Welcome back to another Core Decay development blog post!
This month we will take a closer look at a hugely important part of the game - computer terminals and hacking.
While I say 'hugely important', I do want to stress that like most other aspects of the game, interacting with computers is largely optional, and hacking entirely so. You can go through the whole game without engaging with any kind of cybersecurity, and foregoing hacking implants and equipment might yield benefits in other areas. That being said, an experienced hacker will find an additional dimension to the game's locations and opportunities, and this approach might be well worth pursuing!
Computers in Core Decay
Before we get into hacking, though, let's look at computers in general and the role they serve within the game.
It's important to realize that in these kind of settings, computers aren't just about mechanics, or even narrative - they also carry a certain atmosphere and sense of worldbuilding, in a sort of cyberpunk, 90s computing sense. While Core Decay usually prioritizes groundedness over the "rule of cool", it applies here - using computers has to feel satisfying, and hacking computers has to make you feel like a hacker. With this in mind, Core Decay emphasizes visual variety in terminal UIs, tactile effects when using computers, a terminal-inspired hacking interface, and more. In a game where you spend so much time reading computer terminals, there's no reason not to make them as varied and interesting as the world around you!
Computers come in many different types and sizes, and importantly these are not strict categories - the overall goal is for computers to feel like an organic part of the world more so than self-contained vehicles for gameplay. Categories may often overlap or not quite apply, which is entirely intentional - but for the sake of conveying the breadth of content, here's a general overview of a few different kinds of computers you may come across:
Info Kiosks
Info kiosks are publicly accessible computers meant to convey general information. These are often seen in public locations such as city streets or corporate lobbies, although they also see some private use. After all, even classified labs and secret facilities sometimes need a central hub for employees to access information!
Info kiosks often take the appearance of a large touchscreen display for ease of use, and are generally unlocked for anyone to use.
When arriving in a new location, keeping an eye out for some kind of public info kiosk is often a good idea, as they may contain useful information. In particular it is common for info kiosks to provide downloadable maps, though they might also contain public service announcements, local news, and more.
Since info kiosks are often public, you may also come across units that have been damaged or even hacked into for one reason or another, which may sometimes provide unique opportunities.
Personal computers
Personal computers, often referred to as workstations when in a corporate setting, are single-user computers that tend to contain various forms of data or correspondence, such as emails, chats, images, audio recordings, or attached files.
Personal computers are often locked and protected with a username and/or a password, though this is not always the case. We'll get more into ways to access locked computers further down this post!
Security hubs
Security hubs are specialized computers that manage any sort of security system, rather than contain information. Doors, cameras, bots, laser tripwires, sensors, turrets, alarms, speakers, lights and much more can potentially be controlled through a security hub, and a single device can control any number of connections.
Like personal computers, security hubs are often locked and may be difficult to access, but doing so can be highly beneficial since it lets you disable security systems or even turn them against your enemies. We will be taking a closer look at security hubs in a later dev blog post!
Datapads
Datapads is a catch-all term for any small, portable device found in the world. They contain a single data entry, which might be text, an image, an audio recording or something else, and are always unlocked.
Datapads are very common and often very useful to gain additional knowledge - including login credentials for other computers, keycodes, or story-relevant information.
Other computers & electronics
There are also many computers that do not fit into these categories. Example of this would be AEGIS kiosks, ATMs, specialized equipment and more. Also worth a mention here are non-computer electronics such as vending machines, TVs, and radios, which can often be interacted with in various ways.
On gameplay and immersion
As mentioned above, an important aspect of computers in Core Decay is for them to feel like real parts of the world and not just a "hack this to gain a benefit" button. However, this too can be taken too far, and given the setting of the game, it is important to strike a balance between the immersion factor and making it obvious which computers in the game are fully interactable and which are solely props.
To facilitate this, Core Decay employs a coherent style of screen graphics, making it obvious whenever a computer can be interacted with. While this does lead to a slight loss of immersion, it's balanced by the large variety of physical computer designs, and many different ways to interact with said computers.
Cybersecurity & Hacking
While some computers are unlocked, many are not.
Accessing a locked computer is generally done in one of two ways - obtaining the login credentials, or through hacking.
Logging in with correct credentials is almost always the better option - it's instant, gives full access, and costs no resources. However, there is no guarantee that you can find login credentials at all, and even if you do, you might have to give something else up in return - such as bribing an employee to give you their password, or lockpicking a door to find a note with someone's username.
The difficulty of finding credentials can also vary in that some computers only require a password, whereas some require a specific username as well - meaning the challenge might increase twofold.
A more direct approach to accessing terminals is through hacking - and here I want to make a quick detour to take a look at how hacking as a mechanic has been interpreted throughout the Deus Ex series.
Hacking in Deus Ex
In the original Deus Ex, hacking is a fairly simple mechanic. If you have at least one upgrade in the Computer skill, you can hack any computer, with further upgrades to this skill making hacking faster and allowing control of turrets and bots. There is no resource cost to hacking, and hacking itself is entirely automatic once you choose to do so.
Invisible War kept largely the same system, now governed by a biomod rather than a skill.
In Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, there was a very different approach to hacking as a mechanic. Most noticably, hacking now takes the form of a minigame rather than simply watching a progress bar (a similar shift can be seen between Morrowind and Oblivion with their lockpicking mechanic). The act of hacking remains free, as long as you have the augmentation to support it, though there are also a few hacking-related consumables available.
The minigame itself is perfectly fine and has a certain atmosphere to it, but still arguably immersion-breaking, and also far more repetitive than the quicker hacking mechanic of the predecessors.
More importantly though, Human Revolution does not feature lockpicking or electronics as separate mechanics - instead the role of these is replaced with the same hacking mechanic (hack a keypad connected to a door rather than lockpick the door itself, and so on). This in itself is arguably a poor change since it leads to less variety and less verisimilitude, but it also has a second downside - this now means that none of these mechanics have any kind of resource cost.
Or to put it differently - there is never a reason not to hack everything you see.
This is a problem, since it removes what would otherwise be an interesting decision to the player. Even the remaining choice of whether to invest in hacking at all is largely irrelevant, and the moment-to-moment decision is gone entirely.
Granted, Deus Ex 1's hacking mechanic suffered from the same problem, but it worked a lot better since there were other resource-driven mechanics to vary it up (e.g. lockpicking), so hacking could stay interesting enough solely on the merit of being a character trait.
Even so, this is one of the (rare!) instances where even Deus Ex 1 has some design issues. There is still never a reason not to hack anything (save for risk of being spotted) and this makes the mechanic less of an interesting choice and more of a monotone task. By comparison, lockpicking and electronics is a lot more mechanically interesting since you always means a calculated risk of whether spending the lockpicks/multitools might be worth it.
With all this in mind, let's return to Core Decay!
Hacking in Core Decay
Core Decay implements hacking in a way similar to Deus Ex 1:
- Hacking is tied to character progression rather than a minigame - the act of hacking is essentially clicking a button and watching the hack happen.
- Hacking is a computer-specific mechanic. Other objects are interacted with in ways that feel realistic - lockpicking doors, overriding keypads, disabling cameras, and so on.
However, it differs in a few key aspects:
- Hacking has a resource cost associated with it, namely hacking shards. These small electronic devices are rarer than lockpicks or bypass tools, making hacking a more deliberate decision.
- Hacking does not time out. Once a terminal is hacked, it stays accessible forever - including if you leave the terminal and then return to it.
- Some terminal content might not be accessible through hacking, needing full credentials to access.
- Some terminals require a more advanced hacking implant to hack whatsoever.
The first change is the most central one - by utilizing an actual resource for hacking, and a comparatively rare one, it makes hacking come with a choice while feeling distinct from lockpicking or bypassing electronics. Because of how this changes how you approach the game, there is also no timer once you have hacked a terminal. Hack it once, it's hacked forever - you already spent the resources, after all. It should be mentioned here that in Core Decay time does not pause while accessing a terminal - so if you are sneaking around where you shouldn't be, that can in itself be a sort of timer!
The actual act of hacking is done through the computer UI - once a hack has started, a terminal interface flashes by and the password is breached character by character. A lot of inspiration overall was taken from Uplink, a brilliant game and one of my personal favorites.
Hacking a terminal leaves a backdoor, so any time you return to the same terminal you can simply enter it in a hacked state again. Alternatively, you can still try to unlock it with real credentials - sometimes this might give access to encrypted documents!
Also noteworthy is that some terminals have better cybersecurity software than others. A few terminals cannot be hacked (at least by your means) at all, and some require a more advanced, harder to obtain hacking implant.
This concludes our look at computers and hacking in Core Decay. There's still much to look at later along the line, such as security hubs, hacking-related cybernetic implants, and different types of computers - but for now I hope this has been informative!
As always, feel free to leave thoughts and opinions below. :)
