A Plague Tale: Innocence was one of the activity industry’s shock hits of 2019. Asobo Studio jumped into the single-participant adventure style dominated by the likes of Naughty Canine and delivered a little something clean and various. The studio mixed collectively a healthful amount of historic authenticity, an otherworldly rat plague, and a honest cast of teenage heroes—and the consequence was a little something distinctive and unique in a style outlined by operate-and-gun gameplay.
The title would go on to market one particular million copies in about a yr, and a sequel, titled A Plague Tale: Requiem, was declared in 2021. Though the initially activity left some plot threads hanging (the rat plague’s supernatural origins, how Amicia and Hugo de Rune would survive a new lifestyle on the shift), it was value asking—how could Asobo prime the 1st game’s freshness in a sequel?
What technological or gameplay advancements could be created in a game that had these kinds of a targeted gameplay loop? How could the hordes of rats be produced any a lot more terrifying? In a conversation with Match Developer, game director Kevin Choteau broke down what Asobo’s objectives were for the sequel, and spelled out how the staff took inspiration from the abundant background of Southern France.
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A Plague Tale: Requiem is a “tale first” sequel
The business enterprise of movie recreation studios will make it pretty complicated to end with a single successful single-participant game. If you’ve acquired a strike on your fingers, your studio requirements sequels or successors to maintain the lights on. Asobo at minimum has the advantage of staying buoyed by Microsoft Flight Simulator, but you’d be forgiven for assuming the corporation would pursue a Plague Tale sequel out of sheer monetary need to have.
To listen to Choteau explain it, A Plague Tale: Requiem was only at any time likely to occur if the advancement group could discover a story they desired to convey to for Amicia, Hugo, and their close friends and relatives.
“Additional than anything at all, the initial issue we labored on the tale,” he mentioned. “Plague Tale is definitely about the tale. If we hadn’t observed a excellent story, it would have been a ‘no-go’ for us.”
With Requiem, Choteau mentioned the staff observed some thing they “wished to converse about,” and then pivoted to what could be improved on the gameplay side. He described that one critical negative suggestions the group observed from critics and gamers was that the gameplay was “far too narrow.” “You’d have just just one decision, one way to do factors, and it truly is some thing we desired to deal with,” he claimed.
That led Asobo to create more substantial places for Amicia to navigate, with much more resources for finding earlier rats or the a variety of troopers blocking her way.
In the remaining item, there are some neat innovations that Asobo’s occur up with. You can find a big work to lower the user interface, offering gamers an open up and uncluttered appear at the specific environments. The game’s skill tree also borrows from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Rather of owning players earn details and choosing how to make investments them, the match tracks how the player navigates certain environments and benefits them by granting talents from that tree.
So if a player wishes advantages in applying stealth, they’ll want to be as sneaky as possible. But if they make a miscalculation and endure a overcome face (combat is nonetheless brief and dangerous—Amicia is not ready to go toe-to-toe with murderous assholes), they will be rewarded with combat competencies.
Choteau named it “a extra systemic earth” that nonetheless consists of the diegetic puzzles of the to start with match (Requiem definitely leans into the plan of a magic formula historical get that believed it was so intelligent it could set puzzles just about everywhere to maintain its secrets and techniques protected).
Drowning in hundreds of thousands of rats
In A Plague Tale: Innocence, Asobo was in a position to put 5,000 rats onscreen at at the time, each and every run by an AI technique that could act independently if a rat navigated away from the horde. Choteau explained that in Requiem, the video game is equipped to make up to 300,000 of the murderous tiny buggers, who’ve now uncovered how to climb up the walls and function on a number of flooring at the similar time oh god.
But even with the extremely visible truth that there are whole cities’ value of rats now onscreen, Choteau noted that through enhancement, the enhancements weren’t tremendous noticeable to the participant. The selection of rats onscreen in Innocence was “already pretty impressive,” Choteau observed.
So Asobo turned to generating the rats deadlier. Requiem‘s rats are substantially improved at steering clear of the light (which is deadly to them), which lessens the amount of space for mistake the participant has when navigating through the dense hordes. In Innocence, casting a gentle sent the bulk of the hoard absent, and particular person small rats caught in the open weren’t a risk to the player.
Now, if you tutorial Amicia far too close to the edge of the light…a lucky couple hundred rats have their hunger sated (and the player has to reload the previous checkpoint).
A person huge spoiler from the close of Innocence was the truth that Amicia’s very little brother Hugo experienced a pretty near relationship to the rat hordes thanks to an historic supernatural drive referred to as The Macula. In the last hrs of the recreation, he gains the electricity to handle them in a constrained capacity. Asobo did minor to conceal this simple fact in marketing Requiem, exhibiting off sequences the place the participant performs with Hugo to management the rats. It allows them feeling enemy positions and of study course, direct them in for the kill.
It truly is a powerful weapon that pitfalls getting absent from the grounded tone of the initially recreation, wherever Amicia and Hugo are just as susceptible to the horde as the Inquisition that hunts them. Preserving that rigidity in Requiem was still a essential process. Asobo was ready to sustain that rigidity with two straightforward tools: restricting how a lot of rats Hugo could management (he’s not a whole rat archwizard or one thing, he is literally a youngster), and building narrative explanations for Hugo not to be with Amicia.
For the reason that Hugo is just not with Amicia all the time, Asobo identified alone in some hard spots when it came to beat style and design. There are specific sequences the place the participant will have entry to Hugo’s powers and ones the place they will not likely. That suggests the degree and AI structure wanted to be flexible enough to assistance individuals setpieces as nicely as ones wherever Amicia is extra isolated and susceptible.
Choteau explained that Asobo “updates” its degree and overcome design dependent on no matter whether or not the participant has access to all those rat powers, encouraging gamers to wield them with gusto when they do, and creating them yearn for those people tools when they you should not have them.
In exercise, this philosophy denies players obtain to Hugo’s powers for a massive, significant chunk of gameplay. Amicia’s to start with experience with the rat horde in Requiem just isn’t with Hugo, but with Lucas: an alchemist’s apprentice who caught with the de Rune relatives after Innocence. With no supernatural electricity at their aspect, the pair have to navigate a condemned slum built inside the ruins of a Roman arena.
Feeding back again into the story’s narrative, Choteau spelled out that the team wished to check out the point that Hugo and Amicia are now each fantastic killers—but they are even now just youngsters. Amicia commences the sport exhausted and terrified at the notion of additional violence, and Choteau teased that for Hugo’s portion, there will appear a time when he thinks he has regulate in excess of the rats—but permitting that regulate slip will have key effects.
Checking out southern France
The Plague Tale games profit greatly from serious-environment inspiration. Although there are plenty of fantasy titles that do miracles with the aesthetics of Medieval Europe, Asobo Studio gets to play in a specific put and time: the 14th century. Innocence introduced to life a more standard northern/central France that gamers may well be familiar with, but Requiem heads to the regions’ southern regions that border the Mediterranean sea.
Choteau pointed out that the area is generally unexplored in the earth of video game layout, and that heading south meant an over-all shift in the series’ shade palette and environmental direction. He reported it was “amusing” to develop up this sort of a contrast. The environments are usually sunnier, the buildings brighter and a lot more vibrant, but however filled with demise and destruction as the Macula plague rears its head.
He grinned when describing a area generally outlined by photogenic postcards and paintings. “And then we are likely to smash it,” he joked.
An fascinating problem for any activity designer functioning with serious record is when historic points clash with the common notion of a offered time and position. While studying the city of Bordeaux (wherever Asobo is located), Choteau claimed that the group at Asobo figured out that a “traditionally correct” recreation of the metropolis at that time would have intended the city’s streets have been loaded with trash, with some piles as tall as a one-tale setting up.
“You couldn’t enter by means of the front doorway simply because it was whole of trash—you’d enter by the window on the very first ground,” Choteau stated. Asobo chose not to depict that historic actuality due to the fact they anxious players would believe they were overselling the grossness and filth of a rat-ridden metropolis.
Choteau’s other most loved historical actuality that the group dug up: when the genuine Black Plague struck France, there was a monastery not much from Asobo’s place of work that right away shut its doorways. “It’s the church, you are not actually intended to do that!” he exclaimed. It truly is the variety of actual-everyday living tale that fuels the series’ suspicion of highly effective spiritual organizations.
A Plague Tale Requiem, just like its predecessor, mixes a balanced amount of horror and earnestness to check out a placing couple of games get to exploit. It’s thrilling to see builders check out these kinds of fairytale-like adventures that mix historical situations with supernatural conditions.