Night Shift: Know Your Role

Welcome back, Operatives.

The work continues apace, and it's genuinely so exciting to see the player character classes and Devils taking shape before our eyes. We can't wait to share them with you... But we're gonna have to. We know some of you out there are climbing the walls waiting for playtest materials to be released, and all we can say is, "They'll be ready as soon as they're ready." We promise to keep you in the loop.

In the meantime, here's a tasty morsel to whet your appetite.

The Role of a Lifetime

In a previous update, Operative Slightly mentioned that we'd identified 12 distinct roles that each of the classes would slot into in different ways. But, cagey sod that he is, that was as much as he was willing to divulge at the time.

Well, word's come down from Division HQ that we're now cleared to release a little more of that juicy intel.

So Roles; what are they? Well in a nutshell, each class in the game is tagged with a Role, which is a way to tell at a glance what that class is built to do best. Are your powers and abilities designed to maximise damage output, provide support to your teammates, or to draw fire that others couldn't withstand? Or maybe a combination of these? Your Role will tell you.

Players are never handcuffed to their Role, though. Each class may be built with a Role in mind, but you as a player are free to deviate from them and play however you want. Just think of them as serving suggestions.

They're the kind of thing that is often implicit in game design -- there are probably a lot of character classes or archetypes in games that you may think of as 'support classes', and that's not by accident -- but in NS:DD, we're making those implicit concepts explicit. We think this will be a big help to players that are playing a class for the first time. And for everyone else, having a clear understanding of where each party member's strengths lie will help make the game feel both more tactical and more cinematic.

Pillars of Assault

The Roles are built around three core pillars: Tank, Support, and DPS. These are working titles and are likely to change, but the core concepts will stay the same.

These pillars give rise to 12 distinct Roles: 6 are pure, sitting fully inside one pillar - 6 are mixed, leading with one pillar and borrowing from a second. Mixed Roles carry a two-letter code to tell you which is the main pillar; so a T/S Role is Tank-first with a Support lean, while an S/T Role is Support-first with a Tank lean.

Without going into too much detail at this stage, here's a hand-dandy graphic to give you some hints as to what each role is designed to represent and achieve. Please feel free to speculate wildly.

Community Highlight

Right, that's yer lot for this time. If you want to keep up with the day-by-day goings on at Slightly Reckless, join our Discord!

You can chat about your games - past, present and future - share fan theories, speculation and headcanon, and there's even a channel for OC art. That's where Eli posted this adorably spooky sketch of three OCs that's giving 'Devil Division but make it The Beano'.

Until next time, squad.

// Operative Mill and the SRG Information Control Team out.

View on BackerKit