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There are Watch Workplace Picnic Goal Onlinetwo main things to know about Absolver: it's visually gorgeous, and its combat will ask more of you than most other games would dare.

It’s not just a brutally specific set of controls like the Dark Soulsseries, or an impressive array of stance-specific combos like in Ubisoft’s upcoming For Honor(with which Absolvershares a small amount of spiritual DNA, as members of developer Sloclap work previously at Ubisoft); it’s that Absolverlets players customize their fighting styles to a degree of detail rarely, if ever, seen in video games.

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The game’s “combat deck” system lets players stack up custom move combos within a variety of stances that flow into and out of one another during fights. One move might start in the front-right stance, for example, but the final move you’ve stacked in the combo will end in the back-left stance.

From there you launch into other combos that use other moves in other stances, and so on, all with the goal of keeping foes on their toes. It sounds like a lot, but the developers feel it's not hard to get the hang of setting up your combat deck.

“It’s actually accessible,” creative lead Pierre Tarno told Mashable. "'Deep' is probably a better word [to describe it]." The goal was to make a system that welcomes casual, pick-up-and-play combatants, but “that also has enough layers for competitive [player-versus-player] gameplay."

As you master the system, Absolverstarts feeling less and less like a traditional fighting game.

"Besides the combat deck, you have in the PvP combat mechanics [like] feints, cancels, parries, special abilities coming into play," Tarno said. "At high levels you reach something that’s more of a mind game."

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Absolverisn't just about high-level play, however. The game's overworld is filled with ruins and mysterious, violent characters. Players explore it cooperatively, unearthing the narrative and learning the ropes before entering the online PvP fray.

"It’s a desolate world," Tarno said, and one that is mainly inhabited by other mask-wearing "Prospects," like the character you play as. The masked denizens of this land "became crazy, basically, for reasons that are explained in the game."

Tarno hopes that players will discover and enjoy the game's narrative, but he also hopes to use the story as a dangling carrot.

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"What we do want is to actually bring in players who are not necessarily competitive action game players and who are interested by the world, the story, its universe, its gameplay. [We want to] bring some of these players -- probably not all, but some of them -- progressively toward the competitive PVP," he said.

"And players who could have told themselves ‘No, that’s not for me, this multiplayer competitive thing,’ I think we can slowly bring them toward it and make them interested in it."

Absolverplayers will be online from the moment they enter the game world, and they can choose to explore, trade, make wagers, or fight with one another as they please. But the game will funnel them toward points in the world where they can enter into competitive bouts with other players, up to three-on-three matches.

"We'd rather do something that's tight [than bigger matches]," Tarno explained. Competitive play will be the "core end game" at launch -- meaning, that's what you'll want to focus on after you finish the story -- at least until the developers start adding more co-op story content, which they plan to do.

"I’m not saying this is going to become an esport or anything. But we certainly hope that with hundreds of attacks ... and hundreds of thousands of different combinations, you’re going to have a meta that emerges with strategies and different combat deck styles and a game that’s rich enough, balanced enough, for competitive gameplay," Tarno said.

That question of "balance" -- making sure there's no single or handful of weapons, moves, or strategies that's totally dominant over all others -- is essential for any game developer that wants to retain a healthy online community.

That's a huge challenge even for blockbuster game studios with hundreds of employees -- just look at the fanfare around Destinyand Overwatchupdates -- much less for a small studio like Sloclap. But Tarno believes the sheer number of potential moves and combinations will allow the community to self-correct whenever one strat starts to rule the meta.

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"My personal belief is that when we’ll see dominant strategies emerge, pretty soon afterward there will be ... counter-strategies that will be put into place by the community using the existing tools and attacks,” he said.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if, eventually, the top 10 players use actually very significantly different movesets and combat styles."

What about everything else a game needs to have to truly attract that potentially lucrative esports fanbase? Leaderboards, spectator modes, private matches, and a hundred other things?

"We’re certainly thinking about it," Tarno said. "We’re an independent studio. The only question is what are we going to have at launch... will you have [that stuff] day one at launch? I cannot say today. But for sure if we see that the community picks it up and that there’s demand for it, we’re going to be updating this game on a very regular basis."

Until then, Absolveris at the very least a beautiful, mysterious game with an incredibly deep -- yet accessible, according to the developers -- combat system.

"As a team we’re having fun," Tarno said, "so I think that’s a good sign."

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