ACE Team Interview
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Eurogamer: You mentioned being over-ambitious a long time ago. Were there any really wild ideas you had back then that now seem ridiculous?
Carlos Bordeu: The game was much larger in scale and we had some features to make it more like an RPG. You could solve quests by violent and non-violent approaches and that proved to be extremely hard, because everything had to have alternate solutions. For instance, you had this city with this big wall that you had to get into and you could either kill the guard and steal the key and get inside, or you could go and kill chickens or something and give them to him and he would let you inside. And doing all these alternate solutions meant doing twice the work for every objective, so that went completely off-scale and was very hard to implement.
And, yeah, the game had a lot of different ideas. It also had co-op; we were building Zeno Clash to work in co-op, which was also very, very, very difficult. You could die in the middle of the game and you went to a sort of Limbo and your friends could revive you - it was crazy but very, very large in scale.
Eurogamer: Are those RPG elements being reinstated in Zeno Clash 2, then?
Carlos Bordeu: The main feature we're bringing back is making the game more open-ended and making the progression of the game non-linear. Zeno Clash was relatively small, which was fine; we were a small developer and we had to focus on doing a really big amount of art and assets and lots of characters and fighting.
But the art style and the universe are very interesting if you put them in an explorable environment, because we see exploration as almost a gameplay feature in itself. It's really interesting when you can visit different places and you don't know what's going to be there. But it's especially interesting in the world of Zeno Clash. Let's say you're playing a fantasy RPG and you're going to go visit a forest or a village, you pretty much know and expect how it's going to look: forests have green trees, villages have these little houses - medieval fantasy is relatively, um...
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Eurogamer: And the RPG elements you're adding, will this be simply the option to choose a good or evil solution to a quest?
Carlos Bordeu: We're looking at having levels for characters, attributes, an inventory, objectives, side-quests and several other bits that make RPGs popular.
