About

Pyrrhic Stars is a co-op action game where every class plays a different genre. Five of you take on the same dungeon and the same boss, but what you are actually doing depends on the class you picked. The Gunner is playing a first-person shooter. The Vanguard is in a Souls-like, reading the boss for an opening. The Blade Dancer is working through a state machine of blade configs. Same fight, and none of you are really playing the same game.

I have played co-op games for about twenty years, and they nearly all work the same way. You bring a tank, a healer, and some damage, and whatever class you picked, the job underneath was the same one: be in the right place and hit your buttons without dying. Your class decided which buttons. It almost never decided what the game actually felt like to play. That is the part I want to break.

I build this on my own, mostly on weekends, on top of a day job. My background is backend development rather than games, which is why the server and the systems are further along than the art is right now. It is all open source.

The inspirations are not hard to spot. World of Warcraft, Furi, and the Souls games. There are two things I care about here: that it ends up fun, and that it stays open for people to dig into. It is very early still, an extremely rough early access of some sorts.

Progress tracks

In v1, the goal is four progress tracks, each its own way to play:

Mercenary. Mythic+ style dungeons.
Paragon. Raids.
Hero. Monster Hunter style: solo or small-group fights against one big boss.
Explorer. Open-world survival.

Each track awards the gear that is best for that track. No need to run dungeons if you want to raid.

How rewards work

No levels, no endless grind, no tedious fetch quests. And nothing drops on a dice roll. You clear something, it pays out in tokens, and you spend those on the gear you actually want.