Manos Vezos: So, if you could just introduce yourselves for starters.
Dave Mervik: I’m Dave Marvik, I’m Senior Narrative Designer on Little Nightmares 2 for Tarsier Studios.
Lucas Roussel: And I’m Lucas Roussel and I’m the producer of Little Nightmares for Bandai Namco.
Manos Vezos: OK. Good. I feel like I’m at a disadvantage by design because the only piece of content we’ve gotten so far is the trailer. Which, sure, I got to watch twice, once last night and once today during the presentation, but there’s not a lot of info there so let’s start with the basics so that our readers can acclimate themselves more quickly and we’ll see where it goes.
Lucas Roussel: Sure. Little Nightmares 2 is about a new character, so that’s the boy with the paper bag over his head and his name is Mono. So that’s the character you will be playing. Six will be with you, will “companion” you but she’s not playable. So this is a single player adventure which still has very high narration, obviously, so you will play Mono and with Six you will venture outside the Maw, for the first time, to other places, you will discover much more about Little Nightmares’ world than in the first game.
Manos Vezos: It’s my understanding that Six, the previous game’s protagonist is going to be AI controlled.
Lucas Roussel: Yes.
Manos Vezos: What kind of interaction can the player expect to be having? I mean, they have to work together somehow so can the player give any kind of instruction to the AI or do we solely rely on the inner workings of the AI?
Lucas Roussel: I mean, what we will absolutely do is make Six like… look like a living character and also faithful to the personality that you’ve seen in Little Nightmares 1. So she will have actions of her own, she will not just follow you, she will take the lead, she will do stuff but you will also be able to ask her to do something. There will be a command for that.
Manos Vezos: I might be overshooting here a bit but does that mean that, in terms of fidelity of autonomous actions made by Six, should we be expecting something comparable to, say, Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite? I’m overshooting, I know but… big picture.
Lucas Roussel: It think it’s very difficult to compare. I think what remains important for us is really the relationship between the two kids and that’s the big thing in our game. There’s definitely going to be more stuff, some very nice cinematics and some moments you’ll have to be very quick yourself with protecting Six, so I think this game is really about the relationship between the two kids. And also as you could maybe see in the trailer, you will be able to use some items with him and that will also bring a bit more action to the gameplay, which is also something that, I think, really adds some value. It’s difficult to compare our game with a game like BioShock.
Manos Vezos: I know it’s apples and oranges but I was trying to focus on the AI part in the sense that you can feel you can somewhat rely on it to work properly through and through. That’s basically what I meant when mentioning fidelity, that kind of thing.
Lucas Roussel: Yeah.
Manos Vezos: Cut-scenes aside, which are directed, linear affairs, going from point A to point B, do we think that the AI interactions themselves try to incorporate some kind of narrative elements, as much AI automation can support such a thing?
Dave Mervik: Everything is part of the narrative. The way Six behaves, the dynamic between the characters, everything that happens in the game feeds into the direction of the narrative.
Manos Vezos: Naturally but I really have to ask since you never really know if there’s been a special kind of consideration about one thing or the other. Some other team might have treated it all AI interaction as something purely technical and thrown the rest in cut-scenes.
Dave Mervik: Yeah.
Manos Vezos: That’s why I’m asking.
Dave Mervik: No, that’s not how we work though. The team works very closely together and we established the core of the game at the very beginning so that we all agree and we all know why we’re doing what we’re doing. So that every practical decision and tactical decision and creative decisions are all based on the same core idea that we’re all aboard. We have a story that we all want to tell, an atmosphere that we want to create so everything comes from the same core and the AI is no different.
Manos Vezos: Is the signal tower supposed to be some kind, as an idea, some kind of bleak commentary to anything? I have my suspicions but I’d like to get your…
Dave Mervik: I would love to talk more about that but I think maybe I can’t say much at this point. I think people shy away from saying what they do is political because it’s a hole they don’t want to head down. I’m not afraid of saying it though because I think whether you chose to do something or you chose to not do something is making a stand still. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, I think maybe that’s for a future interview maybe so I wouldn’t want to spoil it for everyone. So maybe we’ll talk again?
Manos Vezos: It seems I’ve unwittingly hit a wall but, well, it happens.
Lucas Roussel: What we can say about the signal tower is… we could feel it a little bit in the trailer, that it is broadcasting some sort of humming transmission that really affects the world and people in the world. How much does this affect, what will be the behaviours of those people when they get this signal is something you will have to discover in the game, but the trailer is already, like, introducing some hints like a large group of people just gathering around it and feeling kind of obsessed by the television. It will also seem like TVs are everywhere in the world and also, like, in places you don’t really expect them. Up on the beach in the first shot of the trailer, so, yeah, TV will really play a central role and it’s obviously connected to that central tower.
Manos Vezos: That was basically my initial thought, that it would have to be about the information age and how fixated we are to that information flow and the quality of that flow, that was the first thing that came to mind. That’s exactly why I asked this question. But you don’t really have to get more specific.
Dave Mervik: It’s a huge part of the world now, that’s for sure.
Manos Vezos: There’s no way around that.
Dave Mervik: There is nothing like it, with the media and how you view things. We’re very interested in talking more about this in the future.
Manos Vezos: OK. Fair enough. We’ll have to work something out for later on then.
Dave Mervik: I guess.
Manos Vezos: Is there something extra for players that put time in the first game, which maybe can be expected, but also the mobile spin-off? Or will you leave things be with the player having to have made some connections themselves first in order to appreciate some elements in the new game?
Lucas Roussel: I think, like, what I would like you to consider is that every little part of this game can be played on its own without having played the previous one or the mobile game. It can be just played and it will make sense. You play the game from A to Z and it gives enough for you to understand the world and also think about the world. Because, as you know, we’re not telling everything. We’re leaving some holes that your imagination has to fill in. If you’ve played more games, you will have more information, but also more questions. And you continue thinking about it. Is Little Nightmares 2 happening before or after Little Nightmares 1? That’s really for the players to make up their minds about. And with regards to the mobile game, it is part of the Little Nightmares timeline but it is before Little Nightmares 1 —we’ve already clarified that— but with regards to Little Nightmares 2 we really want people to imagine the rest. Is it before or after Little Nightmares 1? Is it before or after the mobile game? I think people will have a lot of fun and discuss about it.
Manos Vezos: OK. Starting out with the first game, did you have at any point hopes —not necessarily plans— to, given half the chance, continue building upon it? Was Little Nightmares 2 in the back of your head when starting out? Not as finished product but as a bunch of ideas.
Dave Mervik: I think we didn’t even dream that Little Nightmares 1 would be called Little Nightmares 1. It was just Little Nightmares. You don’t go that far unless you’re an egocentric maniac. We were so over the moon with the amount of people that would just talked of what we’d done. But the same time, to create the story that we told in the first one, we had to create a whole universe that it existed within. That kind of came during development of the DLC, we knew that all of this stuff that we were doing had to make sense, had to be grounded. Like what kind of a world would create something like the Maw? And obviously where did Six come from? You know all these things that we created, there’s a world outside of it. So once it started to become apparent that people were hungry for more from this world… Of course it’s dream to do it. We just wanted to make sure the next thing we did was something worth telling, not just like “let’s repeat the first one” or go back in the Maw and add more monsters. We wanted to wait till we were “here” again. This is the thing that we’re really excited about, here’s a really cool character that we think people are gonna love in an instant. Here’s some new residents that belong in this world just like, you know, the ones in the first game. We only dreamed we’d get at this point. But we never planned it. You prepare in case things go really well.
Manos Vezos: Yeah, I understand. Sometimes you can’t even let yourself hope, just to be on the safe side.
Dave Mervik: Yeah and also I think it’s important that, if it’s the only thing put out, it has to be the best you can do. If we never had a chance to make another game, let’s make this the best way we can instead of holding back and, you know, wait for a sequel. And when the chance comes up to do it you say “let’s make this the absolute best it can be”. It always has to feel worthwhile, a valuable thing to put out with something to say about the world. The first one was about the way we saw the world at that time and we exaggerated and amplified all those feelings into the character design and the story and the atmosphere. So we just wanted to make sure this is at the same level.
Manos Vezos: What was your greatest, let’s say, fear the first time around? I’m asking mainly in the sense that there was a different kind of narrative in the media space on the role of medium to big budget narrative-based games. Many publishers had expressly lost faith on such productions and whatnot. But not only did your game… it was a good game but that’s beside the point, the thing is that the gaming community believed in it as well. That’s why we’re here today, that’s why Little Nightmares 2 is a thing. Contrary to what I understand as being the norm with big publishers, I see Bandai Namco trying a lot of stuff, with many different teams when it comes to narrative-based games. So was that a thing you had to worry about, that, regardless of the quality of the game, you’d be rejected by a market that just might be at a weird place?
Dave Mervik: Yeah it always feels like risk if you make your decisions based on what feels right to you, compared to all the marketing data but that’s how we did it. We weren’t, like, studying trends and where the market’s going. That’s not, that’s not how we work. We ‘re driven by something that we care about and we want to tell stories, show our world and the characters. We were super lucky that Bandai Namco was into that as well, that they were looking to work with a studio like us. And yeah, I mean, you know, it’s great, maybe… I’d like to think that the community out there that bought into that did so partially because this was authentic. This wasn’t a cynical move by us to try and create something to fill a gap in the market, you know, and say “this is going to be our niche”. So this is something we were really, really passionate about, people just poured their souls in to make sure it was the absolute best it could be and just express themselves the best way they could.
Lucas Roussel: I think there is really like room for very different kinds of narrative games. We have narrative games here like The Dark Pictures, which is a very different kind of narrative game. There’s a lot of dialogue and choices that affect progression. Our game is… It is funny because it is a very narrative-oriented game without any dialogue. So how do you make a game that is, like, highly story heavy without any dialogue. Well, you do it through gameplay and through direction. Every scene from the game needs to give you something about the story.
Manos Vezos: You essentially have to work with a vastly different “vocabulary” to express yourselves.
Lucas Roussel: It is true. In the first game, for example, some said that the story was a bit too cryptic. It really depends on how much people really get into it or not. Some people are really passionate about it. Some people would like to get a bit more, let’s say, easier access to information about the story. That’s also a message we’ve tried to understand without compromising our approach. So in regards to story, we’ll try to make it slightly less cryptic. But there will be, of course, question marks that the player will really have to imagine and think. We want the players brains to keep functioning while playing our games. I think that’s very interesting. That’s also how you keep your community alive. Because if it’s all very clear from the beginning to the end, then there’s nothing to talk about. The game was released three years ago but we still have people making theories about it, talking about the game. And some people go very far in the details like in paintings etc., the characters, how they move, people come up with theories, it’s amazing.
Manos Vezos: No argument there. I believe that’s all the time we have, so thanks for your time.
Lucas Roussel: Thank you.
Dave Mervik: Thank you.
Για την καλύτερη εμπειρία σου θα θέλαμε να σε παρακαλέσουμε να το απενεργοποιήσεις κατά την πλοήγησή σου στο site μας ή να προσθέσεις το enternity.gr στις εξαιρέσεις του Ad Blocker.
Με εκτίμηση, Η ομάδα του Enternity