Games
We catch up with Supergiant on their latest project, the PS4 and PC party-based RPG Pyre.
You don't need us to tell you that indie games are in the middle of a resurgence. This year alone, games like Firewatch on PS4, The Witness and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture have completely blown our minds, and there's plenty more to be excited about with the likes of cartoon side-scroller Cuphead coming to Xbox One soon, Capybara's dungeon-crawler Below, and Limbo creator Playdead’s latest adventure all still to come.
Look a little further ahead into 2017, and there's one title that burns bright on the horizon. Supergiant Games are back with a third game, Pyre, that promises more of the studio's distinctive storytelling and beautiful art direction. We sat down for a chat with Greg Kasavin, Supergiant's resident writer and creative director, to find out how the studio has evolved, and get the inside track on their latest game.
Independent developers have been turning out quality titles for a long time now, but Supergiant Games are fairly new to the scene, despite being one of the darlings of the industry.
Had you heard of Supergiant five years ago? Maybe. Had you ever played any of their games before? Trick question. The answer is no, because they didn’t have any. Bastion didn't arrive on Xbox Live Arcade until July 20, 2011, and when the studio followed up with the equally successful and brilliant Transistor, Supergiant had cemented themselves as a group to watch – one that was pioneering the vast creative potential of the indie renaissance.
Supergiant has come a long way in those five years, but whilst they've grown in stature, the approach to making games remains the same. "We're the same small independent team we've always been," says Kasavin. "What matters most to us is sticking together and making games over the long haul. We've made two games, Bastion and Transistor, and each one did well enough for us that it gave us the chance to make something new. So, that's what we're doing once again.
"We don't aspire to anything more than being able to keep making games on our own terms, and having each one find an audience."
Which brings us nicely onto Pyre. The trailer doesn't give away too many clues about the game, but the story starts thus – you're an exile, banished into a mystical purgatory and discovered on the brink of death by another group of exiles. As they bring you back to health, you will lead them out of purgatory to freedom, via an ancient competition between rival groups of exiles. Although it has a familiar look for fans of Supergiant's previous games, Kasavin reckons that Pyre "represents our first foray into a completely new genre."
"In terms of mechanics, Pyre is fundamentally different to our previous games," says Kasavin. "We consider Bastion and Transistor to be action RPGs, but we've seen Pyre compared as much to sports games as anything else!
"We consider Pyre to be a party-based role-playing game," he continues. "Part of the play experiences revolves around navigating an overmap, making decisions about where to go, and how to spend your time while the narrative unfolds. We've seen people compare this aspect to games like Oregon Trail, Faster Than Light and Banner Saga. These traversal sequences feel like they play out on a grander scale than our previous games. These bits aren't action-oriented, but more about the expressive choices you make."
The "traversal sequences", as Kasavin calls them, are just one part of the experience, albeit a major one. Under the surface of the overmap lies a team-based game of sorts, where you must take control of a ball and get it into the opponent's goal area to lower their hitpoints.
"Once you arrive at one of the celestial landmarks, these mystical events called the Rites take place," explains Kasavin. "This part of the game plays out like an action-packed, pitched competition, where you switch between controlling several different characters. The object is to extinguish the pyre of the exiles you're pitted against before they do the same to you, so you have to outwit and outmaneuver your adversaries to succeed. We've seen these sequences compared to everything from ice hockey to basketball, rugby to Harry Potter's Quidditch. They have a competitive feel to them, and the back-and-forth tension of a showdown.
"As the game advances, you'll have more places to go, more decisions to make, and more characters to interact with on the overmap," he continues. "And during the Rites, more characters to choose from, more challenging opponents to square off against, and more ways of specialising your individual characters, among other things. It's important to us to start off with mechanics that are relatively simple but immediately suggestive of having depth, while then providing opportunities to dig into that depth over time."
So, half Faster Than Light, half Quidditch? You're forgiven if you still can't quite mesh those two things in your head, but there's no doubt that the idea is both unique and intriguing.
"We really love creating original worlds and characters for our games," says Kasavin. "This time we really wanted to make a game with an ensemble cast – a larger group of characters you could get closer to. We quickly gravitated toward the idea of these characters being trapped in some sort of mystical purgatory, and having to depend on one another to achieve both a shared goal – namely, their freedom – as well as their personal goals. And it all just flowed very naturally from there."
That originality has become one of Supergiant's calling cards. When you sit down to play Bastion, or Transistor, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that these games aren't interested in re-treading old ground. They're clever, unconventional, imaginative – and that immediately marks them out as something special. Not only do Supergiant know how to create a compelling story, they know how to tell it, too.
"Narrative has always been an important part of our games," says Kasavin. "It can be a powerful way of making an experience take on a richer meaning than it might have otherwise. I've known since I was a little kid that games can be very impactful through their narratives, and that's true for pretty much all of us at Supergiant, so I think we're always looking for new opportunities to take advantage of the medium's unique capabilities."
"As the person who does the writing for our games, this time around I was very interested in taking advantage of the written word – in some ways, a more traditional method of storytelling in games than our previous games' heavy reliance on voice over. But here I think we've found ways of making the act of reading feel significant and rooted in the world of the game; the game doesn't take your, or anyone's, ability to read for granted."
"It's difficult to pin down all the influences on the narrative aspects of our games," he continues, when we ask him where he and Supergiant find their inspiration. "Where to even begin? I've been playing games all my life. I've also read a lot of fiction and studied literature for my Bachelor's degree. My lifetime of absorbing various forms of media, as well as my own life experience, are my influences. It would be a disservice to my brain to narrow it down to specifics.
"Broadly speaking I can say I take a lot of influence from both Western and Japanese games. When I was a kid, I found that most game players tended to prefer one style or the other – someone who loved, say, Elder Scrolls didn't necessarily love Final Fantasy. But I always loved it all, and would say I'm heavily influenced by both traditions when it comes to narrative in the role-playing genre.”
Writing isn't the only area where Supergiant have wowed us over the last five years. Both Bastion and Transistor featured beautiful art direction, with effervescent, soft neon visuals that left us more than a little speechless at times. Pyre certainly looks to be continuing that trend, and to our naked eye, it looks recognisably like a Supergiant game.
"That's funny, because from my perspective, Pyre has its own unique look, tone and atmosphere that's quite distinct from our previous games," says Kasavin. "We made a very conscious choice to create a new game from scratch, and part of that means having this game assert its own strong identity.
"That said, I can see how folks can just tell that Pyre is a game from our studio," he adds. "Our games do share a common set of values – for example, I think any game we ever make is going to take advantage of music and audio as key aspects in defining the atmosphere. But mostly I think what you're detecting is, for better or worse, a consequence of us being the same small team. We do our best to push ourselves creatively with each new project, while also staying true to what we care about. Over time that means you'll be able to see our fingerprints all over our games. Hopefully that's a good thing, and we'll continue to surprise you in a good way!"
Pyre is still very early in development – in pre-alpha stage, according to Kasavin. Most of the core features and content is in place, but there’s still a huge amount of work still to be done. Despite that, Pyre is already looking like a far bigger game than either of Supergiant's previous titles.
"The first playable version of Pyre that we showed is bigger and has more going on in it than what we first showed of Bastion or Transistor," Kasavin says. "That's not because we set out to show something bigger, but I think the premise and structure of Pyre are suggestive of a bigger, more expansive-feeling game than, say, Transistor, which took place during a very specific moment in the main character's life.
"Our goal with this game is to give its larger cast of characters plenty of room to breathe, so you can get to know them, get to know their stories, and get invested in their respective journeys. To what extent this translates into a specific number of hours of gameplay, though, I just can't say right now as it would be disingenuous. We've never been concerned with hitting some magic number of hours of play anyway. Our jobs would be easier, I think, if that's what we cared about.
"We're far more concerned with trying to make complete-feeling games, that are paced well, and are respectful of the player's time. So, hopefully we'll strike a good balance when all is said and done. We will always lean in favor of quality over quantity."
Way back in 2011, Supergiant teamed with Microsoft to bring Bastion to Xbox 360 rather than PS3, but both Transistor and now Pyre when it arrives in 2017, will be a console exclusive to the Sony PS4.
"It's launching simultaneously on PC too," Kasavin is quick to remind us, "but if you're asking 'how come we haven’t announced Pyre for other consoles?' the simple reason is our bandwidth constraints as a small team. The quality of our games is paramount to us. We could bring our games to more platforms simultaneously, but that would either require us to refocus a lot of our engineering efforts on achieving that, or staffing up to achieve that and compromising our desired team size, and therefore our culture. We just don't think it's worth it. We've had success bringing our games to platforms in a more-serial fashion and have managed to avoid spreading ourselves too thin.
"Also, we had a good experience launching Transistor on PlayStation 4 and PC. We think we know what that takes, having done it before, and think it's something we can achieve again with Pyre."
If you're Xbox 'til you die, don't fret just yet, because if history is anything to go by, we could still see Pyre arrive on other consoles and platforms in the fullness of time. After all, you can now play Bastion on PlayStation 4 and PS Vita should you wish, and both Bastion and Transistor arrived on iOS and Apple TV last year too.
"I never would have expected that Bastion would come to the PS4 and Vita more than four years after its initial launch," admits Kasavin. "In fact, both our previous games came to other platforms post-launch, and in both cases, we had no such plans until after launch. Right now, we're focused solely on making Pyre the best game it can be, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine! We like to keep our future options open, and not bind ourselves to plans for the distant future. Besides, who knows where the game industry will be in another couple of years?"
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