The Tomorrow Children, a PS4 exclusive game being developed by Q-Games, promises to be a very different take on open-world sandbox game mechanics in which you play as stylistically-rendered children in a Soviet-Russian dystopian future. Dylan Cuthbert, the head of Q-Games and lead designer on the game, reached out on Playstation’s Official Blog to speak about the game mechanics:
The Tomorrow Children is an online game, combining synchronous and asynchronous gameplay. This is to encourage a fresh style of play. If you just want to explore by yourself you can and other players can’t see you. But if you want to interact with other players, your actions in the world will begin to pop up in their worlds. The world itself is synchronized too, so your interactions appear in both your own world and theirs. For example: if you dig a hole, that hole will be dug in the same place for other players in their world. It’s pretty interesting to see people working together within this system, digging out to find resources and using them to build up their towns together.
People have asked what kind of roles players can assume in the game. The Tomorrow Children is a sandbox but there are some loosely defined roles you can take on such as Radio Officer which is a kind of scout role, and Engineer Commander who likes explosives and building roads, but you can mix and match your tools and weapons any way you like. The policemen around town will assign you roles and give you a default tool if they feel there is a shortage of a particular type of player. You can always ask them for advice, too.
Sharing is a vital aspect of the game, whether it’s with resources or information to create a more connected community. In addition to helping build each other’s towns in online gameplay, there are a number of ways to communicate with other players, such as blowing a whistle, or gesturing, or using a megaphone, and later on we will be adding the ability to hijack the tanoy speaker system in the town to really get what you want to say across to other players.
The ‘sand’ in this sandbox is the collective subconscious of mankind that was splayed all over the world in a failed Soviet experiment to make the thoughts of all mankind as one. Kooky! The art direction is gorgeous and the game mechanics are robust enough to give those people who enjoy the freedom to explore and build on their own all the space they need, while giving those who prefer to have a collective role to fill the option to work together to build utopia. Fans of Minecraft and Terraria should keep their eyes on this one coming out sometime in 2015.
Check out the reveal trailer below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bnfz3XjUxQ
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