Your primary avatar in Galactrix will be your ships, with all their customizable and upgradeable components, but the actual person whose portrait you pick at character creation will have some bearing on how you perform in battle. There won't be a class system, per se; instead, you can choose to increase certain skills every time you level, which correspond to the three main gem colors: gunnery for red, engineering for yellow, and science for green.
Portable Systems
Just like in Puzzle Quest, expect the gem board to factor prominently in every activity you choose to participate in. Care to mine an asteroid? Just match the appropriate gems (in this case, they represent mineral commodities). Feel like crafting an upgrade? Ditto. Hack a jumpgate to travel to a new system? You get the idea. You'll find, however, that Galactrix has taken some more earnest cues from modern RPGs in some aspects of its design. There will be a whole bunch of factions spread throughout the galaxy who you can befriend or antagonize, which changes the way you're received in their native systems, as well as how likely their ships are to attack you when you encounter them on the playfield. The commodities you acquire will also differ in value depending on where you are.
It also bears mention that the universe looks positively huge, with dozens of systems already built into the early version that was shown earlier this week. When asked if players would be able to conquer the galaxy as they were neighboring kingdoms in Puzzle Quest, D3 producer Marcus Savino stated that while that functionality hadn't been implemented yet, we shouldn't discount the possibility.
As mentioned, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is due out in early 2009, at which time I'm fully expecting it to get me through at least 200 hours of Internet broadcasts. (Let's hope I don't relapse into WoW before it comes out.) Until then, folks looking to while away half-idle hours had probably better make do with plain old Bejeweled, sans the mana.
