Three years ago, the small French development team Asobo Studio reached new heights with its hit release, A Plague Tale: Innocence.
After gaining a passionate community of fans with this cinematic action-adventure experience, A Plague Tale: Requiem aims to overcome and surpass the limitations of the original. The key behind this evolution is the push toward being able to play Requiem “the way you choose.” In anticipation of the sequel’s release on October 18, a PlayStation Blog Correspondent spoke with Asobo Studio’s director, Kevin Choteau, about the direction of the title, its development, and much more.
When Choteau was asked if he and the rest of Asobo wanted to accomplish this sequel to the original Plague Tale, he went all in with his ambitious plan.
“Everything, honestly. The first thing that comes to mind is our work on the first game. We had no experience at all in this genre of game. We’re not known for these kinds of cinematic experiences. So we started with the action-adventure on Innocence and did so as noobs, not knowing what we were doing.
When we started Requiem, the idea was to take everything we failed with or did wrong in the first one and try to tackle them. We’ve read all the feedback from the players and critics and tried to do something about it. So the first and biggest thing is the gameplay. Innocence was quite narrow, with only one way to approach a situation, and we wanted to address that. We’ve created much wider open areas where you can play as you want. It was the key to the law of level design. Now you can play Plague Tale any way you choose.”
Also, Choteau delved a little into how this sequel would display an improvement, tech-wise: “We push everything further graphically, of course. But the rats have been pushed to extreme boundaries. We had around 5,000 rats on PS4, and now we have 300,000 on PS5. It’s incredible because it’s a new tool that allows us to do this huge rat tsunami that now destroys cities. We couldn’t do that with the previous tech. So we can push it even further now and have these super detailed graphics with many NPC and rats swarming the cities.”
Will this be the end of A Plague Tale? Choteau ensures it’s the end, at least not for now. “But the door is never closed, and we’ll see the player's reception. We want to see their reaction before deciding anything. They are driving our production, and if they don’t like what we’ve done, we need to do something else.
I’m proud of my small 70-person team because they push everything even further every time. I’m happy and proud of what they have achieved these past three years. And I wish the best for the player. I hope we won’t disappoint them and give them the sequel they wanted and deserve.”
What are your thoughts on this? Are you excited about A Plague Tale: Requiem? Let us know in the comment section!
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