Weird West – Raphael Colantonio Interview

WolfEye Studios’ president and creative director Raphael Colantonio recently had a chat with ScreenRant that resulted in a rather lengthy interview focused on WolfEye’s upcoming immersive sim action-RPG Weird West, the game’s setting, its restrictive save system, narrative structure, character archetypes and skills, and some of its standout mechanics.

Here’s just one sample question:

This is a very specific genre that is kind of rare overall. Where did you guys come up with the idea of applying “weird west” to an immersive sim?

Raphael Colantonio: It’s not like we saw The Dark Tower or played the Deadlands RPG and then we thought, “Ah, we need to make a game based on that world.” It’s definitely not that. It’s more like…the weird west is a very, very niche genre. It’s not like a specific product, [where] I look at it like, what is “medieval fantasy” to “medieval?” If you look at those worlds – whether it’s the medieval worlds or the wild west – they both have something in common, in that it’s a one-to-one kind of world. If you think “medieval,” everybody imagines the same thing, like a knight coming on a horse is going to save this princess or whatever it is that would make this world, and there’s a troll on the way.

Of course, it’s inspired by old legends, but there’s something else. They all have these clichés, and those simple worlds allow for actually very accessible stories, that can [yet] be extremely deep and interesting and relatable, as opposed to some more modern politics or complicated conflicts with conspiracies. So I think that’s why these worlds are so easy to be drawn into. They usually go with simple stories of revenge or control of land, things that many people can grasp.

Now, if you add the mystery layer to that, you know, sorcery, magic, occult, weird horror, whatever it is, and get inspired by things like Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, then you have, I think, a very interesting world. And some of us were …So it just felt…We did not look at it like a marketing opportunity. It’s interesting because it is, I think, a market opportunity. Because there aren’t that many, it’s a weird like, small niche that hasn’t been exploited at all. But that’s not how we looked at it, we just looked at it like, what is that we want to do? And it felt compelling to all of us.

When we did Dishonored, we were not thinking steampunk, specifically. We were thinking: England, weird technology, some magic. And then people said, “Oh, steampunk!” But we made our own version of it. And I think, for the Weird West, it’s a little bit of the same. We’re taking the wild west, we’re adding some stuff, etc. We’re not like, taking other people’s references, we’re more into doing our own thing, so I think it will have its own vibe. Yes, it has to fall into the weird west category, but it’s a subtle difference, though. As opposed to like, taking a genre and doing the canon version of that; it’s more like, our own path to weird west.

All of our games, I can tell you, we start thinking very, very much RPG. We start thinking stats and skills, this and that, millions of weapons, and all the things that RPGs do. And, for some reason, invariably, we go back to like, “You know what? It’s more fun to just be accessible, walk around, jump, shoot, do things.” So what we like is somewhere in between. We like the depth of RPGs, all the possibilities, all the things that they allow you to do, but we don’t like the turn-based [part]. At at the end of the day, our games are at the intersection between the depth of RPGs and the immediacy of action, but all [while] still hoping that players feel a big level of authoring of their own experience, and that they feel like they are playing the way they want, as opposed to a prescribed way.