Walking through walls left players ”disorientated and really lost,” despite being just a small number of rooms. To combat this Airtight give us ‘obsessively subtle’ hints.
VP Matt Brunner says you might just get to love walking through walls, and hate going back. The Murdered devs have had to think carefully to keep players from floating off.
”It’s a horrible design headache,” admitted Brunner to X360. ”If you can imagine, how do you design a clear path for your character when you can bypass it in anyway possible? That was the real challenge we were faced with. There was a small group of us early on into development that said ‘It doesn’t feel like I’m a ghost yet, why? What’s missing?’”
”It just feels like you need to be able to pass through objects.” Early forays into ‘noclipping’ walls proved a jarring experience and made it difficult to orientate to your surroundings. ”So one of the things we do in the background of the game is give the player subtle environmental hints, almost obsessively so, about where they are so that the player doesn’t get lost. We’ve also spent a lot of time putting voice over and other elements that will redirect them if they do get lost.”
”Interestingly enough when you run around now in the game and you start getting used to it you start thinking ‘I don’t really want to play a game where I can’t just pass through any wall I want’. There’s something really freeing about it.”
Murdered: Soul Suspect releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in early 2014.
