2/12/2023 0 Comments Void bastards lore![]() (See also Blendo Games’ forthcoming Skin Deep. Chey’s well aware of the comparison, though Void Bastards started before it was announced. It’s all about options, Heat Signature-like options, in fact, in 3D Heat Signature-like ships. “I can rift a guy, then I can lock the door of a little room and rift it into it, through the solid wall, so I can have a little room where I keep all the monsters prisoner!” Or you can rift monsters into a launch tube and eject them into space, or hack a turret and rift it around the level, shooting monsters for you. Use it to ‘rift’ any NPC into it, carry it about, and then shoot it out again. “Right now I think it might be the most powerful weapon in the game,” says Chey. The last weapon doesn’t inflict direct damage. Open a door, shoot, close the door, wait. Think the Clusterflak, which shoots a cluster of bomblets on a slow timer. ![]() A secondary weapon, usually more contextual and complex and often requiring a little foresight and preparation. Pretty standard: think shotgun, assault rifle, pistol. When you board a derelict you choose three items to equip. Fundamentally, an action-based immersive sim. ![]() That idea evolved into half of Void Bastards: a systems-driven FPS. So we thought, what if we built a framework in which the player can get into interesting tactical combat situations more frequently and in a more structured and player-directed way?” It wasn’t really something the game needed but it was System Shock-y. I remember having long arguments during BioShock about whether we should allow the player to go back to earlier levels. “The BioShock games had that too, but they didn’t push it and in a way went backwards, because as they got more narrative-heavy they had to constrain the player more. “We thought, there’s something there,” says Chey. Chey started his career as a programmer at Looking Glass on Thief and, after cofounding Irrational Games, directed System Shock 2 and managed BioShock’s development, and he talked about where the Shock series had gone, and how some of Thief’s ideas about persistence had been left behind: levels that you could backtrack through and monsters that lived in them, outside the influence of the player. It didn’t turn out that way: its growing scope eventually pulled in six staff and took on as consultants Magic: The Gathering designers Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias.īut as the team continued to expand Card Hunter, they started to discuss what would come next. Blue Manchu’s first game was Card Hunter, a delightful tabletop gaming-inflected tactical CCG which was meant to be a simple year-long first project. Making things right is where Void Bastards’ story starts, but Chey didn’t jump straight into it after going indie. “I always thought there had to be a way of making a game of XCOM as a firstperson shooter.” “It felt like a missed opportunity on my part that I hadn’t managed to make that project work while I was there,” he says. The trouble was that it was 2K’s ill-fated XCOM FPS project, which eventually came out, long after Chey left, as the unloved The Bureau. “We all love XCOM.” And he once had the opportunity to work on an XCOM game. “I love XCOM,” Jon Chey, founder of developer Blue Manchu tells me. I reckon that’s the best reason to get into making something special. It’s got cool guns and a striking comic book art style, and it’s the result of some extremely qualified unfinished business. You play as a desperate crim boarding extremely hostile derelict spaceships to loot stuff. I mean, it’s a new deeply systems-driven FPS made by some of the people behind System Shock 2, Neptune’s Pride and Captain Forever.
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