There’s a plague afoot. Rats swarm the streets, the houses and the town. There’s no practical escape from them… except the light. In Asobo Studio’s
A Plague Tale: Innocence, you take the role of Amicia, a young girl who is trying to find safety in the dark recesses of 14th century France, for her younger brother Hugo, away from the rats who eat everything in their path, and away from the human threat: the Inquisition. Solving puzzles, and using the rats against your enemies to get to safety is your only hope for survival.
We had a chance to sit and talk with David Dedeine who is the creative director of
Plague Tale: Innocence, and asked him some of our questions.
You obviously must have been aware that many players would fear that this game could be looked at as one large escort mission. What steps have you taken to make sure that that doesn’t happen?
The mindset is to take this as an opportunity. We really believe that it’s the strength of the game. We are basically playing with this feature, giving it more context more situation. Hugo will never be a backpack. He has its own behavior, his own feelings. Hugo will just take Amicia’s hands. It’s not something we forced to use on her to do most of the time, Hugo will instinctively go to Amicia and have her protect him because he’s just five.
But any moment you can ask him to stay somewhere, or to follow you. Basically, if you believe you don’t realize how dangerous something is, basically ask him to follow you. That very simple tool generates a lot of different situations. For example, if you ask Hugo to stay somewhere, and he stays too long, or if you’re out of his sight for too long, he will panic, he will shout, he will call for Amicia, and that will probably attract guards, for example. It basically forces Amicia to manage the environment around Hugo, or create a time window to do what she has to do. There are some very cool gameplay elements near the end. We have all these things to fix right now in the game, but this aspect, to me, works pretty well.
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