We grab a few words with the creative director of 2014's most controversial game

Yeah, so you might just have heard of a little title called Hatred, from a Polish team called (appropriately enough) Destructive Creations. In it you play as a grumpy chap with long, dank hair that looks a bit like me when I was fifteen and into Slipknot and Disturbed. Unlike me at fifteen, he’s a one man killing machine that’s hell-bent on taking some kind of nebulous revenge on the local population of innocent civilians and police officers.

Controversial stuff, clearly. I managed to track down creative director Jaroslaw Zielinski to quiz him on all things Hatred.

GameWatcher: When you came up with the concept for Hatred, were you planning for a media response exactly like the one you got? Was outrage a part of your marketing strategy from the very start?

Jarosław Zieliński: Yes, we knew that word-of-mouth would be the easiest way of promotion. Very effective, as you may guess but as it turns out, even more than what we expected. We knew that it may cause some mess and discussions over the web, but we didn’t know we’ll draw that much attention of press not related to games. So, basically - the effects went far beyond our highest expectations.

GameWatcher: You write on your website that Hatred is a response to a trend for “politically correct” games. Is that really true? I mean, there’s a whole host of super-violent games already out there.

Jarosław Zieliński: It’s not the violence itself that is “politically incorrect” here, you can find games much more brutal out there. What is disturbing people about our game are the goals of the main character, which the player has to reach. It’s not very common for games to be about “killing for killing” and to be “evil” in general. This game certainly is evil as hell, the main character is the true villain, that’s why we chose to call him The Antagonist instead of considering him as the protagonist. The other thing that is awkward here is that we want to show all those “morality knights “ that we can make any game we want (as long as we don’t break any laws) and it’s fun to watch their frustration. We don’t want this game to be polite or to be a compromise between anything.

GameWatcher: There must be areas that even Hatred shies away from – murder of children, extended torture and so on. If you’re saying that virtual violence is meaningless, shouldn’t there be no limit as to what you can depict?

Jarosław Zieliński: The fact is, we’re not some sick kind of guys here at Destructive Creations and even we have some borders, we wouldn’t cross. So even for us killing children in this game would be uncomfortable. But I guess it’s just that people are not used to virtual violence against children. You can always say that no one is innocent (I guess that’s what The Antagonist thinks), but I believe that children are, actually. The other thing is that creating children as NPCs would add a lot of additional work - new character models, animations, voiceovers. It’s just not worth the effort. Especially if we don’t really want to do it. As for the lack of torture - it’s somehow related to how we imagine our main character who’s not any kind of sadistic guy, but we rather wanted him to be a cold-blooded eliminator. Tortures are always something personal, while he considers all humans to be just a herd to slaughter.

GameWatcher: Is there any humour in your game? You mention Postal as your key influence, and that’s a game that’s definitely got an anarchic sort of black humour.

Jarosław Zieliński: Well, first Postal didn’t really have a lot of humour, the only thing which was a little silly there were Postal Dude’s one-liners. I never accepted where RWS company went with the Postal series (into the satire and humour), I wanted to do something going into the opposite direction. Something more serious, darker, just purely evil and with a dense atmosphere.

GameWatcher: What made you go down the isometric, twin-stick shooter route?

Jarosław Zieliński: We’re a team that worked on FPS games for too long and we’re actually sick of it. We wanted to do something new for us and it’s giving us a lot of challenges, we’ve never faced before. That’s the first reason. The second is that Hatred should resemble the first Postal. The third is that there are not really many titles in the “twin stick shooter” genre, that can beat Hatred’s quality, we just found a gap in the market, we knew we’re able to fill.

GameWatcher: Is there any story behind the action? Cutscenes and so on?

Jarosław Zieliński: Yes, there is story and there are cutscenes. They’re mostly based on The Antagonist’s grim monologues, but there are some where more is going on. Action is pushed forward by the storyline, but let’s make it clear - the plot is not the most important thing here. Anyway, there’s no background of this character, we don’t want to justify him in any way, everything starts where he’s gathering his equipment and leaves the house, ready to die soon. The whole story is meant to be quite believable (well, besides this guy can take many bullets and still stand) and our anti-hero reacts to what is going on accordingly to his psychological portrait, that I’ve developed in my head.

GameWatcher: How does the action escalate? Does the player start by killing civilians, then move on to police officers and army personnel?

Jarosław Zieliński: The game is divided into two types of action - player taking role of the hunter and then it twists to being hunted. Civilians in Hatred don’t want to go down easily, they require to be hunted, they run away and sometimes they try to obtain some weapons hidden inside houses. When law enforcement comes to the scene, things get different. Usually it’s best to run away (not to stay in the open) and ambush your enemies. So with the approach we took gameplay is changing constantly through the whole game and the best addition to this is the open structure of levels, that effects in a lot of diversity each time you play.

GameWatcher: Do you have traditional shooter mechanics, like power-ups and weapon pick-ups, that kind of thing? How many weapons are there?

Jarosław Zieliński: There are no-power ups, no score, I wanted to get rid off all this arcadey stuff for the sake of realism and the game’s atmospheric credibility. Weapon pick-ups are there, but set in the proper places and most of the gear you can find is on the dead bodies of law enforcement. There are about 10 weapons.

GameWatcher: How long will each level take to complete? This seems like a game designed to be played in short bursts.

Jarosław Zieliński: It’s hard to say, it depends on how much the player will go off for free-roaming to find some side objectives, or how many times he’ll die. The average should be something like 25-30 minutes, but that’s just a simple guess.

Many thanks to Jaroslaw for talking to us. Hatred is expected to be released sometime in Q2 2015.