“For our pirate culture, we wanted to create a sense of ridiculousness, of goofiness, and of romance,” explains Sea of Remnants creative director Alfie in my recent visit to developer Joker Studios’ China HQ. “I would say that some of that actually overlaps with the common definition of what pirates should be and what pirates are supposed to be, but beyond that, we still want to create something very unique.”
Nowhere is this desire to stand out more apparent than the upcoming open-world RPG’s distinct puppet art direction, a natural evolution of the cutesy toy-like aesthetic of the studio’s previous release Identity V. The game also seems poised to catch eyes by pushing technological boundaries with the colorful cast of more than 400+ named NPCs, complete with their own individual daily routines and even favorite foods, that inhabit its huge main city: Orbtopia.
“We’ve been working on this very hard for many, many years,” he says. “It’s very ambitious and also very challenging, from our perspective,” he adds, highlighting the creation of the fundamental technology that underpins the game’s many interwoven mechanics as a particularly tough endeavor.
Building up
“We had to lay very concrete, solid rules, or technologies; put the fundamental programming in place so that we could use it to build up the facades that you see in every individual part of the city,” he reveals. Luckily, with these systems now in place, it sounds like future expansions of the game’s world will be easy (the team has already confirmed the game will receive a deluge of post-launch content), with the creative director hinting that fans should very much “look forward” to “future creations.”
In addition to their day-to-day activities, NPCs also feature dynamic story arcs that can react to the player’s actions. An NPC that sets up a shop, for example, might find its business struggling without input from the player. You even have the ability to kill some NPCs outright, an ability that Alfie describes as “a very important feature” that he hopes players “will find interesting.”
All of your choices have the potential to affect the trajectory of the city itself, with multiple different possible states that reflect its flourishing or falling into destitution. Don’t worry about accidentally locking yourself into a terrible situation, though, as players do have the ability to go back in time and alter some of their decisions to discover new outcomes.
“This creates the power for the user to choose whether they should do something or not,” Alfie says. “At the end of the day, we don’t want to burden players so as long as you can [ultimately] make a choice, that’s good.”
When you’re not playing with the outcomes of their lives, NPCs offer a wide range of minigames that vary from drinking competitions to board games and outdoor activities like ring toss.
There are loads to discover, all of which are intended to reinforce the goofiness at the core of the game’s design and provide a little diversion from the main open world. “Players can still sometimes come back to very basic games,” begins Alfie. “When I play mahjong [which is featured as a minigame], I can play for hours within the game. It’s just basically for the purpose of having fun, that’s the language of the game.”
Piracy on the go
I’ve spent more than 10 hours with Sea of Remnants so far, and the sheer scale of everything on offer can be almost overwhelming.
The creative director is careful to clarify that crafting a compelling experience was the priority rather than pursuing sheer scale from the get-go: ‘our original intent was not to scale up for the purpose of scaling up, but to do things for the purpose of having an interesting result”
My playtime has been entirely spent on a powerful gaming PC, but the game is also set to launch for mobile phones in addition to Xbox and PlayStation, leaving me eager to find out if there have been any big hurdles in optimizing such a massive experience for portable devices.
“Of course, the challenge is very big, especially if you consider the performance of mobiles and also the different form factors of the devices. Consoles and PCs have big displays, but mobiles have limited display size, he responds.
“We have to consider the balance between viewing comfort in different mediums. As a matter of fact, when I play the game as a player, as a gamer, be it in front of the PC, or be it using my phone, I still can feel a similar level of enjoyment. I think that is quite important, and [achieving that] actually makes us strive to work harder and eliminate all the possible difficulties.”
We’ll have to wait and see just how well the experience holds up on a tiny screen when Sea of Remnants launches later this year. For a detailed look at some of the game’s biggest mechanics and to see how well it all works, learn why it’s shaping up to be one of the most ambitious games ever made in my full preview.
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