Vampyr - vampire action-RPG from Life Is Strange devs

[---]

Expect more previews to sink your teeth into soon – “Le #WhatsNext de Focus” press event begins next week!

 

[Excidium II]

"Le" fucking reddit

 

[WhiteGuts]

No it's just french

 

[ERYFKRAD]

No it's just french

Right, like that's any better.

 

[WhiteGuts]

It's not better or worse. Focus is a french publisher, they're using french.

 

[naossano]

With that kind of picture on the codex, i would have expected comments about gay romance in video games...

 

[LESS T_T]

"You can complete Dontnod’s Vampyr without killing anyone, but it’s a tough challenge" https://www.vg247.com/2017/02/08/yo...out-killing-anyone-but-its-a-tough-challenge/

There are new screenshots.

According to PCGamesN, they showed the same demo from E3 and Gamescom at Focus Home event, with no hands on.

 

[makiavelli747]

I think the story will be dull.

 

[Zombra]

"You can complete Dontnod’s Vampyr without killing anyone, but it’s a tough challenge"

Huh, I wonder if that includes those vampire hunter trash fights, or just the "choose a citizen to murder from this list" parts. It really seemed like the trash fights were, OK now 6 guys are shooting you, kill them to proceed.

 

[Sizzle]

"You can complete Dontnod’s Vampyr without killing anyone, but it’s a tough challenge"

Huh, I wonder if that includes those vampire hunter trash fights, or just the "choose a citizen to murder from this list" parts. It really seemed like the trash fights were, OK now 6 guys are shooting you, kill them to proceed.

Yeah, they said that there will be fighting no matter if you kill anyone or not, just that the fights will be easier if you give in to your vampire vampyre side.

So that probably means that you'll have to kill some hunters no matter what, but you won't be able to drain them to get those sweet powers of the night nyght.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/02/08/vampyr-is-a-more-interesting-take-on-the-vampire-myth

Vampyr Is a More Interesting Take on the Vampire Myth

By John Robertson

The vampire is one of the most familiar and consistently employed of the monster roster. Each year we are beset by new creative works that use bloodsuckers as either their central protagonist or antagonist, some creators claiming to shine fresh light on the creature and some happy to shamelessly re-tread the same ground.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of vampires, French studio Dontnod (Remember Me, Life Is Strange) remains convinced of their continued ability to attract audiences and has dedicated itself to focusing its next game, Vampyr, around them. Set in early-20th century London, a city in the throes of political, scientific and social upheaval, you play as a doctor struggling to come to terms with recently having become a creature of the night.

We’re still yet to get hands-on with the game, so a first-hand account of how well Vampyr is coming together is impossible, but the goal of exploring the moral traumas that arise from a former saver of lifes becoming a taker of lives is a potentially interesting one.

Why, though, would Dontnod choose an entity as common as a vampire as the basis of their next game? Why not find another, less predictable, means of exploring conflicts related to sudden change and emotional turmoil? In answer to this question, and as a means of explaining what Vampyr is really about, narrative director Stephane Beauverger explains that his interest in exploring the vampire myth is twofold.

“Firstly, the vampire is a conscious monster,” Beauverger, dressed in leather jacket and black jeans, sporting a ponytail and face-consuming beard, tells us. “It’s a monster that knows exactly what it is and it has to rely on deception in order to embrace its true nature. Unlike a werewolf or a zombie it’s not simply a brainless killing machine and, because it is intelligent, it sometimes suffers emotionally as a result.

“Secondly, I think vampires are popular because they’re about us questioning ourselves about topics that are important to humanity: death, love, sex, seduction. A vampire is Eros and Thanatos mixed together in the perfect way.”

‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos’ have become shorthand for what psychologist Sigmund Freud described as humanity’s driving forces being a desire to experience both life and death. Eros represents our desire to survive and live, Thanatos is our inclination towards self-destruction and, ultimately, our demise.

Within the vampire both of these ideas exists in extremely clear ways. In order to become a vampire in the first place you must embrace dying and killing off your life as a human, but in doing so you embrace the eternal life of a vampire. The vampire turning a human into a vampire is herself simultaneously performing murder and creating new life.

It’s this sharp conflict that exists within the vampire that Beauverger wants to use to explore other ideas surrounding morality and ideas around right and wrong. Whilst combat does exist in Vampyr (although our latest showing involved nothing of this kind) this isn’t trying to be a game about promoting the typical folklore elements of a vampire’s power: health regeneration, transforming into a bat, being vulnerable only to certain materials.

Indeed, Beauverger is actively dismissive of games that concern their exploration of vampires on only these elements. Instead, the vampire offers a way to challenge players to make morally difficult decisions in a way that doesn’t preach a strict sense of right and wrong.

What Beauverger wants to avoid is propagandising to players that a certain course of action is morally superior to another. To explain the point, he explains precisely what he doesn’t want to see in Vampyr:

“The first time I played Peter Molyneux’s Fable I was particularly struck by the tutorial that asks you to make a decision about something that the game tells you is either a good or bad thing,” Beauverger describes.

“I think it’s the butcher of the village is having an affair with the baker and if you decide to reveal this then the game says you’ve made the morally right decision. If you keep the information hidden then it says that you’ve made the morally wrong decision. I don’t agree with that at all.”

What Beauverger and Dontnod do not want, then, is to force players to submit to the moral compass of the creator. In examples like Fable there is no room for the game to accept the outlook of the player; the game simply dictates to the player what is decisively right and wrong. Whether the player agrees or not is inconsequential.

The promise in Vampyr is that no decision that you’re asked to make comes coupled with a definitive sense of good or bad. Choices revolve around situations that are more ambiguous and more open to interpretation. You and a friend might both choose the same option as to how to act, but you might both have a different idea as to whether you did the ‘right’ thing or not. That, at least, is the kind of response Dontnod is seeking to foster.

In order to make decisions difficult on a morality level, then, characters cannot be too shallow in their personality and history. If you have to make a decision about whether or not to murder, for blood, a rapist or a serial killer then you’re not putting the player in a tough or interesting position. Most, if not all, players will kill such individuals without a second thought for them or their existence given that they’re presented as wholly despicable beings.

“It’s more interesting for us and the players if we create someone that might be violent but he’s only violent for an understandable reason,” explains Beauverger. “You might be given the choice to kill a violent person, but you come to realise whilst finding out about his life that he’s only violent because he’s living in poverty and violence is the only way for him to survive and provide food for his son.

“If we can provide characters like that for players to think about then there’s a balance and moral decision being created there that the player has to interpret for themselves before deciding how to act.”

Whereas in Life Is Strange you have the option of turning back time once you’ve made a decision in order to view other immediate consequences of your actions, in Vampyr you’re every decision is final. Again, this finality is designed to force you to think through your own sense of morality before you decide where your beliefs reside.

If Vampyr can genuinely force us to think about how we’re acting and why we’re performing in-game actions then it will have achieved something that the vast majority of games don’t even attempt to do, let alone succeed at doing.

Any creative work that forces us to question ourselves and our view of events and decisions is worth investing time in, so let’s hope Vampyr lives up to its promise as a game capable of self-examination.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

And here's an interview:

http://wccftech.com/vampyr-lets-you-decide-bloodsucker/

Dontnod’s Vampyr Lets You Decide What Kind of Bloodsucker You Want To Be

I had the extraordinary pleasure of interviewing Stephane Beauverger, Narrative Director at Dontnod about the upcoming game, Vampyr. From the studio that brought you Life is Strange, Stephane Beauverger explains the creation process for each game, and some interesting insights into Vampyr and the role players will have in shaping their fictional world of London 1918.

Vampyr is due to launch later this year for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. For an earlier interview with Beauverger, check our Gamescom 2016 report.


Your first game, Remember Me, was set in Paris, your home city, your second game was set in America. Why did you choose to set your third game in London?

Each time we decide to make a story about a new subject, we start by creating the universe. With Remember Me we wanted to create a game set in the future, in one hundred years. We asked ourselves where would it be? We knew Paris, and it was interesting to ask what would become of this city.

For Life is Strange this was different. We said let’s have a teen movie, a sad variation of the teen movie, so it had to be in the US. What are the cool places in the US today, we asked ourselves. Oregon, where the hipster movement has very strong roots, so let’s focus on that.

For the Vampyr project, what we set out to do was make a game about vampires. What is interesting about vampires? What is interesting for us is that is it a clever monster who knows what he is. He is trying to hide his nature, he is a creature of deception. We wanted the player to feel all twisted and torn about the nature of the vampire they play, so we asked ourselves what is the opposite of a vampire. A doctor. He used to save lives but now he’ll have to take them.

Where would it be interesting to put this character? We wanted to set it during an epidemic, where everyone is dying and a doctor could do the most good. 1918 London. This is what we want to create as a world, as a story, now we can begin to build on the mechanics. We can decide how the player will interact with the game world.

Each time we make a game we start with a core team, the game director, the art director, and the narrative director and these three people build the game together. They build it the art, the game design and the story line together. The three sections must match perfectly and then we will have something interesting.

Is London in Vampyr built historically accurate or more fictional?

We went to London, we went to the East End, we went to the City, we went to Temple Church, we visited a lot of the city. The problem is that the city is huge and it has been rebuilt a lot since the beginning of the twentieth century. So we had to go back to documentaries and history books about Whitechapel, the docks and the Isle of Dog. A lot has changed since 1918 so we had to go back to historical material to find out how the buildings looked, how people dressed, what people looked like and what they ate there. Stuff like that.

So it’s based on historical facts.

And then you threw in vampires.

Of course, vampires are historical facts too, they exist, I promise you they exist.

With the vampires themselves, did you create your own lore for them?

Yes, absolutely. We had to decide exactly what kind of vampire we wanted to put in the game. Can they be seen in mirrors? Can they be destroyed by the sun? Does garlic repel them? Can they enter a church? All the classical notions of a vampire. So once we had established all these questions we got a very precise aspect of the kind of vampires we wanted the player to be. So we’ve said that this is the creature you’re going to play. We wanted the players to ask how could such a creature exist, where could it possibly have come from? So we created a whole original lore that gave the players context.

We created different species of vampires and created a lore where everything is linked to the blood. Even the central character asks “Why did someone make me a vampire? When the city is facing the worst epidemic ever and I am a blood specialist. Someone has a plan here, and I have to find out what it is.”

So there is a larger conspiracy going on in the background as well.

As a vampire the player will have the choice to drink innocent blood in the game, but how will that affect the story and the city?

There are no nameless civilians in the game. They all have their own stories and interests and friends and enemies. Each time to decide to kill one of them you’ll have to see the consequences for the rest of the city. There will be an impact on the local scale.

When you decide to kill some gang member in the East End, it will not change the fate of the city of London, but it will change the people that knew him. Each time you kill a civilian you will see some consequences on the local scale.

And then the main storyline will regularly ask you to make a major kill choice. This will make you decide what to do with a very important NPC. They might be community pillars or people who are very famous in a specific district of the city. When you decide what to do with them, kill them, spare them or make them a vampire, it will have a huge impact.

Is there any morality or karma meter in the game, or is it up to the player to precise whether they did right or wrong?

This is actually a very interesting question, at one point we had a system where you could get good or bad karma. But when we looked at it, it looks like when you kill someone you can have better karma. That seemed very strange, you can’t get good karma for being a murderer. We also realized that because of the game mechanic, you could not give the same karma points to everybody. We had tried to link that to the blood quality, and we realized that the poor and the sick had small karma. It was less punishing for you to kill them as if there was a different price on human life, dependent on social level. We decided to change that: one death, one damnation point.

We decided that you can only go down to hell, you just decide the speed. So we thought about putting in a karma system but we decided against it. If you take a life, any life, you pay the price.


With every death having a big or small ripple on the city, every player will have a different looking city by the end of Vampyr?

If you kill too many people too soon, you can reach what we call the ‘critical health status’ for the district. That means even if you left some citizens alive, the district will crumble because there are not enough people left alive. You will lose the entire district. You can go back if you want but there will just be monsters and guards and vampires. No one else is alive anymore.

At the end of the game, if you decide to kill lots of people you can have the city burning down with no one left alive. It’s not ‘the evil ending’ it, just how you decided to play the game. You can go back and play it again and try not to kill anyone if you want.

http://wccftech.com/nioh-pre-order-bonuses-detailed-director-says-challenging-game/
Life is Strange let you rewind and change your mind during the important decisions of the game, will Vampyr let you do that as well?

It’s the exact opposite. Each time you kill someone there is a saving point and you can’t go back. Like the game State of Decay, when someone dies that is it, there is no going back.

With different species of vampires, do you also have different factions?

Of course. You will meet at least two different factions of vampires in Vampyr. There is a lesser species of vampire, unwanted children of the vampire as it were. They hide in the sewers. Other vampires tend to kill them on sight because they are less clever. Vampires tend to destroy them. Actually, some of them are much cleverer than you think but they are still hiding.

You will meet another vampire faction, very posh, very aristocratic and members of the high society. They secretly rule London, and even parts of the British Empire actually. They are defenders of the crown, though. They are really servants of the crown and really conservative, they don’t want any female members. They are assholes. They are immortal assholes.

The player will be asked to join them for a time. You don’t have too, but if you do so you will be invited to do something you don’t totally agree with. But you don’t have to play their game, you don’t have to follow their agendas. You have complete freedom.

On the same subject, you will also have to fight different bosses. One of them is the leader of the vampire hunters. But to defeat him in a fight doesn’t mean that he is dead. After the fight, you can decide to kill him, let him go or make him a vampire. That would be a terrible punishment for him.

Is it possible to use the stealth mechanics in the game to avoid the boss fights?

No, you cannot avoid the boss fight.

But you have three different skill sets. You can be a shadow vampire that tries to hide and uses his powers to manipulate his victims. You can be an instinct vampire, he has claws and is very aggressive. And then you have the blood vampire who can control his enemies to make the blood boil for example, or impale enemies on blood stakes.

You can buy the skills you like and develop them if you want too. So by the end of the game not only will each player’s city be different but their characters, too.

So you’ve got the vampire hunters and vampires. Can you play them against each other?

You will frequently see vampires and vampire hunters fighting on the streets. And you can choose to join in or leave them to it.

Is Vampyr an open world game?

Yes, it is a semi-open world game. This means you can go freely everywhere in the city except for a few locations that are locked for storyline reasons. But it is not a huge world like Skyrim or GTA so we call it a semi-open world. But once you enter London you can go almost everywhere very early on in the game.

Will there be side quests?

Yes, many citizens will give you side quests for you to perform. That is another price to pay if you kill too many citizens. If a district falls you won’t get any merchants or side quests left.

And if you kill too many civilians will you get an evil ending?

There is no good ending or bad ending. The game will not punish you and say you had the bad ending, there is simply a logical end that reflects the actions you made during the game. It is not a morality judgment based on your actions.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamereactor.eu/news/504383/Dontnod+choice+in+Vampyr+will+be+much+more+brutal/

Dontnod: choice in Vampyr will be "much more brutal"
"You have complete freedom, you could decide to kill everybody in the game."

After the success of Life is Strange, the expectations are certainly high with regards to the next game from Parisian studio Dontnod. Vampyr is a third-person action-RPG set in London during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

Against the backdrop of this interesting period of history, the player will take control of a character who has very split priorities. On the one hand he's a doctor - a blood specialist to be precise - helping those he meets along the way. On the other, he's got a thirst for blood to contend with.

During a recent event in Paris we spoke to the game's narrative director, Stéphane Beauverger, who had plenty to tell us about the title and the decisions you'll be making along the way.

"You have complete freedom," Beauverger explained, adding that "you could decide to kill everybody in the game. Or to take no life at all. Except, I would say, no innocent life."

According to Beauverger, the game offers a semi-open world with four districts that the player can explore, revealing different areas in London.

"There will be two main ways for you to explore the city. You will have to conduct investigation to find answers to your questions by talking to citizens, finding clues, talking to the most important NPCs in the game.

"And at the same time you will be hunted down by the vampire hunters who are totally aware of your presence and try to destroy you. So you will have to fight them or to escape them if you can. And of course you will have also to fight very strange, very strong vampire figures."

Dontnod now enjoys a reputation for writing games with a strong narrative twist, this after their work on Life is Strange and, before that, Remember Me. We asked whether there were any elements from those games that carried over into Vampyr.

"We are always trying to create games that put the player in the situation of making [a] choice and then having to face the consequences. That will be the same case with Vampyr. The difference, of course, will be that the choices here is much more brutal, there [is] much more blood involved. You will have to kill.

"The question sometime will be 'will you spare this one, will you kill this one?' The question sometime will be 'who will you kill?' But each time you decide to take a life as a vampire, each time you decide to save a life as a doctor - because you are both at the same time - you will have to face the consequences.

"You will see in the game what will happen to the people you killed, and most important, to the people who knew the victim and will have to survive now without that person."

The game, which Beauverger confirmed will have a branching storyline and multiple endings, will be released at some point in 2017, and it's set to land on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Expect to see more of Vampyr later in the year as and when Dontnod are ready to share more.

 

[Zombra]

There it is, there will be plenty of killing, just the "which citizens will you deliberately murder" parts will be optional.

 

[PirateScum]

So, you can't get EXP-blood from hunters because reasons, so if you want to level up, you have to drain civilians?

 

[Aenra]

Studio wants to make a mature game; thinking involved; consequences; gray lines; ambivalence.. blah blah blah

Line four from the excerpt: “Firstly, the vampire is a conscious monster”.
Monster. Monster. Because ambivalence, lol.. because maturity, lol.. because gray lines and matters of perspective..

I keep telling you, retards making games for retards. Just hopeless goddammit

 

[Zombra]

So, you can't get EXP-blood from hunters because reasons, so if you want to level up, you have to drain civilians?

Correct. I'm into it.

 

[Zombra]

I used to be like you people. Then I thought it through.

 

[Siel]

So I read in Edge Dontnod hired Teppei Takehana who was a veteran dev on Kojima games. Most likely to handle the combat and animations.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/24/15...-is-strange-dexter-moral-compass-release-date

In Life is Strange dev’s next game, Vampyr, players choose a monster’s moral compass

Will they be Jack the Ripper, or Dexter?
by Charlie Hall@Charlie_L_Hall Mar 24, 2017, 3:00pm EDT

The world first learned of Dontnod’s Vampyr on the eve of the launch of its last title, Life is Strange. Since then, the French development team has given regular updates on its progress. Now that it’s in the final stretch, it’s also producing a demo for this summer’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. The real challenge will be getting across the main character’s motivations in such a short period of time.

Vampyr is a third-person action role-playing game set in 1918 London. Players take on the role of a physician named Jonathan Reid. The demo will feature a new look at the game’s combat system, but it will also take time to explore Reid’s own background.

“Dr. Jonathan Reid was in the war,” said Gregory Szucs, Vampire’s art director. “He was trained as a soldier at some point and he brought back some ideas, so he will definitely use that, like trench clubs and things he brought back with him. He still uses his service weapon — a Webley — and a blade. And the combat will happen in the streets, in the sewers. It's not going to be about mortar shells.”

Reid wakes up in a mass grave during the Spanish flu epidemic in London. The early game will be about coming to grips with being a vampire, while the arc of the game will focus on how he deals with the malady and his quest for a cure. The team said it chose 1918 because it was such a period of dramatic cultural change, a time when a vampire could perhaps secretly find a safe place to live alongside mortals.

“It was interesting for us because there were a lot of scientific progress and discoveries that emerged during this period,” said Philippe Moreau, Vampyr’s game director. “It was really, I would say, the first time that science could challenge religion and mysticism in a sense that science could provide answers that religion would never have been able to.”

Because of what Reid has seen in the war, and because of his ethical obligations as a medical doctor, Dontnod said they plan to play with preconceptions of what motivates a classical vampire to feed or take a human life.

“One interesting question we want the player to ask themselves is, ‘Who am I going to kill and who am I going to spare?’” said Moreau. “We have created a wide variety of citizen archetypes, very different archetypes, so you can really decide to play the game like Dexter, as he would do in the TV show. Or you can decide to do it the other way, be like Jack the Ripper and take lives and just feed and be in full possession of your supernatural skills.

“You can navigate between these two extreme paths. There is no good or bad decision. We don't want to influence you on your moral choices. It's really up to you how you want to experience the game.”

Where other vampire games might weaken players if they don’t feed, Szucs and Moreau talked more in terms of how Reid’s choice to kill citizens would grant him evolutionary powers. One conflict they hope to play with is Reid’s own need for self preservation. In Vampyr, a powerful group of vampire hunters are hot on the doctor’s trail, and only by increasing his own combat abilities can he stay alive long enough to cure himself.

Throughout the interview, the team stressed that Reid had a rational, scientific mind. We asked if someone like that, given his experiences during the war and his horrible affliction, might consider allowing the vampire hunters to simply kill him, or even go so far as to take their own life.

“That's a very interesting question,” said Szucs wryly. “Jonathan has a lot of trouble accepting the situation at first and it will definitely approach it in a rational way, so he will conduct experiences and he will come to some conclusions. But then it is going to be up to the player, really. There are a lot of ways you can deal with the situation.”

Vampyr is expected to arrive this year for Windows PC, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Unlike Life is Strange, it will be a single, non-episodic product. The team tells us players should put aside between 15 and 30 hours to experience it all.

TL;DR

Dontnod is preparing a proper gameplay demo for the E3, showing the combat system, the C&C and Reids motives.

 

[Lacrymas]

At this point I'm not sure "moral choices" is the proper term. Just choices will suffice. And logical consequences. Like it always should be.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Small tidbit I found (in French):



Cédric Lagarrigue, the CEO of Focus Home Interactive says they're aiming for a September or October release for Vampyr. The Cthulhu game is also scheduled for an October release.

 

[LESS T_T]

Long gameplay video is coming with E3.

FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE UNVEILS ITS E3 2017 LINE-UP

Today, Focus Home Interactive is happy to unveil its exciting E3 2017 line-up! From closed-door presentations to exclusive interviews and hands-on demos - here is the full list of games to be showcased at the Focus Home Interactive booth, West-Hall #4512, at E3 2017 in Los Angeles, June 13-15.

Developers will give exclusive closed-door presentations - the perfect opportunity to discover these anticipated games in action:

• Vampyr (DontNod): 45 minutes of never-before-seen gameplay.
• A Plague Tale: Innocence (Asobo): A 15 minutes gameplay walkthrough with developer commentary.
• Call of Cthulhu (Cyanide): A gameplay walkthrough with developer commentary.

More information for the following titles will be revealed in face-to-face sessions with developers in our Interview Area – exclusive assets and info will be made available for:

• Insurgency: Sandstorm (New World Interactive)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse (Cyanide)
• GreedFall (Spiders)
• The Surge (Deck13)

Finally, you’ll be able to get your hands on some of our recent and imminent releases – a dozen playable stations will be available for journalists and also for the public!

 

[pippin]

when you name your game after a meme

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

when you name your game after a meme

"Popamole: Yuge rise of the shovelware"