14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Insomniac Games has recently delivered quite a bit of information about their upcoming Sunset Overdrive experience, and now the company is ready to talk about the way they came up with speed as the main element of the experience.
Speaking to VG247, Marcus Smith, the lead creative director, says that the initial apocalypse-like setting was quickly settled on and that the team was searching for ways to make it fun to explore the game world and add some color to it.
The developer explains, “At that time we didn’t really know what our mechanics were going to be, so as designers you sit around chewing over things like ‘what is fun’? Well, fast is more fun than slow, so then we look at how we can speed things up and add that feeling of velocity throughout the game. We also want to have a load of abilities but to also make it easy to jump in and still have a feeling of mastery in the game.”
The team admits that, initially, the various elements did not fit together perfectly and that it took some time to arrive at the current version of the title, which blends an open world structure, traditional shooter mechanics, and a movement system that is similar to that seen in Tony Hawk.
Gamers have the options of running up walls, using zip-lines and grinding rails in order to gain a better position from which to take out their enemies ruthlessly and efficiently.
The mix of apocalypse and fun can also be seen in the way the characters of Sunset Overdrive dress, with no regard to social norms and fashion trends.
Insomniac Games wants gamers to be free to choose their own style and abandoned any idea of linking stats to the items worn.
Marcus Smity adds, “We had the ‘be who you want to be’ element and we will have multiplayer so we want people to be able to distinguish themselves from one another. That meant taking the decision to make clothing aesthetic only and have no functional attributes on clothing because as soon as you do that everyone’s wearing the same overpowered piece of armor.”
Sunset Overdrive will use the cloud computing technology that Microsoft has introduced on the Xbox One to create a compelling world.
Launch is set to take place at some point before the end of the year only on the next gen device.