Rebel Galaxy Outlaw - Interview @ GameSkinny

GameSkinny talks to Travis Baldree about the upcoming (Epic exclusive) release of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, the current status and development process.

GS: Is Outlaw going to be as procedurally generated as the first one?

TB: No, it's all hand-built this time out. There's a certain amount of procedural space-filling, but everybody shares the same seed.

The previous one was fully randomized. Everybody had different solar systems and planets and whatever. I regretted that after the fact. I thought it made everything feel purposeless, and the randomization didn't contribute anything to replayability like it would in something like an action-RPG. It just made everything feel soupy. So we jettisoned that completely.

While we do use procedural stuff to fill in the intervening spaces, it's kind of like how you would say in a game that, oh, there's a forest here. Please procedurally place trees for me. You don't have to hand-place every tree, I just want a forest over here. Because there's so much space, that's the only way to populate it that makes any sense.

But in Outlaw, this planet, say, will always be in this location, it will always have this bartender, it will always have this bar. These landmarks are where they are, and anyone playing the game can reference them to anyone else and they will always be in the same place.

…

GS: I'm actually surprised by how much you're iterating on Rebel Galaxy here, moreso than you usually see out of a sequel.

TB: There's definitely a lot of taking ideas, throwing out what didn't work, and improving and adding where we think it would've benefited. Some of it is just things we would have liked to have done before and simply didn't have the time. We certainly applied every lesson we learned from the last game, everything from pacing and how equipment is handled and leveled, and how the world progresses.

Rebel Galaxy, I think, had a very saggy middle. A lot of that was that we were making this transition. Eric [Schaefer] and I have been making action-RPGs forever, and they're very leveled games, right? There's just this long power curve from one end to the other. There's this constant bing-bing-bing of getting the next thing along the curve, with little spikes and valleys as you go.

Applying that to a space game, you have Level 1 lasers, Level 2 lasers… all of that honestly just feels tedious. The power curve just is not as important.

As a result of that, because of that power curve, we have this long period in the middle of Rebel Galaxy where you're just trying to effectively "level up," and it ends up being grindier than it should be.

The battles also have to scale to take that leveling into account, so they get denser and denser, and more and more time-consuming, to engage in over the course of the game. Instead of the pace accelerating, it slows.

One of the nice things about a fighter game is that the scale of your ship doesn't change that much. You can keep those engagements, and the amount of time you have to spend in them, more constrained. As long as the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable and interesting things are happening, it doesn't matter. The leveling is not as important.

We certainly still have things where you spend more money and get better stuff, and we want you to have better stuff, but we want all that stuff to be more singular. You may get this gun, and it's cool, but you don't get it and then the Level 2 and 3 versions of it. It is what it is, and when you get it, it's great. Maybe it has a different utility based on circumstance or whatever, but the mindset is very different.

More information.

Ripping off Privateer to this extent is quite alright with me, considering it's one of my favorite games of all time.

There's something about Travis that makes me want to punch his lights out - and I never cared for his past games.

But I gotta check this out, regardless.