GameCentral plays Rebellions new co-op shooter and talks to boss Jason Kingsley about medieval RPGs and 2000 AD games.
Games Inbox: What was the worst E3 2018 no-show?
Theres something reassuringly old-fashioned about Strange Brigade. Not just in its fantasy 1930s setting but the fact that it comes so unencumbered by gimmicks or complications. Its a game about four people teaming up to fight monsters, and there are no loot boxes, microtransactions, or overlong cut scenes to get in the way of it.
It was one of the relatively few games at E3 that was actually playable and while the demo wasnt too different from the last time we saw it we did learn a bit more about the upgrade and magic system. And how much the inclusion of a Lancastrian accent can immediately elevate any video game.
British developer Rebellion – makers of Sniper Elite – readily admit that Left 4 Dead is a primary inspiration for Strange Brigade, but its very far from being a clone. Not only because it uses a third person perspective but because the entire tone of the gameplay and storytelling is completely different.
Although it features all manner of supernatural, Egyptian-themed, monsters Strange Brigade isnt supposed to be scary and instead puts the emphasis on mowing down hordes of mummies in as effective a way as possible. This involves not just some enjoyable meaty gunplay but setting off environmental traps, such as giant spinning scythes; throwing grenades; and making use of each characters special abilities.
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We were playing as an African woman in tribal garb, who apart from having a wicked kick as her melee attack (perhaps inspired by Elena from Street Fighter III) also has a devastating area of effect attack that can take out dozens of cannon fodder zombies at once.
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But as we progress we also get a look at the upgrade system which revolves around collecting gold to get more powerful weapons, which in turn have more slots for special gems. Its these gems that are the most important collectables as they allow you to add special elemental abilities like fire and ice or buff your attack and defence in other ways.
The demo was only brief but also showcased some puzzle-solving (a sliding block puzzle hiding a particularly bounty-filled treasure chest) and a hint at a giant end-of-level boss. The games out this August and seems like the perfect antidote to overblown games as a service titles. A subject, as it turned out, that Rebellion boss Jason Kingsley had some strong opinion on, as we talked to him about everything from Judge Dredd games to horse-riding…
Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Publisher: Rebellion
Developer: Rebellion
Release Date: 28th August 2018
JK: Nice to see you again.
GC: Thank you… so, E3. Do you enjoy it? Are you here to see all the new games and trends?
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JK: No, it is more about business meetings and marketing and PR meetings. But I do read widely about it, and see what people are announcing. The trouble is theres so much out there that it becomes impossible to see everything. Its like having an enormous buffet and not being particularly hungry, because youre so busy. So it takes me a few days to try and extract the good stuff. But I do find it very useful, because it focuses everybodys minds.
GC: Youve got Strange Brigade coming out in August and Arcas Path VR… is that this year?
JK: I dont think weve announced a release date yet, were trying to find a slot in the busy schedules.
GC: Well, Im glad you look at the calendar, unlike some publishers!
JK: [laughs] I think theres a big issue for the industry there, youd think publishers would get together and make sure they didnt overlap too much.
GC: Dont get me started on that, its one of my pet hates.
JK: [laughs] Can we just have that weekend and you have the weekend after? Would that really make that much difference to their PR? It will if they both come out at the same bloody time, because ones gonna lose. Or everybodys gonna lose because it doesnt work.
GC: I hate that some publishers are just too proud to move, and yet movie companies do it all the time.
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JK: Yeah, and if you look at the sales as well; yes, there is obviously a jump at Christmas but its not as much as I thought it would be. The peak Christmas selling time might be twice as important as the trough in the summer, but the trough in the summer is still fairly significant because theres hardly anything coming out. Its not like its 10 times more important.
GC: Isnt it something like 75% of all big-name games are released in the same three-month window? Its madness.
JK: It does annoy me. But its also challenging for the consumer, cause Im very aware that your average consumer cant play that many games.
GC: Thats what I always think. Even if they can afford them all when are they going to find the time to play everything?
JK: Yeah, exactly. Games are so huge. One of my big issues is that games are getting bigger and bigger and its got to the stage where Im looking at games I really want to play and thinking, Theres no way Im going to be able to finish it in a hurry. So then I ask myself whether I can even be bothered to start it, which is really daft because I really want to play it.
And thats why I think its really important to have easy difficulty levels, story mode – I like story modes. I like single-player games. Strange Brigade, weve been promoting the co-op part but theres a very strong single-player game in it. And I like playing my games solo. Cause often when I play Ive got an opportunity – Ive got an hours gap in my schedule that I can play a game.
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And I also like co-operative multiplayer, because quite frankly for me I dont get a thrill about being shot for the eighth time in a minute. And I know a lot of people like it, and I know Battle Royale mode is very in at the minute and a shitstorm of money is going into investing in more Battle Royale games.
My concern is, how big is the market for that? And is it just a certain number of people who want to play and theyll have to jump ship to another Battle Royale, which seems to be what already happened with PUBG and Fortnite. The tail for PUBG is obviously very long, but at the same time… I played that game but I found it frustrating. Cause I quite like my games to be paced more methodically; I like to explore, I like to see what people have made for me.
GC: You do have to put a lot of time and effort into getting good at these games.
JK: Yeah, and also being yelled at by 14-year-olds saying, git gud! again and again… Yeah, youre right but I actually have a job and I do have disposable income, and I actually have lots of other calls on my time. As opposed to you who dont have to pay rent, dont have to pay electricity…
GC: You typed all that out in chat?
JK: [laughs] In my head I was justifying the fact that I was crap at playing the game. But I like to play on my own, I like role-playing games, I like adventures, and I like to explore. I know we make shooters and I enjoy that. But its important for me and Chris [the other Kingsley brother – GC] that the games we make are the games we want to play.
GC: But if thats the case why not make a role-playing or adventure game? Or something set in the medieval era, since I know from last time you have such a passion for jousting and horses.
JK: Yes, I know. We made a free-to-play game called Joust Legend, which was… moderately successful. Rather flatteringly I am one of the endgame bosses. [laughs] So thats kind of nice.
But the interesting thing for me, because I love all my medieval stuff, and medieval fantasy, is because I know so much about how to ride a horse its really hard sometimes to communicate that to designers and games players. I guess it would be a bit like – and Im not bragging here – but imagine a Formula 1 driver working on a racing game.
GC: But I always enjoy learning a new skill in games, thats something you dont see so much of nowadays.
JK: I would like to do it. And I love my heighted medieval. Obviously Game of Thrones is a medieval fantasy, but basically swords and sorcery is a theme Im very interested in. And for some reason we havent really done a game like that.
GC: You havent really done any single-player role-players. Is that because you need different expertise? Or is it a question of budget?
JK: I dont know to be honest. Ill have to ponder on it. Strange Brigade has elements of role-playing in it. You are adventuring through a landscape and exploring it and uncovering secrets. Sniper Elite is kind of its own thing…
GC: But you said you liked Skyrim, couldnt you try and make a game like that?
JK: Yeah, yeah we could. I dont know… Its an interesting question: why havent we? I guess our expertise as a studio is more shooter and co-op action adventure games. And doing something like Skyrim requires a slightly different approach. But… dunno. Its an interesting point.
GC: There are a lot of people now at Rebellion.
JK: Just under 300.
GC: Right, so you must be well aware that while you might want to do a jousting game or experiment with something new youve also got to balance that with being a business man.
JK: We tend to make games on the basis of do we think thisll be a fun game to play? And if we think it will be fun the next question is whether theres a business case for it. So Im often asked, Where do you start making a computer game? And the answer is you start making a game that you think will be fun.
So the Zombie Army series came out of, How many enemies can we throw at you? and we saw a landscape with lots of shambling figures and we thought of them as zombies and put a game together. But after that we went through the analysis of it and worked out whether we thought it might sell. Can we do the game with the budget thats gonna be a sensible budget? Because theres a lot of very non-sensible budgets in games at the moment.
I just do some quick and dirty calculations of how much some of the big publishers spend on their games and Im thinking, If that is a number one best seller thats still only marginally a return on investment. Which is very risky, because if youre putting 100 million into making a game then youre hoping youll get 100 million back if its as success.
But you can fall just a little short of that and end up losing tens of millions. It doesnt take many 20 million losses for your shareholders to decide that youre rubbish at running the company.
GC: And you can see where that fear of failure dominates most publishers decision-making process.
JK: Its a brittle thing. Its a bit like the top free-to-play space, where they make a ton of money but they spend a ton of money. And it only has to change slightly for them to be spending a ton of money and losing a ton of money at the same time.
Not to be odd about this but a game might be twice as good as a game we make but its cost 10 times as much to make. How much do you have to spend to get a game twice as good? And whats the return on it? So I think were kind of in the sweet spot. We make games with very controlled budgets, cause its our own money. We dont have anyone else giving us money for it.
Luckily, we dont have any shareholders either, apart from Chris and me. So, if you like, these are all privately funded by individuals. And so we try to be a bit cleverer about scope, and Im a huge believer in the traditional kind of gameplay thats worked well for us. Rather than the whole Battle Royale thing where everyones bundling in together or loot boxes…
GC: Well, quite. Games as a service is definitely the current buzz word. When you see a new bandwagon coming along, how do you approach it?
JK: We look at how much it costs! The thing with games a service is that invariably that game has to be shut down eventually. Whereas Strange Brigade will go into the back catalogue, but it wont ever be shut down.
One of the most astonishing things for me is people doing their calculations and saying lets not bother with single-player anymore. And I find that really… odd.
GC: Microsofts pre-E3 conference was almost solely games as a service titles, but what interests me is how Sony is the absolute opposite. Im sure theyve both got teams of people carefully analysing the industry so how can they come up with such completely different conclusions?
JK: Exactly. Which means what are they looking at? When we do analysis on our games we obviously know all of our data, particularly on Steam and PC formats. And I look at the number of people that play our single-player games and our single-player consumer is 80/90%.
So wed be insane to move away and just focus on the noisy 10%. We do have multiplayer components in our games, which services that audience, but I find it quite strange… I wonder whether its shareholders?
GC: I spoke to a Microsoft exec earlier where he claimed it was just whatever their studios said they wanted to do, but Im not sure I believe him.
JK: Yes, theres a lot of talk from corporate executives about how independent their studios are. But I know quite a few of these studios and they would describe the independence as slightly more fettered. I think the idea of being able to have a shit when you want to, for some execs, is probably freedom. But for creatives, I think the idea of actually making the game you want to make is something more.
GC: It does seem unlikely that by complete coincidence all their studios wanted to make games that fit exactly with the latest industry trends.
JK: In some ways its easier to do a game that doesnt have any single-player content. And if your AI is irrelevant, because its all people, you dont have any AI to do. What youre effectively doing is creating a sandbox and saying, Have at it! Its actually quite easy.
It obviously makes some people a lot of money but for me, I like my traditional games. Because our audience likes a beginning, a middle, and an end. They like to feel they can actually play the game easily in the time they have.
GC: It seems you have the freedom others only pretend to have.
JK: We literally have nobody telling us what to do, apart from the consumer.
GC: Do any of them ever ask for loot boxes?
JK: Ive had many people ask many things about many games, but I havent had a single person ask me to add loot boxes or that kind of monetisation in-game.
GC: What about free-to-play?
JK: No, nobodys ever asked us to be free-to-play. I think most consumers understand that people have to be paid to do the job.
GC: But do younger gamers? After all, theyve grown up in a world in which a lot of entertainment content is essentially free.
JK: It is a challenge, but I think once people grow up a bit I think they realise that nothing in life is actually free. If a service is free its somehow being monetised and it might be it isnt a free service and you are the product. Especially on social media, you are the product. Youre giving all this information to a corporation who is using it to target advertising to you. Were all products, which is pretty scary. [laughs] I read 1984 for O-level English…
GC: I find it almost funny that were living in the sort of world that sci-fi predicted decades ago, and yet everyones acting surprised by it. Those werent just stories, they were meant to be cautionary tales!
JK: [laughs] These in-home smart assistants, where they claim theyre not listening until they are.
GC: Oh yeah. I heard a story recently about one accidentally recording a conversation and forwarding it so some friend of theirs at random.
JK: Yeah, yeah. And they said it was just a glitch. But why was it doing it in the first place?! The idea that the thing only listens when you activate it… its listening all the time. Its an always-on system. Its a spy. The thing about Orwell is he wrote about people being monitored but that was all installed by the government, against peoples will. These things are paid for by the person its spying on!
GC: It is odd how the modern world is this weird mix of Orwell and Huxley. Right down the middle between the two of them is where we are now.
JK: Yes, absolutely. But I guess were getting a bit off topic here…
GC: Well, not necessarily. This all sounds like an interesting plot basis for a video game.
JK: [laughs] Its always difficult because a game takes so long to make that the political landscape can change. We make games that are commercial and wed like them to be award-winning. Id love to make a change to society with a product that were doing but Im not that focused on winning awards. The award I want is other people buying and playing our games. And making a point is probably something I can do in interviews or in blog posts and that kind of stuff. Some games are very heavy-handed at doing that.
GC: What Im building up to here is wouldnt all of this fit in very easily with a 2000 AD game, which already specialises in future dystopias?
JK: [laughs] Well, theres a lot happening with 2000 AD.
GC: You said that last time.
JK: [laughs] We havent announced anything yet but were working with a lot of third parties on 2000 AD.
GC: So youve found a specific developer now?
JK: Weve found lots of them and theyre all putting stuff together and there should be announcements coming out later on this year.
GC: And would you try and reflect some of these issues weve discussed in those games?
JK: Well, 2000 AD has always been a piss-take. We even had a lunatic U.S. president that brought about the Apocalypse War…
GC: Youre still talking about 2000 AD, right?
JK: [laughs] We had Bad Bob Booth who kicked it all off, which is where the genesis of the judges comes from. And hes a populist demagogue, and Im thinking Holy Moley! At the end of the day we want to entertain people. If we can entertain them with interesting subjects that amuse them, distract them from reality sometimes, thats really my objective.
GC: Have you played the new Wolfenstein games?
JK: Yes, but I think theyre a bit heavy-handed.
GC: But knowingly so. When an action game is subtle the points are easily ignored but Wolfenstein finds a way to be in-your-face about the issues and make that the whole point.
JK: I guess so, yes. Thats certainly one way to go about it.
GC: Well, look Im getting told to stop now but its always fascinating to talk to you. And I cant wait for those 2000 AD announcements.
JK: Sure, yes. We must talk again.
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