* This article is compiled from IGN France and unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
With less than two months to go before its release, Harvey Smith, Creative Director of Red Sky Island, was interviewed by IGN France.
In the interview, Harvey talked about the characteristics of the Arkane-style open world, the changes brought about by the acquisition by Microsoft (including the abandonment of the PS5 version), the challenges encountered in development, how to balance multiplayer and single-player games, dynamic difficulty adjustments, and other topics.
Harvey Smith, Creative Director of Red Sky Island, Creative Director of Dishonored series, and Lead Designer of Out of the Siege
I think the biggest challenge with Red Sky Island was combining the open world with Arkane's lauded "immersive simulation" DNA, so what was your design philosophy when developing this project, when it came to this genre fusion?
Harvey Smith: It's interesting that I used to work on Dishonored 1 with my friend Rafael Colantonio, and now I'm working on Red Sky Island with Ricardo Bare, and Ricardo and Rafael on Predation, Ricardo and I on Out of the Siege, and there's always going to be two leaders on the team, or a group of main developers, or maybe just one person. Anyway, for me, there will always be a group of main developers in the team, an association.
We envision intuitively and aesthetically... Let's just say it's a rule, so we'll imagine the rule from these perspectives. At one point, our lead animator made an animation. We wanted a special animation with a stake through the vampire. What he made was that the vampire spat out his tongue, his eyes moved like crazy, and then he burped, and that's pretty much it. We were like, "What are you doing?" He was shocked and asked, "That's interesting, isn't it?" It's scary and fun." And then we said, "This is not Arkane, this is not our style, why are you still confused, this is not our style."
Maybe I shouldn't have gripped so tightly, and I don't want to blame him too much, but in a big team of more than 100 people, there will always be some people who understand and some people who don't. As a director, your role is to tell a story for years before the game was born, telling people what it would be like to play the game. So when the game didn't exist, I had to tell a story like this: "I was walking down the street, the fog was thickening, I turned on the flashlight, I went to the door, the door was locked, there was blood on the doormat, so I went around the back door and pried the lock." When I went in, I saw someone's diary, and there was a noise upstairs."
I started telling stories like this before the game existed. People listen, but only understand half of it. Some people think of one look after listening to it, and some people think of another look after listening to it. The biggest challenge is communication and communication. You have to have an idea to convey something. Even if there are the best communicators in the world, the best programmers in the world, without a specific idea, there will be an animation that is more funny, and the other is more in line with the effect we want to do, that is, the vampire will be full of anger.
As for philosophy, we always have a few principles. We like the first person, we like to be more down-to-earth, and although there is humor in the game, our game will always have humor, such as the guards in Dishonored are silly and say stupid things to each other. It's interesting because the game itself is dark and serious, so this kind of clip is needed. That's one of our rules: break the serious moment with something lighter, but not play, it has to fit into the world.
These people would talk about what to eat for lunch as they dumped corpses into the river. It's a strange combination, and the only reason it doesn't seem weird is that you're hiding in the shadows and they don't know you're there. When they notice you, they stop talking and start yelling at you, and now the player's motivation is to hide, listen to the movement, wait and maybe hear the fun conversation again. These things all need to complement each other. But we have to have that principle, right? Narrative is a good reward for stealth, moments that can easily break the dark atmosphere, but it has to fit into the world.
Other principles are: We like the first person and we like to act with a strong presence. We like the sense of heaviness and darkness that is broken by humans from time to time, because humans are fun, right? We like environments with rich narratives. It doesn't mean you have to read the text or watch a 15-minute show, but it means that I can get a sense of who might be working here as I walk and watch.
(He began to describe the office we were in): She has been working in the company for 10 years, and there is a "Women in Gaming" poster on the wall, so the owner is probably a woman, there are potted plants on the table, it looks neat, and the Eiffel Tower can be seen from the window, so she is probably the boss here. You can draw a lot of conclusions. If there's blood on the shelf or a pair of men's underwear, you can piece together a story from that, right? So rich narrative is one of our principles.
Creatively combining different game mechanics is also one of the principles. To allow people to solve problems in ways we didn't expect. We have Remy... She has C4 bombs that can be attached to everything. She also has Bribón, an unkillable pet mechanical dog. He can be brought down, but you can resurrect him without punishment. He also has a skill, I can't name it at all, but he can dance a small antenna and make a lot of noise, which can attract hatred from vampires and surrounding enemies. So the players started gluing the C4 to him. This is not the usage we planned. So the combination of different mechanisms can lead to very creative uses.
We want players to go slowly. Doom, for example, is fast, players are always on the go, and we don't want that experience. We hope that players can walk around slowly, pick a lock or something. Once, I spent 30 minutes at a power station guarded by mercenaries from (mercenary company) Bellwether. I thought of a safe house with an automatic turret in front of it. I hid behind the car, trying to get close to the turret and blacken it so that it could be used by me and attack the guarding soldiers. But I died again and again, and I wrote several bugs because as soon as an enemy saw me, they would blow up the car.
I couldn't touch the turret before they could find me, so I talked to the level designer, "Look, what if the last car had concrete in it that allowed me to hide behind and not die after the car exploded?" What if we move the turret a little bit this way so I can get behind it, or let this soldier go farther away and spend a few more seconds before turning back?" That's how we figured it out. That's an example of the gaming experience we want, and it's player-driven. If the player wants a slower pace, they can slow down, and if they want to be fast, they can also go faster.
These principles make up our vision, but they are not the whole story. I'm referring to storytelling with the environment. Players should be able to deduce information from the environment, not being told, but inferring it themselves. These are part of our ideas and ideas. It solved 80% of the arguments. When you're in a room with a group of opinionated people, everyone has something they want to do – level designers, artists, etc. We do argue, but 80% of the time, we can say, "Here we have to go back to the principle, this is the right thing to do, that's not the right thing to do."
You just mentioned how the open world, online cooperation, and these things can be integrated. Take online collaboration, for example, which determines the design of the role. At first, people wanted to add a cool ability to co-op, one character against another. But wait a minute, what if it's a stand-alone machine? Then this ability is useless. We work very hard to avoid neglecting single-player players.
(Editor's note: Harvey also told us that he often plays in single-player mode to ensure that the single-player experience is not diminished by multiplayer.) ）
So, we follow our usual standards, and then we have an additional set of standards, such as those involving online collaboration, and those about the open world. Arkane used to make games, and people often said they were non-linear. But in some senses, they are still relatively linear compared to the open world. But in other ways, they are also more nonlinear.
The nonlinearity of the open world is that you can go anywhere, but in another sense, they are also quite linear because there is really only one thing to do. For example, I don't want to be specific to a particular game, but a lot of times they tell you "you're going to this place" and then the mission starts, and then there are four snipers in a fixed place, or whatever.
In our game, the scene is more directional, such as a wide canyon, not a corridor, more like a spacious street. You can do a lot of things in it, but there's still only one general direction. But if there's a quest like the one just mentioned, maybe you can bribe someone to let you in, maybe you can sneak in and take out the guards one by one, or you can walk under the street.
It's hard to say what's linear and what's not, but it's clear that in terms of direction, open-world games can accomplish objectives from a variety of directions, but we have to say, "We don't want that, we don't want you standing here and going in any direction." We want an open world, but we also want to be oriented. How can you guide the player while still making the player feel that this is an open world? Because there are a lot of games that make you feel like you're in the open world, but it's really just in a wide area, like Borderlands.
And we really want to make open-world games. That's why it's often a whole neighborhood without allies, without "traboule." The gallery is a characteristic building of Lyon, which used to have long blocks, so they would leave passages through the building in the building, as well as some strange stairs. For example, when people are carrying goods, they can go straight through without making big bends outside the building, and they were also used by resistance groups during World War II, and there are tours of the gallery in Lyon.
Anyway, sometimes we're going to go through the block, but other times we're not, we want you to go all the way to the end or go around, and we'll use things like cliffs to get there. There is a game called "Pachinko", which is a game played with marbles, and if the marbles fall down in amazement, it will be boring, so the marbles must "bounce". When walking through the open world, you must have both an open world feel and a good level design to guide you. We have to think, "How can we do it?" We haven't made an open world game before. We have to come up with a whole new set of rules. Some of them are intuitive, and some of them are comprehended while doing.
- Since this is an open world, does it have a dynamic difficulty that allows players to go where they want to go whenever they want? I played near the coast during the trial, and I felt that the enemies there were noticeably meatier.
Harvey Smith: It's a combination of both, and you feel right. I don't think it's very interesting to have a thorough dynamic difficulty. You don't feel like you're actually improving. And after that, you want to get a sense that you have thoroughly mastered the area. Some areas are really harder, but we also have dynamic adjustments. We have four difficulty levels, and most players are expected to use the default, which is the second difficulty. Most of the people on the development team play the third difficulty because we play a lot. Other than that, there's a very, very easy difficulty, and there's a very, very difficult one.
This will change the difficulty, and whether the places you go will become harder depends on the difficulty you choose, and boss fights are usually very difficult. Just like Dishonored, ordinary pagans or three guards, such enemies are not difficult. Dynamic difficulty is usually triggered by increasing the number of squads. We can't add more enemies. If the programmer says, "If you want 60 fps, you can have 20 vampires on the screen." Then we can't add another 10 because the game will change cards. We also don't want to be "bullet sponges" ... So we're going to adjust the number of elite monsters.
Imagine that you have 5 pagans opposite you and you are alone. One of the enemies may have a megaphone, and if you let him go, he will summon a vampire. But if you're playing with friends, two of them might be elite monsters. For example, if one of them can be shielded, you have to kill him first, because he can shield others. Another example is the Favored, where if you kill her, a vampire will immediately appear because you killed his favorite human pet.
There are also other characteristics, such as the ability to return blood, stronger attack power, and so on. If you're playing with three or four people, when you meet this group of pagans, they're probably all elite monsters, all with traits. The same goes for vampire enemies. Vampires also have their own characteristics. Bellwether's mercenaries also have their own characteristics. The difficulty adjustment we tried was that the number of players would change the number of elite monsters.
—— A little bit about topics other than "Red Sky Island", did Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax affect the development of Red Sky Island?
Harvey Smith: We were already working on Red Sky Island before we got acquired, and we thought, "What if we make an open world game?" Then Ricardo said, "How about a co-op game?" So we combined the two ideas, which was probably a stupid decision, because the workload was particularly large and exceeded our expectations.
I think "Red Sky Island" has two relatively big topic points. One is what kind of game it is, and now that you've played it, you can rate it. Our games are all about getting better and better to play, like Dishonored and Predatory, and after 4 hours of playing, it gets better and better because there are so many systems available. For example, there is a whole system for Grave Lock, a kind of collectible, that you may not have discovered yet.
Another topic is, "What the development team went through". When we started the project, it was much more time-consuming than any game I'd done before, and you got used to the cycle of development. For example, if you are a college student, you will get used to the length of the semester... If one suddenly becomes ten times as long, you will feel "Oh my God, when will this semester end?" It's the same with game development.
We spend 6 months on pre-production and concept design, maybe up to a year. At this time, most of the people have not yet joined the group and are still doing other things. After that, it enters the official production stage, which takes about two years. Then there's the post-stage, where we finalize what we weren't sure about, and a lot of people, like animators, can leave the team because most of the work is done and the rest of us can fix bugs.
So most of the team is on a two-year cycle, and this time, some people have been working on the game for 5 years. It's starting to feel hard because it's a bigger game, and we don't want to force people to work overtime. Our workload is quite reasonable. During the pandemic, we had everyone off on Fridays and adjusted the deadlines directly if needed. But it also came at a cost, and after a while, we began to wonder, "Can we get it done?" So first there's the impact of the size and length of the game.
Then there was another outbreak. We were going well, and then all of a sudden I had to call everybody into the pantry and say, "I'm going to have you work from home, bring your machines, we're going to figure it out with project management and IT, we're going to have conference calls on Zoom, we're going to find a way to make it interesting." The first summer we used Zoom, I had a meeting in an inflatable children's pool in my backyard. We did a lot of interesting things, but after a while, people started to get tired of Zoom meetings.
There was still a bunch of things going on in society during this project. Because of the snowstorm and climate change, Austin's infrastructure collapsed twice, and we had a power outage for an entire week! Someone died! Although not someone from our team, someone died! We ran out of water and for a week we had to boil the water to use it. This happened twice! Unbelievable. Between these two times, I installed solar panels, so the second time it was slightly better.
We also... I've forgotten a lot of things... Our chairman passed away, Robert Altman was a very kind, very cool guy who made a lot of things possible, he funded Dishonored to make it possible, and he died. He was a good friend, the founder of our company, he was a mentor, he left us.
We were acquired by Microsoft, which was a sea change. They said, "No more PS5," and now we're on Game Pass, Xbox and PC.
- So this game was supposed to be released for PS5?
Harvey Smith: Of course there was a plan at the beginning, and we originally wanted to be all-platform. But we don't mind the decision, I think it's a good decision. Join Game Pass, and worry less about one platform, you can worry less about a layer of complexity. Game Pass makes it accessible to a lot of people. This has the potential to become our most played game because of 30 million or how many Game Pass users.
I must have missed something, because every time I think about it, I realize that "oh yes, there's more," and there's so much going on... Sometimes people ask, "What else can go on?"
- Aliens?
Harvey Smith: You're joking, but the Air Force released a bunch of information before, and people on our team said, "No."
However, this is another topic point. We've persevered and we're proud that the people on the team have maintained a good relationship. Like I said, at the height of the pandemic, when everyone was worried and scared, people with small children at home were saying, "I picked up my kids from school and he asked me what happened." There have been a lot of pandemics for kids before. For example, in 1910. I have studied a lot of materials from the 1920s, because during the epidemic, I ran a one-year running group, which was set in the 2020s. It's basically the DND version of "The Great Gatsby". We run video tours twice a week. Some people say, "This saved us!" This makes me particularly happy.
In short, it pains me to look up this information, because now we have people who are against masks, there are people who are against vaccines, and before there was polio or influenza for children. I lost a friend during this time, and we didn't know how bad the outbreak would be. Now we know that it affects the elderly and people with low immunity the most, and these people are important. Now that we have the vaccine, things are much better and we can talk in the same room. But it's easy to forget that 2020 had a terrible time! Students are stuck in dormitories, you know. That's bad.
In the subtitles at the end of the game, I wrote a letter that roughly said, "We will remember this moment for the rest of our lives." Halfway through the project, I asked myself, "Can it be done?" Can you make something decent in the end?" Our games usually come very, very late to get the parts to work together. Games like Dishonored got better at a very late date.
Because we start from something very complex, it causes a lot of problems, fires everywhere, and then when we put out the fire, when we deal with these problems carefully, we find that we make very intricate things. Many people make games from a simple game concept, they don't develop it like this, but when it's done, the game is quite simple. This is both our gospel and our curse.
Anyway, a few months ago, this game started really... It's very exciting. We still have two months, so it's going to get better. This is our first game on the server, so we can keep track of it. If 80% of the player's deaths are caused by falls, we will modify the fall damage or ladder code or other possible causes. We can make small adjustments like this. This is an important part of understanding this project: it is our anti-pandemic project. I'm looking forward to doing a different project next, one that is not during the pandemic.