Discover Guns of Icarus Online

This quest to discover Guns of Icarus Online was automagically added, as described at I'm gonna do a silly thing that adds hundreds of posts to the quest board... :slight_smile:

I just heard people complimenting each other accents… :slight_smile:

Folks are hanging out in chat making WW2 references and being insensitive. I suppose that is expected for a war game. Makes me not want to play.

That’s sad. I played it at a LAN party and thoroughly enjoyed the aesthetic. We’re flying?? In an airship?? In these gorgeous mountains??

Running and jumping around trying to fix the ship was fun, too.

At a LAN it sounds amazing. Few games have given me a rush the way a close match in GoIO does. And since I’m unlikely to invite others to play, let’s get into it!

First, there’s the music. It is so relaxing, until it isn’t. You can daydream, walking around the beautiful steampunk vehicle, hearing the rattles of metal and tightening of leather as the ship dangles from the balloon. And then… an enemy is sighted…

There are these beats, a constant war drum, subtle to not distract, but constant enough to ensure you are paying attention. It keeps you on edge, until the droning thud is dispersed in a piercing shout of gun fire or the consuming rush of fire enveloping every metal thing on the ship, for some reason…

Of course the sound scape and indistinct land forms (it works, from an air ship everything is fuzzy in detail!) aren’t what makes the game, so those central game loops: it is basically a very decent strategy ship game.

The class loadout system essential allows a freeform system where any role can be fulfilled by another, but with limited slots on any ship (four including captain), each person will have a natural assignment on a given ship. Surprisingly, there are enough customizability available to mix up the configurations and assignments. Classic stuff, like building “glass cannons” or “long-range sniper platforms”.

In Battlefield 2, there were commanders, players that basically hid somewhere and played “UAV map” to drop supplies and bomb the enemy. There were also these helicopters that a squad leader could pilot, and their squad members could spawn on them. The result was being able to fly way high, and drop folks anywhere needed.

When two opposing helicopters got into a dogfight, it was amazing and thrilling and felt emergent rather than scripted.

GoIO is that game! They provide just enough options to make every match a unique experience, and let a few core game loops fill in the rest.

It got me thinking about RPGs I could run to emulate ship combat and the type of drama that the frankly inspiring backgrounds are indicated by the factions in the game. I was thinking Aether Sea (Aether Sea • A World of Adventure for Fate Core - Evil Hat Productions, LLC | Fate Worlds (Slim) | DriveThruRPG.com), sans fantasy races, and tweaked to aesthetic, might be a quick and dirty replacement.

Of course it won’t quite replace the visceral experience of murder-ballooning folks out of the beautiful, toxic sky. :slight_smile:

Actually, and I’ll have to double-check, I actually think Sails Full of Stars (Sails Full of Stars • A World of Adventure for Fate Core - Evil Hat Productions, LLC | Fate Worlds (Slim) | DriveThruRPG.com) is even more on point (circa 1850s). The thing I need to double-check is there might be a country-management component in this game, so like a mini-Risk game happening in the, um, macrocosm. Which is funny, because I played GoIO before they had factions or the Alliance sequel, and there is now this world map one can spend coins, and it seems super boring. Not sure how much better it would be at the table.

Or maybe I’m thinking of a different RPG. This is why I need game pages. :face_with_monocle: