At first glance, Wolfenstein: The New Order Developer MachineGames might seem like an odd fit for the first (non-Lego) Indiana Jones video game since the Wii era. While there is some overlap in the over-the-top Nazi villain department, the “shoot your way through every obstacle” nature of the new Wolfenstein games don't seem to lend themselves well to Indy's more free-form, adventurous exploration style.
For the coming Indiana Jones and the Great CircleDirector Jerk Gustafsson said that the transition from a first-person shooter to a “MachineGames adventure” style shift was a tricky balancing act for the developers. While the team never wanted to prevent the player from using their revolver during action sequences, there was the possibility that giving the player that freedom would allow them to “just go gunning” in a way that would be at odds with Jones' character.
To avoid this problem, creative director Alex Torvenius said that most of the game has been balanced so that “it's dangerous to shoot your gun and it's dangerous to be shot at.” Action where you shoot guns will be a winning strategy in some situations in the game, but “[there are] “There are many scenarios where you can travel through the environment without using weapons,” he continued.
The design is focused on “trying to make sure that you're primarily using your wits and your whip… to navigate around an enemy rather than through them,” Torvenius added. “The only solution in this game is absolutely not to shoot your way through them.”
The man-to-man combat of the Chronicles of Riddick games were a big source of inspiration for MachineGames.
Gustafsson said this design was heavily inspired by the early 2000s Chronicles of Riddick games, which many of the MachineGames team worked on directly. Like those games, the focus is on combat in Great Circle revolves more around hand-to-hand combat or the use of improvised weapons found in the immediate vicinity.
Gustafsson said that he “likes to think of the whip as the entry point into combat,” and during a brief gameplay session seen by Ars Technica, we saw the whip used to disarm unaware enemies, trip them up from a sentry post, or simply swing in from above to surprise them. We also saw Indy pull off the tried-and-true “throw a bottle to make the guards think I'm there” trick, and use nearby hammers and even rolling pins as handy melee or throwing weapons. The revolver only made an appearance occasionally during the demo, such as to take out a sentry on a distant scaffolding.
The change in style from the Wolfenstein games, with guns as the first point of contact, was fun for the studio, Gustafsson said. “You see the team moving from what we're so used to doing — the gun experience, the crazy gun experiences that we've done — to something that's much more lighthearted… It's definitely taken some time to navigate that transition, but it's been refreshing for the team, for the studio.”
“Ignore the shooting”
To help with that transition, Gustafsson said the team decided to “ignore the shooting” early on in the game’s development, in part because “we know we can do it well, we know we can do it well.” Instead, the focus early on was on a scene that featured the many types of non-shooting tasks that would be incorporated into the game, such as exploration, stealth and traversing through trap-filled environments, as well as the aforementioned hand-to-hand combat.
It is set in 1937, during the period between Raiders of the Lost Ark And The Last Crusade, The Great Circle begins with a break-in targeting a priceless relic in Jones' home. The pursuit of that break-in leads Jones and a team of unlikely allies to a set of mystical stones arranged in the titular “Great Circle” of locations that form a complete arc around the world. In pursuit of the stones, the team attempts to evade Dr. Emmerich Voss, a Nazi scientist who sees the artifacts as an otherworldly force key to a vast global conspiracy.
The scenery-eating villain and McGuffin-filled plot all serve the heavily exploration-focused gameplay. Using a period-appropriate camera, Indy can snap photos of various clues and trash in the environment, providing the player with important narrated and written background information as he does so (it's like an old-school version of Metroid Prime's scan visor). All of these photos and clues end up in a constantly updating scrapbook that the player can refer to at any time to solve little mysteries and figure out what to do next.
