For this week's edition of "Game On," The Fly spoke over email with Nick Pearce, managing director at Australian developer Modern Storyteller, which released mystery adventure role-playing game "The Forgotten City" earlier this year on PC, PlayStation 5 (SONY), PS4, Xbox One (MSFT), Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch (NTDOY). In the interview, Pearce discussed time loop games, releasing a cloud version on Switch, and more.
'THE FORGOTTEN CITY': When asked how he feels about the game's reception so far, Pearce said, "I feel great about it! When I walked away from my 10-year legal career to set up an indie studio and make video games, 5 years ago, it was the most insanely risky thing I'd ever done. Given the commercial and critical success of the game, it turns out it was one of the best decisions I ever made."
TIME LOOP GAMES: "The Forgotten City" utilizes a time-loop system, meaning the player replays certain events with the goal of finding different outcomes and learning new information each loop. When asked how his game stands out in a genre that seems to be increasingly popular, with time-loop titles such as "Deathloop" and "12 Minutes" also releasing this year, Pearce noted that "The Forgotten City" started out as a mod for "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" years before the current trend.
"The biggest challenge with making a time loop game is avoiding the sense of repetition that comes from re-living the same day over and over again," the managing director said. "The Forgotten City stands out from the pack because of its unique methods of ensuring the story never feels repetitive, especially because each time you start the day again, you can delegate all the quests you completed in a previous loop to a helpful non-player character, which means you can just pick up where you left off in the previous loop and continue your investigation. You can also keep all the knowledge and items you retained in previous loops which means you can steam key items from one timeline and use them in another - which is very handy and leads to some fun puzzles. For example, when you first arrive you discover a woman who has died because she couldn't get life-saving medicine in time. So you can steal that medicine, loop through time, and get it to her just in time to save her life.
SWITCH: Since the Nintendo Switch's hardware is less powerful than that of its console competitors, the Switch version of "The Forgotten City" was cloud-based, meaning players had to stream it to their systems instead of downloading it. Pearce noted that this decision was due to the difficulty of releasing the Switch version "in a way that we were happy with." "It was going to be difficult for us to port a version of The Forgotten City to Switch in a way that we were happy with, which is why we worked with Ubitus to release a cloud version; it looks the same as the PC version, because it's run on PCs on remote servers and streamed to the user's device," he said. "Series X and PS5 were a breeze to port to; they're both powerful machines."
OTHER CLOUD PLATFORMS: When asked if he would consider releasing a cloud-based version of the game on other streaming platforms, such as Google Stadia (GOOGL) or Amazon Luna (AMZN), Pearce said there's "definitely" a place for cloud gaming in the future and that he's "keen" to explore it. "I think any service that allows people to play games in additional ways, and helps games to reach new audiences, can only be a good thing," he told The Fly.
XBOX GAME PASS: "The Forgotten City" was recently added to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription service, and Pearce said he's "very pleased" that the service is helping more people play the game. "I'm very pleased that it's helping more people discover the game, in circumstances where they might have slept on it otherwise," he said. "But I think a lot of people will always prefer to buy games outright because you have them in your library forever, not just for 12 months."
"Game On" is The Fly's weekly recap of the stories powering up or beating down video game stocks.
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