Games
In case you've been under a space rock, there's a PS5 joint that's all the roguelike rage at the moment, in more ways that one. This is our Returnal chat with the puppeteers behind your frustration!
Returnal is making waves as one of the first true next (or new) gen titles of 2021. With a game mechanic that centres around dying over and over again, how has developer Housemarque made sure this is a fun and engaging part of the overall experience? We asked them outright in this developer interview!
Depending on your stance on grinding in games -- a hot topic at the moment for numerous reasons -- Returnal is either going to feel like an incremental crawl to an esoteric, cosmically-charged narrative revelation, or a chore-laden, challenge-fueled Souls-lite exercise in frustration. But boy, is it pretty.
There's a lot to love about Returnal, but maybe more importantly, there's still a lot not known that we're wanting to learn. Questions that can only be answered from the creator's mouth, rather than in the shifting pillars and statues of the "Forbidden Planet" we continually "return to" (get it?!?). Things that permeate motivation and inspiration, as well as worlds beyond the nightmare of the one we're on in the game proper. And so after ample time with the game we had a chance to chat with game director at Housemarque, Harry Krueger, and the studio’s business development and marketing director, Mikael Haveri, about all things Returnal. Check out what they had to reveal.
Honestly, I think it was just the combination of a lot of different influences when we allowed ourselves to dream...
Red Bull Games: Thanks for joining us guys. You wear your hearts on your sleeves with Returnal, and you’ve probably revealed a lot about that already, but instead of broadly speaking, what was the genesis point from an influence perspective? It's probably a really good place to start, because there's plenty of science fiction riddled throughout, but was there one single dot that started the whole thing?
Harry Krueger: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm trying to think back now over four years ago when the seed was originally planted. And honestly, I think it was just the combination of a lot of different influences when we allowed ourselves to dream. So we're fans, of course, of dark sci-fi, Lovecraftian horror, classic arcade games... and we just thought if we didn't have to compromise on anything creatively, what would be our dream project? And Returnal, which was originally codenamed “Dark Planet”, was the result of that early creative process.
[But] going a bit deeper into some of the gameplay influences… I think if you look at our classic influences over the last 10 years or so, we have been focusing a lot on this arcade-inspired gameplay. So it's impossible not to see, for example, influences of classic Treasure games there and Cave, of course. And it's just not any game in particular, but just the spirit of those games and how they always prioritised razor sharp controls, this kind of creativity in a lot of different boss fights and of course, an unapologetic amount of explosions and bullet hell throughout as well. And all of that has been great. It has been creating our own unique formula of Housemarque's explosive action. And in some ways, those were the biggest influences for us, just games like Nex Machina, Resogun, and all our other games that we wanted to just take and crank up to 13 for Returnal.
RBG: We’re wondering why the game isn’t first-person, given that we've now seen a lot of really fast-paced first-person shooters. Doom is a really good example of an action shooter that has a lot of platforming and good jumping mechanics; fast moving twitch game play that translates really well on console. Can you talk a little bit about the decision behind the third-person versus first-person, because you obviously have-first person in the game when you're in the ship, or was it always just a third-person perspective you were building towards?
Mikael Haveri: Third-person does have a lot of advantages in terms of having a... if you compare it to Doom, Doom is clearly an entity of its own, but especially when you're doing bullet hell and close dodging and these kind of mechanics, you need to have a visible understanding of where your character is, like in any Housemarque game. You have that hit box. You need to be in full control of your hit box to be able to react to external threats. That it does translate over to games like Doom, but not with the same type of position and player-feedback that we have with the third-person. Correct me if I'm wrong there, Harry?
Harry: No, you're spot on, Mikael. And as you were just saying, I think it is about just embracing that: the benefits of the spatial awareness that you have from a third-person perspective. There's a lot of verticality, there's platforming, there's fast dashing and bullet hell, and avoidance gameplay. And we felt that with third-person we were able to flesh that gameplay out a little bit more than what we would have done with the first-person perspective, which you do get the trade-off between... let's [just] say you get a more intimate experience. And at the same time, you sacrifice a little bit of the awareness of what's to the sides and what's behind you.
RBG: Yeah…
We're very close to what Blizzard is doing. They've clearly chosen their words because they want to communicate certain things. We've chosen to use things like roguelike elements...
Harry: And as you said, we do actually have the first presser camera anyway there. And specifically for those moments where we felt that the game would benefit more from that more intimate play style where you would be quite literally in Selene's shoes, exploring these more psychological moments.
RBG: Two questions, the levels -- upon each run is it a procedural system that delivers the level and if not, how have you managed that? Because if you talked to anyone from Blizzard, for example, they will never say that Diablo is procedural. It is an interlocking series of levels designed to shift and change, but it's not based on a procedural engine. And I know it's... you sort of start getting into nitty gritty and nit picky here, but I guess I want to talk a little bit about how you attach people to the world outside of the memory side of things versus a fresh run every time versus leveling up versus... I don't know. If you guys can extrapolate on where I'm going…
Mikael: Yeah. Well, we're very close to what Blizzard is doing. They've clearly chosen their words because they want to communicate certain things. We've chosen to use things like roguelike elements. And because [there is] procedural spawning, procedural generation of a modular level system, clearly each area that you enter is handcrafted, but then the contents of those areas is spawned randomly. So the weapons, the pickups, the enemy placement, even the different types of challenge content that you may get per environment is generated on the fly. So every time you die, the level composition is made again out of these modular sections. Now it really is up to the audience to make what they do out of that. We don't want to go defining it as roguelite, and roguelike is again, one of those terminologies that is quite open to interpretation. But that's the way that the game structures itself.
RBG: Can you guys talk a bit about how you've leveraged PS5 in terms of... it's a stunning game, and it's very fast. Obviously one of the key things that jumps out at you when you fire it up is the haptic feedback right from the moment the ship flies into view. What has the PS5 afforded you that you might not have been able to do beforehand?
Harry: Yeah there's quite a few things that we're able to do now that we couldn't before. As you mentioned, the haptics of course are a very tangible kind of feature there. So that does bring this layer of nuance and tactility to the experience that we simply couldn't do at that level any other platform. Of course, we do have the adaptive triggers as well. I don't know if you got a chance to really get a feel for it, but we do have that dual functionality tied to one trigger now, so halfway down, you get any down sides and then it clicks into place and you get the alt-fire mode, so that's another fairly new feature that we haven't been able to do before either.
RBG: I thought my controller was broken because it's the first game that's properly used that to that degree.
Harry: Oh, cool. We were actually quite excited to explore that as well and see just how intuitive it is. It just feels like you have so many creative possibilities as a developer and how to utilise the controller. What else? The 3D audio of course, especially if you play with headphones…
So [those have] helped a lot with not only creating a more immersive mood of course, but we feel also helps with the spatial awareness. So even during tactical combat, it's not just crystallising the locations of incoming bullets and threats and time preparations for enemies and such. And yeah, I think the advances of the SSD, of the fast loading is definitely something that fits our roguelike nature quite well. In a game that's all about dying and restarting quickly, and quickly transitioning between different wildly varying biomes, the SSD has allowed us to do that really quickly with zero downtime. And just if you look at the game, just the raw processing power of the machine has allowed us to take all of our trademark flair and particle effects and all of those elements, and really just push them to the next level all while maintaining a rock solid 60fps which is our target. The tentacles, for example, are all particles... so that's all custom in house tech.
RBG: Right. I was playing around with the tentacles yesterday. I'm a big Lovecraft fan. I was going to ask you guys if there was any Lovecraft love in there as well, given this…
Mikael: For sure. Clearly this... it's not necessarily picking any specifics, but it's more about that cosmic scale, and the mystery and the sort of system at play, so I think our world building assumes a lot of Lovecraftian influences. And then of course, I think Harry goes into detail with the enemy design being also very underwater influenced, because there's a lot of alien to that as well. So it's just interesting to see mechanics and movements that are a bit foreign, and then trying to incorporate them into things that could then stand as hostile, feeling entities.
RBG: We'll stick with world-building for a minute there, because I did want to ask a question about the narrative. Was it happenstance that creating a game that is built around sessions or “runs”... did you come up with the Quantum Leap, Looper, Groundhog Day ideas based from that as a narrative means to tie a story and mechanic together? And if so, how deep did you go in adding layers of story and mystery and bait for the players to continue to want to learn more and more about Selene, so A: I'd keep playing... or B: was this story also part of that genesis part of the game we spoke of before?
Harry: It definitely was. Yes.
So one of the very first things we set out to achieve was to create an inseparable connection between the gameplay and the narrative. So yes, the concept of time loop and just [being] trapped in this endless cycle, that was one of the early ideas and how that ties, of course, with psychological horror -- Lovecraftian themes; the incomprehensible. These kinds of things we've covered a little bit already, but then just adding a twist to that. It's what if every time that you awaken, the world is slightly different or drastically different each time? And what effects would that have on Selene's sanity over time when you don't even have that comfort of that familiarity with each one to just build this more linear comprehension of the story? So we firmly embraced that from the beginning, and all of our world-building and narrative decisions have been made using that framework.
So the more you play the game, the more it will open up to you both in terms of gameplay, and in terms of narrative. You will get a lot more [narrative]. For example, audio logs or these VO moments, and small teasers or flashbacks, let's say of something that might be very related to Selene's past, for example. And we have the house sequences as well. Those are also unlocked progressively the more you play the game. So it's very much embracing the roguelike formula, and using that as a framework for our narrative.
We're just going through this transformation as a studio as well, so we want to be able to showcase our latest and greatest learnings...
RBG: As a new IP on a new system, you're striking while the iron's hot. There's a bit of an argument going around that whichever platform is your platform of choice, maybe they were both released a little bit too early, given both are slightly light in terms of content. So you guys are... you're in a really good window here, where you're going maybe garner some fans that might not have jumped on straight away, and I think that there is something really strong here in not just it being a relatable experience given those influences that we've talked about. But I guess from a creator perspective, what's your expectation for the audience that you think will gravitate towards the game versus new people coming in, and what's your hope they'll get from this experience that maybe speaks to them differently to what all the disparate influences might have in this game or that game versus the whole package that you put together?
Mikael: You know, we've been a part of an early PS3 life cycle, and PS4 launch title with Resogun, and we have an idea of what it means to be very early on in a console lifecycle, so we do understand that it's just getting started, and there's a lot of early adopters and people who want to feel something special. Then again, we just are going through this transformation as a studio as well, so we want to be able to showcase our latest and greatest learnings. How can we actually transform our previous arcade-centric legacy into this new format? So I think mostly what we're looking forward to is people getting into experiencing not only the great gameplay that we want to deliver. So every second of shooting and dashing should be fun, but then how those experiences are layered on top of it.
And especially this PS5 future set can give you much more of a bigger experience than players have had before. So I think that it's like going to an IMAX movie for the first time, or it should feel like a spectacle in a way that hopefully our game's able to cater to what people expect from a next generation console while at the same time with especially our fans, we want to showcase that there is so much more we can do. Give us an inch and we'll give you so much of cool things to do. And then it's just a start to what Housemarque wants to do with the next 25 years.
RBG: Yeah. That's another good segue into an expanded question there. Could you foresee this... if there's enough positive feedback from fans and enough of an adoption of a new IP like this, for Returnal to go into transmedia? There's a lot of Sony products out there that tend to go beyond videogames for all the right reasons. Is that, like, a grand idea, or is that something that you guys quietly are confident you might be able to pull off?
Mikael: Well with Resogun, it might've been a far shot, but with the Returnal, I think we're a bit closer to having conversations of a “future anything”, to be honest. That's again, like you said, the first step is how do the fans accept it? What's the feedback? Do they buy it? Do they play it? And then we can speculate further on if there's anything. But again, I see all of that as an extension in terms of the fan service. So if the fans love it, of course we want to give them more, and then we can think about what format it should be in.
RBG: Hmm. Let's stick with fans then. This game, and you talked a bit about having a modular level construction system. Did it ever cross your mind to put level design in the player's hands from a content creator perspective where level creation is something, because this is obviously a skill-based game, and there are... with your dash and your jump, and other upgrades, it feels like people could create their own gauntlets and speed runs for other people to challenge. Is that something that came across the desk or on the whiteboard, or is it might be in future ideas?
Harry: Yeah. It's not something that we considered. For us, it's been more about creating; meticulously crafting this world for players to explore and discover. And we feel that that is part of the appeal of Returnal. That every time that you play it, the game has something fresh and unique to offer you based on its fundamental design in many ways. We do also have these daily challenges, by the way. These may be roguelike staples in many ways that bring a little bit more of that score-hunting and that competitive aspect to the game as well...
RBG: No photo mode, I noticed.
Mikael: Well, there... even a lot of the Sony staples haven't had it at this stage, so…
RBG: It's just that it's such a pretty game, and I’ve been taking screenshots every time I play. And I was, like, as much as I love this UI, I wish I could just strip it all away. So just want to bank that request.
Mikael: Oh, let's hope for something in that regard.
RBG: All right, guys, thank you so much for your time.
