“ Klose is still quite proud to admit that The Surge is still very much in the spirit of Dark Souls.

Much like Lords of the Fallen, which Deck13 Interactive co-created with CI Games last year, the studio’s upcoming action-RPG The Surge Klose won't tell me exactly what "The Surge" refers to aside from it being a dramatic event in the game's story, but he does provide a few hints into what it means for the game's dystopian setting."The universe of The Surge is a lot about broken systems, like technical systems but also economic systems and society itself," he says. "And it's about systems that seem to have long collapsed and still go on and on every day, not noticing their own death, up to a point of total failure which triggers the Surge."The Surge thus provides the foundation for a tale that's seemingly meant to be as cautionary as it is action-packed. Klose tells me that the story pulls from contemporary political concerns—things like climate change, bio-electronics, augmentation, and the "increasingly creepy role of mega-corporations"—and uses them to create what he says is an equally realistic and eccentric tale that "might remind [you] more of BioShock than Dark Souls."And that's where the main character comes in. As in Lords of the Fallen, he'll be a specific character rather than one created by players, as Klose notes the studio likes "strong characters" like Harkyn from Lords and "complex heroes like Lara Croft and the Witcher." But this won't be some battle-hardened soldier from Grizzlestan; in fact, he's apparently not a trained warrior in any way. The twist, though, is that he walks around in an exoskeleton that has partially made biological modifications to his body, although Klose is careful not to spoil the reasons why he wears the suit and the accompanying implants.It's a convenient setup that goes a long way toward explaining why there won't be a lot of guns or ranged combat in The Surge despite its futuristic setting. The player, in fact, initially doesn't have any weapons at all but instead crafts makeshift ones from tech he finds on his journey. Even when ranged combat figures in later, it merely supports the core emphasis on "powerful, duel-like combat" rather than dominating it. Even the bosses have industrial rather than military origins, and Klose admits the team had fun thinking about how their purely industrial functions could be applied to combat situations."From legs and thrusters to cutting devices—if a gigantic, robotic industrial machine wanted to fight, how would it go about doing that? The results are superbly exciting," he says.Even more exciting, though, are Deck13's plans for the combat, which complement the grim setting by placing a heavy emphasis on dismemberment. It's not just for a gory show, either. As one of the game's main methods of character progression, it'll also allow players to target specific limbs on the enemies they encounter and use them to create new modifications for the exoskeleton."It depends on how he attacks his enemy and what parts he's targeting," he says. "This is what we call 'How you fight is what you loot.'"After spending so much time in Fallout 4 recently, the limb-targeting system sounded a little like that series' V.A.T.S. setup, and I worried that it would slow down the action that usually worked so well in Lords. But Klose assures me that's not the case."It's totally fluid and, opposed to Fallout, works without any pause in combat," he says. "I think it feels very elegant and natural, and it doesn't even make controls more complicated."Indeed, despite taking such steps to differentiate his studio's upcoming game, Klose is still quite proud to admit that The Surge is still very much in the spirit of Dark Souls. He notes the team has made other combat changes, though, such as shifting the focus on rolls to a "fast dashing move" that better complements the hero's exoskeleton."As with Lords of the Fallen, we think of the Souls games as an emerging genre and we'd love to see more games in that space," he says. "This time, our main combat system is more different and more complex, our scenario is fresh, the locations are built in a very different way to Lords.""Our future justifies some of the more interesting mechanics, because it's built on a realistic framework," Klose says. "It's a logical consequence of many different things, rather than simply dreamt up."

Leif Johnson is a contributing editor to IGN who lives on a ranch in the wilds of South Texas. You can chat him up on Twitter at @leifjohnson