Arrowhead Game Studios’ recently released (and instantly popular) game has a great approach: let the player do their thing and see what happens.

Last year’s Baldur’s Gate 3 showed what it’s like to give players real freedom to be creative. But that’s an RPG. As far as shooters go, we haven’t seen much of that lately, but Helldivers 2 (which is also co-op) could offer a similar experience. Johan Pilestedt spoke with PCGamer editor-in-chief Evan Lahti about it, and we learn that desktop RPGs were the inspiration for Arrowhead here as well.

“We all imagine it together, and then we talk about it as if it were real life. We can joke about it decades later: ‘Remember when you blew me up with that spell? In this game, we tried to visualize it, but it’s still the same kind of tight-knit group that shared the experience. And it’s going to be something that connects the four people who were there to a very special moment. [In terms of the weapon design, we tried to be at least authentic, if not realistic, and celebrate the differences in the weapon systems, in the way that things can unfold. We believe that if we do that, things will inevitably become cinematic and immersive, rather than putting it behind a cut-scene. Let the player do the action and you’ll see what happens,” Pilestedt said.

As an example, he told an anecdote about hitting a rag doll with a recoilless rifle and it went flying, and he said it felt like skeet shooting. He feels that this story will be told many times during their beer sessions. An arc gun can do a lot of damage, but the way electricity moves in real life is unpredictable. And the unsafe mode of the railgun was born out of how it would work in the future and how people would jailbreak the weapon, which by default releases 50% of the energy it is charged with, but in unsafe mode you risk it being maximized to create a massive, deadly explosion. It’s also all based on tabletop RPGs.

It’s hard to find an element of the studio’s work to criticize.

Source: PCGamer