Epic Airship to Airship Combat
Today we’re going to get a look at another region of the world: snowy Firnfeld, long known to residents of Burren as simply “The Frozen North.”
The world has changed since the years of war, and as the skies darkened and the climate grew colder, the polar ice cap expanded and descended to cover over what once was a temperate region in the old world with permafrost and snow, burying its cities and their secrets and driving out all but the most hardened survivors.
There’s a map floating around that some enterprising ludic cartographer made showing the comparative sizes of a few particularly expansive game worlds. You may have seen it — it ranges all the way from Grand Theft Auto III at about three square miles to Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall at 62,394 square miles. That’s a lotta land.
I’ll hold off on revealing precise figures just now, but let’s just say that on that list, the map of Guns of Icarus Online should fall somewhere in between Fuel and Guild Wars: Nightfall, which is a pretty sizable chunk of real estate.
The world of Guns of Icarus is in an interesting place, historically speaking — a grand civilization devastated by relentless war and sunk into a post-apocalyptic ruin, so much progress and knowledge and technology lost, the people who remained scrabbling and struggling and surviving, barely.
But that’s not where we enter this world. We enter it later, as the tides are changing and something new is shifting beneath the surface of the restless sands. As more and more airships are built in makeshift dockyards in villages scattered across the Burren, as young men and women leave their homes and take to the skies to crew them, traders and adventurers and daredevils and visionaries, a new class is arising, with the potential to change the world. Airship captains and their crew are the new knights errant, the new merchant class, explorers and ambassadors and warriors. As trade routes open and formerly isolated communities come into contact with the wider world for the first time, a seismic shift is underway, and nothing can stay the same. Not that it will be easy. Not that it will be peaceful. Not that anyone knows what it will be like.
Because in the multiplayer campaign mode, those new adventurers changing the world are you, and we don’t know what you’ll do.