Wolfeye Studiosmay seem like a studio in its infancy, having only been formed in 2019, but at its helm are experienced industry veterans Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby. Wolfeye president Colantonio met CEO Roby during the early years of Arkane Studios where they worked on projects likePreyandDishonored. Having left Arkane at different points in their careers, the two reunited to form Wolfeye Studios and released theindie titleWeird Westin 2022. Now, there’s something else in the pipeline, and the first details about it are beginning to emerge.
Game Rant recently sat down with Colantonio and Roby to discuss their new project. As well as talking about the thought process that goes into the worlds they create, they also discussed the importance of fan feedback, the ideal development team size, and thestrong correlation between music and gaming.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Wolfeye Studios New Game
Q: In the past few days, you’ve unveiled the first images from your new project, a retro FPS sci-fi RPG. Can you talk about the retro aspect of that, and how that might help set it apart from other FPS sci-fi RPGs?
Colantonio:When it comes to creating a world, it needs to have a proper history for it to feel visually compelling and believable. That history forms the guidelines for the artists to create something that actually exists. With Manu Petit, who is our art director, and Lucas Loredo, the writer, as well as myself and some other people involved, we’ve been asking ourselves, what is this world? Where does it come from, and why does it look the way it looks? We are almost like historians. We started with the concept of America in the 1900s and the way we know it, and then we said, what if something happened there, like 20-30 years earlier?
Without going into detail, there is an event, an incident, that changed the world forever in a sense. While they have access to very futuristic technology, it is manufactured in the way it would have been in the 1900s, which is an interesting concept. That’s why you have this kind of look andsetting that some people might call ‘Steampunk’. Honestly, I’ve read all kinds of descriptions for it. Some people will say Steampunk, I’ve heard ‘Dieselpunk’ too, but that’s the gist of it. Now, the reason why things are the way they are is going to be explained in the game. It’s going to be part of the plot. At some point, there’s a huge twist, which will hopefully make players say ‘Oh my god, this is kind of crazy.' The story goes pretty crazy at one point.
Q: In terms of the overall aesthetic that you’re going for, what was your aim with that?
Colantonio:Yeah, so if we talk about the art direction, we always loved the association between the past and the future. Thishas always been something that excites us. In this instance, we wanted to try to marry the deserts and the orange kind of vibe that you have from this old time in America together with some modern steel and some darker stuff. It really marries well together, and it’s nice. Then, we always want to have some level of stylization because going too realistic is not that interesting. It’s not that memorable, and it ages poorly. We like to see some brush strokes, some sort of stylization that adds a bit of identity to the overall image.
Q: You’ve also announced that there will be a limited private alpha for the game. How important is it to you that fans will be involved in this from an early stage and can give you feedback that you’ll be able to act on in real-time?
Roby:I think it’s pretty important for us.We did it onWeird West, for instance, but for that, we did it very close to release. The challenge we had with that is that we got a lot of feedback, but there are some major things that we wish we had more time to act on. This time, we wanted to verify that we, essentially, get to see how people play the game and whether they play the way we intend. Sometimes they understand the game the way we thought they would understand it, but not always. This way, by doing it early enough in the development, we have time to actually act on feedback so it’s more meaningful. Then people who are participating in this playtest actually feel like what they are doing is having consequences in the final game.
The end goal with that is to make sure that we ship the best game possible. It’s really interesting on social media channels. When we announced the testing, some people were asking if we were doing a game as a service, an online game, or something because I don’t think it’s common forsingle-player gamesto do a round of alpha or beta testing. I feel like it’s something interesting, and it’s probably similar to what some people are doing with early access. It’s the intention of having the community participate in the development in some way.
I think it’s the scale of the test also, which is important because if there are fifty or one hundred people play testing it across the duration of the project, you might not get accurate statistics. But if you get five or ten thousand people to play the game at some point, you can start to see trends. It depends on the sample size. Sometimes it’s tricky because you can make a great game, and there could be one little thing in the middle that you didn’t spot which could jeopardize everything. By getting feedback early on, you make sure that when you release the game, all the work that you did for three or four years isn’t destroyed just because of one thing that you didn’t see coming.
Colantonio:It’s new. We began developing games a long time ago. Back then, we did not do things like early access, so, of course, it’s a little scary. I think you have to just be prepared for the feedback, but I think it’s great because it really helps you as the developer. It shows you things before it’s too late. Usually, we do that somewhere between alpha and beta, but then you can only fix the surface-level issues.
Q: You’ve been involved in some huge projects over the years. How would you say this one compares, in terms of scope?
Colantonio:I would say it’s just as big as previous ones. It’s a tricky question though because I think our games, historically, can be played very quickly if you know how. There are so many systems, so many tricks you can exploit. You can abuse the game in some ways, where people will maybe jump over something they shouldn’t have or take a different route we didn’t expect, for example. l look atthe scope ofPrey, how long it takes to finish that game and how many times people can replay it. That would be comparable. In terms of a target, it will probably be around there, but in a different structure though - more spread out, more of a large sandbox.
Lessons Learned From Arkane
Q: You had great success at Arkane. What would you say the main lessons that you learned there are, and are you trying to implement some of those at Wolfeye to replicate that success?
Colantonio:I think we all learned different lessons at Arkane. I was there for 18 years, from day one to 2017. That’s basically how long I stayed, so I went through the very beginning, the acquisition with Bethesda, etc. I’ve always done exactly the kind of games that I wanted to do, and I’ve been lucky to find collaborators like Julien and some others who are all into the same type of games. It’s paid off. At first, it took one game at a time and incremental improvements, etc. We do things we know how to do. Every time it gets better, and the fans love it. I think, for me, it’s more of a matter of presentation.
I would say the big lesson for me about these games,immersive sims, etc., is that they are amazing. They are incredible, but it’s also about what they bring, right? The best immersive sims bring these unique moments where you feel like you are actually in that space for real. You’re doing things, making choices, and some things happen to you that don’t happen to any other player. This is incredibly powerful, but it’s no good if that only happens to a small number of players. If you don’t teach the players what to do or how far they can push the mechanics, that will be wasted. For example, the fact is you can kill anyone including NPCs, practically utilize every object in some way, or combine stuff in unique ways. Usually, there is so much more than the players are ready for or even care to see.
They don’t even know they need all these possibilities. We are on a mission to make sure that people absolutely see that. We need to try to train the players how to play the way we intend, to play the game in a way that they can fully express their choices, which is not easy. I don’t think people are really aware of all of these choices in these kinds of games unless you have a really powerful onboarding system. That is something that we’ve learned over and over at Arkane. Our games aredeep. Some of the gamers really get it. They love it, and they see everything we want them to see. But, for the majority of people in the world, for a random gamer, it’s likely they’re just going to stay on the surface.
With this next game, we need to make sure that when something like this happens for the first time, we have a message that pops up, like a tutorial maybe. We used to think it was kind of cool to have this sort of ambiguity, letting the player always wonder if they just did something wrong, but I think it’s important now to really play to that strength of the game and explain why and how certain things work.
Roby:There’s a funny story about this from our last game, Weird West. In that, you could kill absolutely anyone and still progress through the game, but people have been trained in games that don’t support that kind of thing. We saw some posts on Discord, where we were engaging with our community. Someone was like ‘Oh, I killed this main character. Now I need to restart the game!' Essentially, the person thought they killed a story character, the game was broken, and it must have been a bug. We were like, ‘No, continue playing!’ It’s actually interesting because if that was some sort of blocker, you wouldn’t be able to do it unless it genuinely was some kind of bug, which would get fixed. You haven’t broken it if you’re able to carry on playing.
Q: You left Arkane in 2017 to take a break, and then came back and started Wolfeye Studios. Did you miss making games? Did you miss the industry in general? Or were you glad to have the break?
Colantonio:Well, I think everything happened the way it had to happen. I loved Arkane. I still love Arkane, and I’m glad I had that experience. The break was just needed. I took the time to focus a little more on music and some other stuff and also think of what I wanted to do next. Then I got talking with Julien. I’ve been with him since 1999 as well. He had left a couple of years earlier than me. I think I knew I was going to go back to games, but really at that time, I felt I was done with big games. I felt I wanted to focus on the essence of the game, without the fluff.
The fact that games are becoming more and more accurate in terms of fidelity has influenced game design. Take, for example, a book. In a book, you may absolutely describe anything you want. It doesn’t cost any more or less, whether the book is a small story or it’s a huge story. If you describe a moment that has 10 helicopters crashing into each other, it won’t cost you any more to write that. To make it into a movie, though, that’s a different story, so I wanted to try and make a game where that fidelity was a little less important. That’s why I wanted to doWeird West. But little by little, the itch happened again because my team and I like beautiful things. We like the effects, we like the feeling that comes with making them. It’s about finding a balance, so we’re going back to games that are a little bigger.
The Future of Wolfeye Studios
Q: Do you prefer the big budget, the big production values that come with making a AAA game, or do you prefer having that little bit more freedom working with a smaller budget and perhaps a smaller team?
Colantonio:I think in an ideal world, you’d have a small team on a big game. It’s more of a matter of how big the team is, and what can we do with a team that is still at a manageable scale. I love working with five people, ten people, twenty people, these sorts of numbers.
Roby:At Wolfeye, there are around 50-60 people. Now we feel like we are getting to that limit of keeping it manageable.
Colantonio:I remember we were about that number when working onDark Messiah. I think there were about 50 people, but that was in 2006, at a time when we did not have the same tools. I would say thenumber of people is more important than budgetin some ways because the budget is impacted by the number of people anyway. It is about balancing the number of people with the tools, and the quality of the tools that you have access to. Until recently, the number of people was increasing, but the tools weren’t.
In order to have those big, compelling games, you had to have a huge, massive number of people. We know some games that maybe had 1000 people involved. Yeah. To me, working on a game with 1000 people would not work. I would hate that. I like to stay in that 50, 60, maybe 70 people sort of area. Even 100 is still feasible. Wen we say ‘big game,’ to me, it’s really a matter of where are we in the current state of the art with the development of the tools, etc, because we can do much more now than with the same number or with a smaller number of people than we could some years ago.
It used to take forever to make some assets, and now assets are getting faster because the tools are better. I’m not talking about AI either. So yeah, to me, it’s really about that. Ideally, I want to make the most impressive company in games as long as I can keep a good-sized team. That’s where we draw the line. It’s like, are we getting inhuman at this point where we don’t even know people’s names? That’s not fun.
Q: Raf, as a musician as well as a video game developer, how much do you feel that your music influences your projects, and vice versa?
Colantonio:Well, unfortunately, I have way less pull in my music career than I have in my video game career. I’ve tried to use my games to occasionally promote some music. It’s fun, I like to sneak in a couple of my songs here and there.
Roby:(laughing) Every damn time!
Colantonio:It’s just the dream of a musician to find a platform to put their music on. Sometimes it really works; inPrey,we used Semi Sacred Geometry. There’s a moment in the cantina, where the music starts and the Phantoms come in, and people really liked it. I think it’s one more layer of artistic expression that goes into the world that I’m trying to work on. I think Julien probably remembers when we were still at the very beginning ofWeird West.
When we were talking about the world, I came up with a song called Ghost Voices. I imagined that music playing as someone comes into this somber Western world, on a horse or whatever, and it did a pretty good job at describing that sad mood, but was kind of eerie at the same time. Not just the usual Western music, but something different. I think it’s probably the same in the movies. There aresome directors, like James Cameron, who do some art. I think David Lynch actually does a bit of music as well.
I think it’s one more way of engaging people in how they see the world. To clarify, I’m not doing all the music in the game; it’s a little nugget that I like to reserve. Music, even sound in general, is probably the cheapest of all the effects. If you think about the cost of visuals, programming, game design, and production, then there’s sound. Sound represents a tiny percent of the budget, yet it’s probably 50% of the effect.
Q: What are your long-term ambitions for Wolfeye Studios?
Roby:Making more games! That’s the reason we are here, to make games, because we like to play them ourselves. I guess we hope that the next one is going to be successful enough that we can make more and keep doing it.
Colantonio:I think that we are super lucky because, if I compare it to a lot of my friends in the industry in general, there’s always someone who works on something they don’t really want to work on. We are super lucky that, I would say for our entire career, we’ve always worked on things we wanted to work on. We’ve decided our own road. We say ‘we want to go there,’ and then we make it happen.’
In this industry where everything is money-driven, where you need to convince people to follow your plans, and where theconsequences of failure are pretty high financially, we’ve been making uncompromised games. Of course, we are doing our best to verify that this has an overlap with the market financially. We’re not going to do something that doesn’t make any sense for gamers, but they are uncompromised, full-on, passion-driven games. Hopefully, we get to do more of them.
Roby:You know, sometimes we talk to finance people. We talk to people who are not into gaming whatsoever, but they ask us for information, like ‘Do you have a business plan for the company?’ It’s what we unfortunately have to do to be able to create the game, but the games themselves will always be our priority.
Colantonio:That’s the thing. Even the biggest companies usually start with someone who wants to make something happen using passion, not money! The money usually comes afterward.
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