Depths of Peril Interview

RPGWatch had the opportunity to fire off several questions to Soldak Entertainment's Steven Peeler about the team's upcoming RPG with strategy elements, Depths of Peril.
Q: How diverse are the characters that can be created and can you illustrate how the gameplay might change with different character development choices?

A: From a class standpoint, they are very diverse. Each class has very different skills from each other and has different strengths and weaknesses. Also each class' power works fundamentally different than each of the other classes. Let's look at the priest and mage for an example of both of these. Priests overall have a little bit of everything but their biggest strength is that they have healing spells and have good buffs. The mage's biggest strength, on the other hand, is offensive spells. The mage has the most powerful and the most diverse set of offensive skills then all of the other classes. As for their power, both of the magic users start with full power, the power gets used when they cast spells, and regenerates slowly over time. However, the priest can pray at any time to regain back her power (called faith) quickly whereas a mage can not. The mage can use items to regain back mana but he has a limit on how often he can use these items and some of them are quite expensive.

Even within a class the player has many choices to make that should make characters pretty diverse. With how our skill system works, you can choose to be generalist and have lots of different skills, or be a specialist and have only a few skills. If you specialize you can choose many different paths. For example, you can make your priest have great healing so that you can last for a long time in battles, or specialize in buffs and be strong in defense, or specialize in attacking magic and kill everything quickly, or even choose to focus on melee and play more like a paladin. So the gameplay can change a lot depending on the skill choices of your character.