Project_Hel : « Vous passez à côté d’un truc en ne laissant pas sa chance à Ghostrunner et Project_Hel ! », selon Jan Gąsior (Writer/Narrative Designer)

Voici la version originale de l'interview :

Jan Gąsior is a Writer/Narrative Designer at One More Level. Jan joined this studio in 2019 to help design a world and build a storyline for Ghostrunner. He previously worked on designing, writing and overseeing live events and location-based games for tourists visiting Kraków. His hobbies include tabletop RPGs, larping and wargaming, among others.

• The DLC, Hel, will undoubtedly bring a new experience. As it will be more combat oriented, players are concerned about the difficulty. New enemies and bosses, it is said that this expansion is also designed for novice players, so the difficulty is lower than the base game? More accessible?

Project_Hel is about, well, Hel - one of the bosses of the base game. Switching sides and looking at the game’s world from the opposite perspective were important factors in the design process. Part of that experience is feeling powerful. The original Ghostrunner was an underdog, everyone was out to get him. Meanwhile, Hel is a rabid dog that is out to get everyone. Compared to Jack she is more resilient, faster and has easier access to flashy special techniques. That is not to say the game got easy though - it’s more like the differences in skill set facilitated level design built around a different set of challenges.

As to the accessibility towards novice players, Hel’s play style is definitely more forgiving - her abilities make her less susceptible to simple mistakes. This will hopefully allow new players not to get discouraged and get the hang of the game before the more demanding levels truly test their skills.

Long story short, compared to the base game Hel_Project offers a gentler learning curve and more tools for the player to use to stay in the game, but ultimately sticks to the original Ghostrunner formula in terms of general difficulty.

• For the Switch version, you had to make some concessions to make it look good (and it's really cool to have Ghostrunner in your pocket). Isn't it too difficult to develop on this platform?

To be precise, One More Level is only directly working on the PC version of Ghostrunner - the Switch version, along with the other console ports, is handled by Slipgate Ironworks.
That being said, we’re well aware of the challenges presented by making a modern game look good and run well on a light-weight hand-held. It’s worth noting how much planning, trial and error and ingenuity it takes to achieve. We’re confident that our colleagues at Slipgate are more than capable of delivering a high-quality experience for Switch and we do our best to support them as necessary in this worthy goal - it is very cool indeed to have Ghostrunner in your pocket.

• Ghostrunner runs on Unreal Engine 4, the graphics are really nice. Have you been able to get your hands on the Unreal Engine 5 and try new things?

Some of our more technical staff has dabbled with UE5 and it looks promising indeed. There’s an enormous amount of radical changes that have the potential to immensely change the pipeline of game production. Lighting, for example, is a crucial part of level building that takes an enormous amount of time and processing power to set up correctly. Lumen promises to change all that and save the developers a lot of effort in a couple of different ways.

Of course it’s important to remember that things are not going to be perfect straight out of the box. It will take developers a while to figure out how to best utilize the new features and to establish a workflow that utilizes the new methods where they shine and stick to the traditional ones where it provides better results.

For me personally one of the most exciting features is the one that sounds the most boring - One File Per Actor. This system will make it much easier for the entire team to work on the game without worrying about overwriting someone else’s work, having your own work overwritten or waiting in line for the chance to access a particular part of the game to work on.

• Ghostrunner is a unique game, how did you get the idea?

For the most part it was a natural evolution of the studio’s identity and interests. OML’s previous game, God’s Trigger, was a top down shooter with one hit kills. It was frantic, fast paced and difficult. Ghostrunner builds up on these foundations, though the addition of the third dimension added a lot of depth to the formula (pun intended). We were also heavily influenced by a number of FPP games that we enjoy, such as Titanfall or Doom. As for the cyberpunk aesthetic, the majority of our team happens to love it so it was also a natural choice that incidentally fitted very well with the game mechanics. The only other setting in which a super-agile, wall-running melee protagonist faces a horde of gun-wielding enemies he’s able to kill in one hit is probably Star Wars and that was not readily available.

Let’s also not forget that back when Ghostrunner was starting to come together the hype for Cyberpunk 2077 was just picking up. Just like most everyone, we were really excited about it and as Radek, our game director, put it once “we wanted a slice of that cyberpunk pie for ourselves”.

• Are you thinking about the future? A new game or a sequel? What would you like to do after Ghostrunner?

We’re thinking about the future all the time. Ghostrunner was a huge success for us and we’re constantly expanding by building up our team and developing our individual skills. The experience we’ve gained during Ghostrunner and Project_Hel’s development is invaluable and we feel like we’ve grown a lot since the beginning of that journey. Ghostrunner 2 was announced some months ago so it’s no secret that we’ve got something to work on for quite some time. After that? Who knows. Whatever specific subgenre and setting we go with in our future projects, I’m pretty sure we’re gonna stick with what we do best - action-packed games that really put the player to the test.

• More personal question, developers are also gamers, what games are you looking forward to this year?

I’m gonna go with: Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m a narrative designer after all so I’m all about RPGs), Total War: Warhammer 3 (huge Warhammer nerd here, I guess it’s cool now thanks to Henry Cavill), God of War: Ragnarök (this one’s a boring pick, but I did love the previous one... Guess I should add Horizon Forbidden West to be consistent here), Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (thanks Henry!). I also feel like I should mention Elden Ring here, since although it’s not exactly my personal cup of tea, it’s a must play for most of our design team. These guys love their Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro - which is probably not surprising to anyone who took a moment to ponder the design principles behind Ghostrunner!

• To the players who have not yet been able to try Ghostrunner, what would you like to say?

I’d like to say, “You’re missing out!” In all seriousness though, I’d like to recommend the game even to the players that do not consider themselves hardcore gamers. It requires some practice and getting used to, but once you master the basics, the experience becomes incredibly rewarding - as attested by our fantastic player base that keeps replaying the game and achieving results I’d never thought possible. Since the game’s launch we’ve introduced Assist Mode - an option to make a number of slight adjustments to the game’s core mechanics that allow for a more accessible experience for the players that would like to play Ghostrunner but find the learning curve too steep. Or you can just start with Project_Hel, for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier. So basically - if you haven’t played Ghostrunner, you’re missing out!

Eric de Brocart Fondateur - Directeur de publication
Magicien professionnel, quand je ne suis pas derrière mon PC, photographe amateur, quand j'ai le temps et surtout un grand passionné de réalité virtuelle.
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