Spacers, welcome back to another transmission from The Shepherd!
As promised, today’s update is all about one of the most requested topics of the campaign: progression. We’ve seen your questions, we’ve read your comments, and we’re happy to finally share what we’ve been working on. But before that, we have a few smaller updates to share from the ITU front - because there’s always more excitement on the horizon!
Let’s chart the course!
SIGNAL CROSSOVER: Quick Updates from Kingdoms Forlorn!
This is actually a double update from ITU! While you're reading this, we’ve just released an update for Kingdoms Forlorn, our fantasy-themed project that’s transitioning from development into production.
In this update, we’ve released the Tabletop Simulator mod and the official Rulebook for Kingdoms Forlorn. If you’re curious to experience its dark, medieval, fantasy world, now is the perfect time to explore and see what awaits
Alright, back to Enormity...
The Glorious Empire of the Thousand Suns Campaign Spotlight... Again?
Wait, what’s this? We’ve uncovered something mysterious... Messages to Earth? What could it be? There’s only one way to find out - take a listen below!
Don’t forget, the Glorious Empire of the Thousand Suns Expansion is already available in the add-ons! If you’re ready to uncover the secrets and explore its content, make sure to secure your copy today!
Progression Spotlight!
The wait is over - it’s time to talk progression! This is one of the most anticipated topics, and who better to guide you through it than Marcin himself? Take it away, Marcin!
Hey guys and gals! The Update you’ve all been waiting for is here. The legendary spotlight, about progression through Enormity, is here. Let me just set your expectations to the correct level: it’s not going to be as sexy as the Intruder one! You can’t beat creature designs and miniature with fancy words – but I will try, nonetheless!
Ok, ready? Let’s go.
Progression in Enormity is a very broad term and can be applied to various parts of the design, all of which we’ll talk about today. In no particular order, you have narrative and custom campaign progression, which describes how you flow from one run to another, and what happens in-between. You have character progression, which is the development of your Spacer throughout the game. Intruder progression describes how Intruders grow in power alongside you, Gear progression is how you keep up and, finally, Map progression deals with how map exploration ties everything together.
Enormity is the most compact ITU game to date, but it may be the most ambitious one yet. Though Aeon Trespass: Twelve Sins of Herakles flirts with the idea of a an open-world, it is still delivered as discreet region maps, broken down with battles on a separate Clash Board. In Enormity, you have true continuity throughout the entire game, including exploration, firefights and even downtime for character development.
Campaign Progression
If you’ve played any open-world game, you know how hard it is to make a compelling narration within its framework – there are always problems with immediacy (‘the world needs saving, but let me explore this region for 20 hours’) and, on the other hand, railroading (aka RDR mission structure).
With Enormity, we wanted to create a sense of growing tension and immediacy, but leave the agency of the moment-to-moment gameplay, and runs, in the hands of players. These sensibilities are reflected in the Course deck, which is the main mechanic of progression.
In story terms, the Course deck represents the current course, and final destination, of the Shepherd. A typical Course deck consists of 15 core cards, 10-12 Run cards and 3-5 Incursion cards. In gameplay terms, each Run or Incursion card represents one gameplay session, an Extraction Run or a Boss Incursion.
Course cards are further tiered into 3 ‘parsecs’: white, red and black, representing you getting further away from your origin point, and into the void. As you might have guessed, the later the parsec, the more difficult the game becomes!
Usually, Course cards are not shuffled, but stacked on top of each other. The Dark Side of the Sun, our baseline campaign is made of 12 cards, 8-9 runs and 3-4 incursions, stacked parsec by parsec, with a boss incursion usually ending a parsec, as a sort of ‘proficiency check’ for Veteran mode players and ‘gatekeeper’ for Normal mode players.
The most important thing Course cards tell you is if you have to go on an Extraction Run or have a Boss Incursion. Sometimes these will specify exactly what type of run to go to, or which location to visit, other times it will be left up to you. In a Normal (Story) difficulty game, you can always go on additional Extraction Runs, to buff up your Spacers and their arsenal. On Veteran (Classic) difficulty the Shepherd always moves forward, each Run and Incursion card bringing you one inch closer to the end. Once you resolve the final Run or Incursion from your final Course card, your campaign will be over.
The second, more important thing Course cards tell you is… everything else. They contain initial and optional campaign objectives. They unlock new Locations on the Shepherd via the intratram system. They introduce new rules, lasting game effects and additional distraction, including ‘free’ runs, which allow you to cheat a bit and go on an additional supply run.
Simple? Simple.
Great. Because the Course cards are much more than a simple ‘timeline’ of runs and Incursions. In fact, I have lied to you, as there are actually 3 types of Course cards! Two of which you’ve already been introduced to: Run cards, which allow you to go on Extraction Runs, and Incursion cards, which force you to battle a fearsome Intruder Boss for your right to stay on the Shepherd.
There is a third type of Course cards, which get added to the deck from various sources (special campaign setups, story passages, various events, Discoveries, even Critical Wounds!): the Enormity Mythos cards. Mythos cards move your current narrative campaign or the setting’s metanarrative forward, reveal setting secrets and challenge your characters in a myriad of ways. Many Mythos cards seed Mythos Cycles, which are sequences of interconnected Mythos cards and Mythos book paragraphs. Think of them as side quests, loyalty missions, secret quests and more.
Furthermore, the course of the ship is set at the start of the campaign, but you may influence it, sometimes adding or subtracting Course cards.
In a narrative campaign, a part of your Course cards is special, tailor-made for the story you’re living through, with unique rules and interactions. In a narrative campaign, you may be urged to move to a certain part of the ship, but you still retain a great deal of autonomy on how to get there, and where to go during the less critical missions. In other words, even in the highly narrative campaigns, you retain agency, and no two campaigns will progress in the same way!
After each Run or Incursion, you have Downtime phase, in a safehouse Location, that deals with crafting, technology, character development and more (I’ll talk about it below). Once you’re done, you reveal the next Course card.
Custom Campaigns
Course cards are used to measure runs remaining until the end of the campaign, as well as to introduce new rules, discoveries, enemies, locations and more. The deck is highly customizable to make the game easier, harder or just to introduce expansions.
It is also perfect to run custom campaigns. In a custom campaign, you use universal Course cards, while any campaign-specific cards are placed in the game box. The Course deck is normally made out of 15 cards, called a campaign, but in a custom campaign it can be of any length (as long as you have enough cards!). A short campaign may be 10 cards long (Parsec I and II), while long ones can be 20 cards+. Generally, the more cards in a given Parsec, the easier the game will become over time, due to the accretion of Gear and experience – we suggest playing long custom campaigns on Veteran mode! However, I lied to you again. I told you there are 3 Parsecs, while in fact, there’s more. Let’s collectively call them Endgame Parsecs.
That’s right. You can, after you’re done with the 3 normal Parsecs which, for the easier Intruders, span levels 1-4, there is a whole other realm of difficulty waiting for you, with level 5-9, as well as level 4, or even 3, of the most powerful beings in the universe.
Being freed from the shackles of a narrative, does not mean you are aimless; you still have some general objectives, and your Course deck can, and will, still include Enormity Mythos cards. Secrets you find persist into other campaigns.
In other words, custom campaigns are not devoid of storytelling, especially that of the environmental and emergent kind, but they flow at a more steady pace, with more focus put on pure exploration and survival, and the challenge of Intruders ever-increasing in power – more Elden Ring in space than Dead Space.
Both narrative and custom campaigns make good use of matrix codes and codenames, which are used to trigger various story events and story chains.
Character Progression
Character progression in Enormity is rich and multilayered, focusing on several distinct spheres - Gear, Suits, specialization, experience and your expedition scale – these allow for a near endless build variety. We’ll talk about Gear in a sec!
Suits represent milestone advancements, as they provide a variety of increases for your Rubicon statline, Spacer tokens, skills and, most importantly, new Action cards. You can salvage, loot or craft suits, based on recovered technology. Like Gear (spoilers!), Suits are interchangeable between characters during the Downtime phase – there is no forced player possession here.
Experience! Who doesn’t like to gain experience. Your Spacers do. Generally, you will gain 1 Experience point per successful extraction run or incursion. On the back of each Character/Specialization card you’ll find a sprawling progression tree. Advancing a node usually costs 1 EXP, to keep it simple, though some juicy upgrades require 2+. You note your experience nodes on a small Spacer Sheet. What can you expect from those nodes? Well… there are Skill Nodes, Ability Nodes, Auto-bonus Nodes, Slot Nodes, Synergy Nodes, Action Nodes, Antinomy Nodes, Specialization Nodes and, yes, Other Nodes for the most special enhancements!
Specializations. We’ve talked about them a bit. These are those expensive 2+ EXP nodes. Specializations represent your characters particular professions, proficiencies and ship stations. The Enormity Demo has 5 pre-generated named characters with fixed careers, belonging to one of the 4 major divisions, while the full game will include additional rules and components to chart your career across several positions and specializations. Specializations are tied to characters, so when a character dies, so does this character’s progression!*
* Well, not really. As I mentioned in a previous Update, Enormity uses a body sleeves system to circumvent all that dying business with a meta-solution. Simply put, both gameplay and the narrative support the idea of ‘Spacer lives’. In Enormity, your Spacer can die. Duh. When that happens, they eject a consciousness black box. This black box is then used to 3d bio-print a new body for you in the EPR (Emergency Printer Room). You can do it as many times you want, provided you have enough bio filament for the printer. On normal difficulty, you have plenty filament. On Veteran, not so much. Maybe there’s some more aboard the Shepherd – otherwise, sooner or later you will run out and face the horrifying possibility of true death.
Specializations change your whole Character card, offering a new Rubicon statline, new abilities, new Skill bonuses, Action cards and so on! They also come with their own progression tree.
Finally, there is the mission scale, sometimes called a ‘Nano-Kardashev’, a kind-of world-wide or campaign-wide experience players accumulate while playing in a persistent world. This progression involves knowledge of secrets, shortcuts, lore and alien technology, and provides benefits to any character within the current campaign, and in case of stickers, persistent advancement throughout all of your campaigns, and is based on collecting Research Points. These may include new Antinomy cards, new Strategems, new Tech Station schematics and new safehouse stations that grant you access to additional meta-game options, like scouting, forward positioning or new side mission types.
Finally? I said finally? Well, I lied again. I mentioned you will use a small Spacer Sheet to track your character’s career. It will include all sorts of information, like a Character name, Player name, Skill Bonuses and Auto-bonuses. It will also include more ominously sounding progression paths: a Sanity track, a Transcendence track and an Inner Dark track. That’s right!
Intruder Progression
Not tired yet? We’ve passed the 2000 word mark by now, and we still have some ways to go. Intruder progression is the most straight-forward of the bunch. Each baseline Intruder and boss Intruder have 1-9 progressively more difficult levels. As our returning backers know, we don’t settle for stat boosts, and add new and unique traits to each level, so that fighting against a higher-level creature becomes a completely new experience, requiring new tactics and new weapons.
Intruder levels are not tied to Parsecs, but to Runs and Incursions, although in Normal mode you can halt that progression by going on the aforementioned ‘loot/exp’ runs. Also, of note, is that Intruder levels are not equal. In other words, a Level 1 Mothman and a Level 1 Conductor share exactly one thing: the number one. In actual power, a Level 1 Conductor is somewhere between Levels 3 and 4 of the Mothman. And yes, it goes to 9.
Each baseline Intruder also has a few Unique specimens and the frequency of their appearance can really swing the difficulty pendulum.
So, that’s the main curve. Besides that, we have the variants, which are usually harder versions of a particular baseline or boss Intruder. These are either discreet or secret versions, hidden somewhere around the Sheperd, their level fixed, or they can scale just as well as their basic versions.
Finally… yes, finally, there is Intruder Knowledge. As you fight a certain type of Intruder, you will get intimately acquainted, learn its quirks and patterns and gain some bonuses against it. However, this is a two-way relationship. If your enemy is smart, they will learn your patterns too and adapt to them, becoming more deadly. And if they are smarter…
Gear Progression
It wouldn’t be a crawler without Gear! Gear is all the equipment and weapons you find during your extraction runs, loot from bosses, craft at a tech station or gain in another of a variety of more or less esoteric ways. There’s 300+ in the Core Game alone!
Gear progression is tied to Parsecs, Locations, Intruders, story events and technology breakthroughs, so you are free to explore different avenues of the sprawling weapon tree, and I can still guarantee you won’t see everything in several campaigns, not even long custom ones.
The most common source of Gear are the caches you find during runs. They yield a random item from the current biome/zone pool (a zone covers several Locations connected by a theme or purpose), with rarer loot being represented by 1 card. The loot pools get refreshed when passing into a new Parsec, so there is always reason to backtrack to a previous section.
The other source of Gear, and one that you can control, is crafting during the Downtime Phase. Simply put, your safehouse has some basic tech stations with basic schematics. These allow you to reforge looted Gear into something new and better. All you need is that baseline Gear and some Location-specific Engrams. Engrams are resources gained from runs, and they differ from zone to zone.
You gain new schematics databases – recipes – from the story, from bosses and through scavenging. The most powerful schematics are those for new suits. Though suits are not Gear, I decided to talk about this feature here, because it ties heavily to the Engram loop. When you gain access to new Suits, its either a single Suit, a schematic for a Suit or a Suit Bay.
Suit Bays give you unlimited access to a given Suit. On the other hand, a single Suit is just that; if you die wearing it, there is a chance that you cannot retrieve it and lose it forever. It seems Suits are harder to replace than your biological sleeves… A happy medium is Suits schematics; you gain access to the crafting process and can create as many as you wish, as long as you have the resources for it. You are still limited in the number of Suits you can field to the number of cards in the game!
As a novum for our games, Gear is perishable. No, no, don’t go away! You are simply limited by the size of your upgradable stash and need to decide what to keep and what to recycle for additional resources, and there are ways to safeguard your most precious possessions. Don’t worry. Also, Gear is interchangeable between characters, not locked in.
Map Progression
Finally, we arrive at the Shepherd’s map, the piece that ties the whole thing together. We’ve made a big deal out of the open-world aspect of the game, of the free-flowing nature of exploration going from Location to Location across two interchangeable books… but it truly is a game-changer.
Let me reiterate what you can already read on the main page: there is only one board, that of the mysterious starship itself. This board is made of unique, hand-crafted locations that sprawl into a near infinite maze of interconnected sections, hidden passages, shortcuts and arenas. Even your downtime – the part of the game where you develop your characters, craft gear and make startling technological breakthroughs – happens on that very same board, in safehouse-type locations, with your actions and opportunities reflected by the equipment provided within, right there on the board page!
Each Location in Enormity belongs to a biome/zone, a region of several map pages that shares some common elements, like Intruder ecology (which Intruders you’ll most likely meet there), environmental hazards and additional rules (like lack of gravity or oxygen), as well as unique Engrams/resources. And there is, of course, the Gear loot deck. Each of the Shepherd’s zones has one. The loot deck contains items unique to this part of the ship.
As you move from Location to Location, you unlock new Extraction Points, which later double as Insertion Points, where you can start a new run. This way, you’re creating an intra-tram fast travel system across the ship. It’d be horrible if that went out at some point.
Some Locations are the lair of a particular boss. Sometimes, the narrative will lead you straight up to their doorstep, as it does in the TTS Demo, other times you may stumble in there unknowingly. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the occupant won’t be home. Sometimes you will have to play an impromptu Lair Incursion! Oftentimes you will be unprepared – but that’s the risk you’re running, scavenging a mysterious, long-lost vessel.
And speaking of moving across the Locations – sometimes your current Course card will tell you where to go, especially if it’s a heavily-narrative gameplay moment, but most of the time you’re free to go where your danger-sense takes you. This means that your adventures onboard the Shepherd will be different from other players: different Location, different Intruders, different Gear and Weapons.
Finally – and this is the final finally of this Update! – Locations are tiered by their difficulty. The deeper you go on the ship, the more dark and transformed your surroundings will become, the higher the difficulty of the ‘local’ Intruders and the greater the chance at good loot – at the price of death. There’s a great intersection here, between the Parsec system and the Location system, working in tandem to adjust the game’s overall difficulty to both the time and place you find yourselves in.
Expansion Progression
Of course, a final lie, that was not the last paragraph. This one will be short though, I promise! Expansion narrative campaigns follow the same progression as the Core Game, and incorporate some of its Locations and Intruders, sometimes in a new light, sometimes at new levels, to keep a high variety of experience.
This works the other way round too – practically all Expansion content, save for the actual narrative – can be readily used in your custom campaigns, as Locations and their ecologies seamlessly connect to the main (and that includes the away missions on alien planets!).
If you’ve taken all that for granted, try this: due to how your progression through Locations works, i.e. that you are usually free to choose where to go, even within a narrative campaign, the Expansion content may also appear in your Core Game campaigns!
Whew. That’s it. That’s Enormity’s progression, summed up and abridged. I am totally spent and will go to bed now, regardless of the hour 😉 Maria, take it away!
Closing Transmission
Oh... well.. that’s actually all for today, Spacers! 😁 We hope you enjoyed this update and the exciting reveals Marcin shared. Let us know your thoughts below - we can’t wait to hear from you! See you in the comments and on The Shepherd!
