Umbra – Diablo Meets Skyrim Hybrid on Kickstarter Now

Diablo meets Skyrim… have my prayers been answered?  Could this be true?  Well, almost.  With your pledge of $225,000 on Kickstarter, it will happen.  This openworld top-down hack and slash RPG is super ambitious and is being spearheaded by a small studio SolarFall Games.  And when I say ambitious, I mean AMBITIOUS.  Take a look at these features:

  • Open World: Discover the world and enjoy it at your own convenience
  • Exploration and experimentation is rewarded with new powers, attributed accordingly to your play style!
  • Free character development– No class limitation. You have three resources: Rage, Stamina and Mana, and they all interact with each other in order to balance gameplay.
  • Apocalyptic Form: According to your play style, you will develop special powers for your character, changing their abilities and look. Fierce melee warrior may gain a third arm to equip with a new weapon; a fire caster will have their skin turn into lava and heal from fire. Even wings and horns might appear on your character depending on your actions!
  • Tons of Loot: Weapons, Armor, Potions and randomly generated magic effects for more gameplay diversity!
  • Semi procedural Weaponry: Blades, pommel and guard details can be randomized for more unique gear in the game!
  • Advanced Crafting mini-game: Build your own weapons and armors thanks to a complex and challenging module in Umbra
  • Tons of Destructible environments: From small walls to complete parts of an area. We hope you enjoy it!
  • Housing: Create your own house and proudly showcase your special gear!
  • Mature story full of secret to discover exploring the world
  • Kythera AI system: The automatic real time navigation adaptation of Kythera adapts to any change in the physics of the world, allowing us to create exciting scene including large portion of levels collapsing or moving and fighting on the back of giant creature, creating never seen before gameplay situation!

On top of all this, there is an asymmetric gear system, allowing you to equip different pieces of armor on different sides of your body.  For example, you can equip two different shoulder pads. The depth is REAL.

While all of this seems really rad and very impressive, one has to be cautious when considering funding this project.  SolarFall has a very small team working on this, comprising of only 7 people.  They may have bit off more than they can chew, being overly ambitious, and the project could turn out to be an incomplete mess of a game.  Blizzard, the recognized King of ARPGs, has dropped the ball with Diablo III, and Smilegate has oodles of money backing it’s future title Lost Ark.  Having faith in such a small studio can leave people skeptical.  However, this team has been working on this project for 4 years and if they can pull it off, we won’t be talking about future games as “Diablo or Skyrim clones”, we will be calling them “Umbra Clones”.