Insomniac Games originally unveiled Overstrike at Electronic Arts' E3 2011 press conference. The game's debut trailer, created by animation studio Blur, blended comedy with action. Characters were heavily stylized. Environments were bright and cheerful. Dialogue was campy.
As the game developed, Insomniac says the lighthearted visual tone of Overstrike didn't match what it was ultimately becoming: a mature, co-op shooter with a more serious story centered around the Fuse element.
"We'd started off with a cartoony art style, but it just never felt like the stakes were that high," says Fuse creative director Brian Allgeier. "You really couldn't take anyone seriously. We actually evolved the style quite a bit just to get to the Overstrike trailer from E3 2011. We were still developing the characters, but there was a certain point where we were ready to go to press and get these characters in the trailer. And they were kind of pulling it out of our artists' hands."
Fuse, even before we knew it as Overstrike, began life as something different altogether: a four-player stealth game.
"That didn't work," says Price of the game's original intent. "We were struggling to find the fun there. [Brian Allgeier] was the one who came to me and said, 'I don't think this is working at all. We need to take this in a more action-oriented direction.' It made a lot of sense, because that's what we do best."
"There's always going to be a Leeroy Jenkins that runs in and screws things up," Allgeier says of the original co-op stealth design. "We realized we really needed to make this about these dual functional weapons — they were called gadgets at the time — but we finally locked down on what seemed to be an offensive, four-player game that's class-based. That was a big step for us about six months into the project."
That's when Insomniac began prototyping Fuse's signature weapons, some of which made their way into the E3 trailer, some of which have since evolved. Price says that, constrained by Overstrike's stylized art direction, the developer was having trouble giving the game's weapons "the impact that we believed they needed to make combat feel satisfying."
"When we went in a darker direction, a less comic direction, we were able to do a lot more over-the-top experimentation with the weapons," he says. "We were able to make them look more brutal and do things to enemies that we simply couldn't do with our previous incarnation of the game. It wasn't until we started trying these things that we realized that's where the core fun, in terms of the minute-to-minute combat, lay."
Price says reaction to the change, even within Insomniac, was somewhat mixed.
"A large percentage [of the team] was relieved that we were embracing a more mature existence because it was more relevant to the gamers we were targeting," he says. "But there are some folks who loved the original campy direction. You can never please everybody. You have to do what you think is best for the game."
Price says the decision to move from Overstrike to Fuse only happened after "a lot of soul-searching," and plenty of "debate and analysis of what's going to make this game great." Allgeier says the decision to center the game around Fuse was made in early 2012.
Fuse will retain a degree of its original humor, Price promises. He says the campy humor shown in last year's trailer has been replaced with a "more sophisticated, dry wit." T.J. Fixman, writer of Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank series, will provide that humor, a component missing from the developer's drearily serious Resistance games.
