Dontnod Entertainment don’t sit still for very long, with Remember Me, Life Is Strange and now Vampyr all having very different worlds and settings. However, there’s now a running theme of focussing on interesting and shifting stories, with Vampyr set in the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic and 1918 London, as a returning military doctor struggles with his newly acquired vampiric urges.
Check out our preview from a little earlier today. We also took the opportunity at a Focus Interactive showcase to sit down with Grégory Szucs, Art Director, and the excellently named Stéphane Beauverger, Narrative Director for Vampyr.
TSA: Coming into Vampyr, this is your third game as a studio and you’re coming off the back of a lot of critical acclaim for Life In Strange in particular. Do you feel the expectation weighing on you, or is it just business as usual?
Stéphane Beauverger: Since we always want to tell stories and create games with a strong narrative structure. We already started that with Remember Me, even if we did not completely deliver, but we definitely showed that we are able to do so with Life Is Strange. So now, in fact, we feel more freedom.
People are waiting for us to give some very strong storylines, because this looks like it’s in Dontnod’s DNA. So, of course it’s a challenge, but people believe in us and we are confident.
Grégory Szucs: We definitely welcome the extra attention brought to us by those successes.
TSA: It’s always nice when people are paying attention to what you’re doing! [laughs]
Stéphane: Yes, absolutely! Also, it’s interesting for us, because now even the publishers and even the top management are saying, “We want some strong narrative material.”
TSA: So, obviously, you’ve set Vampyr in London in 1918, but how have you gone about reconstructing the city? Have you aimed for something that’s very accurate or more the feeling of London and the essence of Whitechapel at that time?
Grégory: We started from historical reference, definitely, but we actually […] take London at that point in time and then we digress just how much we need to tell our story.
Stéphane: It will not be like in GTAV, where it looks like you’re really in Los Angeles. It looks like London, but as you said, it’s the essence of London.
TSA: Yeah, I feel you have some common ground with The Order: 1886?
Stéphane: Yes, and the tricky part for us was to avoid the Victorian era feeling, because we are 30 years after. We are just after the First World War, so now there is no more gas lighting, there is electricity.
Grégory: Some people still use gas lights though. Not everyone [has moved on].
Stéphane: There are cars, even if very old ones, there are cars and the trolley bus, and things like that. The metro…
TSA: I think it’s still a tricky time period to get a distinctive look for, though.
Grégory: The architecture is still a lot like Victorian and Georgian.
Stéphane: But the technology is very different.
Grégory: That’s where you can get those relatable moment, where there is a steamroller or something using electricity. There’s all the advances in medicine and the tools brought back from warfare, which are very distinctive to the time period and definitely not Victorian.
Stéphane: We have a lot of historical research on scientific information, to precisely see what the medical knowledge was at this time. Personally, I’m very glad to show in the game that, yes, in 1918 they had X-rays, they had microscopes. I’m sure people will say, “X-rays? They had those?”
TSA: Well yes, because they really started to use those during World War I!
Grégory: Even plastic surgery for all of the broken faces; the guys coming back with completely changed faces. It all started there, there was no need before.
Stéphane: This was really a transition era. This was the beginning of the modern time, I would say, and for us it’s perfect to put the storyline in this time, because science is pushing away the darkness on old superstitions. Science seems to be the answer to everything, and the hero is a doctor from a medical scientific background, and now he has to face supernatural nature, even within himself.
TSA: So that there’s this conflict within his own personality?
Stéphane: Exactly. This is the conflict of this time and this is the conflict that he will have to face for himself.
Grégory: It’s funny, because all of the men of science at this time were convinced that they’d just killed God. They thought they can explain everything away with science, but this guy is facing the supernatural and it doesn’t fit that model at all.
Stéphane: Now that you can’t face a crucifix, and that’s very strange. [laughs]
TSA: Well, they’d already killed God, so at least there’s no need to go to church! [laughs]
One interesting point from the presentation was that all of the people you encounter have a name, backgrounds…
Stéphane: Yes, there are no nameless characters in the game.
TSA: And so, does that restrict the scope that you have in building this world, because you have to create so many people?
Stéphane: Well, since we knew that we had to give a unique identity to each NPC, and that means there will be no nameless crowds, we had to downsize the number of citizens and we had to explain that in the game.
The story takes place at night, and people who go out at night always have a good reason to do so. The city is hardly coping with the end of the war and the Spanish flu killing more people than even the war had itself.
Grégory: People are locking themselves up or they’re just too ill to go out. We really tried to find a setting that would lend itself to the exact population that we needed.
Stéphane: So of course there will be less people than in a normal day in London, but the situation in the game and the historical background justify that and make it logical.
TSA: Yeah, and what kinds of people are we going to meet? There’s presumably going to be thieves and crooks, but there’s also these quarantined zones…
Stéphane: At the very beginning of making the game, when we had to define who you would meet, I said you will meet the saints, the sad, the mad and the murderers. There are no “normal” people, I would say, who dare to go into the streets at night. There will be a lot of strange characters, some of whom have secrets to hide or good reasons to go there.
TSA: Is there then an overt morality system, as you pick and choose who you feast upon to get stronger as a vampire? Or is it more about how you yourself feel as you play?
Grégory: It’s definitely more about how you feel. There’s no clear cut, black and white karma system, with one path being good and the other bad. All of the situations that we try to depict are kind of grey, and even if you make up your mind about something, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more layers to it.
Stéphane: What we really wanted to avoid was to give a reward when killing someone. We say that, no, to take a life is always one more step toward damnation.
TSA: And how do you represent those decisions in the game? I know that a character’s relatives and friends will be affected.
Stéphane: I can’t give you all of the details about this system, because it will be revealed later this year, but you will get some information gradually in the game.
Some people will come back to you, some NPCs who you know and trust, perhaps even your family since you are coming back from France to London. People that you know will talk about these awful crimes and these bodies that have been emptied of blood. They don’t always know that it’s you, but they’ll speak about you and what you did. So there will be no moral judgement, but what you do will always have consequences and it will be remembered to you, even by the newspapers.
TSA: It actually almost feels strange to then have the combat in the game. There is such a story focus, and that fits with what people currently look to Dontnod for, so how are you positioning the combat? Is it straight up action RPG, or it actually looked a little more like Dark Souls, where you have to be very cautious?
Grégory: I guess it would be closer to Bloodborne without the punitive aspects. It’s definitely something where you have to move forward.
As a vampire, you fight quick and dirty, and this is a place where you get to show all the abilities that you gain. You are a formidable creature, and you will come against formidable opponents too – definitely not just humans. It will be about positioning, timing, creating openings, and using all of your abilities.
There is a strategic layer, so if you know more about your enemies, you can customise your weapons in the crafting system. You learn about a certain type of weakness, it can give you an edge against those enemies. So there is that strategic element to the furious, forward moving combat.
Stéphane: It’s important to realise that, yes, you are the main character and the hero, but for all of the people in London, you are a monster. So you will be chased down by some vampire hunters, who would really like for you to go down into your grave for good! So yes, you will have to face some enemies who would really want for you to be destroyed, and you will have to face some not-so-human creatures who do not share your agenda.
Vampire society is very secretive and secluded. They all have immortality to build up their plots and their projects, and they never really appreciate when someone new comes along.
TSA: Actually, along those lines, you are turned into a vampire, so I’m curious if you can turn other people to vampires? Or is that something beyond you.
Stéphane: I would say that it’s always a risk…
TSA: And yeah, talking about the abilities of a vampire, the main one showcased was the Spring, to teleport forward, and the Mesmerise, to hold sway over the humans. How closely do you stick to classic vampire myths or is this more of an adaptation? Can you turn into bats, for example?
Stéphane: When we created the backstory, we had to decide which parts of the vampire we wanted to show in the game and which parts we didn’t want to go with.
So, very quickly, we decided that they are not ghosts; they have bodies, they can see themselves in pictures and mirrors. Since they can get in fights and take damage, we decided they have to bleed somehow. So that answered the question of if they will turn into bats.
No, they are not magical creatures, but perhaps you will some encounter species of vampire who look a bit like bats. That’s how we give all these kinds of answers.
Grégory: Everything that’s been written about vampires, there are so many interpretations, but we ticked all the boxes on everything we wanted to create our very own representation of what they are.
TSA: Finally, are vampires the only mythical creatures in the game? Or – and I know you can’t talk in detail – but might there be something else that we could encounter?
Stéphane: I guess, as soon as you accept the fact that there are vampires, perhaps there could be something else too… […]
Grégory: If you were to compare it to the masquerade, the world of darkness, you’re not going to see faeries, mages, mummies, werewolves… We really focused on the vampire society.
TSA: I’d really like to see mummies walking around London…
Thanks to Grégory and Stéphane for talking to us about Vampyr. The game isn’t planned for release until 2017, so there’s quite a long wait for its release, and I’m sure we’ll see more and more details revealed about the game before then.
