Weird West Interview

WolfEye Studios’ co-founders Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby recently had a chat with WCCFTech about their upcoming isometric immersive sim Weird West. The resulting interview covers the game’s unique five-character structure, inspirations, player choices, and more.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

Immersive sims seem to have a pretty steep barrier to entry, whereas that doesn’t seem to be the case with Weird West. Was that a conscious design decision?

Raphael Colantonio: Yes, totally. Although I think it was not a deliberate design choice from us as younger designers twenty years ago when we made those games hard. This time we really wanted to make that effort to onboard the player, having lots of tutorials, even little videos whenever you find something new.

These games become hard if you don’t tell the players what they can do. If you just assume that everybody is going to figure it out, then you’re going to lose a lot of people. Even though Weird West is equally hardcore, this time we’ve made a lot of effort bringing that support that we never really put so much attention on before.

Julien Roby: Compared to previous games we made like Arx Fatalis or Dishonored, Weird West is a lot deeper, it has many more systems. However, we lowered the barrier.

With Arx Fatalis, many players figured it was a linear game during their first playthrough. Here, we wanted to make sure the depth was actually visible from the get-go, so players would understand they could approach everything in their own different ways.