Force of Nature
Avalanche Studios' Christofer Sundberg on the creation of a new world and the reinforcement of an existing one
After a tough couple of years that saw Swedish-based Avalanche Studios lose $34 million worth of publishing contracts and lay off dozens of staff, the studio is well on the way to recovery - buoyed by the recent release of Just Cause 2, buying the licence for free-to-download game theHunter and opening a new studio, Expansive Worlds.
In an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Avalanche founder and creative director, Christofer Sundberg, discusses the perils of a split focus, the importance of brand identity and the business of making games.
It’s true that our games have been set in these open worlds but that doesn’t mean that we won’t look to create games in the future that look to guide the player in a particular direction with regard to narrative or game play experience.
At the moment the studio is still feeling a little shaky and we’re recovering from a really rough 2008/9. It was an uphill struggle for us and we’re pleased to have been able to release Just Cause 2 which, as an open world game, was characterised by more risk, time and expense.
It’s partly due to the numerous different play styles that we have to put in to the game in addition to sheer number of areas that it is necessary to develop. These are elements that, because of the nature of the game, some players may not see at all and so in this way, could potentially be considered as waste. Of course we’re committed to including all of these elements and so we don’t see them as waste but basically your dedicating time and money and then allowing the player to bypass certain parts if they want to or to miss out on their full potential.
However, we’re now able to capture metrics to track what each player is doing with the game and how much of the island they see, the ground that they cover, number of kills and so on so this can help us in developing future games.
We’ve also been able to use this as an analysis tool. For example, we found that one area, that was a little out of the way and that not a lot of players were going to during testing, had a disproportionately large number of NPC deaths and we were able to pinpoint this to a bug that was basically a misplaced NPC spawn point, the spawn point was off a cliff.
Well we worked with a company called Emote on theHunter, which is a free to download hunting simulator. Emote ran in to financial problems and we decided to buy the game back from the administrators at the end of last year. Once we’d obtained the licence we discussed the image of the game and felt that it wasn’t quite right for the Avalanche brand. We decided that Avalanche should be associated more with massive explosions, car chases, action and big game worlds and should focus more on consoles and so we felt that a slow paced hunting game wasn’t really the right fit for that. So we established a new studio to continue development of updates for theHunter. Also we want to explore the concept of distributing games digitally and going direct to the consumer so we felt that those type of plans would be better realised under a new brand.
In addition, theHunter is our first real investment in our own IP and obviously there is a risk associated with that, so from a corporate standpoint it’s frankly better to have that separated from the main Avalanche brand.
The key word for theHunter has been realism. The game world that is available at the moment for theHunter is based on an area of Washington state, so we’ve tried to create a replica of that part of the world. There's not been any real inspiration taken from other commercial titles, we developed theHunter for people that want a more serious hunting experience.