Depths of Peril Q&A

Gameguru Mania was able to track down Soldak Entertainment's Steven Peeler for a lengthy Q&A about their upcoming action RPG, Depths of Peril.
Q: How much choice and what kinds of choices will the player have in the starting player character and in how it develops through the course of the game?

A: The starting choices are fairly simple. You pick one of four character classes, your character's name, and your covenant's name. So you are playing the game very quickly.

Now the development of your character is much more interesting. Each class has 30 skills that are all available at the very beginning of the game. There are no stepping stone skills to simply get to the next skill in the tree, and there is never any wasted skill points. The small catch is that each skill has a starting cost, and costs one more point for each level of the skill. So the player can choose exactly which skills he or she wants to focus on, and only put points into those. Of course they might have to save up skill points to get to some of them.

The character also has to pick where to allocate his or her attribute points that you get at every level and of course what equipment to use.

The other main thing the player has to develop, which is different than other action RPGs, is your covenant itself. Not including your character, you can recruit up to five npcs to make your covenant stronger. There is an infinite variety of possible recruits you can find and/or recruit. It's up to you to build the strongest covenant possible from those recruits you have managed to recruit. First you need to decide which recruits you actually want. Each recruit is one of the four classes, has a certain amount of experience (and thus level), has picked 4 skills to focus on, and might even have a natural enhancement or two that makes them stronger, smarter, or better in some other way than the typical recruit. So you must pick wisely which recruits you choose to build your covenant. It's also up to you how to equip your recruits once recruited.