In Capcom’s recent drive to overhaul the original Resident Evil games, remaking Resident Evil 4 is the hardest project to justify. While time has not been kind to the fixed camera angles and awkward controls of Resident Evil 2 and 3, Resident Evil 4 was designed specifically to reinvent the tired conventions of those preceding titles. It was so successful that games from God of War to Fortnite still refer to its design dictionary to articulate their third-person action. Twenty years on, the original Resi 4 remains not merely playable, but utterly exhilarating, a masterclass in action game design.
Hence, the onus for Resident Evil 4 Remake is very much on not screwing things up. Which makes it a huge relief to say that Capcom has applied its screwdrivers with atomic precision. This refit retains the essential qualities that makes Resident Evil 4 one of the greatest games of all time. The intense crowd-control combat, the endlessly inventive action sequences, even the B-movie storytelling, all survive the transition in recognisable and thoroughly entertaining form. Which is not to say that it is a straight retread. Combat has been tweaked, certain sequences have been redesigned, some ideas have been expanded, and a few have even been removed. But the core throughline is distinctly Resi 4, and it’s every bit as fresh and invigorating as it was in 2005.
Like the remake of Resi 2, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 Remake is a complete rebuild of the game in the company’s RE engine. The challenge the visual overhaul faces is slightly different, however. Rather than recontextualising pre-rendered environments into 3D, Capcom must instead update the original’s presentation without compromising its austere, eerie aesthetic.
In this, Capcom strikes a fine balance. The opening village area remains largely painted in autumnal browns, but everything is much more intricately drawn. You can see the protruding stonework of the opening village’s buildings, the overlapping clay tiles of their sagging roofs. Perhaps the most impressive visual work is on the Ganados, the base-level enemies who harass you incessantly through the game. Capcom utilises the power of modern rendering tech to enhance their expressive nature over the roughly-hewn polygons of the GameCube days. The Ganados have piercing eyes set in deeply lined faces, and rictus grimaces that remain visible even when their faces are splattered with blood.
Resident Evil 4 Remake. Credit: Capcom
More broadly, the opening section of the remake provides a handy snapshot of how Capcom balances preservation with alteration. Leon’s initial encounter with the Ganados at the Hunter’s Lodge has been made more elaborate, building the tension more gradually and adding a couple of new shocks to wrong-foot veteran players. By comparison, the following village battle more directly replicates the original’s preindustrial pressure cooker, perfectly capturing the brilliance of this iconic set-piece.
Even here, though, there are subtle changes, mainly revolving around the remake’s adjustments to combat. Leon can now sneak up on enemies and dispatch them quietly with a knife, adding a light sprinkling of stealth into the game’s mechanical loop. Similar to The Last of Us, this is less about ghosting your way through encounters, and more about building tension until you’re inevitably spotted, whereupon all hell breaks loose.
Knives are a focal point in the remake’s changes to combat. As well as letting you score a few silent kills, Leon’s knife also lets him parry enemy attacks, quickly break free of grapples, and eliminate incapacitated foes before they can recover. Indeed, knives are useful tools in the Resi 4 remake, which is why they also come at a cost. Leon’s survival knife degrades with use until it eventually breaks. If this happens, you’ll have to rely on far more brittle kitchen knives and other blades plucked from the environment until you can find a spot to make repairs.
Beyond the more elaborate knifework, Resi 4’s combat is largely true to the original, which is to say, sublime. The ganados are as delightfully relentless as they ever were, lunging at you with everything from bare hands to farm tools to chainsaws. Leon responds to these coordinated attacks with a mix of coolheaded shooting and bursts of martial-arts flair, stunning enemies with headshots before lunging forward for a clearing roundhouse. Alongside Leon’s knife counters, are a couple of other small yet significant changes to his moveset. Leon can now strafe, making it easier to shift position during a fight, while certain attacks can be dodged with a timely response to a button prompt. Combined, these enable Leon to counter pretty much any attack thrown his way, which is incredibly satisfying, if you time everything right.
Resident Evil 4 Remake. Credit: Capcom
To be clear, Capcom hasn’t changed Resi 4 into a pugilistic rhythm-action game that demands perfection. It’s still fundamentally about judicious use of the resources available to you. Choosing weapons that fit the situation remains a crucial part of combat, as does using the environment to your advantage, barricading yourself inside a building with furniture, or shooting explosive barrels and ceiling lamps to incinerate your enemies. Particularly satisfying is using your enemies’ weapons against them. A stick of dynamite in a ganado’s hand is as dangerous to them as it is to you, and a carefully placed shot can smear a whole group of enemies across the ground, saving you both ammo and health. As in the original, there’s significant room for creative problem-solving and changing tactics on the fly, and what adjustments Capcom have made contribute to that emergent play.
While combat remains pleasingly familiar, more extensive changes have been made to the story. Most of these are more specifically to the storytelling, with a rewritten script that attempts to reduce the overwhelming smell of cheese that emanated from the original. But the core plot has also been altered in places, with certain key events happening either at different times or in different ways.
Do these changes make the story better? Not massively. The plot remains distinctly B-movie, while the writing and characters retain a heady whiff of queso about them. Yet while Resi 4’s narrative will never be as acclaimed as, say, that of The Last of Us, it’s nonetheless enormous fun. And it does make some genuine improvements, like giving Ashley a more rounded character, removing some of the more ballistically terrible lines directed at her.
Resident Evil 4 Remake. Credit: Capcom
Either way, the purpose of Resi 4’s story is not to be some great literary work, it’s to facilitate the game’s unparalleled set-piece design. It’s easy to forget just how frequently and cleverly this game escalates and reinvents itself. Almost every area you enter throws some new idea at you, or remixes earlier ideas in a way that subverts your expectations. The remake does a fantastic job of emphasising this creativity. Again, not everything plays out in exactly the same way. Some set-pieces are nigh identical to the original, but others have been refined or adjusted, usually for the better. One of the most improved sections of the game is a brief sequence where you play as Ashley. Once the weakest part of Resident Evil 4, this section has been heavily reworked into a fantastically tense set-piece, stripping out much of what didn’t work and refocussing the action on the original sequence’s best idea.
While pretty much all the major sequences have made it into the remake, not quite everything has. The biggest omission are quick-time events, which have been almost completely expunged. This mostly means you’re less likely to die suddenly when the game does something unexpected, although it does mean some significant changes to how one boss fight in particular works. The net result is definitely an improvement, however, creating a more up-close and personal encounter.
The remake sports a few blemishes. Ashley has clearly been locked up for a long time, because she’s constantly out of breath whenever she’s with you, and her hyperventilating behind your back becomes distracting after a while. The remake also follows that recent trend of NPC companions pointing out puzzle solutions before you’ve had a chance to solve them yourself. Finally, there a lot of new content revolving around the merchant, some of which feels crowbarred in compared to Capcom’s other design changes. It doesn’t always fit with the game’s general flow, and feels unnecessary in a game that is as wide-ranging as this.
But these are minor quibbles. All told, Resident Evil 4 is as good a remake as you could hope for, one that clearly understands what made the original great, makes considered alterations where it deems necessary, improves the parts of the game that didn’t work so well, and of course, makes the whole experience easier on the eye. It may not be as necessary a tune-up as Resident Evil 2, but it’s nonetheless a fantastic excuse to revisit one of the best games ever made.
Capcom’s remake of Resident Evil 4 ensures the greatness of the original is maintained, while making careful changes that enhance its best qualities and massage out the kinks.
Pros
Fantastic visual update
Retains everything that made the original great
Small mechanical adjustments enhance the core combat
Cons
Story remains disposable
Companions over keen to point out puzzle solutions
Precision is the defining characteristic of Dead Space, a meticulously constructed thrill-ride about carving up alien mutants inside the universe’s most cursed spaceship. Visceral Games delivered a perfectly paced blend of action, sci-fi, and horror when it launched the game in 2008, and it’s a similarly surgical approach that justifies this year’s glossy remake. EA Motive‘s overhaul is a carefully considered retelling of the original story, keeping much of what worked, changing a little of what didn’t, and making a few additions that mostly benefit the experience.
Naturally, the most substantial changes are to how Dead Space looks, with Motive’s rebuild of the game in EA‘s Frostbite engine providing a massive jump in fidelity. The game’s grungy sci-fi style has been largely retained, which is to say the Ishimura’s many corridors are just as murky as they were in 2008, although much more detailed. Some of the more dramatic scenes are truly dazzling, such as when you step into the Ishimura’s bridge for the first time, or skulk beneath the searing gravity vortex housed in the mining deck.
More broadly, the new visuals contribute to the experience in two ways. The improved lighting and shadow compounds the oppressive atmosphere of the Ishimura – especially if your PC can handle the demands of ray-tracing. Watching the necromorphs loom out from real-time shadows is quite remarkable. Speaking of the necromorphs, the other notable improvement is how the infestation of the Ishimura is represented. The biomass that seeps from the Ishimura’s now glistens fleshy and translucent, while the tendrils that frequently obstruct your progress ripple and pulsate as you navigate around them.
Dead Space Remake. CREDIT: EA Motive
All this added lustre comes at a cost. Dead Space requires a beefy PC to run on its higher settings. Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX mitigate some of the pain, although their performance can be inconsistent, with the game running smooth as a mill pond in some areas, and choppier than the North Sea in others. It isn’t clear whether this is an implementation issue or simply the consequence of the game’s technical demands, but unless you’re running Dead Space on a thermonuclear reactor, expect to do some tinkering to find the appropriate balance.
Motive’s Dead Space doesn’t merely offer a visual upgrade. Most aspects of the game have been tweaked in some way, while other areas have received major rethinks. One of the most significant changes is made to the zero gravity sections. In the original Dead Space, Isaac could walk on any surface in zero-G, but couldn’t float freely around environments. Now he can, using boosters built into his suit to move around, much in the style of Dead Space 2. It’s a sensible change, making these sections more entertaining to navigate, and fighting floating necromorphs less clunky. Some of the related environments and puzzles have been adjusted to allow for this locomotive change, but Motive has largely resisted the temptation to bulk out the zero-G sections, or say, add extended EVAs around the hull of the Ishimura.
Dead Space 2 is the proving ground for other changes too. Isaac Clarke was a silent protagonist in the 2008 game, but in 2023 he finds his voice on the Ishimura. Again, Dead Space 2 doing this first makes it a logical revision. But the effect is less impactful than the systemic changes to the zero G. This is largely because both Isaac and the broader plot are functional creations and not where the game personality resides, so Isaac speaking doesn’t make much difference to his character. His whole deal remains that he fixes things and that he’s the galaxy’s biggest wife guy. Beyond dialogue, the audio design wisely sticks close to the original game, using identical or similar sound effects for weapons, item pickups, save points, and so forth.
On the subject of weapons, combat feels much as it did in 2008, which is to say, phenomenal. Isaac’s Plasma Cutter remains a disconcertingly perfect tool for the job of anatomising necromorphs, while his trademark stomp is as bone-crushing as ever. There are a few changes. Certain weapons like the Line Gun and the Contact Beam have been given new alt-fires to make them more useful, and certainly, no weapon feels redundant. Hacking up necromorphs has been made extra grisly thanks to a splendidly named “peeling system”. Through this, your weapons strip the flesh off Necromorph bodies as you fight, or in the case of the Force Gun, blasts their entire skin off in one spectacularly gory go. On a completely unrelated note, the Force Gun is my new favourite weapon in Dead Space.
Dead Space Remake. CREDIT: EA Motive
The boldest choices Motive makes are found in the story. These still aren’t vast alterations, but the central plot nonetheless plays out slightly differently, while “side-missions” have been added that expand upon certain characters or events. The mileage varies with each change, but overall they’re the least effective adjustments Motive makes. The end result is a slightly more convoluted plot that leaves you mildly more informed about its pantomime characters. But none of it is egregious, and most of the added side-content can be uncovered with only minor detours from the main path.
This latter point is crucial, because what makes Dead Space so entertaining is its propulsive forward momentum. From the moment you step off your shuttle into the Ishimura’s hangar bay, you’re on a runaway train of action and body horror and grungy industrial sci-fi. Every chapter has an exciting and immediately tangible objective that forces Isaac into increasingly perilous situations. Fixing anti-asteroid defences on the outside of the ship, dislodging a giant monster from hydroponics, flying across to a shuttle of space marines that has smashed into the Ishimura’s hull. Each problem is designed to take roughly an hour to solve, and in that hour you’re constantly moving, fighting and problem-solving, only stopping to pick up the ammo left behind by the shattered bodies of the necromorphs.
Dead Space remake. Credit: EA Motive
And what a glorious setting the Ishimura is. Spaceships and space stations are ideal video game environments, as they can be completely self-contained without requiring a suspension of disbelief. But the coherence of the layout, how it unfolds over time, the way it seamlessly melds worldbuilding with puzzles and objectives. It’s one of the great virtual spaces, up there with System Shock 2‘s von Braun, Resi 2‘s police station, Deus Ex‘s Liberty Island. It’s worth noting Motive has rejigged the layout of certain levels to help them flow better. It’s hard to judge the exact changes without playing both games through side-by-side, but either way, there’s no issue with how this game pulls you forward through its sci-fi nightmare.
Where The Callisto Protocolwas a reminder of everything that sucked about mid-noughties games (poor checkpointing, annoying boss fights, endless snatching of control from your hands), Motive’s Dead Space highlights everything great about this era of game design. It’s twelve hours of urgent storytelling and ferocious combat with ideas by the bucket and minimal bloat. The remake is a fine conduit for revisiting the Ishimura, but one way or the other, play Dead Space.
EA Motive’s remake of Dead Space does most of what you’d hope for, massively improving the game’s visual quality and improving certain mechanics like zero-g, while retaining the frantic combat and lightning-paced story of the original. Your mileage may vary on the changes to the story, but it feels for the most part like the Dead Space you remember.
Content Warning:This piece includes mention of self-harm, suicide and child abuse.
At the end of a road called Peach Street, somewhere around the Freeport area of Texas, an abandoned house sits beneath a copse of overgrown trees. Built at the turn of the century, it was once home to a young couple who were engaged to be married. But before the wedding, the bride-to-be was hospitalised in a serious accident, resulting in paralysis from the waist down. After the bride left the hospital, the wedding went ahead. The groom carried the bride over the threshold of their home, and together the newlyweds lived in romantic seclusion until their deaths.
The story of this couple may or may not be true. But the house itself is real enough, and at some point around 1981, fifteen-year-old Harvey Smith crept inside its long-abandoned shell, seeking evidence of this lifelong romance. “We moved super slowly. We tried not to break anything,” Smith says. “Rain had come in through the windows. I think there was a dead animal skeleton, like a dead cat or raccoon. We read through papers, like meaningless stuff, looked at their dishes. Nobody had lived there for a long time.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith and the two friends who accompanied him found nothing that verified the rumours they’d heard about the house. But the experience of being in that space, surrounded by the detritus of people whose whereabouts was unknown, stayed with Smith all his life. “The tension was sublime. At any moment, it felt like somebody might call out from upstairs, or somebody might pull out and beat on the door.
“That kind of drama, even though it’s slow moving and nothing happened, it’s more powerful to me than the rollercoaster.” The rollercoaster is Smith’s analogy for cinematic action games, titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty which funnel the player down a linear sequence of explosive set-pieces. Arkane Studios, the company Smith directs, specifically does not make these kinds of bombastic games. “You’re on a track, you can’t get out of the car, you’re rolling along. And at a certain point, you’re meant to feel your stomach drop. You’re meant to scream. You’re meant to go through some cold air. It’s all very carefully crafted, and that is a form of drama. That is not what I’m interested in at all.”
So, what exactly fuels Smith? Across some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time that he’s worked on – including the sci-fi conspiracy thriller Deus Ex and the fantastical revenge epic Dishonored– there’s a pull towards the kind of limitless experiences where it feels like anything could happen at any given moment.
“When I built some of the level design for the first Deus Ex, the little compound out behind UNATCO is modelled exactly after the satellite communications building compound that I worked at in Germany”
“In Dishonored, you can do things like skirt across the rug in this beautiful environment, and you hear a guard, but your health is low and your resources are down. You just duck under the table, and you’re hiding under the desk while the guard stops. He starts talking to one of the ladies cleaning the office, and they have a semi-comical conversation. And you’re hiding under the desk and you know that if you get busted, he’s probably going to kill you or you’re gonna kill him and her, the whole room’s gonna blow up into body parts and violence,” Smith explains. “It’s the drama of exploration and player pacing, and the potential of action, not action. And the longer I can drag out that delicious part – where it may or may not happen – the better.”
These types of games, known by their fans as ‘immersive sims’, are what Smith has spent most of his career making. He tested them at Origin Systems, designed them at Ion Storm Austin, and directed dozens of developers dedicated to them at Arkane Studios – most recently on the vampire-themed Redfall. Known for their highly interactive systems and intensely detailed environments, immersive sims are among the most ambitious games around. They’re also notoriously hard to make, and even harder to sell to a mainstream gaming audience. Today, Arkane Studios is the only developer of its size that still designs them, making Smith the most prominent torchbearer of a genre perennially on the verge of extinction.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Harvey Smith grew up in Freeport, Texas, an industrial town on the United States’ south-eastern shoreline. “You could stand in one direction and see the beach and the oil derricks [rigs] out on the water. In all three other directions you could see smokestacks with fire on the top, and boilers and chemical plants. It looks like something on the Death Star.”
Smith describes his early childhood as being “shattered” by a formative series of events. “I had the blue collar father, the chemical plant worker who was violent and eventually took his own life. But prior to that, there was a lot of abuse of various forms on my mom’s side of the family, and lots of drug problems”. Smith’s parents split up when he was young, and he went to live with his mother. “She was the centre of my universe, basically. And when I was six, she OD’d, and I watched her die.”
Following the death of his mother, Smith returned to living with his father. “It was all the stuff you’d expect from that side, but when people exchange stories, lots of people have had that story. ‘Yeah, my dad was a bit rough or whatever,'” he says. “When you’re a little kid and your mom dies, your world is destroyed. It’s the end of the world. In class, I would just stare at the corner.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
As Smith grew older, he eventually found refuge in fiction and fantasy, initially books, comics and films, and later tabletop RPGs and video games. His first games console was an Atari 2600, purchased by his father.
The Atari 2600 entranced Smith. “I could just lose myself in this world. It’s very similar to a good drug experience, where you feel some things, but also you cease to exist for a while. Any anxiety you have, is just gone.” As for the games themselves, Smith was indifferent to most of them, but one that grabbed his imagination was Adventure, a fantasy game developed by keystone Atari designer Warren Robinett, where players had to retrieve a magical chalice from a kingdom prowled by three dragons. “The key was that it had procedural systems. The various keys to the various castles were rearranged. The monsters could spawn in different places, the items spawned in different places. So every time you played, it was different. And it made a narrative, like, ‘Oh, I left this castle and I went out and I found the sword in this location, and I killed the green dragon with it.'”
By 12, Smith had a group of friends who frequently played Dungeons and Dragons together, but his access to video games remained limited until age 20, when he joined the US Army as a way of getting out of Freeport. “We had these laptops [manufactured] by Swann; very expensive because they would put them underwater, or they would take them up to high altitude, and put them in cold. They had to survive, and they were like $26,000 each” Smith says. “We used them for mission stuff, but we mostly used them to play Wolfenstein.”
“Deus Ex is the game that sort of put me on the map, which I only care about as far as it lets me do other things that I want,”
It was also during his Army years that Smith first encountered Ultima Underworld, which immediately became his “favourite game of all time”. Developed by Blue Sky Productions (later and better known as Looking Glass Studios), Ultima Underworld saw players exploring a sprawling, subterranean fantasy world, and gave them a wide range of tools with which to interact with it.
Underworld was the prototypical immersive sim, and later iterations would expand upon the game’s propensity for giving players a wide array of tools to solve problems in innumerable ways. While most modern gaming blockbusters take place in vast open worlds, where players can visit dozens of locations connected by sprawling wilderness, an immersive sim is typically split into levels set on a single street or even in a single building. But it will give you dozens of ways to explore those limited spaces, and options to approach whatever goal the game has set out for you however you please.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Although it served as an escape from Freeport, Smith didn’t particularly enjoy Army life, spending most of it volunteering for night duties in places like Florida, Saudi Arabia, and Germany. He left the Army after serving his enlistment, and for the first time in his life, had the option to go wherever he wanted. After some deliberation, he decided to return to Texas, but to Austin rather than Freeport. This was partly because he had fond memories of camping around Austin with the Scouts. But Smith also had “one good friend” living in the city, a man named Steve Powers. Powers, who currently works at Arkane, had recently landed a job as a game designer at Origin Systems, the developer best known for the Ultima series of role-playing games.
Smith ended up hanging out with Powers and much of the Origin team, joining their softball team, playing tabletop games in their meeting rooms, and even going on a skydiving trip with Origin’s founder, the future billionaire and astronaut Richard Garriott. All the while, Smith was applying for every job he could at the company. Eventually, he landed a job as a games tester, and soon worked his way up to the position of lead tester on a game called Super Wing Commander.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Then came the moment that would define the rest of Smith’s life. “Over somebody’s shoulder in the department one day, I saw this game. And immediately across the room – you know how people talk about falling in love? I locked eyes with that game. I went over and I was like, ‘What is this?'” The game was called Citadel, although it would soon be renamed System Shock. It was the new title from the creators of Ultima Underworld, coming into Origin (who published games for Looking Glass) for testing. “I was like ‘Who do I have to kill to get on this project?'” Smith immediately went up to the office of his manager, Kay Gilmore, and pitched to her why he ought to be lead tester on System Shock instead. Gilmore gave him the job.
Smith spent ten months overseeing the testing of System Shock, and the experience was transformative. Not only was it a dream project, but it brought him into the orbit of Looking Glass, who were among the most forward-thinking game developers in the world at that time. “A lot of them had gone to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were super bright and super well educated. Instead of going to win math awards they had turned their focus onto video games.” Smith soon found himself chatting about games and their design with people like Doug Church, who literally wrote the book on immersive sim design theory, and Warren Spector, a veteran producer at Origin who would soon go on to direct the most ambitious immersive sim ever made, one which Smith would also play a key role in designing.
“They said ‘How about you work on this ninja game we’ve got called Dishonored, which is just [on] paper right now?'” Smith recalls. “We were like ‘What if it wasn’t ninjas?'”
Smith worked his way at up at Origin to a leading design role on a game called TechnoSaur. But the game was cancelled, and Smith departed Origin to join a startup named Multitude. There, he worked on a game called FireTeam, which Smith notes was “One of the first games with voice [chat], before Xbox had voice, even.” In 1997, Smith was exchanging emails with Warren Spector, hashing out scenarios for a game idea Spector had called Troubleshooter. Smith pitched an idea for a specific mission within this hypothetical game. “[Spector] was like ‘That’s the game I want to make.’ And when you’re directing a game, the more people on your team that get it, every one of them is like a general in your army.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith was hired by Spector’s new studio – Ion Storm Austin – to be the lead designer on Deus Ex, which at the time of its development was one of, if not the most ambitious game ever made. It puts players in a world where every conspiracy theory of the nineties was true, and tasked them with unravelling those conspiracies. Crucially, they could approach this however they wanted, shooting up opponents with a wide variety of weapons, sneaking through high-tech facilities and the backstreets of cities like New York and Hong Kong, hacking advanced security systems to turn them against their operators, or using observation and dialogue to talk their way out of sticky situations.
Deus Ex represented a huge milestone in Smith’s career, but he has always viewed the project in very pragmatic terms. “Deus Ex is the game that sort of put me on the map, which I only care about as far as it lets me do other things that I want,” Smith says. “The more recognition you have in games, the more you’re free to do your own thing.” It was also his most practical project, in another sense. “Deus Ex is also the game where I did the most level design work, where my hands were on the mouse, and I was in the editor. I worked on something like sixty per cent of the levels,” he says.
Most of all, Deus Ex was where Smith figured out what was important to him as a game designer. “What I like is the quieter moments that can explode into violence. I like the fish tank part. I like watching the AI ecology. I like exploring. I like going through abandoned places and having a sense of what happened there,” he says. One level of Deus Ex encapsulates Smith’s more particular tastes – Nicolette DuClare’s Parisian Chateau.
“DuClare, who in the game is the daughter of an Illuminati council member, abandoned the house after her mother’s death and has not returned since.. “I had this vision for that. I wanted no fighting and I just wanted this sad person to narrate you through part of their life. In the end, I’m so glad we got that in there.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Deus Ex was a smash hit both critically and commercially. Ion Storm Austin immediately set to work on two new games, and with Spector managing the overall studio, Smith was given the task of directing the sequel to Deus Ex, subtitled Invisible War. The follow-up had grander narrative ambitions than the original, but was hampered by being released on both the PC and the less powerful Xbox, resulting in much smaller, simpler environments.
Having gone through a divorce around the same time of Invisible War‘s development, Smith left Ion Storm and spent nine months recovering, before joining Midway Games, another Austin-based studio. Originally, the plan was to make a game inspired by Michael Mann’s Heat, which would have “immersive sim values.” But Smith was persuaded by the CEO to instead helm a sci-fi tactical shooter called Blacksite: Area 51.
Blacksite had a lot going for it. A system that let you contextually command a squad of soldiers, levels of the game were set in American suburbia – which felt like a novelty at the time. The story itself was “a satire of America funding people and then calling them enemies later.” But the project was difficult from the start, and ended in disaster for Smith. “I was crunched to death [working] until midnight or one in the morning for six nights a week, for a year.” Then, at a point where Smith estimated the game needed another year to complete, Midway took him off the project and hired a “finishing producer” to get the game wrapped up as quickly as possible. “From my perspective, it basically got shipped at alpha [before the game was feature-complete]. It just needed like six or eight more months,” he says.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Around this time, Smith attended a games conference in Canada, which would have fateful consequences for his career at Midway. “I was talking to the press and I shouldn’t have been, and I was a little too negative [about Blacksite]. And you know what happens? You’ll do an article and then some editor will make up a headline, and then make up the most incendiary headline that they possibly can. It’s something I never said and then it goes wide,” he claims. “So I literally got fired from Midway for all of that.”
Smith describes this incident as a “very negative moment” which took several months for him to bounce back from. He soon found his way back into game development when another friend, Raphael Colantonio, asked him to join his company Arkane Studios. Based in Lyon (although the company would eventually open a second studio in Austin) the French developer had spent the last ten years creating its own, entirely separate strand of immersive sims from the cluster of developers that spilled out from Origin and Looking Glass Games, shipping ambitious fantasy adventures like Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith joined Arkane while the studio was shopping around for a new project. Ideas that he tinkered with included a pitch for a Blade Runner game, and toying with the idea of a fourth Thief game (another series of immersive sims with games previously made by Looking Glass and Ion Storm). In the end, though, Arkane ended up working with Zenimax Bethesda –developer and publisher of the acclaimed Elder Scrolls series of sprawling role-playing games – on a completely new project.
“They said ‘How about you work on this ninja game we’ve got called Dishonored, which is just [on] paper right now?'” Smith recalls. “We were like ‘What if it wasn’t ninjas?'” Instead, Arkane pitched a wildly imaginative fantasy setting based on Victorian England, where an industrial society had harnessed electricity by burning whale oil, and where an amoral god known as the Outsider messes with society using dark magic. “We just did what we love to do, and to our utter surprise, they were fully supportive every step of the way. The weirder we got, the more they were like, ‘wow, this is very distinct’. Most publishers aren’t like that. Most publishers are like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, can you maybe set it in Detroit instead?'” he says wryly.
“My relationship with Arkane Lyon and Austin has been so strong, dude. In January I will have been there for fifteen years. No job I’ve ever had has lasted three or six years prior,”
Dishonored was a project that defied the odds in many ways. A decade on from the highs of Deus Ex, immersive sims were in a slump. Primarily a genre designed for PCs, the platform had become a secondary consideration to consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation over the course of the 2000s. Though they were cheaper and more readily available than the PC, they lacked the power, control scheme, and to a certain extent the audience to make immersive sims commercially viable on them. “At times, it’s been hard to get games funded,” Smith says. “Because games are very expensive. Publishers and executives want sure bets, although there’s no such thing.”
Dishonored, however, proved that the immersive sim still had an audience, and that you could make an aesthetically weird, mechanically complicated, productionally expensive game and have it sell well across PC, Xbox and PlayStation. “Dishonored was important to me because I was like, well, maybe I just got lucky that one time? Dishonored was like, boom, the whole world paid attention. When that happens to you once it’s awesome. When it happens to you a second time, it validates all the bad moments.”
Arkane followed up Dishonored with a sequel, which placed the emphasis of the story on a female character, the Empress Emily Kaldwin, and doubled-down on the first game’s nuanced systems and intricate level design. One of those levels, A Crack in the Slab, sees players exploring an abandoned, southern gothic mansion in two separate timelines: one where the mansion is pristine and opulent and buzzing with activity, and a second years in the future when it is a crumbling, abandoned ruin. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever had the privilege of being a part of,” Smith says.
Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the finest games ever made. Still, its sales were markedly lower than those of the first game, and combined with similarly underwhelming performance by Arkane’s next game, Prey, it was a stark reminder of the uphill struggle that is making immersive sims. According to Smith, the challenge today is very different from the hardware limitations that stalled Immersive Sims in the noughties. “Most of the things that made immersive sims kind of cutting edge are everywhere in games [now],” Smith says. “Everybody does environmental storytelling. Everybody does visual and audio-based AI to some extent.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Hence, for its next game, Redfall, Arkane Studios is taking the ideas that underpin immersive sim design, intricate 3D spaces and highly interactive systems, and fusing them with ideas that haven’t been done before. Redfall, which sees players hunting vampires in a small Massachusetts town, will not only be Arkane’s first game to take place in a contiguous open world, it will also be the studio’s first game to feature cooperative multiplayer, with up to four players able to explore Redfall at the same time.
“It’s been the hardest project I’ve ever worked on,” Smith says. This is partly due to the pandemic, which like many other companies saw Arkane and Bethesda adjusting to a work-from-home structure. It’s a change in working life that Smith strongly supports. (“I feel like it’s a thing workers have won,” he comments.) It has also proven a challenge bringing open world and multiplayer to an immersive sim-style game. “If you look at like the Dishonored missions, it might be [across] a couple of streets, and a couple of buildings,” Smith says. “Imagine if you had to do all the streets at that same level of fidelity, with every room detailed: who lived here, a sense of the place, from that mission all the way across town to the other one, even though there’s no missions between.”
Nonetheless, Smith is excited for the potential the open world offers, and the flexibility brought by the optional multiplayer component. “[In] single player, there’s lots of exploration and stealth mechanics, lots of environmental storytelling, and narrative in every square inch of the game,” he says. “I personally think the game is best with two people, because it still has a lot of that, but you’re working with somebody else. When you add three or four people, suddenly it’s like a party. It’s a completely different game with a different pace.”
What Redfall will ultimately mean for Arkane, and the trajectory of immersive sims in general, is yet to be determined. But the studio is already the most successful developer of immersive sims in the industry’s history. Redfall will be its seventh game within or orbiting the genre, five of which have been released in the last ten years. It’s an unprecedented run of stability for a developer specialising in this type of game, a stability that has been reflected in Smith’s own life. “My relationship with Arkane Lyon and Austin has been so strong, dude. In January I will have been there for fifteen years. No job I’ve ever had has lasted three or six years prior,” he concludes. “It feels like an amazing run. I’m not saying in terms of how great the games are, because other people can decide that. But an amazing run in terms of my life.”
For help, advice or more information regarding sexual harassment, assault and rape in the UK, visit the Rape Crisis charity website. In the US, visit RAINN.
Content Warning:This piece includes mention of self-harm, suicide and child abuse.
At the end of a road called Peach Street, somewhere around the Freeport area of Texas, an abandoned house sits beneath a copse of overgrown trees. Built at the turn of the century, it was once home to a young couple who were engaged to be married. But before the wedding, the bride-to-be was hospitalised in a serious accident, resulting in paralysis from the waist down. After the bride left the hospital, the wedding went ahead. The groom carried the bride over the threshold of their home, and together the newlyweds lived in romantic seclusion until their deaths.
The story of this couple may or may not be true. But the house itself is real enough, and at some point around 1981, fifteen-year-old Harvey Smith crept inside its long-abandoned shell, seeking evidence of this lifelong romance. “We moved super slowly. We tried not to break anything,” Smith says. “Rain had come in through the windows. I think there was a dead animal skeleton, like a dead cat or raccoon. We read through papers, like meaningless stuff, looked at their dishes. Nobody had lived there for a long time.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith and the two friends who accompanied him found nothing that verified the rumours they’d heard about the house. But the experience of being in that space, surrounded by the detritus of people whose whereabouts was unknown, stayed with Smith all his life. “The tension was sublime. At any moment, it felt like somebody might call out from upstairs, or somebody might pull out and beat on the door.
“That kind of drama, even though it’s slow moving and nothing happened, it’s more powerful to me than the rollercoaster.” The rollercoaster is Smith’s analogy for cinematic action games, titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty which funnel the player down a linear sequence of explosive set-pieces. Arkane Studios, the company Smith directs, specifically does not make these kinds of bombastic games. “You’re on a track, you can’t get out of the car, you’re rolling along. And at a certain point, you’re meant to feel your stomach drop. You’re meant to scream. You’re meant to go through some cold air. It’s all very carefully crafted, and that is a form of drama. That is not what I’m interested in at all.”
So, what exactly fuels Smith? Across some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time that he’s worked on – including the sci-fi conspiracy thriller Deus Ex and the fantastical revenge epic Dishonored– there’s a pull towards the kind of limitless experiences where it feels like anything could happen at any given moment.
“When I built some of the level design for the first Deus Ex, the little compound out behind UNATCO is modelled exactly after the satellite communications building compound that I worked at in Germany”
“In Dishonored, you can do things like skirt across the rug in this beautiful environment, and you hear a guard, but your health is low and your resources are down. You just duck under the table, and you’re hiding under the desk while the guard stops. He starts talking to one of the ladies cleaning the office, and they have a semi-comical conversation. And you’re hiding under the desk and you know that if you get busted, he’s probably going to kill you or you’re gonna kill him and her, the whole room’s gonna blow up into body parts and violence,” Smith explains. “It’s the drama of exploration and player pacing, and the potential of action, not action. And the longer I can drag out that delicious part – where it may or may not happen – the better.”
These types of games, known by their fans as ‘immersive sims’, are what Smith has spent most of his career making. He tested them at Origin Systems, designed them at Ion Storm Austin, and directed dozens of developers dedicated to them at Arkane Studios – most recently on the vampire-themed Redfall. Known for their highly interactive systems and intensely detailed environments, immersive sims are among the most ambitious games around. They’re also notoriously hard to make, and even harder to sell to a mainstream gaming audience. Today, Arkane Studios is the only developer of its size that still designs them, making Smith the most prominent torchbearer of a genre perennially on the verge of extinction.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Harvey Smith grew up in Freeport, Texas, an industrial town on the United States’ south-eastern shoreline. “You could stand in one direction and see the beach and the oil derricks [rigs] out on the water. In all three other directions you could see smokestacks with fire on the top, and boilers and chemical plants. It looks like something on the Death Star.”
Smith describes his early childhood as being “shattered” by a formative series of events. “I had the blue collar father, the chemical plant worker who was violent and eventually took his own life. But prior to that, there was a lot of abuse of various forms on my mom’s side of the family, and lots of drug problems”. Smith’s parents split up when he was young, and he went to live with his mother. “She was the centre of my universe, basically. And when I was six, she OD’d, and I watched her die.”
Following the death of his mother, Smith returned to living with his father. “It was all the stuff you’d expect from that side, but when people exchange stories, lots of people have had that story. ‘Yeah, my dad was a bit rough or whatever,'” he says. “When you’re a little kid and your mom dies, your world is destroyed. It’s the end of the world. In class, I would just stare at the corner.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
As Smith grew older, he eventually found refuge in fiction and fantasy, initially books, comics and films, and later tabletop RPGs and video games. His first games console was an Atari 2600, purchased by his father.
The Atari 2600 entranced Smith. “I could just lose myself in this world. It’s very similar to a good drug experience, where you feel some things, but also you cease to exist for a while. Any anxiety you have, is just gone.” As for the games themselves, Smith was indifferent to most of them, but one that grabbed his imagination was Adventure, a fantasy game developed by keystone Atari designer Warren Robinett, where players had to retrieve a magical chalice from a kingdom prowled by three dragons. “The key was that it had procedural systems. The various keys to the various castles were rearranged. The monsters could spawn in different places, the items spawned in different places. So every time you played, it was different. And it made a narrative, like, ‘Oh, I left this castle and I went out and I found the sword in this location, and I killed the green dragon with it.'”
By 12, Smith had a group of friends who frequently played Dungeons and Dragons together, but his access to video games remained limited until age 20, when he joined the US Army as a way of getting out of Freeport. “We had these laptops [manufactured] by Swann; very expensive because they would put them underwater, or they would take them up to high altitude, and put them in cold. They had to survive, and they were like $26,000 each” Smith says. “We used them for mission stuff, but we mostly used them to play Wolfenstein.”
“Deus Ex is the game that sort of put me on the map, which I only care about as far as it lets me do other things that I want,”
It was also during his Army years that Smith first encountered Ultima Underworld, which immediately became his “favourite game of all time”. Developed by Blue Sky Productions (later and better known as Looking Glass Studios), Ultima Underworld saw players exploring a sprawling, subterranean fantasy world, and gave them a wide range of tools with which to interact with it.
Underworld was the prototypical immersive sim, and later iterations would expand upon the game’s propensity for giving players a wide array of tools to solve problems in innumerable ways. While most modern gaming blockbusters take place in vast open worlds, where players can visit dozens of locations connected by sprawling wilderness, an immersive sim is typically split into levels set on a single street or even in a single building. But it will give you dozens of ways to explore those limited spaces, and options to approach whatever goal the game has set out for you however you please.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Although it served as an escape from Freeport, Smith didn’t particularly enjoy Army life, spending most of it volunteering for night duties in places like Florida, Saudi Arabia, and Germany. He left the Army after serving his enlistment, and for the first time in his life, had the option to go wherever he wanted. After some deliberation, he decided to return to Texas, but to Austin rather than Freeport. This was partly because he had fond memories of camping around Austin with the Scouts. But Smith also had “one good friend” living in the city, a man named Steve Powers. Powers, who currently works at Arkane, had recently landed a job as a game designer at Origin Systems, the developer best known for the Ultima series of role-playing games.
Smith ended up hanging out with Powers and much of the Origin team, joining their softball team, playing tabletop games in their meeting rooms, and even going on a skydiving trip with Origin’s founder, the future billionaire and astronaut Richard Garriott. All the while, Smith was applying for every job he could at the company. Eventually, he landed a job as a games tester, and soon worked his way up to the position of lead tester on a game called Super Wing Commander.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Then came the moment that would define the rest of Smith’s life. “Over somebody’s shoulder in the department one day, I saw this game. And immediately across the room – you know how people talk about falling in love? I locked eyes with that game. I went over and I was like, ‘What is this?'” The game was called Citadel, although it would soon be renamed System Shock. It was the new title from the creators of Ultima Underworld, coming into Origin (who published games for Looking Glass) for testing. “I was like ‘Who do I have to kill to get on this project?'” Smith immediately went up to the office of his manager, Kay Gilmore, and pitched to her why he ought to be lead tester on System Shock instead. Gilmore gave him the job.
Smith spent ten months overseeing the testing of System Shock, and the experience was transformative. Not only was it a dream project, but it brought him into the orbit of Looking Glass, who were among the most forward-thinking game developers in the world at that time. “A lot of them had gone to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were super bright and super well educated. Instead of going to win math awards they had turned their focus onto video games.” Smith soon found himself chatting about games and their design with people like Doug Church, who literally wrote the book on immersive sim design theory, and Warren Spector, a veteran producer at Origin who would soon go on to direct the most ambitious immersive sim ever made, one which Smith would also play a key role in designing.
“They said ‘How about you work on this ninja game we’ve got called Dishonored, which is just [on] paper right now?'” Smith recalls. “We were like ‘What if it wasn’t ninjas?'”
Smith worked his way at up at Origin to a leading design role on a game called TechnoSaur. But the game was cancelled, and Smith departed Origin to join a startup named Multitude. There, he worked on a game called FireTeam, which Smith notes was “One of the first games with voice [chat], before Xbox had voice, even.” In 1997, Smith was exchanging emails with Warren Spector, hashing out scenarios for a game idea Spector had called Troubleshooter. Smith pitched an idea for a specific mission within this hypothetical game. “[Spector] was like ‘That’s the game I want to make.’ And when you’re directing a game, the more people on your team that get it, every one of them is like a general in your army.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith was hired by Spector’s new studio – Ion Storm Austin – to be the lead designer on Deus Ex, which at the time of its development was one of, if not the most ambitious game ever made. It puts players in a world where every conspiracy theory of the nineties was true, and tasked them with unravelling those conspiracies. Crucially, they could approach this however they wanted, shooting up opponents with a wide variety of weapons, sneaking through high-tech facilities and the backstreets of cities like New York and Hong Kong, hacking advanced security systems to turn them against their operators, or using observation and dialogue to talk their way out of sticky situations.
Deus Ex represented a huge milestone in Smith’s career, but he has always viewed the project in very pragmatic terms. “Deus Ex is the game that sort of put me on the map, which I only care about as far as it lets me do other things that I want,” Smith says. “The more recognition you have in games, the more you’re free to do your own thing.” It was also his most practical project, in another sense. “Deus Ex is also the game where I did the most level design work, where my hands were on the mouse, and I was in the editor. I worked on something like sixty per cent of the levels,” he says.
Most of all, Deus Ex was where Smith figured out what was important to him as a game designer. “What I like is the quieter moments that can explode into violence. I like the fish tank part. I like watching the AI ecology. I like exploring. I like going through abandoned places and having a sense of what happened there,” he says. One level of Deus Ex encapsulates Smith’s more particular tastes – Nicolette DuClare’s Parisian Chateau.
“DuClare, who in the game is the daughter of an Illuminati council member, abandoned the house after her mother’s death and has not returned since.. “I had this vision for that. I wanted no fighting and I just wanted this sad person to narrate you through part of their life. In the end, I’m so glad we got that in there.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Deus Ex was a smash hit both critically and commercially. Ion Storm Austin immediately set to work on two new games, and with Spector managing the overall studio, Smith was given the task of directing the sequel to Deus Ex, subtitled Invisible War. The follow-up had grander narrative ambitions than the original, but was hampered by being released on both the PC and the less powerful Xbox, resulting in much smaller, simpler environments.
Having gone through a divorce around the same time of Invisible War‘s development, Smith left Ion Storm and spent nine months recovering, before joining Midway Games, another Austin-based studio. Originally, the plan was to make a game inspired by Michael Mann’s Heat, which would have “immersive sim values.” But Smith was persuaded by the CEO to instead helm a sci-fi tactical shooter called Blacksite: Area 51.
Blacksite had a lot going for it. A system that let you contextually command a squad of soldiers, levels of the game were set in American suburbia – which felt like a novelty at the time. The story itself was “a satire of America funding people and then calling them enemies later.” But the project was difficult from the start, and ended in disaster for Smith. “I was crunched to death [working] until midnight or one in the morning for six nights a week, for a year.” Then, at a point where Smith estimated the game needed another year to complete, Midway took him off the project and hired a “finishing producer” to get the game wrapped up as quickly as possible. “From my perspective, it basically got shipped at alpha [before the game was feature-complete]. It just needed like six or eight more months,” he says.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Around this time, Smith attended a games conference in Canada, which would have fateful consequences for his career at Midway. “I was talking to the press and I shouldn’t have been, and I was a little too negative [about Blacksite]. And you know what happens? You’ll do an article and then some editor will make up a headline, and then make up the most incendiary headline that they possibly can. It’s something I never said and then it goes wide,” he claims. “So I literally got fired from Midway for all of that.”
Smith describes this incident as a “very negative moment” which took several months for him to bounce back from. He soon found his way back into game development when another friend, Raphael Colantonio, asked him to join his company Arkane Studios. Based in Lyon (although the company would eventually open a second studio in Austin) the French developer had spent the last ten years creating its own, entirely separate strand of immersive sims from the cluster of developers that spilled out from Origin and Looking Glass Games, shipping ambitious fantasy adventures like Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Smith joined Arkane while the studio was shopping around for a new project. Ideas that he tinkered with included a pitch for a Blade Runner game, and toying with the idea of a fourth Thief game (another series of immersive sims with games previously made by Looking Glass and Ion Storm). In the end, though, Arkane ended up working with Zenimax Bethesda –developer and publisher of the acclaimed Elder Scrolls series of sprawling role-playing games – on a completely new project.
“They said ‘How about you work on this ninja game we’ve got called Dishonored, which is just [on] paper right now?'” Smith recalls. “We were like ‘What if it wasn’t ninjas?'” Instead, Arkane pitched a wildly imaginative fantasy setting based on Victorian England, where an industrial society had harnessed electricity by burning whale oil, and where an amoral god known as the Outsider messes with society using dark magic. “We just did what we love to do, and to our utter surprise, they were fully supportive every step of the way. The weirder we got, the more they were like, ‘wow, this is very distinct’. Most publishers aren’t like that. Most publishers are like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, can you maybe set it in Detroit instead?'” he says wryly.
“My relationship with Arkane Lyon and Austin has been so strong, dude. In January I will have been there for fifteen years. No job I’ve ever had has lasted three or six years prior,”
Dishonored was a project that defied the odds in many ways. A decade on from the highs of Deus Ex, immersive sims were in a slump. Primarily a genre designed for PCs, the platform had become a secondary consideration to consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation over the course of the 2000s. Though they were cheaper and more readily available than the PC, they lacked the power, control scheme, and to a certain extent the audience to make immersive sims commercially viable on them. “At times, it’s been hard to get games funded,” Smith says. “Because games are very expensive. Publishers and executives want sure bets, although there’s no such thing.”
Dishonored, however, proved that the immersive sim still had an audience, and that you could make an aesthetically weird, mechanically complicated, productionally expensive game and have it sell well across PC, Xbox and PlayStation. “Dishonored was important to me because I was like, well, maybe I just got lucky that one time? Dishonored was like, boom, the whole world paid attention. When that happens to you once it’s awesome. When it happens to you a second time, it validates all the bad moments.”
Arkane followed up Dishonored with a sequel, which placed the emphasis of the story on a female character, the Empress Emily Kaldwin, and doubled-down on the first game’s nuanced systems and intricate level design. One of those levels, A Crack in the Slab, sees players exploring an abandoned, southern gothic mansion in two separate timelines: one where the mansion is pristine and opulent and buzzing with activity, and a second years in the future when it is a crumbling, abandoned ruin. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever had the privilege of being a part of,” Smith says.
Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the finest games ever made. Still, its sales were markedly lower than those of the first game, and combined with similarly underwhelming performance by Arkane’s next game, Prey, it was a stark reminder of the uphill struggle that is making immersive sims. According to Smith, the challenge today is very different from the hardware limitations that stalled Immersive Sims in the noughties. “Most of the things that made immersive sims kind of cutting edge are everywhere in games [now],” Smith says. “Everybody does environmental storytelling. Everybody does visual and audio-based AI to some extent.”
Credit: Ismael Quintanilla for NME
Hence, for its next game, Redfall, Arkane Studios is taking the ideas that underpin immersive sim design, intricate 3D spaces and highly interactive systems, and fusing them with ideas that haven’t been done before. Redfall, which sees players hunting vampires in a small Massachusetts town, will not only be Arkane’s first game to take place in a contiguous open world, it will also be the studio’s first game to feature cooperative multiplayer, with up to four players able to explore Redfall at the same time.
“It’s been the hardest project I’ve ever worked on,” Smith says. This is partly due to the pandemic, which like many other companies saw Arkane and Bethesda adjusting to a work-from-home structure. It’s a change in working life that Smith strongly supports. (“I feel like it’s a thing workers have won,” he comments.) It has also proven a challenge bringing open world and multiplayer to an immersive sim-style game. “If you look at like the Dishonored missions, it might be [across] a couple of streets, and a couple of buildings,” Smith says. “Imagine if you had to do all the streets at that same level of fidelity, with every room detailed: who lived here, a sense of the place, from that mission all the way across town to the other one, even though there’s no missions between.”
Nonetheless, Smith is excited for the potential the open world offers, and the flexibility brought by the optional multiplayer component. “[In] single player, there’s lots of exploration and stealth mechanics, lots of environmental storytelling, and narrative in every square inch of the game,” he says. “I personally think the game is best with two people, because it still has a lot of that, but you’re working with somebody else. When you add three or four people, suddenly it’s like a party. It’s a completely different game with a different pace.”
What Redfall will ultimately mean for Arkane, and the trajectory of immersive sims in general, is yet to be determined. But the studio is already the most successful developer of immersive sims in the industry’s history. Redfall will be its seventh game within or orbiting the genre, five of which have been released in the last ten years. It’s an unprecedented run of stability for a developer specialising in this type of game, a stability that has been reflected in Smith’s own life. “My relationship with Arkane Lyon and Austin has been so strong, dude. In January I will have been there for fifteen years. No job I’ve ever had has lasted three or six years prior,” he concludes. “It feels like an amazing run. I’m not saying in terms of how great the games are, because other people can decide that. But an amazing run in terms of my life.”
For help, advice or more information regarding sexual harassment, assault and rape in the UK, visit the Rape Crisis charity website. In the US, visit RAINN.
System Shack is NME’s new column that explores the mechanics behind the industry’s most successful games. This week, Rick Lane vies for power in Path of Exile.
When it originally launched in 2013, Path of Exile was the scruffy underdog to Diablo 3. A far rougher, more understated game compared to Blizzard‘s wildly successful action role-playing game (ARPG), it lacked Diablo‘s visual flair and slick, stylish combat. But in its rise to the ARPG throne, Diablo 3 had lost sight of what makes ARPGs so uniquely appealing. It came to believe that the genre was about loot. Amassing it, trading it, and making a fat profit out of it via its controversial real-money auction house.
Though penniless and with nothing but a tattered loincloth to its name, Path of Exile had an ace up its sleeve, knowledge. It understood that ARPGs are not, in fact, about amassing loot but about amassing power. Whereas traditional RPGs challenge you with how your character is to solve a problem, ARPGs challenge you with how awesomely your character is going to solve a problem. The bigger and more dramatic you can make that power trip, the better.
This acute understanding of an ARPG’s raison d’etre is what separates Path of Exile from every other game in the genre. Other ARPGs might be more stylish, more spectacular, more original, or more innovative. But none of them let you embark on the same raw power trip as Grinding Gear Games‘ gritty fantasy epic.
Path Of Exile. Credit: Grinding Gear Games.
Crucially, this power-trip is directed entirely by you. Like most ARPGs, Path of Exile starts with players selecting one of several character classes, such as the Marauder, Ranger, and Witch. But these classes only define your basic stat alignment, the emphasis they place on strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Your class doesn’t define your character’s skills or abilities, and doesn’t even define their onward stat progression. They are lumps of clay for you to mould going forward. They just start in slightly different shapes.
Instead, character progression is governed by two overarching systems. The first is Path of Exile‘s infamously vast passive skill tree. Inspired by the sphere grid of Final Fantasy 10, Path of Exile‘s skill tree is a sprawling, node-based affair which each class starts on in a different position. Every time you gain a skill point, you can unlock a new node that can do anything from increasing your base stats, to boosting specific weapon damage output, improving status resistances, and much more.
There are typically multiple directions you can travel along this grid at any one time, meaning you can progress through this skill tree however you choose. Marauders can weave into the Witch’s progression path, combining their melee attacks with magical abilities, while a duellist could balance speed and strength by navigating into Marauder territory. These are extremely rudimentary examples, too. Characters can focus their passive bonuses on specific abilities like Totems, magical automatons that let you deploy in-game abilities by proxy.
Path Of Exile. Credit: Grinding Gear Games.
On the subject of abilities, the skill tree has nothing to do with the active powers your character can wield. Those are dictated by gems. Collected alongside other forms of loot. Gems can be socketed into weapons and armour, and it’s these which dictate how your character fights, whether they use spells and incantations, or melee attacks like heavy strikes and ground slams.
But gems don’t only affect which abilities your characters can wield, they can also alter how specific abilities work. Alongside straightforward skill gems, players can pick up support skill gems, which can be slotted into loot alongside a base skill gem to augment its abilities in certain ways. They could add elemental damage to an ability, give it knockback powers, or alter an ability so that rather than casting it personally, your character summons a totem to do it for them.
All of this combined means that you can create astonishingly specific and nuanced character builds, which may or may not lie within familiar class archetypes. Yes, you can create a powerful warrior, but you could more specifically create a powerful warrior who doesn’t personally do any fighting whatsoever, instead relying on totems and minions to do all the bloody work for them.
Path Of Exile: Credit: Grinding Gear Games
Path of Exile‘s power curve was impressive when it launched with its original three-act-structure. But now the game has a whopping ten acts that let you slowly transform your character into a god-killing colossus, facilitated by new, higher-level systems like ascendancy classes that allow players to build even further upon the game’s already towering character progression.
This is an extremely broad flyover of a game that has been constantly expanding and evolving and drilling deeper and deeper into its own ideas for the best part of a decade. Once a somewhat crude and obscure game from New Zealand, Path of Exile has become the standard-bearer of ARPG design. When Diablo 4 launches next year, it won’t be seeking to inherit the crown from Diablo 3, it’ll be seeking to reclaim it from Path of Exile.
System Shack is NME’s new column that explores the mechanics behind the industry’s most successful games. This week, Rick Lane builds a house of cards in No Man’s Sky.
Every year or so, I reinstall No Man’s Sky and start a new game. This is partly because I want to see what’s changed, what new and exciting features Hello Games has added in its obscene run of post-release support for the procedural space sim. Every year I enjoy the game more than I did previously. Yet no matter what Hello Games adds to its now hugely diverse universe, be it freighters, alien derelicts or space whales, there’s still something about the game that doesn’t quite click.
It would be easy to dismiss No Man’s Sky as simply not being for me. But that’s the thing. No Man’s Sky is completely for me. A game that lets you explore a vast, colourful and remarkably diverse galaxy, where you chart stars and planets, flora and fauna while seeking to unravel a mystery at the heart of the universe? No Man’s Sky couldn’t be more for me if it arrived on my doorstep with a crate of lager and a punnet of chicken madras. The premise speaks directly to my soul, and yet it always feels like there’s a barrier between me and truly enjoying it whenever I play.
Given how much No Man’s Sky has changed, there’s only one area where this barrier can really reside – the crafting system. While Hello Games had added a vast amount of content around the edges of No Man’s Sky, the core loop of the game has remained roughly intact. And for everything that No Man’s Sky does well – and full credit to the game, it does a lot well – there’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about how it handles crafting.
On the face of it, No Man’s Sky’s crafting is little different from other crafting systems. You take resources from the world, combine them with other scavenged bits to make new items, and then use those items to create new equipment, fuel existing equipment, and so forth. But there are subtle differences in how Hello Games implement these ideas that dramatically affect the sensation of crafting.
At the heart of this are the game’s menu cards. Every resource and item you collect from the game world is turned into a card icon when represented in your inventory. Crafting in the game involves moving these cards between different menus, combining them to create new cards, and then installing them into menu slots to upgrade ships, weapons, tools, etc. The problem with this system is it means nearly every interaction happens inside the menu rather than in the game itself. Actions like upgrading a weapon, refuelling your starship, and replenishing your suit’s oxygen is all done in a series of similar menu screens, putting a barrier between you and the incredible worlds that No Man’s Sky has you explore.
No Man’s Sky Endurance update. CREDIT: Hello Games
Hello Games is clearly aware of this problem, and over the years has added various new features to make crafting a bit more physical. The building systems introduced in the Foundations update is an obvious example, but there are also smaller features like the refiner, which you place in the world to convert raw materials into more advanced compounds. But operating the refiner still requires the use of a menu overlay, where you insert cards in one end and pull new cards out of the other.
This interactive distancing is far from the only issue with No Man’s Sky’s crafting system. Turning every item into a card means they’re all uniformly shaped, which makes it harder to identify specific resources in your inventory at-a-glance (compare this to Minecraft, where every item icon matches its shape in the game world. No Man’s Sky also commits to a semi-scientific naming convention for its resources, which can make learning crafting recipes difficult. Just call it ‘iron’, Hello Games, you’re not fooling anyone with this ‘ferrite’ nonsense.
No Man’s Sky. Credit: Hello Games
Even the basic action of collecting resources has a distancing effect to it, as it requires you to hold down a button while an icon timer ticks down. Not only does this lack the physicality of, say, chopping down a tree or yanking a plant from the ground. Since No Man’s Sky uses the same context-sensitive action for almost everything, whether that’s climbing into your spaceship or chatting with an alien, it means there’s no tactile difference between these actions. The game’s planets may look wildly different, but they feel homogenous.
The result of all this is a crafting system that’s flat, unintuitive, and serves to pull you out of the experience rather than reeling you further in. Despite the improvements made by Hello Games’ many updates, these updates have also placed greater emphasis on a crafting system that wasn’t really designed to sustain that level of complexity. As a result, No Man’s Sky’s incredible universe is often viewed not through the canopy of your spaceship, but through the translucent rectangle of the game’s inventory screen.
No Man’s Sky is out now. It has been for six years, even.
System Shack is NME’s new column that explores the mechanics behind the industry’s most successful games. This week, Rick Lane goes for the jugular in Doom Eternal.
I firmly believe that Doom Eternal is a contender for the greatest FPS ever made. It wasn’t always this way. When I first played the game on launch in 2020, I felt slightly let down by it. I didn’t like many of the new additions id Software had made, like the extra platforming sequences and the greater emphasis on story. The experience felt baggy and cumbersome in a way that the 2016 reboot did not.
But then I played the game a second time, to refresh my memory of it before the expansions dropped. And I absolutely adored it. What had seemed like a baroque and overwrought experience now felt slick, satisfying and perfectly paced. I spent the next twentysomething hours in a trance-like state, carving my way through every demon hell had to offer.
What changed? Well, the simple answer is, me. On my second playthrough of Doom Eternal, I knew every trick up the Doom Slayer’s sleeve. I’d internalised every counter to every demon attack, knew exactly which weapon to use against which foe. I had done what Doom Eternal wanted me to do, which is not merely to shoot demons, but to inhabit the character of the Doom Slayer.
Doom Eternal. Credit: id Software.
Like IO‘s Hitman trilogy, Doom Eternal is a game that takes more than one play-through to see its true magnificence. Yet whereas Hitman is about mastery of your environment, Doom Eternal is about mastery of your moveset. It wants you to feel like more than a dude with a big gun, it wants you to feel like an unstoppable force that has a bloody solution to every immovable-seeming obstacle put in front of it.
Doom Eternal‘s murderous mechanics radiate outward from the “glory kill” idea introduced in the previous game, whereby performing grisly executions of damaged enemies reward you with health. This meant killing enemies helped you perpetuate your murder spree, letting you push forward aggressively rather than fleeing the fight in search of health.
Doom Eternal takes this idea of violence leading to more violence, and massively expands upon it. Now not only can you earn health by killing, and earn ammo by slicing enemies apart with your chainsaw, you can earn armour by setting enemies on fire and then killing them, showering the surrounding area with armour shards.
But the most notable change Doom Eternal makes is that virtually every enemy you encounter has a specific weakness that lets you nullify their attacks and kill them quicker. Cacodemons, for example, are vulnerable to having a grenade lobbed into their gaping maw, instantly opening them up to a glory kill. Spider-Arachnotrons can have their turrets destroyed with a pinpoint shot from the assault rifle’s sniper scope, while the Cyber Mancubus’ heavy armour can be instantly shattered with a percussive Blood Punch.
Doom Eternal. Credit: id Software.
As you progress through the game, you build up a mental library of these tricks, learning which technique works best against which foe, which weapon is most effective in which scenario, until they become second nature. Once that happens, you can kill pretty much any enemy in the game in a matter of seconds. The mighty Doom Hunter? Zap that sucker with your plasma gun and then snipe out its jets from beneath it. The Baron of Hell? Soften him up with your chaingun before giving him a taste of your rocket launcher. The infamous Marauder? Juggling your super-shotgun and ballista will put that scab down in moments.
Internalising these techniques enables you to utterly dominate the battlefield, which in turn allows id Software to crank up the heat. The latter stages of Doom Eternal feature some utterly frenzied fights. And the expansions, oh my, the expansions offer the most intense single-player FPS action I’ve ever encountered, with furiously protracted battles that test your skills to the limit.
There is a potential counterpoint to this, which is that can Doom Eternal really be the best FPS around if it only shows its true greatness the second time you play it? It’s true that Doom Eternal could do a better job of communicating these new ideas, taking a bit more time to teach you each skill during active play, rather than constantly interrupting the experience for separate, easily forgettable tutorials.
Doom Eternal. Credit: id Software
That said, it would hardly be the first game that requires learning to truly enjoy. We don’t expect to be incredible at multiplayer games the first time we play them, but that doesn’t mean those games are poorly made. And there are many single-player games that require a certain level of mastery of to see them at their best. From Software’s RPGs take no prisoners whatsoever, but are regarded as some of the finest games ever made.
If you only played Doom Eternal once and dismissed it, I urge you to give it a second try, and pay a little more attention what it’s trying to teach you. The Doom Slayer may not be great at communication, but when it comes to killing demons, he knows his onions. Listen well enough to his monosyllabic grunts, you’ll be dancing through a rain of demon blood in no time.
This introduction is probably going to land me on a government register, but when I play first-person shooters, I like my enemies to bleed. There are many layers to good FPS design, the feel of the movement, the design of the levels, the weight of your weapons. But it’s hard to ignore the pure catharsis of turning someone trying to kill you into a pile of quivering mince. Painting the walls with your enemies’ insides is one of the great joys of FPS gaming, and the farther a shooter lets me spread the red into the corners, so much the better.
It’s to Fashion Police Squad‘s credit, therefore, that during my time with it I barely missed the gore and giblets typically associated with the genre. This retro-styled shooter sees you using your arsenal of colourful weapons to fix your enemies’ fashion crimes, painting charcoal suits with a dye-blasting shotgun, and shoring up baggy pants by whipping those trailing trousers with a belt. It’s a gimmick that could easily run thinner than the seam on a second-hand pair of boxer shorts. But there is an impressive amount of substance backing up Fashion Police Squad‘s sense of style.
You play as Sergeant Des, a dapper (if slightly dim) clothing copper dedicated to fighting a fashion crimewave afflicting his city. The streets are overrun with ill-fitting suits, socks-with-sandals, and blindingly loud jerseys. As Des, you’ll need to dodge flying briefcases and high-speed electric scooters as you try to get the measure of these scruffy scofflaws, dispensing justice with an array of fashionable firearms.
Fashion Police Squad. Credit: Mopeful Games.
The hook of Fashion Police Squad‘s gunplay is that each weapon is geared toward solving a specific type of fashion crime. So while your 2-Dye-4 Elite is perfect for solving colour-based crimes, smartening-up drab suits and toning down loud shirts, it’s useless against an enemy with poorly-fitting frippery. For those foes, you’ll need to switch to your Tailormade, a rapid-fire sewing machine that’ll stitch up opponents in no time.
The risk with this style of FPS is that it ends up feeling restrictive, forcing you into a game of murderous matching rather than letting you figure out the optimal way of battling enemies. Fashion Police Squad doesn’t entirely escape from this – the first few levels can feel somewhat binary. But the issue fades away as the weapon and enemy roster expands. A few hours into the game, you pick up the Wet’Ones, a sud gun handy for dousing enemies whose fashion is too fire. But the Wet’Ones high-pressure soapy spray is also useful for shrinking baggy suits.
Fashion Police Squad. Credit: Mopeful Games.
Developer Mopeful Games has clearly thought hard about how to make fixing clothing calamities as satisfying as blasting a demon’s entire respiratory system out the back of their ribcage. Weapons have the weight and feedback that a good shooter needs, while some like the shotgun do let you paint the walls, just with dye rather than digestive fluids. When an enemy’s health reaches zero, their fashion crime is resolved in a puff of smoke, while a booming, Unreal Tournament-style announcer makes effusive proclamations like “fabulous” or “voguish”. It’s amusing, but also gratifying.
Fashion Police Squad is also an impressively kinetic shooter. Your belt, for example, isn’t solely for whipping baggy trousers into shape. It can also grapple onto flagpoles, letting you swing across gaps and up to higher ledges. This action has a powerful momentum behind it that brings to mind leaping on and off the Skyrails in Bioshock Infinite. Mopeful Games applies this mechanic to some liberating platforming challenges, with you leaping between balconies and along perilously tall alleys of skyscrapers. The Wet’Ones, meanwhile, has a secondary function that lubricates the floor in front of you, accelerating your movement. This enables you to jump across much larger gaps, which in turn lets Mopeful Games get more creative with the level design.
Fashion Police Squad. Credit: Mopeful Games.
On the subject of level design, Fashion Police Squad‘s maps are colourful, knotty affairs, reminiscent of a brighter, breezier Duke Nukem 3D. Like the mechanics at the core of the game, the levels become more interesting as it progresses. For example, one mission is set on a subway train, and initially appears to be a straightforward, linear gauntlet. But it quickly reveals itself to be much more serpentine and interesting. There is a recurring problem with the map design, however, which is that most levels involve a fair amount of backtracking. Sometimes the game tries to mitigate this by sprinkling in new enemies on your return trip. Other times, though, it just doesn’t bother, leaving you wandering back through inert-feeling spaces.
This isn’t the only loose stitch in Fashion Police Squad‘s outfit. The game has a weird quirk whereby when you initially defeat an enemy, they turn transparent, remaining that way until all enemies in the area have been beaten. The intent, as far as I can tell, is to stop defeated enemies from obscuring the battlefield, which would have fair logic to it. That said having defeated enemies basically disappear does slightly undermine the transformation element of solving the fashion crimes.
FPS also has a surprisingly strong narrative thrust, with the game’s story delivered through text-based chats between Sergeant Des and various other characters. The writing itself is decent, with an appropriately light-hearted tone that pokes gentle fun at both shooter convention and the game’s own patently absurd fiction. But these conversational interludes impact the broader flow of levels, lending them a stop-start quality that can be frustrating.
These hitches aside, Fashion Police Squad is a fun and imaginative twist on classic shooter design. While not quite on the same level as the best FPS throwbacks, the likes of Dusk and Amid Evil, it does more than enough that’s different and eye-catching to earn its place on the catwalk.
System Shack is NME’s new column that explores the mechanics behind the industry’s most successful games. This week, Rick Lane swings for the fences in Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Superhero games are all about embodying the fantasy, about letting players get as close as possible to feeling what it would be like to be their favourite crimefighter. But the fantasy is different for every superhero. A Superman game is worthless if it doesn’t make you believe a man can fly, while a good Batman game needs a beltful of gadgets and the ability to scare the guano out of your foes.
With Spider-Man, it’s all about the swinging. While there’s room for interpretation in areas like Spider-Man’s personality, how he fights enemies, and even who lurks beneath the mask, one universal constant is how Spider-Man moves. Spidey’s habit of swinging through New York like an urban Tarzan is fairly unique among superheroes, so for any developer making a Spidey game, capturing that distinctive method of traversal is critical to realising the fantasy.
The developer of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Insomniac Games, clearly understands this, and dedicates a remarkable number of resources to making Spider-Man’s web-swinging as thrilling and intuitive as possible. The result is arguably the best traversal system of any game. Not any superhero game, but any game full stop.
Marvel’s Spider-Man. Credit: Insomniac Games
What’s perhaps most surprising about the web-swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man is how simple it is to control. The basic interaction of starting and completing a swing is all baked into a single button press. There’s no alternating trigger-presses to shoot web to Spidey’s left or right, no need to time your button presses so that your web sticks to the right place. All you do is press the button to begin a new swing, and then release it to make Spidey let go.
On paper it seems overly straightforward, but it makes sense in the broader context of the game. Peter Parker has already been Spider-Man for several years in Insomniac’s universe, so it makes sense that the web-swinging should feel effortless. Moreover, simple does not mean unsatisfying, and Insomniac deploys meticulous audio/visual design to lend the web-swinging an incredible sense of physicality. You can feel the weight of Spidey as he glides through the air, the tension in the web-rope as he reaches the end of an arc.
There is more complexity to the system than this, but that complexity is largely optional, serving to make your web-swinging more efficient and spectacular. Although you can start and end swings whenever you want, ending a swing at the zenith will give Spidey a boost of altitude, while waiting until the last second to commence a new swing will massively boost his speed. You can also add extra momentum to Spidey by performing a “web-zip”, which is useful for leapfrogging over rooftops. Meanwhile, you can also direct Spidey to a specific point on a building, then catapult off it using his “Point Launch” ability for a further speed injection.
Marvel’s Spider-Man. Credit: Insomniac Games
Arguably the most important element of Spidey’s movement design, however, is how Insomniac strive to ensure that Spider-Man’s transitions are as seamless as possible. The game has a wide range of bespoke animations for traversing specific obstacles, from rounding a sharp corner to rebounding off the tip of a flagpole. Holding left-shift while on a wall will also cause Spidey to run along it, which not only looks awesome, but means that accidentally swinging into a building doesn’t kill your momentum. It’s all about removing the friction between the player and the environment, ensuring that no matter what situation you wrangle him into, he has a way of adapting to it.
The fact this works so well is interesting, considering that the same idea is precisely what doesn’t work about the movement system in Dying Light 2, which I wrote about last week. But there are some key differences. Spider-Man is about being a superhero, whereas Dying Light 2 is about being an acrobatic, but otherwise normal, human being. The scuffed feet and sense of exertion is crucial to making Dying Light 2‘s fantasy work, whereas it would be antithetical to the idea of being Spider-Man as he pirouettes through Time Square. Moreover, Insomniac is simply much better at massaging the game’s animations into the rhythm of play. You always feel like you’re in direct, one-to-one control of the character, which is not the case in Techland‘s game.
There’s one last element in Spider-Man’s web-swinging that, while not strictly related to mechanics, is crucial in selling the fantasy of being New York’s most iconic superhero – the music. When you leap off a skyscraper and begin swinging down one of Manhattan’s streets or avenues, the game’s audio neatly slides into a rousing, inspirational score that forms the perfect accompaniment to Spidey soaring over the streets of New York. It’s all built to make being Spider-Man as awe-inspiring as possible, and the result is one of the most successful adaptations of a superhero into a video game yet.
“I have no heroes in games,” David Goldfarb announces toward the end of our chat about his career. It seems like an odd comment from someone who has spent almost thirty years working on them, from testing games at Acclaim Entertainment – the publisher of titles like the dinosaur-shooter series Turok and Shadow Man, a voodoo-themed action-adventure based on the Valiant Comics series – to leading huge, multimillion dollar projects like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at DICE, one of the biggest developers of multiplayer FPS games. “I don’t feel like a game developer most of the time, more like a stranger someone let into the building who knows a few things about games,” he elaborates. “And games are made by teams in most cases, so lionizing one person feels kinda weird.”
What he says next, however, is like a ray of light breaking through clouds. “If there’s anyone who I admire and who I love unconditionally, it’s musicians,” he says. “It’s easier for me to admire musicians because they are closer to how I feel as a person than anything else, except I don’t have their ability, just the appreciation.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
It’s a statement that could be seen as convenient, considering Goldfarb’s current project is Metal: Hellsinger – a first-person shooter made in Unity, where players blast their way out of hell to the rhythm of a bespoke metal soundtrack performed by some of the genre’s biggest names, from Trivium’s Matt Heafy to System of a Down’sSerj Tankian. Yet there is more to it than that. Goldfarb’s career has been wide-ranging, occasionally confrontational, and highly itinerant, taking him from his home country of the United States, to Italy, the Netherlands and finally to Sweden. Yet the most crucial moments in his life have often revolved around sound.
Growing up on Long Island, Goldfarb was raised by his parents, who were both teachers. “They gave me a lot of rope to do what I wanted when I was younger, ” he says. “My takeaway from their careers was I didn’t have any interest in doing it myself, ” He doesn’t recall many specifics from his childhood, apart from that he “loved to read books and loved baseball and baseball cards.” But he has a strong sense of being independently minded, stating he was “always happy to be alone” and although would enjoy the company of other children, never felt like he needed it.
“I have no heroes in games, if there’s anyone who I admire and who I love unconditionally, it’s musicians.”
“My parents said I would go over [to] my friends’ houses and read their books and never interact with them many times, so I guess that probably says something,” This independent, perhaps headstrong nature has remained part of Goldfarb throughout his life, and he freely admits that it has sometimes gotten him into trouble. “I knew what I didn’t want to do and what I did want to do, and generally, I didn’t do the stuff I didn’t want to do, even when it made people angry.”
Goldfarb first encountered video games during the heyday of arcades, when to play games was to be surrounded by a cacophonous, discordant and endlessly changing soundtrack, from the iconic ‘wakka wakka’ of Pac-Man, to the ominous buzz of Space Invaders. Amid all the games Goldfarb played at that time, one stood out – Atari’s Asteroids. “The vector graphics were different,” he says, citing the game’s clean lines and dazzlingly bright visual display that marked it out from other arcade games. “I hadn’t ever seen anything like that, even though we’d been playing Pong or whatever garbage there was,” he says. ”It’s also very loud, if you remember. It didn’t feel like it had any analogue in my experience.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
As video games began to enter the home, Goldfarb’s experiences of them mostly remained outside of it. “I didn’t really have a console,” he says. “I couldn’t afford a PC either, so in both cases I had to go to my friend’s house. Star Raiders I played on the Atari 800. Wing Commander I played on my friend’s Amiga.” But Goldfarb’s fondest memories of games during this period are primarily of RPGs [role-playing video games]. “The biggest formative games were definitely things like Wizardry and the Gold Box SSI Dungeons and Dragons games.”
Goldfarb knew that he liked games, but at that time he never seriously considered game development as a viable career. Not least because, in the early nineties, there was no obvious pathway into the industry. “People would laugh at you if you told them ‘I want to go to school for games’”, he says. “Now, you can get a game degree.”
In the end, it was fluke timing that kickstarted Goldfarb’s games career. “My mother had found an ad in the paper that said ‘game testers wanted’, which happened to be at Acclaim, and she was like ‘You could probably do this’. And I was like ‘I probably could do this’.” But Goldfarb was planning a trip to Mexico with his then-girlfriend. “I said: ‘I’m gonna go to Mexico. And I’ll come back and figure out if this still exists.’ And I came back, and it was still there. So I got the job.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
But Goldfarb’s time at Acclaim was something of a false start. Stuck in what he describes as a “dark grotto” of “just about all men”, there was very little relationship between the testers and the development team. “You were super isolated from the game,” he says. “You were there as kind of a clean-up crew looking for problems. And that’s not how quality assurance should work.” After a year in QA, Goldfarb moved into a tech support role that proved to be “so much worse than QA” then left Acclaim six months later to work for an interactive agency in New York.
Goldfarb didn’t return to professional game development for a few years, moving to Milan in 2005 to work for racing game veterans Milestone, as lead designer on Alfa Romeo Racing Italiano. Produced in just four months, Goldfarb says it was a “critical disaster” but was in some ways ahead of its time “It had some RPG stuff and some time-reversal mechanics for if you fucked up.”
“I knew what I didn’t want to do and what I did want to do, and generally, I didn’t do the stuff I didn’t want to do.”
After a couple of years at Milestone, Goldfarb joined Guerrilla Games in the Netherlands, where he worked on his first triple-A title, Killzone 2. “They were such an exceptional group of people,” he says. “I had never been part of a production team that was so aligned around the vision.” Despite this, Goldfarb ended up leaving Guerrilla before Killzone 2 was complete. “My vision for the game wasn’t in line with theirs. I wasn’t happy with that, so I quit,” he says. “They still made a great game, I am happy to have contributed to it, but it isn’t the game I wanted to make.”
Then, in 2008, Goldfarb moved to DICE, where he was assigned to work on Battlefield: Bad Company, the latest entry in the Swedish studio’s series of multiplayer shooters. Although a decent game, Bad Company’s thunder was stolen by the launch of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare the previous year. “That made everyone go, like ‘Oh Jesus’,” he says. “When you compare [Bad Company] to Call of Duty 4, there’s an obvious mismatch in terms of visual fidelity and stuff.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
After Bad Company, Goldfarb worked briefly on Mirror’s Edge, before being promoted to lead designer on the game that would ultimately put him on the map. For Battlefield: Bad Company’s sequel, he decided he would both oversee the design, and write the script for the single-player campaign, which he wanted to have a tongue-in-cheek, action-movie vibe. “I was writing it to kind of poke fun at Call of Duty:Modern Warfare,” he says. “I love those guys, but someone needs to take the piss out of them.”
Goldfarb’s memories about the development of Bad Company 2 are sketchy, partly because, as he puts it “the whole thing was kind of a blur”. It also seems that, for a long time during Bad Company 2‘s development, the team couldn’t explicitly articulate what made it so uniquely enjoyable. Instead, the game’s development was more intuitive, with DICE experimenting with new technology like destructible buildings and feeling out it worked, like a guitarist playing around with a new riff. “I remember the first time we played with some of the destruction and new stuff. People were losing their minds really early in the development, and you could see it was magic,” he says.
What everyone at DICE knew for certain, however, was that the game sounded incredible. Bad Company 2’s thundering orchestra of war set the standard for audio design in first-person shooter games, and arguably hasn’t been surpassed. Goldfarb lights up when he speaks about it. “The audio was so amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a game sound better than Bad Company 2,” he says. “I still maintain that that was the best DICE ever sounded.”
Bad Company 2 was both a critical and commercial hit for the Swedish game developer, selling twelve million copies within two years of its initial launch. The studio took this success forward into Battlefield 3 – the game that established Battlefield as the main competitor to Modern Warfare for the multiplayer shooter throne. Yet unlike with Bad Company 2, Goldfarb’s heart wasn’t really in the project. “BF3 was less a labour of love for me. It was more of a ‘gotta make this work’,” he says. “A lot of the stuff I think I would have preferred to do, it just wasn’t possible.”
Goldfarb cites the change in tone of BF3 as part of the problem: with the grittier, more serious approach being less to his tastes. Tech was also an issue throughout the project. BF3 looked astonishing, blowing audiences away with its incredible ‘Fault Line’ demo, which still impresses today. But the focus on visual fidelity came at a cost, as the new toolset Battlefield 3 was built on was much harder to work with. “Single player was like bashing your head against the wall, because we switched engines,” Goldfarb says. “We didn’t have a lot of the tech to make the combat really good in single player.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a game sound better than Bad Company 2,” he says. “I still maintain that that was the best DICE ever sounded.”
Goldfarb eventually left DICE in 2012 to join Starbreeze, directing what would become the company’s biggest game, Payday 2. Ironically, he got involved with Payday 2 because he wanted to do “something small.” “I got to do a lot of fun stuff,” he says. “I’d never made a co-op game, and those guys had really good level designers.”
But Goldfarb is clearly conflicted about his time at Starbreeze. “I had a really big problem with Bo [Andersson] who was the CEO of Starbreeze, who was later left in shame,” he says, referring to the scandal that resulted in Andersson’s dismissal and the studio being raided by Swedish authorities on claims of insider trading. Goldfarb doesn’t go into too much detail about their relationship, but it’s clear that he left Starbreeze in a manner that was far from amicable. “After Payday 2, a lot of the conflict and unhappiness became untenable,” he says. “It was funny because the game was enormously successful, but in the way of all things everybody writes the history of why they were successful.”
After leaving Starbreeze, Goldfarb was at a loss. “I left there thinking ‘Oh shit. I dunno what I’m gonna do now, but it won’t be working with humans again.” Then a serendipitous message from Fredrik Wester, the CEO of Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive, gave Goldfarb the idea to establish his own studio. “I found three other people to found this studio, and eventually we signed a deal with Take Two [the publishers of BioShock and Borderlands] for what would become Darkborn.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
Darkborn was Goldfarb’s first project that he had complete creative control over. It was an open-world, first-person game in which you play as a wight: a monster who exacts revenge over the Viking warriors that butchered the creature’s family. Starting out the game as an infant, Darkborn would have seen players grow into a terrifying creature that could tear its foes limb-from-limb.
The studio worked on Darkborn for five years, and in 2019 showed off a fifteen-minute gameplay reveal at Barcelona’s D.I.C.E convention (not related to DICE, the developers of Battlefield). But as audiences went wild over their first taste of Darkborn, Goldfarb and his team already knew the game was pretty much doomed. “A lot of people think we made this decision to abandon that project. That’s not true, okay. We really wanted to make that game,” he says. But Darkborn was struck dead after The Outsiders parted ways with publisher Take Two, the manner of the split leaving the developer legally hamstrung when it came to finding another publisher. “We couldn’t get anyone to pay what it would have cost to continue, because of a lot of complicated legality around IP ownership and the publishing rights to the game.”
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
Goldfarb doesn’t specify the reason for that initial split, but he does explain that Darkborn’s development had troubles of its own. For example, the entire structure of the game changed midway through production. “It didn’t start as an open world game,” he says. “It became one, and that’s why we got fucked. If we had done it another way, maybe we would have been okay.” He also points to the combat system as another sticking point. “Doing first-person melee is probably the hardest thing in the industry,” he says. “We never really cracked that.”
The cancellation of Darkborn left The Outsiders in dire straits. “We had probably, I don’t know, a month of money left”. But it wasn’t just players who had been impressed by Darkborn’s demo. One of the people who saw it in action was Rui Casais, the CEO of Funcom. “Rui was like ‘Okay, well if you can’t do this, is there something else you want to make?’
“A lot of people think we made this decision to abandon Darkborn. That’s not true, okay. We really wanted to make that game,”
There was. While Goldfarb had always enjoyed a strong affinity with games, his other lifelong love was music, specifically metal. “I grew up with a lot of what my dad listened to, most of which I didn’t like, but some stuff I did, like Bob Seger and CCR,” he says. “Around 11 or so I heard metal for the first time, and that was a big deal, and then later stuff like new wave and punk came along on MTV, and that began to shape me more, and then I guess I was about 15 when I heard Husker Du for the first time, and that was really the start of everything.”
These two driving forces in Goldfarb’s life had always existed in separate worlds. Until, that is, in 2016, when Goldfarb played id Software’s reboot of DOOM. “I was listening to Meshuggah, and I had such a cool experience killing stuff to the beat.” Goldfarb thought it would be cool to make another shooter that engaged directly with the rhythm of its soundtrack, but forgot about the idea because Darkborn was mid-development. “Then, when Rui had asked me ‘What do you want to do?’ I was like ‘Oh, there’s this crazy [idea] like a metal album cover come to life: only you’re a demon and you’re slaying to the beat.’”
Casais liked the notion, and after making a more official pitch to Funcom in California, Goldfarb was asked to make a proof-of-concept. “We did this prototype, and I think it was six weeks of ‘let’s see if we can make this even remotely fun’,” he says. “It was the best prototype I’ve ever made or seen. I can’t believe how good [it is]. It’s still fun.” Funcom agreed, and Metal: Hellsinger was born.
Fast-forward two years plus, and the game has grown enormously from that initial concept, turning into a remarkable musical collaboration, between The Outsiders, the specialist video-game composers Two Feathers, and a festival’s worth of A-list metal vocalists including Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy, System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and many more. “To be able to work with these people whose music I adore, and even to write lyrics for them and hear them sing it…I feel so lucky to work with so many great people,” he says.
The results speak, or rather, scream for themselves. This summer, The Outsiders released a demo of Metal: Hellsinger, and its explosive blend of rhythmic violence instantly arrests your attention. As the player character, a demon denominated as ‘The Unknown’, you blast and slice your way through hordes of the devil’s minions as your make your escape from hell. As you fight, shooting enemies on the beat deals greater damage, and also increases your “Fury” score. As this score ratchets up, the soundtrack intensifies, with guitar riffs and vocals dynamically layering in over the basic rhythm. The cascading relationship between the action on-screen and soundtrack is quite literally entracing, with your focus narrowing in on hitting beat after beat, foe after foe, until the chorus bursts into life in an infernal crescendo.
Credit: Dan Kendall for NME
With Hellsinger, Goldfarb appears to have rediscovered that same magic that made Bad Company 2 so special. Only this time, he has a much clearer understanding of what that magic is. Is it a coincidence that his projects seem to spark into life when they have a strong audio component? “I hadn’t thought about that. But I know that it’s always important to me,” he says. “To me musicians and music are the closest to the intensity and rhythm of life, of all the arts I connect with music the most. I feel games are amazing and wonderful but they aren’t immediate in the same way music is. I can listen to 5 seconds of a song and fall in love, games are longer, slower burns for me.”
This, ultimately, helps explain the trajectory of Goldfarb’s career. The road from Acclaim to the Outsiders has itself been a slow burn. Goldfarb’s progression through the ranks of game development has been outwardly steady, but at a personal level, that progress was driven less by a desire to climb the ladder and more by the passion he felt (or didn’t feel) for every game he worked on. His journey across continents through ever larger and more ambitious studios speaks to a desire to find a project he truly resonates with. And in the fire and fury of Metal: Hellsinger, he seems, finally, to have found it.
“When I was younger I had a really hard time sticking to something unless I loved it passionately. That’s still true, but now I have better tools in case I know the growth curve will be very steep and painful,” he says. The growth curve of the Outsiders has undoubtedly been painful, but persisting through those difficult years has spawned the game that is closest to Goldfarb’s heart. “This is my favourite project ever.”
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