![]() ![]() We’ve done our best to tutorialise Weird West, but I think we can do better, and by very early testing with the community we can reach that in better ways and include people from the get-go.” “Some players are not used to being left alone with a bunch of systems and figuring out what they have. “I think there's the game’s core and the presentation, and sometimes the presentation prevents people from seeing the core,” says Raph. RELATED: Interview: Looking Back On Dishonored With Its Creators It runs deep, but Raph suggests that the future of these games is to ‘keep the depth, and remove the complexity.’ It’s a game where towns may prosper or be overrun by ghouls depending on your actions, and where random NPCs you save earlier in the game may return later to save you in a shootout - perhaps even sacrificing themselves in the process. Weird West is a systems-driven game - the kind of game that’s vulnerable to a problem faced by many immersive sims, which is that players can engage with those systems to create incredible moments and generate emergent stories, or they can play the game while completely overlooking the game’s systemic magic.įor example, at the start of Weird West you can bury your son, return later to dig up the grave, then use a bone from your son’s body as a weapon to lay vengeance upon the people involved in his death (an emergent B-movie revenge tale right there). For our next game, we’re probably going to involve the community at a very early stage.” It's also helping people in the making of the game, which gives you access to a huge diversity of opinions. “We've never looked into things like early access because we thought it was just a way for developers to pre-sell their game and start funding it with the money that they make,” he tells me. In fact, he admits that he had certain prejudices about Early Access, and that looking back Weird West could have benefited from going down that route. With Arkane being Bethesda-owned since 2009, and ‘indie’ publishing looking far different back then to what it is today, Colantonio’s hadn’t worked independently in a weird new gaming world where concepts like ‘Early Access’ and ‘Game Pass’ are the norm. And yet Weird West’s journey has still been a learning experience for him. ![]() In close collaboration with the community, WolfEye have not only fixed the game, but meaningfully evolved it, adding new systems and mechanics, as well as dozens of little touches that really put the ‘immersive’ into the ‘sim.’Ĭolantonio is an industry veteran, having made his first game with Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis, back in 2002. But Weird West has come a long way in a short space of time. Bugs and other assorted quirkiness meant that the game’s early review scores - while still firmly in the ‘good’ bracket - reflected a game that some felt could’ve used a bit more time in the oven. It wasn’t an entirely smooth launch for Weird West seven months ago. The latter really shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that Dishonored co-creator (and Arkane Studios co-founder) Raph Colantonio made Weird West with his new indie outfit WolfEye Studios. ![]() Weird West is, as you might imagine, a weird game - a uniquely systems-reliant isometric immersive sim that evokes the original Fallout games if their combat was real-time, as well the excellent Dishonored. ![]()
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