Bytten

Kicking off live from the show floor at PAX East last weekend, Muse Games (www.gunsoficarus.com) has once again turned to Kickstarter to launch the next phase of its revolutionary airship combat game, Guns of Icaurs Online. The expansion, Guns of Icarus Online: Adventure Mode, takes the game’s unique team-based PvP battle system and places it in a fully realized persistent world, keeping the co-operative elements and expanding the game to include PvE, massive AI-controlled enemy ships, biplanes, missions, player progression, and a dynamic system of towns and player factions that evolves day by day as players actively affect and shape the world. Find out more at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/musegames/guns-of-icarus-onlineadventure-mode

1. AI Director: At the heart of a good PvE experience is a smart, responsive AI that can go toe-to-toe with players and scale up or down on the fly to keep the experience challenging and entertaining. This pillar will enable the creation of co-op and solo missions to complement competitive PvP.

2. Socio-Economic System: Adventure mode will add a world map of towns and trade routes, with six player factions and a fully dynamic resource economy. Missions are generated dynamically to help or hinder the towns and the factions that control them, depending on their circumstances and needs. Completing missions earns status in certain quarters and notoriety in others, enabling players to rise in the ranks of their chosen faction, unlock new opportunities and perks, and exert an even greater influence over the world.

3. World-Building Tools: A robust toolset is necessary to build an expansive world map with diverse and varied environments. This pillar involves the creation of new tools and processes to speed up the development of new maps and locales using a combination of procedural generation and manual composition. While the existing PvP maps have all been assembled painstakingly by hand, worldbuilding on the scale of Adventure Mode will require a whole new way of doing things.

Just four days into the campaign, Muse Games is already well past 25% of the way to the first funding goal. In addition to numerous digital goodies, physical swag, and exclusive rewards, Kickstarter backers can gain access to the currently released game on Steam (Skirmish Mode), as well as Adventure Mode upon its release! Take flight with Muse Games at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/musegames/guns-of-icarus-onlineadventure-mode

Muse Games is an independent game development studio in New York City that creates original 3D games using the Unity engine. Their flagship products, CreaVures and Guns of Icarus Online, are available on Steam. Find out more at www.musegames.com