shot. Out of Time is launching on the Epic Game Store this fall.Preorders are available today.
