Beyond a Steel Sky - Interview @Gaming Bolt

Gaming Bolt interviews Revolution co-founder Charles Cecil about Beyond a Steel Sky.

There’s a drastic change in how players are going to interact with Beyond a Steel Sky as compared to what Beneath the Steel Sky was. What led to that change? Was it simply because of the passage of time, or are you looking to try some other, newer things in terms of what sort of a gameplay experience this is going to be?

When the original Beneath a Steel Sky was released, point and click adventures represented the cutting edge of graphics technology. The vision for Beyond a Steel Sky is to deliver the narrative and puzzle structure of an adventure, but in a much more dynamic way utilizing the opportunities of current technology.

We have once again partnered with Dave Gibbons, and are using advanced toon-rendering technology to create an interactive comic book style. Not only does this offer a unique look, but it also works well for an adventure game – the flat-coloured backgrounds make it easier for the player to scan and recognize objects that will be relevant to solve the section’s puzzles. Rendering the game in 3D also, of course, offers great opportunities for dramatic cinematography.

The core gameplay developments actually take inspiration from Revolution’s original games, in particular Lure of the Temptress – that of creating a ‘virtual theatre’ environment in which AI-driven characters inhabit the world, following their own motivations which the player can then subvert – either directly through their actions in the world, or indirectly through hacking the AI systems to create unexpected outcomes for those characters. This makes the world feel very dynamic, with the solutions to puzzles often emerging from logical character behaviours.

These elements do mean that the game will offer an entirely new experience, albeit one that takes place in a familiar setting for fans of the original.

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