Worms Revolution Developer Diary 3: HATS!

Team17, the development team behind the iconic Worms franchise, have just released the third of five developer diaries building up to their next Worms title, Worms Revolution. The third development diary has info about classes and customization of the individual worms. Kelvin Aston, Senior Producer of Worms Revolution, goes over how the Worms franchise is changing with different classes. New classes like the scout, scientist and heavy now allow the gameplay to expand and become a better rounded strategy title. The worms can also be customized with different trinkets that don’t effect gameplay but give players an option on how their worms will look. You can either watch the Dev Diary on our YouTube Page or read the information bellow. Personally I feel reading is overrated but hey, don’t say we didn’t offer both.

Worms Revolution Classes and Customisation Q&A

Q. So, I’m seeing a lot of different looking worms around, what are these?

A. These are the classes which we’ve introduced into Worms Revolution, we needed to evolve the gameplay some more and we thought why not actually change the core worm itself? We’ve had the same worm for about 15 years so we thought why not make it a bit different? So we’ve changed his actual physical size so we’ve got these various new classes which we’ve got four of, there’s the Scout, the Soldier, the Scientist and the Heavy. We worked with Tom Glückmann on the concept artist stuff, he’s a famous Worms artist, his humour is a bit risqué so we had to vet a lot of his stuff we got but in the end we nailed down some awesome classes and stuff.

Soldier is the first class, he’s the all-rounder, and he’s the worm that you’ll recognise from previous versions of Worms. He walks and jumps just as you expect – he does damage just as you expect it to be. So he’s the default guy who you start with when you start playing Worms Revolution.

Then you’ve got the Scout worm, he’s the little cute fella is the Scout worm. He’s the sort of worm that you trust to look after your cat for a fortnight whilst you went away on holiday to Ossett. He’s very nimble is the Scout and he can also jump a very long way as well. The downside of the nimbleness is that he can take a real kicking by other worms, if the Heavy hits him with a Baseball Bat he’ll go flying, so a bit of a downside of the Scout. But a cool thing with his size is that because he’s so small when he digs a Blow Torch tunnel, they are very, very tiny so the other worms, Scientist, Heavy they can’t get down there so very cool to hide the Scout away down there.

There’s the Scientist worm, he’s the brains behind the brawn. You’ll recognise the Scientist because he’s got a huge, big head that head is full of brains, so we hear, it’s not some kind of cranial dysfunction going on in there. And he’s the support class for the team, at the start of a turn with the Scientist, each worm on that team gets 5 health which is a real bonus and he also does things like the Sentry Guns, Electromagnets which he creates are far more powerful as well so a very good support class to the rest of the team. But the downside is he’s not a frontline fighter, with the Scientist we find, get him dug away somewhere, out of harm’s way, and he’ll support from the back will the Scientist.

Lastly, we’ve got the Heavy worm; he’s the giant looking, mean looking worm from the artwork which is out there. We actually got some local nightclub bouncers in to do some motion-capture so we think he’s a realistic gripper that we’ve got there. With the Heavy worm he’s very slow, he doesn’t go up slopes very well and he can’t jump very far even with the Jet Pack he doesn’t move very well but the flipside of that is that he’s really, really powerful. He can take a punch and he can give a punch back so he’s the sort of class where people who love to fight toe-to-toe in Worms are going to love.

Something which we’ve got for Worms Revolution is actual physical damage on the worms themselves. Usually worms can go twelve rounds and they don’t bat an eyelid but now in Worms Revolution they’ve now got black eyes, they can have missing teeth, they can have bandages. It’s funny but at the same time it’s a bit tragic because you realise what these worms are going through, so it does shed a tear to your eye whilst being funny at the same time.

Q. If I want to dress up before war, what customisation elements are available?

A. One of the things we’ve got more of in Worms Revolution is hats, we know people love hats. So we’ve got the usual selection of military style hats like the WW2 Helmet so if you want to dress your worm up military serious style you can do that. As well as the serious ones, we’ve got comedy ones in there such as we’ve got wigs and stuff, particular pop star wigs were once they are on a worm I do find it pretty hot actually, so a bit of something there for everyone. As well as the hats we’ve got new gravestones and we’ve also got new victory dances, forts and other things. Something which we revamped for Revolution is the speechbank system before we had one sample, pretty much, for each one action in the game but now, because you can get sick of hearing the same sample again and again, after fifteen years of hearing a worm saying ‘Look at that’ it’s kind of got to us a bit, so we’ve fixed that problem. Now we’ve got the bucket system in place, were there’s multiple samples for each one action in the game so you never get bored of the worm saying the same thing over and over again and we’re very proud of the bucket system as well.

Also for Worms Revolution we’ve got Trinkets now as a customisable option where the worm takes these into battle, they don’t really bring to the gameplay as such, they’re just things that worms get out and play with whilst they are bored. For example a worm can get out a particular hand held console device – actually no it can’t, for legal reasons we took that out the game so now it gets out a Teddy Bear, it gets out a Football and it will play with these whilst the actions going on waiting for its own turn so they don’t actually bring anything to the party, they just look funny whilst worms are playing with them.