Weird West – Raphael Colantonio on Ultima VII and Fallout Influences

Raphael Colantonio, the founder of Arkane and now WolfEye Studios, is currently working on Weird West – an isometric immersive sim that mines inspiration from such notable RPGs like Ultima VII and Fallout. And if you’d like to learn more about this upcoming mix of genres and ideas, you should check out this PC Gamer interview with the man.

Here’s an excerpt:

With its isometric perspective, Weird West is the most strikingly Ultima-esque game of Colantonio’s career. But that’s not Wolfeye Studios’ only RPG touchpoint: the studio is referring back to the very first Fallout, too.

“It’s a game that’s not faking it,” Colantonio says. “If there’s a door, there’s a key to that door. If there’s a key to that door, it’s somewhere in the world. It’s maybe on a character that owns the place. It all makes sense, as opposed to a fake building with an invulnerable NPC in front of it who’s waiting to give you a quest.”

Rather than double down on dialogue, stats, and spells, however, Weird West draws on Arkane’s action experience by, well, drawing pistols. “We have a few younger generation action gamers in the team,” Colantonio says. Ultimately, this game belongs to the same genre as Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah. Colantonio thinks that immersive sims are like wine, in that enthusiasts debate what makes the perfect batch. The simile holds true in another way: the ideas in immersive sims have aged well.