A long-read celebrating one of 2022's finest games. It's the story of APlagueTale
. And back then, Asobo was one of the studios tasked with imagining what HoloLens gaming experiences could look like."We've done a game that nobody knows and nobody will ever play," Choteau says with a smile."It's called Fragments."
This is Asobo's HoloLens game Fragments. It's the game that started the studio's whole storytelling endeavour, really. It knew it wanted some fantasy, because there were supernatural powers in the game, and for a moment, it considered creating an original world to house all of these things in. But this was the studio's first game, and not only was it"frightened", as Choteau says, by the prospect of the work involved in doing that, it also didn't want to pull the attention - both ours and the team's - away from what it really felt was important about the game: the characters.
And the moment Asobo did use rats, everything fell into place. Here was a stealth game where you couldn't easily hide in the dark because another threat lay there. Here was a stealth game with light and dark systems. Here was a game with an iconic setting and a point of difference. So, barring some insults from the developers who had to realise hundreds of rats on screen at one time, work on 'Plague', as the game was codenamed, got underway.
"And when the reviews started coming out," Choteau adds,"we were all together again, many of us around my computer, and we were like..." He pauses."It was stunning for us. We don't have a 90 Metacritic, we are around 82, and it was unexpected - the best score we've done with Asobo [...] We were stunned. I don't know what to say. I didn't sleep at all during that night just waiting for the next review and watching streamers playing the game.
In September 2019, work on A Plague Tale 2 began. And the starting point for it was to address all the things that hadn't worked, or that people didn't like, in the original game."We knew we wanted to do a nice sequel, not a lazy one," Choteau says. So he asked his team to gather all the negative feedback and find out what the most common things were that people didn't like.
"It has been decided when we were writing Innocence," Choteau says."We wrote all the background around the Macula and the rats and everything - the purpose of Gaia, of a Protector. Everything was written down and every threshold they need to cross was there. And we knew that there's two ways it can end up for tiny Hugo: one is the Apocalypse, and then you will live through the rats, through this desolation of killing people; or he will die.
Deciding it would happen was the easy part; working out how to do it was another matter. The final chapter took the longest work of any section in the game."We've done thousands of versions of this final chapter and the way she will approach him and he will die." Would he die alone? Would you simply watch? Everything the team tried didn't feel satisfying or work."He was always dying but still, the way was not defined until it became obvious for us that she had to do it.
McBurney was the total opposite."She was destroyed," Choteau says."She was in pieces. Not enough tissues in the booth. During this sequence, she was herself, basically, living the death of her little brother." The big difference between Requiem's release and Innocence's, three years earlier, was that this time there were expectations. Nobody knew about A Plague Tale before Innocence came out so if the game had been a disaster, it wouldn't really have mattered, but now there were fans' expectations to live up to."They are our fuel," Choteau says,"we are doing the sequel thanks to them. We don't want to disappoint them.
Why the technical performance was overlooked on some platforms, he genuinely doesn't seem to know."I don't know if we were naïve or too much in the excitement of the release, but we haven't seen it, actually. We've played the game on PS5 here at the office, together and doing our review, and we haven't seen the performance issue. And I don't know why, I can't explain it.
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