Runic Games are the small Seattle development team behind the excellent Torchlight games, which some would say – at least until Blizzard got their house in order – actually out-Diabloed Diablo 3. Now the studio’s hard at work on its next project, and is exploring a new genre with isometric action-adventure Hob. An almost entirely dialogue and text-free game, Hob mixes a more tactical, tool-driven style of combat with exploration and puzzle-solving. I grabbed a chat with lead level designer Patrick Blank and Runic PR manager Wonder Russell to find out more.
GameWatcher: So to kick off, could you guys give us a brief rundown of Hob’s basic story?
Wonder Russell: Well, that would be tricky because we’re keeping a lot of it under wraps. Just because it is an adventure game, a mystery, and we drop the player into the world without a full explanation or a cutscene, and there’s no NPCs, it’s very much ‘jump in and start exploring’. The more you explore and unlock parts of the world, you’ll have kind of an experiential story that happens as you explore the world. We have some things planned that we do hope to be able to get into the game, we want to have some twists and turns like any good story, but we want the player to go through and discover them and have those moments of surprise and realisation about where they are and who they are.
GameWatcher: You’ve talked about wanting a dialogue-free game, where the story is unraveled through exploration. What were your main reasons, inspirations for that?
Patrick Blank: I like to say it started out as a joke; when we finished Torchlight 2 and somebody made the joke that “whatever we do next let’s do something we don’t have to sort out the localisation for”. But it was more that it just fit the kind of game we wanted to make. We wanted to be heavy on world exploration, the world telling the story, it’s very much a solo experience of the player slowly discovering what’s going on. We had a lot of NPCs and quests with the last game, and we just wanted to take a different route of the player’s experience, and them discovering what everything means.
Wonder Russell: And who they are, too. One of the ways to describe this game is as a quest for identity, because you don’t know who you are, there’s no-one else like you on this world. You don’t know why you can do the kinds of things that you can, and there’s no one around to tell you. But you start to learn about that as you play.
GameWatcher: I think a lot of fantasy games bog the player down in lore and exposition, which is why I think in recent years there’s been an increasing number of successful games that have relied more on environmental storytelling; Dark Souls for example. Do you think in some ways that’s a more natural way for a player to unravel a story in-game?
Patrick Blank: Yeah, I think a lot of the guys here have latched on to that, we have a lot of Dark Souls fans here. That’s definitely the kind of approach we’ve been taking, ‘let’s see how we can make this interesting in other ways’, like telling the story through the environment, in what you see and what you do. There is exposition in something like Shadow of the Colossus, but a lot of it is you just going out and discovering things, and that’s something that as a studio we’re really interested in right now.
GameWatcher: One of the major mechanics in the game is the way the levels can be shifted around, and the terrain dynamically adjusted by the player. Does that mean you’re using random generation?
Patrick Blank: There’s no random procedural generation in Hob, it’s all very planned out and hand-crafted. It’s definitely… I’m not sure if you saw our PAX demo video? We show some world shifting in there, and everything in there is just a small part of what you’ll see later in the game. World-shifting is a huge, huge part of Hob, and it’s all hand-crafted.
GameWatcher: Combat was obviously a big part of your previous game, and it’s a prominent element in Hob as well. How exactly does it play out? Do you unlock different tools and weapons as you explore the world?
Patrick Blank: Yes, you do. We’re trying to make combat a much more rewarding experience, so while you’re not fighting hordes of enemies, the enemies you do fight require slightly different tactics. They’re much smarter than what we had in Torchlight, and as you go through the game you acquire a gauntlet – and there’s a story element as to why and how you acquire it – that you can upgrade with different abilities that you find as you progress through the game.
These abilities are kind of two-fold; firstly they help you explore the environment and progress past the puzzles that you’ll find, and the second part is that they play into combat. Something we showed off in the PAX demo is that you come across this creature with these armoured shin-guards, and he’s a tall creature so all you can do is hit his legs. If you wail on him forever you’ll eventually break them but it’s very tedious, while if you use a grapple pull that you can acquire, you can use that to pull those shin-guards off, and then expose his Achilles’ heel and whittle him down that much faster. There are elements of that to most creatures that you fight, you have to use tactics through your glove abilities to figure out the best way to dispatch them. Then, on top of your glove upgrades you will be upgrading things like your sword, we’re talking about possibly some kind of armour you can upgrade. You don’t loot per se, but you definitely acquire upgrades as you progress.
GameWatcher: In terms of the puzzles, are you looking at fairly simple solutions, or do you plan to have some real head-scratchers in there?
Patrick Blank: We’re still early on, so there’s a lot that we’ve still got to balance, but we definitely want a mix. We don’t want something so hard that it stops a large amount of people from even getting through, but we do want the game to get more difficult and challenging as it goes on. The key thing is we want it to be fun and not frustrating, and we’ve still got a lot to do there.
GameWatcher: Do you have a lot of boss fights in the game?
Patrick Blank: We will, yes, but that’s all I can really say on that right now!
Wonder Russell: There will be less boss fights in general than in something like Torchlight 2, which is more of a loot-driven game, whereas this is more driven by exploration. But I think that like Patrick was saying, it lends itself to be more thoughtful about the fights, making them more like little puzzles in and of themselves, making them part of the world instead of just something you have to hit ten thousand times before it falls over. One of the things I love about Hob is the way the tools you use to navigate the world, to explore and progress are also used in combat as well.
GameWatcher: Obviously combat and exploration are both key concepts in the game. What is the balance there, would you say? Is there a lot of combat in each level, or do you go through long sections of just exploring and platforming?
Patrick Blank: You know, that’s something we’re still balancing out, as to where that ratio should be. But we are definitely using combat as a beat through the exploration, where it’s not combat-combat-combat and then you stop for some exploration, the game’s more about exploration and the combat is kind of scattered throughout that. It’s definitely not thrown in your face, there aren’t a hundred guys running at you, but at the same time it’s not sparse either. Like I said, we’re early on and there’s along way to go, so we’re still trying to find that sweet spot.
GameWatcher: You’re a developer with a well-established back catalog, and we’ve seen many studios in a similar position turn to crowd-funding. Why did you decide not to go down that route, and to self-publish and self-fund instead?
Wonder Russell: Simply because we didn’t have to! We’re very lucky to be in the position we are, where we’re a very small team that’s used to running lean. Torchlight 2 did great for us, and that’s given us the ability to stay independent and make the kind of game that we want to make and not have to have a publisher or… I think people who Kickstart games are very brave and it’s a legitimate and great way to drive pre-sales, but essentially your audience is your publisher at that point, and you have a massive responsibility to your customers to deliver something that’s fun and entertaining. I think we’ve just been really lucky so far that we can go along with just developing in-house, and we hope to be able to stay that way.
GameWatcher: Torchlight 2 was a big success for you guys, and I think maybe people assumed you would continue that series for your next game. Did you feel a bit burned out on the action RPG, or did you just want to try something new?
Wonder Russell: Both. I was actually talking to someone who really thought we should be making Torchlight 3, and I said “never say never!” I mean, of course Torchlight 1 and 2 we’re always going to be very fond of and we have great memories of them, but even if you’re eating the meal you love the most, after ten years of the same meal every day that gets a little old! So it was a couple of things, we wanted to take a break and we had the opportunity to, but also we thought “what’s the game that we want to make?” We didn’t have to make something that was just called a Diablo-clone. What was a game that we could really infuse with ourselves and our inspirations, that we would want to bring to the table? Something we can make that says more about us as a developer, and the games that we like to play.
Patrick Blank: Yeah, there are several people here that have been making action RPGs for about ten years, and I think they wanted a break. Torchlight 2 was a very long process, and it was a huge, huge game, honestly bigger than it needed to be. We put everything we had into Torchlight 2, worked really hard on it and made it the best we could possibly make it. To then turn around and do a third one, I think people needed a break like Wanda said. We wanted to do something different. It’s always like, “what could we do next in the same franchise?”, and everyone has ideas, but at the same time we were pretty burned out and needed a break. I think a lot of people here would be happy to return to it at some point, but we have a lot of people with a lot of interests, and we want to try to explore what we can do together as a team. Hob is a logical step towards that.
Many thanks to Wonder and Patrick for speaking to me. Hob is still pretty early in development right now, so Runic hasn’t discussed a potential release date. If the team’s past efforts are anything to go by, it’s one to keep an eye on.
