Satellite Reign

We recently had the chance to get some in-depth info about Satellite Reign directly from the team crafting the project. The upcoming strategy game follows in the spirit of 1996’s Syndicate Wars, which makes sense, since programmer Mike Diskett was a big part of that series back in the day.

We put some questions to several members of the development team at 5 Lives Studios to learn more about what makes Satellite Reign such an unusual and surprising game. 

What is the storyline setup for Satellite Reign?

Mitch Clifford: Satellite Reign is set in a future world where governments have become nothing more than a facade. The real power lies with mega-corporations, who bend society to their will via wealth, power and brute force. One such mega-corporation, Dracogenics, has risen far above all others due to an innovation they created which all of the world’s rich and powerful have become reliant on. The result is a gritty, dystopian future full of violence, corruption and oppression.

Players will be part of a new, smaller corporation, tasked with commanding a team of agents to take control from Dracogenics. Whether the player wants to help the population break free of oppression, or simply use them as tools to achieve their goals is up to them.

What are the main character classes in the game, and what makes each distinct?

Chris Conte: The Soldier, Support, Infiltrator and Hacker. 

The Soldier is fairly straight forward. The Soldier is the agent you want wielding the biggest guns and is going to be able to take the biggest beating. 

The Support’s main role is to make sure every other agent is performing at their best. The Support is your field medic and has abilities that give offensive and defensive bonuses to your team.

The Infiltrator is the ninja-assassin of the group. With the greatest agility and stealth abilities, the Infiltrator will be the head of your team if you are planning on playing a more stealthy game. 

Finally, the Hacker. The Hacker is the tech-specialist of the group, able to hack into security terminals to shut down CCTV cameras or hijack the neural implants of civilians or enemies and use them as meat shields.

To what degree can I customize each of my characters? How does augmentation work?

Conte: The classes themselves are more of a starting point and a “flavor” for each agent. The classes allow each agent to have their own strengths and bonuses, but the customisation of the agents really does allow you to build your team to fit the type of playstyle you like.

Your Soldier may be geared towards combat, but you can still equip him with stealth generators, silenced weapons and smoke grenades if you would rather your team play as a stealthier group. 

On the flip side, if you wanted to kit your group out to be a more aggressive bunch, you could equip your hacker with attack drones, shields and laser weapon overclockers to become more of a tech-savvy killing machine.

Augmentations each fit into one of the agents 4 augmentation slots: Head, arms, body and legs. Throughout the course of the game, the player will find, steal or buy augmentations for their agents, each with their own pros and cons. If we just look at the chest augmentations, the player may be able to purchase an augmentation that gives better health regeneration and greater max health, or one that enables breathing in poisonous gas without taking damage, or perhaps one with a highly volatile core that detonates once the agent dies. Each option will let the player further customise their agents to play the way they want to.

Next Page: What ideas carry over from Syndicate Wars?

Satellite Reign has been described as a spiritual successor to Syndicate Wars. What specific features carry over from Syndicate Wars? And in what ways does Satellite Reign venture into new territory?

Mike Diskett: There are a couple of features that we share with Syndicate Wars. One is the setting, a futuristic cyberpunk dystopian city, heavily inspired by Bladerunner. The other is the gameplay mechanism of controlling a handful of units (cybernetically enhanced human agents) in an RTS style game.

In Satellite Reign, we have added the class-based system to differentiate how the agents are used in the city, and to open up the number of ways of interacting with the world and its inhabitants. This increases the number of ways a player can tackle an engagement with the enemy. The world is no longer a series of discrete missions set within small segregated areas. Instead, it’s a seamless open-world city with a very open sandbox-like mission system.

Where does Satellite Reign fall in the balance between linear, crafted mission design, and open world exploration and choice in how to tackle a mission?

Diskett: Satellite Reign effectively gives the player one goal at the start, take down Dracogenics, the corporation running the city. You could theoretically go straight to the final encounter and attempt to take on the CEO, but you would be massively underpowered, underarmed, and under-augmented, so you’d likely to get your ass kicked. So the whole game is about the player arming up for the final assault. To this end, the whole game is effectively a series of non-linear objectives that the player can either uncover or to some extent make up for themselves. For example the city is full of CCTVs that can call up unwanted security to deal with whatever illegal activity you are engaged in. A wise player might choose to attack and destroy the central CCTV hub facility to cause a temporary shutdown of all CCTVs before attacking an installation. Destroy the CCTV hub might never be presented as a mission to the player. It’s something they can come up with themselves, having simply seen the facility on the map. How much we drip feed the player mission objectives and how much they come up with for themselves is something we are balancing at the moment.

The city contains many armoured and defended facilities. Objectives often provide alternative ways into a facility or make things easier once inside, or perhaps provide useful gear to tackle a facility. For example, a mission might result in you obtaining a grapple device that allows you to zip wire down into a compound undetected.

One of the main aims of Satellite Reign is to provide the player with a varied number of strategies to take down a facility. More and more strategies open up as you gain more skills, abilities and augmentations. For example, there’s the obvious guns-blazing approach, a more stealthy approach, or perhaps you sidestep the whole thing, acquire blackmail material and get direct access to a facility that way. Perhaps you bribe a guard to turn a blind eye, then use your infiltrators cloaking to bypass a security check and get into the main vault of a R&D facility. Perhaps you hijack a civilian’s neural implant and send him guns-blazing to distract a corporate patrol. 

One of the great things for us as developers is seeing players post videos of the Steam Early Access build completing objectives in ways we had never even thought of.

How does combat play out in Satellite Reign? Once combat begins, are there options to strategize and slow things down, or does everything play out in real time?

Conte: Combat will play out differently depending on your play style and how your agents are kitted out.

If you are more of a stealth player and your agents are setup to try and sneak around everywhere, you may have your agents equipped with smoke grenades and simply throw them down, cloak your agents and try and run and hide from the fight. 

If you are happy to just plough through any trouble that comes your way, you may equip your agents with the biggest guns, armor and shielding you can find and just start shooting like crazy. 

If you are somewhere in between you may want to put some points into your supports “Team Stims” ability that lets you temporarily slow time and maneuver your agents into cover. From there you can use items like emp grenades to briefly stun enemies or disable sentry guns in order to buy yourself more time to get your agents where you want them.

Cover plays an important role no matter what play style you choose. Both enemies and your agents receive defensive bonuses by getting into cover, so it is critical you to keep your head down when under fire and to try and outflank your enemies before they outflank you.

Next Page: Learn about the city of Satellite Reign, and the emergent qualities of the world.

Describe the city through which you explore in the game. What are the different districts to explore in the city, and what sort of visual and gameplay identity does each district have?

Clifford: The city in Satellite Reign consists of seemingly perpetually rain-slicked, neon-lit streets. Police patrols are here and there, keeping up appearances, but the corporate soldiers are the true force to be reckoned with. They keep the citizens on their toes, and have very little patience for trouble-makers.

While the Dracogenics security forces are the most prominent throughout the city as a whole, each district can be considered the “turf” of different corporations. Downtown, where you’ll find the Red Light nightlife strip and Chinatown, is primarily kept in-check by Dracogenics themselves, with a few installations patrolled by their respective corporate holders. The streets here are a melting pot of different social backgrounds, from punks in alleyways to the elite looking to indulge their inner desires.

The Industrial district is largely controlled by the (still presently unnamed) Russian conglomerate. The industrial district is what you’d expect. Manufacturing, warehouses, shipping docks, and chemical plants. If you’re after better armour and ballistic weapons, this is the place to go.

The Grid is the most “futuristic” area of the city, and almost looks like it was designed by Steve Jobs. Clean, minimalist, stark. It’s controlled by a group known as “The Eternals.” Technically a corporate entity, they’re more like ideological movement, or even a religious organization. They believe advancement through augmentation is the future of humanity, ultimately wanting to rid themselves of any trace of their biological origins. Because of this, The Grid is a great place to go for augmenting and upgrading your agents’ abilities.

Lastly is the CBD. Again, Dracogenics are the most prominent here, with installations from other corporations scattered around. Highrises and corporate hotshots are abound, making it a great place to get yourself some more researchers, or to “acquire” some additional funding for your cause.

How would a player utilize propaganda to solve a problem or mission in the game?

Diskett: Propaganda is a way to influence the civilian population of an area of the city. Within the city are giant video boards playing adverts, or general corporate propaganda, or perhaps just a pleasant sunset scene. An example of using propaganda would be to hack a data terminal connected to a video billboard, upload an illegal underground anti corporation video, this could draw a crowd of civilians who then enraged by what they have seen effectively riot through the streets killing corporate soldiers. The player could use this simply as a distraction or as a way to frontal assault a large corporate headquarters with an army of angry civilians. 

Satellite Reign seems to focus strongly on encouraging emergent gameplay moments. Can you offer some examples you’ve seen in the game of interactions or events that were unexpected?

Diskett: As we balance gameplay and tweak gameplay we often see unexpected behaviours; one time a group of corporate soldiers patrolling the streets arrested a civilian, who resisted and was shot. He managed to get a shot on the corporate soldier, causing the soldiers to treat all civilians nearby as enemies, and this resulted in this one small squad of heavily armed soldiers to go on a killing spree through the whole city killing every civilian they saw, leaving behind just a bloodbath of corpses. I’ve seen corporate soldiers kill a hobo for pissing in a side alley, I’ve seen guards go AWOL from duty because they were hungry and went and bought some noodles.

It appears as if different players might have different final goals for their squad. Is there an ultimate end goal or game conclusion in Satellite Reign?

Conte: As Mitch mentioned earlier, Dracogenics is the big enemy corporation that is in control of a technology that allows people to “transfer” their consciousness from one body into another. This technology effectively allows people to live forever in freshly-grown clone bodies, and has rocketed Dracogenics to the top of the corporate food chain. The player will steal, bribe and fight their way through a city filled with rival corporations and seedy underworlds in order to infiltrate the Dracogenics headquarters and take control of the transfer technology for their own end.

When will the complete version of Satellite Reign be released? Any plans for versions other than PC?

Conte: The planned release for Satellite Reign is mid-2015, and we’re presently only targeting Windows, Mac and Linux. We may assess other platforms sometime after the PC release.