Developer Brimstone was kind enough to answer our questions for an Overthrown interview following the game’s Xbox release and Game Pass addition earlier this week. Overthrown is in Game Preview and hasn’t yet got its Overthrown achievements, but if you’ve given it a go you’ve likely noticed some interesting changes to the city-building idea: a magical crown? Superhero-style abilities? The fact that you can pick up and throw buildings like nobody’s business? Read on to find out about Overthrown’s gameplay and more!Overthrown has you working together with your friends, but the devs are still keen to see “all the ways players can sabotage each other”Game Preview release date: December 5Game Pass tier: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game PassPlatforms: Xbox Series X|S, PCSo, if you’re yet to try Overthrown: in this game, a soul-stealing crown grants magical powers, akin to superhero abilities, introduce utter chaos to the city-building genre. You have to run and manage your kingdom while defending it from its enemies, but those anime-style powers mean you can do things like lifting and throwing anything, zooming across water, and spinning into the air like a helicopter.”We wanted to make a sandbox game that players can just jump into and play, whether by themselves or with friends, and thought of different ways to achieve that. Being able to lift anything meant that players wouldn’t have to worry too much about where they placed a building as it could just be picked up and moved if they found a more optimal location later,” the Brimstone team explains.”Later on in development we took that mechanic and ran with it, because if the player is strong enough to lift buildings shouldn’t they also be able to run really fast, jump high, etc? In a third-person city builder the player needs to always be able to quickly return to the settlement to respond to any issues that might come up, and so having great mobility was a natural fit.”You can play with up to five friends. The person with the crown is able to use their moves more often, so it’ll be a bit of a race to get to the crown at the start, but everybody still has the same powers, and there’s no PvP combat to take into account — you’re all working together. That’s not to mean you still can’t mess with your friends, however, as one of the things the Brimstone team is most looking forward to is “seeing how players approach co-op — running away with stolen buildings, or throwing their friends out of the map or into bandit camps. Basically all the ways players can sabotage each other!””The crown generates charge faster the more living beings are nearby,” Brimstone continues, and adds that since that “feels a bit passive,” they’re going to take a look at other ideas such as having the player “obtain an immediate boost in charge whenever something dies nearby instead (friend or foe!), as well as an active soul-steal ability for faster healing in combat for the crowned player.”The devs are also planning to explore having in-game lore about the crown and how it fell into our hands closer to Overthrown’s 1.0 launch. As for our kingdom, we’ll have our own citizens to help out. “A goal from the start for development was that the player should always be free to leave the settlement to go explore, with the management being straightforward enough and designed to run by itself with NPC citizens,” Brimstone says.”The player decides where things should be built, but NPCs can rebuild and repair on their own, take jobs by themselves, and handle all gathering and even defense. The player is there to respond to emergencies or to boost resource gathering or set up new construction. The task priority system for each NPC job is intentionally kept really simple; the complexity comes from how dozens of jobs interact with each other, which depends on the player’s city planning and how outside threats might intervene.”Overthrown is out now for Xbox Game Pass. It’s in Game Preview, and Brimstone has a lot planned for upcoming content — here’s our Overthrown interview on Brimstone’s plans for Game Preview and Xbox achievements with more info!
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