5LS developer Dean has been rather active on the forum recently. Here’s what he had to say in response to a question about customization:

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Team Customisation
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The team will always consist of 1 of each of the 4 classes, they will not be interchangeable/stack-able.
For example, you won’t be able to have 2 Soldiers and 2 Hackers to make up the team, this doesn’t mean you can’t bias the entire team towards a specific play style you prefer, it just means each agent will have unique skills and ways of achieving goals in your chosen style.

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Agent Customisation
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There are a plethora of skills, items, weapons and augmentations which will allow for a wide range of game play styles.
You will be able to spec out the entire team to be heavily defensive, heavily offensive or any mix in between.
Even within these broad archetypes the class system allows for subtleties per agent.

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Agent Visual Customisation
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Given the scope of the title and the resources available to us we need to be very smart about what we invest in creating. With such a small team going crazy on character customisation was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

The following is what we felt was a good balance:

– Each of the 4 agents can be either male or female
– Agents gain the head/hair model of any person they high-jack and clone which allows for a wider range of face/hair/racial combinations
– You will be able to change your teams colour palette
– Each weapon has a unique model
– Certain backers tiers will have an alternate skin
– Certain backers will have their names and/or face in the game

In the scheme of things visual character customisation for a title such as this, while adding to mood, doesn’t add much to game-play and when balancing our time between tasks which can make the title more attractive and tasks which can make the game play better we air on the latter.

-5LS-Dean

Later down in the thread, he followed this up with the following:

As mentioned in my previous post above we will have the ability to tint the agents.
– Skin
– Hair
– Primary clothing
– Secondary clothing
– Glow/Trims

These will be palettes I create (not individually accessible) and you will access them most probably at some period during the cloning process, although we haven’t finalised this yet.

-5LS-Dean