00:01Peggy 18
00:08You play as yourself an underworld descendant.
00:11You are plucked from modern day earth
00:13and deposited in this
00:16deeply immersive
00:18subterranean realm
00:19full of conflict and intrigue.
00:21It's the Stygian Abyss.
00:23It's this liminal
00:25space that exists between
00:27a few different dimensions,
00:29including the underworld.
00:32The original underworld,
00:33the last that you saw of it,
00:36it was placed in
00:39what had been an inactive volcano.
00:41The volcano starts erupting
00:42and there's a dimensional gate
00:43crashing around the volcano.
00:45Goodness knows what's going to happen.
00:46So we go from there
00:49to
00:51years later
00:54and parts of
00:55that world, parts of other world
00:57have become interconnected and accessible to each other
01:00under some direction from Sir Cabirous,
01:04who's the character who was originally responsible for bringing the Stygian Abyss
01:09in the first game together.
01:12Cabirous is a character who has faced similar great challenges like you, and he has been crushed by the weight
01:18of impossible standards. Literally. He has paid the price for his time in the Stygian Abyss, and now he applies
01:28those same standards to you.
01:31Well, our goals for gameplay are very system driven, and we're trying to avoid having this highly scripted experience. A
01:40player's journey through the game still needs to have a kind of dramatic structure, right? And so you need game
01:45mechanics that are going to heighten tension over time, build to a climax that the player can see what that
01:52state is, can read the impending danger in the game's central conflict, which in our case, you know, is the
01:59the threat of Typhon, who is a sort of primordial nightmare, is a nemesis of Zeus. You face this impossible
02:08challenge.
02:10So part of what you need to do is orient yourself in the space, find the inhabitants here, make connections
02:18with them, and go from, you know, being a prisoner and outsider to a tourist and finally a native.
02:26The factions are the ones who are hiring you out to do missions that advance their aims within the Stygian
02:35Abyss. The three factions in the game are the Expedition, the Deep Elves, and the Shamblers, who are a fungal
02:43hive mind. They are in a sort of Cold War conflict when you arrive within the Stygian Abyss.
02:51The Stygian Abyss itself was, I think, one of the first environments within a game that had a sort of
02:58sense of space and unique character, and I think went on to inspire many others, such as Rapture and Columbia
03:08and more.
03:09So it's really interesting for us, especially as we've worked on some of those games, to kind of come back
03:15and take the learnings we've had from those and really expand the Stygian Abyss and make it unique and memorable
03:23and challenging.
03:27I really like where we've landed with the look of the game. It's heavily influenced by our experience as tabletop
03:35gamers and the idea of miniature figures and miniature terrain.
03:41It's not trying to be photorealistic. It's trying to be artistic, where it's going for a specific style and a
03:51crafted style.
03:52So thus the forms are a bit sort of large in the same vein as you would see an old
03:59school Dungeons and Dragons art book, that sort of look.
04:03The figures in the game suggest something about the form and scale of these miniature figures that we grew up
04:09playing with, and the whole environment around them also has this kind of somewhat crafted look to it.
04:17He wanted to have large, readable forms that can be visible to the player at any time during the game.
04:25We're creating these sort of medieval structures that have to be rooted in some sort of logic, so that the
04:31place feels real.
04:33And when we start building things up really high, we really have to think about how it's all being supported
04:38from underneath, and how it was built, and why it was built this way.
04:44You know, some areas will have tunnels that have collapsed, and rocks have sort of flowed into that area.
04:51And we have to be, you know, and in order to tell that story visually, we want to make sure
04:55that the rigid shape of that tunnel is evident, you know, and broken away.
05:00I'm thinking of the levels more as like playsets, so like a Castle Grayskull, you know, sort of thing, where
05:06there's lots of opportunities for the player to sort of enact their own fantasies.
05:11You know, a lot of real world architecture is about usability and accessibility, right?
05:16And the space needs to be, you know, inviting and comfortable.
05:19And that's not what we want here, right?
05:21It needs to be, you know, difficult, you know, not impossible, but it's a space that, you know, you are
05:29not, it's not your native environment, right?
05:32It's a challenging space.
05:33It needs to be a place.
05:38It needs to be a place.
05:39It needs to be a place.
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