Greetings, fellow Kindred! So you’ve just guzzled down two sodas, a pack of Pop Rocks and three mint cappuccinos. Your hands are trembling with excitement, your mind racing with possibilities: you can taste colors, juggle knives and cover five blocks in under 9.08 seconds. The night’s brimming with life, and the slow ones will be left to bite the dust… but make sure you take care of all your business before your inevitable sugar crash. That’s right! This month is all about Celerity and all the cool things you’ll be able to do with it.

Celerity is a give-and-take. You tap into borrowed power for just an instant, just a glimpse of greatness: a punch swung fast and hard, rounding the corner before your opponent has the time to react. With this Discipline, we wanted to simulate this feeling of ebb and flow, which is perfectly exemplified in the Discipline’s core abilities.

The Discipline passive is Restlessness. In combat, instead of having baseline turns with two actions, you will have a turn with three actions followed by a “winding down” turn of one action. This lets the player feel that burst of speed and power, making sure they’re back in a safe spot before the rush inevitably runs out and you’re left as a sluggish, drowsy sack of vegetables. For social situations, Restlessness turns you into that annoying, hyperactive bundle of indecision that people will either love or hate. Your next Physical roll will receive a boost, with a cost… taking that roll with a Celerity user in the party will severely debuff your party’s next Mental roll but boost your next Social roll. This process is cyclical in nature (it will eventually come back to a Physical boost), as you don’t have time to concentrate on things for a long period of time and would rather be doing a thousand other things.

The second component you need to worry about when playing Celerity is the Exhaustion mechanic. Most combat abilities in Celerity are very, very powerful, but performing them will leave you Exhausted and branded with a negative effect. We have not yet decided whether we want an universal Exhaustion debuff after using one of these abilities (you can’t take offensive actions in the same turn and your movement is limited) or if we want every ability to have their own, unique Exhaustion debuff. As an example, Flower of Death allows you to go into the middle of a battlefield and pop everyone in the area until your bullets give out; however, if you don’t outright end the battle then and there your character will be a sitting duck until your next turn. The Celerity lifestyle is risky, and we want players to embrace that.

As in other tactical games such as Xcom, things like ascending a ladder or interacting with technology will usually cost you an action; the passives in this tree are designed to let speed devils such as yourself bypass such menial nuisances. Throughout passive nodes in the tree you’ll be able to interact with locks, reload, hide bodies and use offensive abilities without spending an action. At times, you can even bend the rules of the game: Adrenaline Rush lets you move an additional time if you land a killing blow on an enemy.

Now let’s be honest, passives in RPGs are usually not that interesting on their own: it’s when you put them all together that you start to feel that surge of power. You have a Restlessness-empowered turn, so you have 3 actions: you empty your magazine on someone, reload (no action), move to reposition, empty your magazine on someone else, reload (no action) and end your turn. You could also move, activate a trap (no action), move again and use your last action to push a hapless chump into the trap you just created. As mentioned before, AFTER you’re done with your killing spree your teammates better have your back, because your next turn, when the bad part of Restlessness and your Exhaustion passives kick in, is not gonna be pretty.

What would a Celerity user be without some active combat oomph? These are some of our favorite combat abilities in the game! Due to Celerity’s mechanics, its buttons can carry really overpowered implications that no other Discipline (except perhaps those Oblivion weirdos) can.

Flower of Death decimates everything around you, so you’ll want to be in the middle of the action; Sucker Punch is the ultimate hit-and-run, a button that does not cost an action, does not remove Stealth and stuns the target for one turn; for Lightning Strike, stack that accuracy stat hard and high, as you’ll be delivering a series of melee attacks with gradually decreasing accuracy until you miss (the more accuracy, the more hits you’ll get in). 

At the top of the tree, you’ll have access to 4 versions of Split Second, highlighting the highest possible speeds a non-human can attain. Whether you like to bypass all feeding restrictions via Love Tap or dive and protect your party from an attack Costner-style with Intervene, Split Second has got your back. Not interested in smooches or basic empathy? Drive around the city at monstrous speeds and slow your perception of time itself with Dilation, or perch somewhere and cheddar-cheese your next target with Guardian. Guardian is our first ability that emulates the Overwatch mechanic from Xcom, where instead of being proactive with your attacks you set up a defensive position and fire in response to your enemies’ mistakes. We feel Overwatch is a vital system in a tactical game with ranged combat such as ours, and we’re looking for ways to make it less accessible, but more rewarding and powerful.

Strike a balance between blinding speed and embarrassing uselessness (that’s a word, apparently), and you’ve got the core of Celerity down. We hope you enjoyed this month’s dev diary, get that feedback coming in and stay tuned for further updates on story, mechanics and characters. See you soon!