Weird West Q&A – The Immersive Sim Goes Isometric, Supernatural and Westward

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If you’re into the kinds of games Arkane has made, the next few months will be a fun time between the studio’s next game, Deathloop, and Weird West, developed by a bunch of former Arkane developers who took over the French studio for a few years. ago left.

WolfEye Studios was founded by Raphael Colantonio (Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Prey) and Julien Roby (Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Dark Messiah: Might and Magic) with the explicit goal of going even further in the immersive simulation realm than Arkane ever did in the add a little procedurally generated content as the proverbial cherry.

Weird West does have a fundamental difference with those games: it is played in an isometric view. This was of course a conscious choice by WolfEye (an independent studio consisting of about twenty developers) to keep the budget manageable. Other than that, though, it looks every bit as enticing as you’d expect given WolfEye’s pedigree, not to mention even more open-ended than any Arkane game to date.

We recently had the chance to speak to Raphael Colantonio and Julien Brody during a group interview. Reminder: Weird West is aiming for a fall launch on PC (Steam), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Will you choose the order in which you play the five characters?

Raphael Colantonio: We went back and forth with that because we could have actually let the players choose, but in the end we thought it would just confuse the players more. In the end we just chose a fixed order, so yes, you always start with the bounty hunter et cetera et cetera.

Julien Roby: They are still connected because it is the same timeline. Whatever you do in the first trip will affect subsequent trips.

Raphael Colantonio: The state of the world inherits everything you do.

Does each character have a very different set of skills depending on what their backstory is?

Raphael Colantonio: They support the character’s identity.

In terms of relics, can you hold a relic of a character to give to another character in a different storyline?

Raphael Colantonio: Kind, yes.

Julien Roby: You can recruit the previous characters to do some combat support work for you. You can also get back everything they still have in their possession, such as relics, gold, keys.

Immersive sims seem to have a pretty steep barrier to entry, while that doesn’t seem to be the case with Weird West. Was that a conscious design choice?

Raphael Colantonio: Yeah totally. Although I don’t think it was a conscious design choice on our part as younger designers twenty years ago when we made those games difficult. This time we really wanted to put in that effort to get the player on board, with lots of tutorials, even small videos when you find something new.

These games get difficult if you don’t tell the players what to do. If you just assume that everyone will find out, you will lose a lot of people. While Weird West is equally hardcore, this time around we put a lot of effort into providing that support that we’ve never paid so much attention to.

Julien Roby: Compared to previous games we made like Arx Fatalis or Dishonored, Weird West is a lot deeper, it has a lot more systems. However, we have lowered the threshold.

With Arx Fatalis, many players thought it was a linear game during their first playthrough. Here we wanted to make sure that the depth was really visible from the start so that players would understand that they could approach everything in their own different ways.

Raphael Colantonio: The reality of developing games is that you do the onboarding at the end as your game becomes clearer. One of the reasons we’ve never done it before is that we didn’t have time for it and we underestimate its value. But this time we said we really had to do it.

How different is the playstyle of the characters in Weird West?

Raphael Colantonio: I think in the end it will be the different playstyle of the players that will matter more than the characters, although the characters do get a bit intrusive. For example, some have a greater propensity for stealth.

What is the split between fabricated content and procedurally generated content?

Raphael Colantonio: I would say 80-20. To give you an idea, it’s not an exact measurement, but the idea is that most of the experience is pre-written with its own ramifications, but on top of that, it’s sprinkled with random stuff that remembers what you’ve done before.

Weird West reminds me a bit of Divinity: Original Sin. Was that an inspiration?

Raphael Colantonio: A little, sure. We love that game. It’s a completely different game, right? They go with turn-based combat, much deeper dialogue, but I have no doubt that we like the same games. We’ve both had a different take on similar games.

The elemental system is certainly very reminiscent of Divinity: Original Sin. Even the way they have these little icons with status like wet, warm. There was definitely some inspiration from that, it’s kind of what we do as designers, we honor the great games that came before.

Julien Roby: We wanted the world to have a coherent set of rules. For example, when it starts to rain, it fills empty barrels. For example, if you had equipped a lightning grenade, then you have now dynamically presented another solution to you. On the other hand, if it rains, you can’t use dynamite.

How much player choice is there in Weird West when it comes to plot resolution?

Raphael Colantonio: At the end of a journey, many decisions will be made and those decisions will change the state of the world for all future journeys. There is one journey where you determine the fate of an entire type of NPCs.

WolfEye is a completely secluded studio. Did you feel you were ideally suited to continue developing during COVID?

Raphael Colantonio: Although we started remotely, we had to meet with the entire team every two to three months. We did that for a while, and it was great. Then of course COVID happened, and everyone worked the same way, which is completely from home. Having a team of 25 has certainly helped compared to much larger developers. But I can’t wait to see these guys again.

Thank you for your time.

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