Weird West: Definitive Edition - top-down immersive sim action-RPG from Arkane founder Raf Colantonio

[Terenty]

Looks a lot like Zelda Botw when it comes to environmental interactions. Hope it's actually something you need to use to survive as opposed to Zelda's pointless gimmick

 

[Jenkem]

This fall is gonna be crowded. Like what? Pathfinder

cringe

atom

unbelievably based

gamedec

was looking forward to this but demo was kinda cringe

this.

based

Possibly elex 2?

based but I doubt it will actually come out this year considering what the released footage looks like


also you forgot ENCASED. (more like enBASED)

 

[Morgoth]

https://www.pcgamer.com/weird-west-is-swinging-just-as-hard-as-prey-and-dishonored/

Weird West is swinging just as hard as Prey and Dishonored

A new perspective on immersive sims doesn't shrink Weird West's scope.

What convinced me Weird West is a true immersive sim had nothing to do with the carefully prepared talking points from a recent 30-minute hands-off demo. While former Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio explains the finesse of the physics system, showing off by tossing a bottle and shooting it out of the air, a better, if slightly less elegant example comes along.

The dust devil skirts around the edge of our top-down view of a ramshackle barn and gunslinger protagonist, first picking up some wooden debris, then passing over a campfire. It then transforms into a raging cyclone of fire and despair, a swirling monstrosity carrying a dozen flaming planks which then light the adjacent farmhouse ablaze and send our demoist scrambling out of the way. "The power of systemic," says someone in the Discord.

My first look at Weird West was short and disjointed, but it was enough to assure me it could be as complex and chaotic an immersive sim as the best of them. I can't wait to see my own plans burn down.

Where a bigger team might run into production roadblocks, WolfEye Studio's smaller team, largely made up of former Arkane talent, and zoomed-out perspective allows for higher concept experimentation in the immersive sim space. For instance, in Weird West, you don't play one character, you play five of them. Each chapter features a new protagonist with a unique story that permanently affects the world state for the next one, until they all converge into a final chapter together.

Weird West's expressive verbs are its most exciting features though, fairly unique to this perspective. Players can pick up and throw just about any object. There's a dedicated kick button (at least for one of the playable characters), and your kicks do not discriminate—they'll hurt friend or foe, chicken or cow. Players can also climb around the scenery, stacking barrels to climb fences and general stores, leaping between rooftops and snooping through people's homes. But as Raph demonstrated, you can also just make your own fun, shooting bottles out of the air or kicking some empty cans around.

We see fragments of how it fits into action throughout the demo. Raph's gunslinger does a Max Payne-style bullet time dive between rooftops, shooting as he flies. From above, he sneaks around some enemies and kicks a flaming barrel towards them, shooting and igniting as it makes contact. He climbs a fence into enemy headquarters and uses some rope he finds to climb into a well—the western equivalent of ventilation shafts—to find an alternate route in. It's about as immersive sim as immersive sims get, but with more tornadoes and an unconventional isometric RPG wrapper.

Much like Fallout 2, you move through Weird West via a world map obscured in fog that lifts as you chart your way across it. Physical spaces are discrete, but embarking on journeys between them run a chance of triggering a random encounter, be it a coyote attack or an invitation to a coven's bloody ritual. Raph takes down a few coyotes, then explores the instance for treasure. Shovels are another important systemic tool in Weird West: you can dig your way out of tricky situations and bury anything, including your dead friends and family. Pray it doesn't end that way.

We'll get perks in relics and a ton of skills to choose from that build out all sorts of playstyles between characters, but I'm curious to see how it feels and what kind of unique combat and stealth encounters the isometric perspective provides. With Prey fresh in my mind, I have more reasons to believe WolfEye will pull it off than not.

Weird West might be a different looking game for a team composed of developers squarely aimed at acclaimed first-person immersive sims in the past, but it just might match up to its older siblings. It's out later this year.

 

[Morgoth]

Dev stream tomorrow:

 

[fantadomat]

So it is as hard as super easy games like prey and dishonoured lol.

Also that no save shit seems retarded.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/im...even-if-that-means-carrying-a-dead-wolf-about

Immersive sim Weird West wants to say yes to your every whim
Even if you just want to drag a dead wolf around



Introducing a hands-off preview session of upcoming RPG Weird West the other day, creative director Raf Colantonio offered a short, sweet summary of its central design principle: "Say yes to the player". We were to expect no arbitrary canyons disguising linear levels here, he promised, nor quests designed to funnel us into binary decisions. Instead, we were to look forward to a literal wild west of open decision-making; a persistent world with its own internal rhythms, through which we would be free to mosey in whichever style we fancied.

Inevitably, then, when the demo (played by game director Gael Giraudeau) got underway, I glossed over the bleak discovery of the player character's son, shot dead by eerie cowboys, and commanded Giraudeau to pick up a dead wolf. It seemed the right thing to do, given the whole "say yes to the player" thing. And to be fair to Giraudeau, he picked that wolf right up. He carried it around for a bit, dodging a tornado in the process, before finding an egg in a haystack, chucking it in the air, and shooting it with a gun. Not bad, Weird West. Not bad.

In case you're unfamiliar with this sort of do-anything ethos, it characterises an unusual supergenre of game called the "immersive sim". It's a confusing bit of taxonomy, as it has very little to do with simulations or immersion, at least as one would usually expect these terms to be used. Simply put, an immersive sim invites the players to approach problem-solving laterally, taking advantage of the intersecting behaviours of things in the world to achieve desired outcomes - your Deus Exs or Dishonoreds, for example. Or you can just revel in their complexity and emergent chaos, as I'm usually more tempted to do.

Of course, some sims are more immersive than others. And so, in a move I appreciated, Colantonio provided a handy chart, positioning Weird West alongside some well-known staples of the genre. Given Colantonio was one of the co-creators of Dishonored, it's worth noting he's trying something considerably more open-ended with this project.


Weird West will not, however, be an open-world game. Instead, as befits its top-down, isometric-ish presentation, the game comprises a galaxy of self-contained maps, positioned all over a big, 1990s-Fallout-style map. As far as I understood, you're not limited in any way with regards to how you explore this wilderness - you can go where you want, when you want.

Indeed, even as Giraudeau left the opening homestead to go and talk to a local sherriff about the son-slaying bandits, he happened upon a mailbox containing a strange letter, hinting at eldritch goings-on in an entirely different location. Since drifting about getting into fights is one of the classic cowboy hobbies, this feels encouraging.

And of course, even when you're not in one of Weird West's play areas, it will keep doing its thing without you. NPCs will have their daily schedules, strange things will occur, weather will happen, and all the rest. What happens if you wander into a town and gun down every living soul with a blank, dead-eyed rage? The town will stay abandoned. No magical respawning here. And if you happen to have killed a plot-specific NPC? Whoops. You'll just have to find an alternative way to progress. Again, lateral thinking and that.

What perhaps intrigues me most on the subject of persistence, is that while the game has plotlines for five separate characters, you play through them in a set chronological order. This means you can interact with, and even recruit, characters you have already played as, or are yet to play as. It also means that each subsequent chapter of the game sees you starting fresh, but in a world that you've already been raising hell in, as an entirely different person. You could bury a wolf, or a egg, for example, like a little time capsule for your later self to benefit from.

Oh, and when I said that if you shoot up a town it will stay abandoned, I wasn't quite telling the full truth. Empty places may get repopulated over time by various factions of settlers and ruffians. Or by pigmen. Pigmen are quite a big deal in Weird West. Indeed, one of the five characters you play over the course of the game happens to be one - that's him in the header image.

Spoiler

Here, also, is a pigman. Is he not horridde?

According to the designers, the intention for the game is to start out as a fairly played-straight western, and introduce more strands of strangeness as the game goes on. As the trailer at the top of the post has it, "The deeper you dig, the stranger it gets". And sure enough, as I watched Giraudeau pursue the case of the player character's gunished son, interrogating one of the captured marauders at the sherriff's office and then being tipped off to the location of the gang's badlands hideout, things got odd.

Stealthing around by the entrance to the hideout, the player character eavesdropped on a conversation between the gang leader and some sort of fluid, silvery wolf... thing? According to the devs, this malevolent entity was a "siren", although I'm taking that designation in a figurative sense, since it was not in any way a mermaid.

I've not seen much more of the game's Westiary, besides some coyotes which attacked in a random campfire encounter. Nevertheless, I'd go in expecting some Lovecraft-adjacent cosmic horror trappings (or William-Hope-Hodgson-adjacent, in the case of the pigmen), blended with the "incest-related mutant" tradition that so often emerges from the confluence of Westerns and horror.


This thing looks horrendous.

I'd also, quite frankly, go in expecting a really dark time. I knew from Weird West's initial teaser trailer that it was going to be both gorgeous and spooky. And while it certainly lives up on the looks front, with elegantly understated use of unexpected colours to disquiet (not to mention an aesthetic drawn from tonally-heavy French comics from the 90s), it's a lot spookier than I'd counted on.

Despite my early presumptions, there's no tongue in cheek element to Weird West's horror at all. It plays things completely straight on that front, and even watching someone else play, I got a strong sense of how unsettling and sinister the game's world was to inhabit.

When I asked the developers which particular westerns they had drawn inspiration from in building the game world, I already half-knew they were going to cite Bone Tomahawk. This was both a good and a bad thing. Because while I would contend that Bone Tomahawk is, honestly, a masterful piece of direction and an extremely effective film, it's also utterly fucking horrible. Seriously. Whether it's the hideous gore, or the extremely uncomfortable take on the Western genre's historic portrayal of Native Americans (I've seen the argument made that it's not, in fact, a racist film, but I'm emphatically unconvinced), Bone Tomahawk is the very opposite of easy watching. Still, like I say, for whatever value you choose to attach to it, it's a movie with one hell of a powerful atmosphere.

If Weird West can carry some of that potency, as I've already seen it do, without becoming quite as brutally distasteful on its descent into horror, I think it could be something really special. Even - and indeed especially - if I choose to play it as a game about carrying dead wolves about the place.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/weird-west/fallout-inspired-isometric-immersive-sim

Weird West is an immersive sim with shades of classic Fallout
And Dark Messiah fans will love the kick

Weird West’s isometric take on immersive sims might finally make me fall in love with the genre. I’ve tried before; in fact, I’m still trying – my playthrough of Prey’s off to a promising start – but something’s still not clicking for me, and Weird West has me thinking that something is literally a matter of perspective. Weird West takes the genre’s willingness to say ‘yes’ to player agency, but unlike the majority of its peers, opts for an isometric view of the action instead of the traditional first-person perspective.

So what does that change? In theory, not a whole lot, but in practice this is the first immersive sim in which I can see strategies forming without having to save-scum my way towards understanding the level first. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sneakily darted up a wall in Dishonored 2 only to peep over the parapet and find myself face to face with a couple of guards. By contrast, you’ll know where most guards are all the way through a level in Weird West. You know the rooftops are clear, you can watch the guard to your left and his colleague to your right simultaneously, and even when hunkered down behind cover you can keep tabs on the path ahead and move that way when it’s safe.

The perspective change helps outside of stealth, too. When trying to storm a stronghold with guns and dynamite, you can linger behind a wall as an onrushing guard tries to get an angle on you, and peek out to shoot an oil lamp as soon as they pass it to set them on fire. Setting traps and baiting enemies into them is nothing new for immersive sims, but the isometric view makes it considerably easier to envision and then enact such ploys.

I wasn’t able to get my hands on Weird West, but the brief demo showcases a few promising ways you’ll be able to mess about with the environment and NPCs. Firstly, it appears there’s a Far Cry-like fire propagation system in place, so if you hurl an oil lamp at a stack of hay bales then the whole lot will go up in flames. If that fire then gets out of control you can boot a water barrel at it to extinguish the inferno. Ammo boxes react a little differently – throw one of these into a fire or shoot it from a distance and it’ll start pinging off bullets in random directions.



String it all together and you can lure a few guards into position with a small fire, then throw an ammo box into the mix and watch the fireworks. Perhaps one stray round hits the cart of dynamite nearby and wipes out half of the base. Even simple things, like picking up a barrel and placing it down to climb up to a new area, can be used to create dynamic, creative solutions on the fly.

Creative director Raphaël Colantonio says that while the switch changes how the studio has approached combat and level design, “the spirit, that matrix of possibilities going through the player’s mind, is the same. To us, immersive sims aren’t tied to a first-person perspective, that’s just the presentation, not the spirit under the experience.”

It’s hard to gauge how much abilities will play a role, especially as Weird West features five playable characters, each with their own set of skills. You don’t swap between these characters during the same playthrough either, instead you play through each character’s journey in sequence. The bounty hunter’s abilities mostly cover weapons, but can unlock a mightier, Dark Messiah-inspired kick, or the abilities to temporarily charm enemies, place shrapnel mines, or slow down time, which suggests you’ll be able to stage all manner of devious executions.

Spoiler

You can also unlock perks that persist over the course of the whole campaign. For the most part these bestow minor stat buffs, but there is one that extends the bullet time effect you get when you do a John Woo-esque dive, effectively letting you hang in the air for as long as it takes to fire every shot in your six-shooter and reload it.

Between clearing out gang hideouts you can travel around the world via a zoomed out map that’s initially shrouded in fog. Clearly inspired by classic Fallout games, you use this map to navigate between points of interest, towns, and enemy strongholds, and you’ll occasionally get ambushed or stumble upon a random event.

This nod to classic Fallout extends to the first town we visit, a besieged, blighted frontier settlement called Grackle. Like the Boneyard or Junktown, you visit Grackle very much as an outsider; the townspeople have their own problems and preoccupations. There’s a main quest that brings you to Grackle, but once you’ve arrived you’re free to wander into any building, talk to its inhabitants, and pick up side quests. Alternatively, you can shoot the place up, turning everyone hostile against you. There’s a fun twist in that the state of the world is persistent across the entire campaign, so if you slaughter everyone as the bounty hunter you might return to find a ghost town later on.



Those specks of RPG DNA are reflected in developer Wolfeye Studio’s own assessment of Weird West, which it places between Skyrim and Arx Fatalis on its continuum of the immersive sim genre, with open-ended gameplay and a much more open structure than games like Dishonored and Bioshock. It’s worth pointing out that Wolfeye’s 25-person dev team consists of 15 former Arkane devs, many of whom have worked on Prey, Dishonored, Arx Fatalis, and – as evidenced by the bounty hunter’s kicking prowess – Dark Messiah. “We love kicking things,” Colantonio says. “It’s expressive, what can I say?”

It’s too early to tell just how far players will be able to push Weird West’s world and mechanics, but from an early glimpse I’m excited to start messing around in one of its outposts.

 

[Infinitron]

More previews:



https://www.ign.com/articles/weird-...rey-devs-latest-is-a-delightfully-odd-western
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2...ishonored-meets-red-dead-in-an-immersive-sim/
https://screenrant.com/weird-west-preview/
https://www.thegamer.com/weird-west-preview/
https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2021/0...-of-possibilities-and-supernatural-shootouts/
https://www.comingsoon.net/games/features/1188996-weird-west-preview-hands-off
https://www.player2.net.au/2021/07/weird-west-hands-off-preview/
https://stevivor.com/previews/weird-west-preview-itching-hands/
https://www.gamingbible.co.uk/featu...red-devs-deliver-gorgeously-dark-rpg-20210728
https://www.godisageek.com/2021/07/weird-west-is-a-down-and-dirty-cowboy-rpg-hands-off-preview/
https://checkpointgaming.net/featur...tunning-immersive-world-ready-to-be-explored/

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Another day at Codex another wishlist.

 

[V_K]

Rather disappointed that different characters aren't alternative picks but you have to play them all in a playthrough. It rubs against the openness emphasized elsewhere and makes the game much less of an RPG.

 

[Gargaune]

I've sperged out on this before, emergent gameplay wasn't the core purpose of the Immersive Sim, embodiment was. Emergent gameplay was just a means to that end along with other game design patterns, such as the first person perspective, locked timeframe, diegetic feedback interfaces etc. Colantonio's just leveraging his Arkane street cred to spin his (admittedly highly) systemic isometric sandbox into something other than it actually is, but the fact is you can see plenty of these "the power of systemic" features in Baldur's Gate 3 without anyone going "ooOoh, immerseeeve seeems!" Naturally, the press is lapping it up and pontificating the sandbox angle because they understand their subject matter like I understand gardening.

P.S. Skyrim's on that RPS "Immersive Sim Continuum" chart while Deus Ex isn't.

 

[Terenty]

Pls be extremely difficult, pls be extremely difficult

 

[Lyre Mors]

So it is as hard as super easy games like prey and dishonoured lol.

I think you misunderstood the headline of that PCGamer article. It wasn't saying that the game was hard, as in difficult. "Swinging just as hard" is a slang phrase implying that it's on the same level - or competing just as strongly - as the other two games mentioned.

Pls be extremely difficult, pls be extremely difficult

There is absolutely nothing indicating this is going to be an extremely difficult game. I wouldn't get your hopes up for that if I were you.

 

[Tyranicon]

So apparently you can chuck a box of ammo out of your inventory, shoot it, have it catch on fire, and shoot bullets all over the place.

ThatsNotHowBulletsWork™

But whatever, it is called Weird West, and there's a certain level of creativity/technical complexity there that I appreciate.

 

[baud]

So apparently you can chuck a box of ammo out of your inventory, shoot it, have it catch on fire, and shoot bullets all over the place.

ThatsNotHowBulletsWork™

But whatever, it is called Weird West, and there's a certain level of creativity/technical complexity there that I appreciate.

how about blackpowder ammo?

 

[Infinitron]

Devstream:

 

[kangaxx]

Rather disappointed that different characters aren't alternative picks but you have to play them all in a playthrough. It rubs against the openness emphasized elsewhere and makes the game much less of an RPG.

It might end up being Mooncrash-esque, which for me isn't a bad thing. I really liked Prey and Mooncrash in spite of their flaws.

 

[ExposedBrainMatter]

Man if this really is another super easy game I'm going to spam Colantonio pictures of my cock on twitter to show him what the difficulty should really be.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Man if this really is another super easy game I'm going to spam Colantonio pictures of my cock on twitter to show him what the difficulty should really be.

How will he know it's not just more of your "fan mail" though?

 

[Harthwain]

My concern is how much the "lateral thinking" with extend beyond combat, especially since the developers are former co-creators of Dishonored.

 

[ExposedBrainMatter]

Man if this really is another super easy game I'm going to spam Colantonio pictures of my cock on twitter to show him what the difficulty should really be.

How will he know it's not just more of your "fan mail" though?

This one will be my penis instead of pet chickens.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Wowza it's like Skyrim!

 

[Junmarko]

Rather disappointed that different characters aren't alternative picks but you have to play them all in a playthrough. It rubs against the openness emphasized elsewhere and makes the game much less of an RPG.

Very off-putting unfortunately, will ruin the replay value.

 

[kangaxx]

Rather disappointed that different characters aren't alternative picks but you have to play them all in a playthrough. It rubs against the openness emphasized elsewhere and makes the game much less of an RPG.

Very off-putting unfortunately, will ruin the replay value.

I think it depends whether you have to play them in the same order. If your actions determine which order, and it has a material impact on the game, I can see it being interesting. To go back to Mooncrash, you could choose the order.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/125325-weird-west-previews.html

Finally, this AusGamers preview doubles as an interview with Raf Colantonio:

And on pouring itself into systems and maybe going overboard on getting it right, something as seemingly trivial as handling weapons became a bigger hurdle than the studio anticipated.​

“Frankly, we didn’t see it coming,” Raf recalls of the issues faced with the game’s aiming mechanic. “In our mind we were going to go with, like, a Twin-Stick Shooter [setup], but twin-stick shooters are usually top-down or if not top-down they’re in one plane anyway. Which is not the case for this game -- it has verticality, so if you’re on top of a roof, for example, you can still aim at things at the bottom. And we didn’t want to do things simple, like just aiming at the characters, we also wanted you to be able to aim at objects. And [so] this is the kind of design we always like to invest a lot of time in because even though at first it doesn’t seem necessary, it feels very good and it feels very expressive to be able to shoot at anything you want. [And] it also provides opportunities for emergent tactics.”​